From Now On by Clarence Major

Author:Clarence Major
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage

I am Mfu, not a bit romantic, a water spirit,

a voice from deep in the Atlantic:

Mfu jumped ship, made his escape, to find relief

from his grief on the way, long ago, to Brazil or Georgia or Carolina.

He doesn’t know which; but this is real, not a sentimental landscape

where he sleeps free in the deep waves, free to speak his music:

Mfu looks generously in all directions for understanding

of the white men who came to the shores of his nation.

Mfu looks for a festive reason, something that might have slipped.

Mfu looks back at his Africa, and there at Europe,

and over there at the Americas, where many of his kin were shipped

and perished, though many survived. But how?

In a struggle of social muck! Escape? No such luck then or now.

And Mfu hears all around him a whirlwind of praise, explanation,

insinuation, doubt, expression of clout—

“It was a good time to be white, British, and Christian” (H. A. C. Cairns).

And remembering the greed of the greedy white men of Europe, greed

for ivory, gold, land, fur, skin, chocolate, cocoa, tobacco, palm oil,

coffee, coconuts, sugar, silk, mulatto women, “exotic” battles,

and “divinely ordained slavery.” And it was, indeed, with reverie,

heaven on earth for white men. But Mfu is even more puzzled

by the action of his own village: Mfu, a strong young man,

sold in half-light, sold in the cover of night and muzzled

(not a mistake, not a blunder); sold without ceremony

or one tap of the drum, sold in the wake of plunder—for a brush,

not a sum of money but a mere shaving brush, sold without consent

of air fish water bird or antelope, sold and tied with a rope and chain

(linked to another young man from Mozambique’s coast,

who’d run like a streak but ended up anyway in a slave boat without a

leak or life preservers); Mfu sold to that filthy Captain Snelgrave,

sold by his chief, Chief Aidoo. Sold for a damned shaving brush. (And

Chief Aidoo, who’d already lived sixty winters,

never had even one strand of facial hair.) Sold for a shaving brush.

Why not something useful? Even a kola nut? A dozen kola nuts?

Six dozen kola nuts? Sold for a stupid shaving brush.

And why didn’t the villagers object?

(After all, he’d not been sold from jail, like Kofi and Ayi and Kojo

and Kwesi and that girl-man Efua.)

And now Mfu’s messenger, Seabreeze, speaks: “Chief Aidoo

wanted your young wife but before he could get his hands on her,

she, in grief, took her own life—threw herself in the sea.”

Here in Mfu’s watery bed of seaweed

he still feels the dead weight of Livingstone’s cargo

on his head, as he crosses—one in a long line of strong black porters—

the river into East Africa;

in his seafloor bed of ocean weeds he still hears white men

gathered in camp praising themselves in lamplight,

sure of their mission—Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,

baptizing them . . . (Matthew 28:19). Mfu, raised from seed

a good boy—to do all he could—never went raving mad at his father,

never shied from work, one to never mope:

therefore when chief said

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