Respectable Trade Read online

  His three companions were asleep: Kbara, the youth who had named himself Accursed, and the boy called Sad. The two little pickaninnies were next door with the women and the girls. Mehuru called to Snake to give him sight for the future and tell him what would become of them all.

  Nothing came. Mehuru thought that the coldness of the air had entered his body and the dark mornings and gray afternoons had bleached the colors from his imagination and would bleach the pigment from his very skin. Every day Snake slid farther away from him, until one day he feared he would be an Englishman, as dull and as slow as any of them, and not an African at all.

  He thought of his house in Oyo: its coolness in the morning and the way the sun gilded the walls and the paving stones of the street, the scarlet-and-black Barbary shrikes gathered around the well, waiting for Siko to spill water for them to bathe and drink. He thought of the cool interior of his home, shadowy and restful even when the sun outside was burning hot, and the comfortable warmth of the outside stones when he came home from a journey and leaned back against them. He thought of his wardrobe of clothes, the intricately embroidered court robes of billowing bright silk, the smooth cotton house robes, the softness of the pure wool traveling capes. He went over every stone in the door lintel in his mind, counting each one with a passionate homesickness. He reviewed the skyline of Oyo, the high walls of the palace, the imposing towers, the great sweep of the city wall that guarded every citizen and encircled a city that a man could be proud of.

  He turned it all over in his mind, loving every stone, every corner. He thought of it as a man will think of the woman he adores, every little detail of her. And he fixed his gaze on the distant star he could see through the skylight and wished that this new life were a dream and that he could wake at home and find himself in his own bed, and Siko coming in with a brass cup of mint tea, and everything in the world to look forward to.

  INSURED, AND WITH HER FULL complement of partners, Daisy was at last ready to sail. Josiah went to see her off on the twentieth day of February. Captain Lisle was on board, going downriver with the ship.

  “I will bring you back another two dozen slaves for your wife to train,” he promised. “Are you sure you don’t want more?”

  Josiah shook his head and laughed. “This is a little venture, not my whole business,” he said. “Sell the slaves and bring me good sugar!”

  “I will,” Captain Lisle promised. Josiah shook his hand and stepped down the gangplank.

  They ran it ashore and cast the ropes off as the rowboats took the strain. Josiah raised his hand to his departing ship. She had brought him in a profit of a thousand pounds on her last voyage, and she was likely to do as well again. He owed more money than his father had earned in all his lifetime, but he was confident. He was investing large sums and he was earning large sums.

  “Godspeed!” Josiah called over the widening gray water.

  Daisy dipped as the rowboats pulled her away from the quayside, as if she were saying farewell. Josiah watched the wedge-shaped stern of his ship move slowly away from him. Above her a flock of seagulls wheeled, hoping for scraps from the galley. Josiah’s last sight of her as she went around the curve of the river was a silhouette of clean rigging, the strong workmanlike shape in the water, and the cloud of seagulls wheeling and calling like mourning angels around her.

  IN THE HANDSOME TOWN house, the slaves were working as domestic servants. There was much for them to do. Every day the big rooms needed sweeping, the large windows needed dusting, the panes of glass had to be washed to rid them of the grease and grit of the constant Bristol smog. Curtains, carpets, all the linen of the house had to be continually laundered against the filth of the uncontrolled industries.

  Every room was heated by an open coal fire, and every morning Kbara and Mehuru heaved full scuttles of coal from the cellar at the back of the house to each room, where the women, under the scullery maid’s nervous supervision, cleaned the grates, laid the fires, and struggled with a tinderbox to light them. Frances liked to have a fire lit in her bedroom before she woke, and the fires were lit in all the downstairs rooms by midmorning. The slaves swept the floors and scrubbed them with buckets of cold water and thick slabs of soap. They got down on their hands and knees and scattered used tea leaves and brushed the carpets clean. Kbara and Mehuru carried Frances’s handsome Turkish rugs into the yard and beat them with cane sticks. Mehuru looked carefully at the quality of the weave. They were vastly inferior to the carpets on the stone floors and walls of his home. He guessed they had been bought from Arab traders, and in his opinion the white people had been robbed.

  Mehuru took to domestic work like a thoroughbred horse harnessed to a cart. He could manage it with ease, but he felt himself ground down by the dirt and the drudgery of labor. He had to take out the kitchen garbage and burn it in the backyard. He had to pour the slops from the chamber pots into the night-soil cart when it came to the backs of the houses every morning. He did tasks that his own slave Siko would not have done. He felt his hands harden and grow callused, and his fingernails, which had once been so carefully manicured, split and broke down to workmanlike stubs rimmed with grime.

  His English improved daily. He learned a dozen curses from John Bates, he learned streams of scolding from the cook. He even learned to distinguish one English accent from another: the affected gentility of Brown’s parlor voice and the Somerset burr of the kitchen and at the back door.

  Lessons with Frances were resumed. Morning and afternoon the slaves were summoned to the dining room and seated around the large table under the ornate ceiling. All the slaves could now name things and understand short clear sentences. In one lesson Frances surrendered to Sarah’s demand and all of them were given new names, English names. Frances chose them without any care, almost at random, from Bible stories. She started with the children. The two smallest boys she called James and John, the three girls were named Susan, Ruth, and Naomi. The two young boys were Matthew and Mark. The three women were Mary, Martha, and Elizabeth. Kbara she called Julius. Then she looked at Mehuru.

  “I shall call you Cicero.” She smiled. She reminded him of a little girl naming her dolls.

  Mehuru felt a slow burn of anger, an unusual emotion for him in these days of servitude and endurance.

  “My name is Mehuru, I come from Africa,” he said, reminding her of the lesson she had taught him. He would not take a strange name. It was as if she was robbing him of the last thing he had been able to bring from his home, his name, his identity.

  Frances nodded. “That’s very good,” she said. She was still lighthearted, she did not realize the depth of his opposition. “Very good indeed. But all of you are to have new names, English names. That will be nice for you. And you and Julius have special, classical names. It is the fashion. Kbara will be Julius, and you will be Cicero.”

  Mehuru shook his head. “My name is Mehuru,” he repeated. His voice was soft, but there was a warning note to it. Frances’s smile died. She turned to the others. “You can go,” she said. She nodded to John Bates. “Take them to the kitchen and see what work Cook has for them,” she ordered.

  “I should perhaps stay with you here, ma’am,” Bates said. “If he gets cheeky, I could whip him.”

  Mehuru looked at Bates, his face like stone.

  “Just because he can speak proper doesn’t mean he can’t be whipped,” Bates said, aiming the words at Mehuru. “There’s no law that says he can’t be whipped even if he can speak Chinese!”

  “I know,” Frances said. “But I don’t need you, Bates. Take the others downstairs.”

  The slaves shuffled out, leaving the two of them alone, still seated side by side at the dining table.

  “I want you to be called Cicero,” Frances told him quietly.

  Mehuru measured her determination. “Not my name,” he said. “I have a name. I will not take other.”

  “English people do not like African names,” Frances said.

  “Then they should not