My Name is Phillis Wheatley

by Afua Cooper

  She touched me softly on my shoulders. Like my own mother.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Does it matter who anyone of us is? We could be kings and queens, merchants, mothers or daughters. Does it matter?” The woman looked like a noble woman, her face, her bearing, her manner of speech. How did she get that shawl? And how was she wearing a long penne wrapped around her waist when most of us were naked?

  The woman propped me up and wiped my face with her shawl. She wrapped her arms around me. For so long I had not known such tenderness. I wept aloud. I would not see my mother again. Would never touch her, feel her breath, inhale her smell of musk, watch as she made porridge or dyed cotton indigo. She would never teach me to sing again. I would never bathe with her in the pool along the banks of the Senegal. As these thoughts raced through my head, I was seized with a fit of trembling that would not cease.

  The ship began to move like the earth moving beneath my feet. The others felt it, too. Screams flew back and forth, and from below deck came the loud and mournful sounds of the chained men. Some cried, others prayed. Prayers sent to the God of their fathers, prayers sent to Allah: Rescue us from the evils of this day. We were leaving the land of the Gambia, the land of the Senegal, the land of Guinea. We were leaving the lands of our mothers, the countries of our fathers. The verdant landscape became a green line across the horizon. Then Africa disappeared from view, became one with the sky, and my heart changed position in my chest.

  Planks were laid out on the deck for small children like me to sleep on. Fulani and Mandinka and Wolof children. There were twin girls, Natta and Néné, a boy named Hassanu and a child around six years old who looked like my brother, Chierno. He was called Jibril. But in my heart I named him Chierno. That night we crowded together. He shivered all the time and kept his eyes closed. My fever came and went.

  The blackness was broken occasionally by toubab men walking the deck with lanterns. I looked up to the sky, and the stars twinkled at me. I remembered that when it was very hot at night, the townspeople would gather on the rock outside our town and air themselves. My father would point to the sky and name each star. I would cuddle close to him, and he would embrace me. “And that one,” he would say, pointing to Venus, “is you. The brightest star of all.”

  I felt Jibril trembling beside me. “It will be all right, Jibril, it will be all right.” I hugged him and gazed at the sky. The ship plowed through the dark waters to our certain death.

  Morning came. It came too soon. Beneath me the ship heaved and rolled. The movement of the boat made me dizzy, and I placed my palm over my heaving stomach to calm it. I kept my eyes closed, though the light from the day penetrated them. There were still the cries and moans. Jibril lay beside me, still as a stone. His trembling had ceased. For that I was grateful. No sooner had the thought entered my mind than I felt a rude poke in my ribs. My eyes flew open. A toubab was prodding me with his hand, hairy as a monkey. Toubabs have a lot of hair on their bodies. He was speaking his funny language.

  “That one looks dead,” he said, pressing his hand in my side, but pointing to Jibril.

  Another toubab was standing over our little group. The twins were also awake and, seeing the toubab standing over us, cried softly. “Looks like it,” the other toubab said. “Let’s throw him over.”

  Their gestures and tones caused me to look at Jibril. He lay calmly, his face full of sweetness. I touched his forehead. It was cool. I smiled inwardly. Jibril was at rest. One of the toubabs scooped him up and walked toward the side of the ship. But the woman in the green shawl shouted, “No, wait. Give him to me.” And, with one mighty bound, she snatched Jibril out of his hands. On hearing her shout, several toubabs ran toward the woman and pointed their guns. But she ignored them. She laid Jibril on the deck and prayed over him. Then she held him in her arms and kissed his face.

  “Give him to me,” the toubab yelled. He pushed the woman aside, scooped up Jibril and tossed his body into the sea as if he were a piece of firewood. Had Jibril been home, mourners, mainly women, some close relatives, would have sung their songs of lament and sorrow. They would have rent the air with their wails and told that Jibril was a sweet child, an angel. Then women would have bathed his body in water perfumed with cloves and musk. They would have dried it and anointed it with shea butter, wrapped it in soft white cotton cloth and laid him to rest, before sunset, in the town’s cemetery. His people would have kept a vigil and prayed throughout the night of his burial, speeding his soul to paradise with their prayers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Middle Passage

  I had a notion that soon I would follow Jibril to paradise. Toubabs with guns herded us on the deck. We were sure they were going to kill us. But soon we heard the clanking of chains and low moans. The men were coming up on deck! Some kept their heads down. They were ashamed. Ashamed that we, their children and wives, their sisters and mothers, would see them in their powerlessness. They were also ashamed to see our shame and powerlessness. Some looked up and around, looked for a long time at the sky.“Move,” the toubab yelled. The men moved. As they shuffled forward, they left behind red streaks. I looked at their feet. The men’s ankles were a mass of bleeding, pus-filled flesh. A great stench rose in the air. “Stop, stop now!” Another order from the toubab. Then some of the sailors attached the iron around each of the men’s legs to a great chain that ran along both sides of the ship. I prepared myself for a great slaughter. But the toubabs were only feeding us breakfast.

  We held out our hands as they passed with a huge iron pot and a large wooden spoon. They dumped boiled rice with bits of meat into our hands. I heard a firm voice saying, “Don’t eat it.” But some of us, consumed by hunger, took the food. I ate slowly, trying to steady myself against the ship’s rocking, and I felt that I was going to pass out. But the voice spoke again. “They are feeding us the meat of the pig.” My stomach churned and heaved, and in an instant I vomited what I had eaten. My vomit spewed across the toubab and fell right into the iron pot.

  “I’ll be damned! Get that one away. I’m sure she is ill.” Another toubab led me to my plank of wood. The earth was spinning. Then cramping pains contracted my stomach. I held my face between my hands and felt myself sinking and sinking. Wait for me, Jibril! Wait for me!

  I was delirious for a long time. I would come into consciousness and find the woman with the green shawl bending over me. Then I remembered where I was, and I willed myself to faint again. Once, when I woke up, fever burned my body, and thick raindrops were falling on me. The water was cool, but the fever held me. I woke again and found myself with other children in the hut built on deck for the pregnant women. Many children were ill. The woman in green was our nurse. I decided that she was one of the angels that Baba Dende had taught us about.

  “Eat, child, eat. Eat so you will live. The ancestors and God demand that you live.” The woman was pressing cooked millet between my lips, but the stench from the hut assaulted my nostrils and I could not eat. When last had we bathed? The floor of the hut was covered in slime: vomit, mucus and our bodily waste. The angel, as if sensing my thought, said, “The captain said today he will give us vinegar to clean the deck. But now you must eat. Do it for Jibril.” At the sound of Jibril’s name I let out a deep howl and could not be consoled.

  How many nights and days passed before the fever left my body I do not know, but when it finally subsided I had become as thin as a skeleton. I was grateful to be in the hut because I could shield my eyes from the grossest humiliations meted out to our people: “exercise,” for the men chained in the bottom of the ship.

  The men of my nation were among the tallest people of the region. When I was with my father, he seemed tall as a tree. My brother Amadi, though he was only fourteen, had the height of a grown man, and my mother said he had not yet attained his full stature. But here men lay on platforms in the belly of the ship. The space between platforms was less than thr
ee feet. So the men could not even sit up, but had to lie spoon fashion, belly to back, packed tighter than the stacks of pancakes my mother used to make for breakfast. Packed so tightly that no air passed between them. Packed so tightly that they could not turn over. A man in his coffin had more space than these men. And they were chained.

  The men could not even rise to answer the call of nature, so they soiled themselves. Their bodily waste, the blood and mucus gave the floor another layer. Every morning, when the sailors went down to hustle the men to breakfast, they would bring up several corpses chained to the living. And the sailors would toss them overboard. There would be no funeral, no wife and children to beat their chests and sing the songs of lamentation. No griot to chant the dirges and tell of the magnificent lives of these men. That that one was a farmer who commanded the largest harvest of rice; that this one was a fisherman to whom the fish surrendered themselves willingly; that another was a hunter who knew the languages of all the animals and the plants of the forest; that yet another was a hafiz, a reciter, who knew the Qur’an by heart. And one was engaged to be married and was snatched from his intended as they stole a moment for themselves on the banks of the Senegal. These were the men tossed to the sharks.

  Exercise was supposed to make the men’s limbs supple again. The men were ordered to jump up and down. Several toubabs stood with their guns and whips, but how could the men attack them when they were chained?

  A captive beat out a rhythm on a broken drum. “Jump, jump,” a toubab screeched. He demonstrated jumping up and down on the deck. “Jump.” And the men, their chains clanking and the blood flowing from their ankles, jumped awkwardly. And they cried as they did so.

  The man who was beating the drum wept and refused to play. One toubab pointed at him with his gun, while another manacled him.

  A toubab played a strange instrument. He blew into a pipe attached to a bag, and a high, sharp sound escaped from the bag. A sailor pointed his gun at the women. “Now it is your turn. Dance!” The women formed a ragged circle. “Dance!” came the order. And the women sucked the air between their teeth and let out a long hiss. This was an insulting sound, but the toubab did not know this. The women kissed their teeth once more and then rocked their bodies from side to side. “Sing!” Another command from a toubab. He opened his mouth and made sounds. We understood. He was asking us to sing. But of what should we sing?

  The women sang out in high, clear voices: “May God curse you forever. May your lineage be cut short. May God destroy you and your tribe.” This they said as the toubab played the strange instrument. They rocked their bodies from side to side and repeated the curse over and over. Then we sang of our grief and pain, of the loss of our families, our country and our lives. We sang of our terror, and we sang of the guns, the whips, the beatings and clubbings, the deaths, the hunger and the fear. I sang in a whisper, thinking of Jibril, of Chierno, of Amadi, of my parents, of the baby, of my teacher, Baba Dende, of the cows — each one named by Amadi — of the River Senegal, of the River Gambia. I sang of my lost life. We sang in the languages of our mothers and fathers. The words formed around our tongues, in Fullah, in Mandinka, in Serer, in Wolof, even in Hassiniyya, a language of the people of Mauretania. The words slipped from our mouths and spilled our sorrow into the air. And, like the men, we cried as we sang.

  After the dancing and singing, the men were led back into the hold of the ship. And were brought up once more for dinner, which was the same as breakfast. After dinner the men were taken back to the ship’s dungeon and the gratings closed over them. When the gratings clicked in place, the men would wail, because down below the air was thick and foul and they could hardly breathe. During the night some would die, and the sailors would bring them up in the morning and throw them to the sharks.

  All day and all night we pushed through the ocean. Sometimes the sea was the sky, and sometimes the sky was the sea. Sharks followed our ship like the vultures that had accompanied our slave coffle through the savanna and forest, knowing they would be rewarded with human flesh. And how the ship stank! Every week the captain had the toubab sailors scrub the floors of the sleeping rooms with hot vinegar, but it did little to alleviate the stench. As soon as the rooms were cleaned, our sick bodies emitted matter that made the floor slippery again, as if the cleaning had never been done.

  Then one day, after we had been at sea for about three weeks, a storm broke. It was after dinner, and the men were at their “exercise.” All day the sky had been gray, with a sharp wind, and getting darker. All of a sudden, the sky was filled with rain clouds and the wind picked up speed. Pebbles of rain splattered on the deck. The captain ordered the captive men back into their dungeons. We, the women and children, ran to our makeshift shelters. The captain sent the pregnant women, with guards, to his own cabin. Sheets of red, blue and gold sliced the air, and for a moment hung suspended. The children shrieked. The women whispered words of comfort, but even they seemed afraid. One kept saying that she had never seen lightning the color of gold before. “It must be a sign, and not a good one,” she said.

  The lightning seemed to last for hours. But this was only the beginning. The rain was pouring from the sky. The wind picked up speed and howled. The ship heaved as if wanting to spew up its wretched cargo. Then the thunder began. First, we heard the low rumble somewhere on the horizon. Then the sound of a thousand drums, low and menacing.

  We huddled together, fear gripping our lungs so tightly that we could not breathe. I had been in a thunderstorm in Fouta, but it was not as strong as this one, and I had had my mother’s skirt to hide behind, her soothing voice to banish my fears and my father’s arms to hold and comfort me. But not here. The rumbling of the thunder crescendoed into a great crash. The sound shot through me and I fell backward. The wind grew even fiercer, and I felt the ship tossing back and forth, back and forth, like a leaf.

  Soon water began spilling over the deck, and in no time it came up to our knees. The wind grabbed the canvas that had been our roof and blew it into the sea. The rain hit me with such force that my skin burned as if touched by live coals. The gale picked me up and pushed me toward the side of the ship. I screamed with every bit of energy I had. A toubab sheltering beneath a dripping canvas ran toward me. A woman did the same. Luckily, I caught the chain of iron that the captive men were chained to when they came up for exercise. The woman crawled through the water and grabbed me. The ship tossed back and forth and the wind tried to throw us overboard, but the woman clung to me and I to the iron. Huddled together, we surrendered ourselves to the fury of the storm.

  As the woman and I held on against the wind, we heard a low moaning that did not belong to the storm. It was neither wind nor rain, lightning nor thunder. It was the voices of humans, the captive men chained below in the belly of the ship. The portholes had been covered, cutting off fresh air to the hold. The men were suffocating because whatever air remained became thick and stank with a thousand foul smells. Shackled and packed so tightly together, the men gasped for air in the boiling heat of the room. Unable to breathe and with sweat pouring from their bodies, the men began to wail as death took them. Despite the rain, wind, thunder, the fearsome crashes, the sound found its way to us on the deck. “We are dying, we are dying.” And the sound filled me with dread and sorrow. “We are dying, we are dying, we are dying.” During the night some would die, and the sailors would bring them up in the morning, if morning ever came, and throw them to the sharks.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dirge

  The ship did not sink to the bottom of the ocean. The storm ended as abruptly as it began. The winds calmed and became a gentle breeze. The thunder ceased. The lightning halted its fearsome display. And, in an instant, the gray of the sky changed to blue and the sun came out. Now we knew that we were in the hands of some malevolent force. Nature was not so fickle.

  The captain passed buckets to the women, and they helped the sailors bail water that had cleaned the
deck of its filth. The captain ordered sailors to rebuild the huts for the women and children. We huddled together, tired, weak and afraid. We were also hungry. And the men shackled together below the deck? How many had died?

  A melancholy began among us children. We stared into space and refused to eat. The women who became our mothers told us the usual thing, that God and the ancestors wanted us to live. But our ears were beyond their words. Grief had built a wall around us. Our melancholy spread to some of the men and the women. The captain ran around with his speculum oris (I later learned the term in my Latin studies with Nathaniel), a mouth opener, to force gruel down our throats. Maybe it was because I was so weak that my lips opened and the captain poured a bad-tasting porridge down my throat. As soon as it hit my stomach, I heaved it up.

  But not even the speculum oris could pry open the mouths of the twins. They sat, holding hands, their teeth clamped together. The captain made the mistake of prying in their mouths with his finger. He let out a bloodcurling sound when his finger went between Néné’s teeth. She bit down and would not stop. When the captain finally extricated his finger, the top of it was missing. Néné spat it out and continued staring into space.

  “You stupid nigger.” A whip hissed in the air and landed on Néné’s back. I turned my head away, ready for her howl. But none came. The twins had passed away from this world.

  The next day, madness took over. Three women ran around the deck, shrieking. A sailor cut them down with his gun. The drummer was once again ordered to play. But who could play, dance or sing after witnessing the murder of the women? So the drummer man cursed the toubabs instead. Beasts, murderers, violators of women, devils from hell, savages, satan’s angels, he called them. And he jumped up and down, harsh sounds coming from his throat. Then he laughed uncontrollably. Two toubabs ran toward him, held him down and chained him. Then the captain applied the whip. The man’s back soon became a mass of raw bleeding flesh, but the captain did not stop. He flogged him until he died.