Confessions of the Fox

by Jordy Rosenberg

  Their eyes met.

  “Are you—” Jack began.

  “Hush,” said Laurent.

  Jack’s eyes flashed again to the tattoo. “Pa ni mèt ankô?”

  A silence fell. Heads turn’d. The dead train was approaching Execution Wharf. Close up, ’twas an even more terrifying spectacle than from afar. A murdering Horde on horseback. The clop of hooves and the drone of Last Rites carried on the wind. The ridiculous hats of the Admiralty and the Magistrates bounc’d against the gloom of the midday gray.

  The cider in Jack’s stomach began to burn.

  Centinels now ringed the perimeter of the crowd. In his shouting with the Mob and knuckling the finer sort, Jack hadn’t seen them draw in. But now ev’ry other person at the edges of the Mob was a centinel. Their faces were hard, superior. One centinel tried to give a child a candied orange peel from his pocket in some show of pretended Humanity. The sprite dart’d behind his mother’s legs, sobbing.

  With a roar, the procession pulled into Execution Wharf. The horses thundered, trumpeter heralded the Admiralty. The Ordinary beseeched a last-minute Confession from the condemned.

  The cart pulled up to the execution theater. A scraggly pale prisoner stood within, held on either side by a constable. His arms were bent sticks in their hands. His beard was long and—even from the distance—swarming with lice. Behind the constables, the Thames rippled at the edge of the dock.

  The wind picked up, rose to a moan, and the crowd grew Restless. The burghers agitat’d for swift death. The masses wail’d in sympathy, despair, and fury. Jack’s throat was caught on a knot, and his Body began buzzing in that away-way.

  And then there was a Movement. Beyond the platform—out on the blust’ry, wind-chopped water.

  A Plague Ship was moving closer.

  Some anchor must have come free. A Panic of centinel-punts were following behind, bellowing to each other contradictory orders. “Tight behind!” “Cut it off!” The strains of Surveillance-speech floated over the crowd.

  Jack nudg’d Aurie, nodding with his chin towards the water.

  “It’s going t’ crash the docks.”

  “Nah.” Aurie’s attention was on the execution-cart. “Nothin’ but slushing around in the currents.”

  But the ship didn’t seem to be slushing around. It drifted slowly, but quite directly, towards Wapping Wharf. Its sail was not rais’d; it looked a shambling, half-starved Golem advancing. Now there was a hum picking up amongst several clusters, pointing and agitating.

  Someone shouted, “The Plague Ship is headed for shore!”—and full Mayhem broke loose. The execution centinels fled the cart, leaving Barnes bound beneath the hanging tree, alone. The burghers start’d crawling over each other at the front, heading towards the perimeter of the crowd for Escape. They were stamping on each other’s heads, shrieking “Plague!” and clawing at the air. At the back, the commoners jostled and pushed, shouting at each other to get to safety. “I am correct’d,” Aurie muttered. He grabb’d Jack’s sleeve and drew him towards the edges of the crowd.

  “Pa ni mèt ankô!”—this time from the front.

  Jack looked at the dock again. There was a figure—unimposingly smallish and quick, darting in and out of the bodies rushing in the opposite direction—a blur of muslin pantaloons and belted smish. He was racing towards Barnes. The centinels, now blocked from chasing by the chaos of the crowd, shouted helplessly, “Okoh!—Grab ’im!”

  No one did.

  “It’s Okoh!” Jack hissed at Aurie.

  “Who’s Okoh?”

  “He ’scaped the Tower guards and he’s—he’s here? And, did Laurent know, and—”

  Jack and Aurie were bump’d and toss’d by the Mob, which, like some flailing animal, surged out and away from the dock in several directions at once. Jack kept his eyes fixed on the docks and the advancing ship behind. It was only yards out from land now. As it got closer, its full bulk was reveal’d. What had seemed from a distance a puny mast swaying against the sky was in fact a thick, heavily rigged trunk plowing upwards from a long, broad deck. The hull towered over the docks, hundreds o’ feet high, boards ripped and pitted, coated in gray-brown riverslime, and caked with patches of pink, white and black—a mix of mussels, barnacles and sea-coral.

  Okoh had reached Barnes. He leapt up onto the cart, turned to look at the ship, then, with an odd smile, peered out over the crowd.

  Aurie yank’d Jack by the back of his collar.

  The sound of the vessel rocking and creaking began to drown out the hysterical crowds. The hull slapped against waterskin. As Aurie dragg’d him towards the perimeter, Jack shouted out, “Okoh! A hero! A true self-made hero!”

  And Okoh’s voice rang out over the hectic assembly. “Hear ye, all! There are in the world no such men as self-made men! We have all either begged, borrow’d or stolen. We have reaped where others have Sown, and that which others have strewn, we have gather’d.”

  “Let me hear this, brother.” Jack tried to pry Aurie’s fingers from his collar.

  “Individuals are, to the mass, like Waves to the ocean.” As the voice intensify’d, the ship grew to massive heights, closing in. “The highest order of Genius is as dependent as is the lowest. It, like the loftiest waves of the sea, derives its power and Greatness from the grandeur and vastness of the ocean of which it forms a part. We differ as the waves, but are One as the sea. And so it is to the sea that we should look—the sea of us all! The sea of Justice and Freedom shall maintain me! The sea shall maintain us, Freebooters and Mutineers all!”

  And just as the crowd began to intone back, Mutineers all!

  —The ship heav’d itself to its highest height, blotting out the sun and the sky behind—looking to devour the dock whole in its slow unstoppable path—

  —And then it did devour it.

  The ship crash’d into the dock with an ear-splitting crack, and the execution tree and cart and the entire dock burst into a Cascade of splinters, a blooming cloud of debris. Aurie’s hand was hard on Jack’s collar, dragging him out of the fray.

  Commoners were fleeing the execution site, thronging the road in a Clatter of screams.

  And then a deadcart with horses being whipped mercilessly thunder’d up behind them. Following it, jeering, were more Commoners running, throwing rocks and clumps of dirt and grasses, calling, Murderers! Murderers!

  At the side of the path, Flanders, waiting in the rushes, held a thick branch in his hands. As the cart jumbled past, he leapt out, jamming a stick into the wheels. A body, wrapped in a burlap cloth, sailed out, carried by forward Motion. A pale arm poked free.

  At just that moment, Fireblood rode up on a horse from the swamps at the shoreline. Flanders scuttled out, threw the Body up onto Fireblood’s horse, and Fireblood gallop’d off in the direction of Wild’s Office before any of the executioners manag’d to gather their Wits. Flanders zipped back into the rushes.

  Aurie and Jack stood amaz’d.

  Now what would Wild’s men want with a body? thought Jack as Fireblood viciously whipp’d his horse past.

  He looked back at the dock. It had disintegrated—shards and splinters were still settling through the air. Okoh was nowhere to be seen.

  *1 This reminds me: I never heard back from my colleague regarding this phrase.

  *2 Pickpocketing of handkerchiefs

  *3 Advanced pickpocketing of cash and watch fobs from particularly deep or narrow pockets—Jack’s fingers being particularly adept at this latter skill.

  READER!

  I have some urgent news to convey.

  This will be my last communication for a period of time. I am not certain for how long, but I do know this: I am leaving tonight. I am taking the manuscript with me. It is something other than what it appears to be. Something far more valuable.

  Consequently, I am, to put
it plainly, shortly to be on the run.

  Let me clarify. Who knows when or if I will be able to speak to you again.

  This last chapter was the final straw. In seeking out its meaning, I found that I had indeed missed a reply from my colleague—Prof. T. Bryant—regarding my earlier query on the phrase: Pa ni mèt ankô.

  Though this was through no fault of my own. Emails containing “foreign words” have begun to mysteriously go to spam. Well, perhaps not so mysteriously. Surely this has something to do with the University’s outsourcing its electronic communications department to the private mercenary-and-electronics corporation Militia.edu. In any case, reminded by this most recent chapter that I never heard back on my query, I hunted through my spam folder and discovered the missing email—and one other.

  According to Professor Bryant, a very rough translation of Pa ni mèt ankô is: “There are no more Masters.”

  The translation itself—while intriguing—is of lesser interest than how my colleague arrived at the translation.

  After diligent searching in her field, the only textual reference she could find for this rallying cry was in Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco: “His lips had found hers, he kissed her smack, she kissed him, they were still kissing each other screaming Pa ni mèt ankô! There are no more Masters” (Gallimard, 1992; trans., Random House, 1998).

  You note the date on the Chamoiseau text.

  1992.

  A date befuddling in itself, but in fact clarifying when combined with the second missing email I found in my spam folder. The email regarding plitho-hypomnesis, or: collective diary-keeping.

  Collective diary-keeping, my Greek colleague has informed me, was a heavily guarded and legendary practice amongst the freedmen and slaves. It is a genre of which we have few to no extant examples. Indeed, my colleague was not sure one such collective diary had ever been found, although great and furtive claims have been made for their existence, always under cover of intense secrecy.

  This translation in conjunction with the other?

  Well, Reader, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that the confessions of Jack Sheppard contain, as they say, multitudes. Put more simply, they are not exactly a singular memoir. They are something else. That something, broadly speaking, is the plitho-hypomnesis of, for lack of a better word, us.

  I must confess that I believe my own attachment to the text clouded my ability to recognize the glaring obviousness of this collective authorship earlier. I was looking for the reflection of a single subject when I should have been looking for something else.*1

  Plitho-hypomnesis is the only explanation for the many generic irregularities and impossible references that populate this text. And it makes this manuscript not only the most valuable Sheppard document ever discovered, but something far in excess of that. Something evasive, gnomic and irreplaceable.

  The diary of a trace.*2

  *1 Caught up in the manuscript, I forgot a central tenet of decolonial theories of the archive—its critique of our fetish for archival truths, our belief that “if a body is found, then a subject can be recovered” (Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, p. 3; Duke University Press, 2009).

  There is no (one) body in this archive, no one subject either. How foolish I’ve been.

  (On this topic, see the Atlas Group: “We urge you to approach these documents…as ‘hysterical symptoms’ based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories,” in “Let’s Be Honest, the Rain Helped: Excerpts from an Interview with the Atlas Group,” in Review of Photographic Memory, ed. Jalal Toufic (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004).

  *2 Given this realization it is imperative that I add some notes to the preceding chapter. Most urgently, I have realized that Okoh’s self-made-men speech is taken almost verbatim (except the concluding sentence), from Frederick Douglass’s “Self-Made Men” speech of 1872.

  The overt citation of Douglass by the text provokes the reconsideration of a further detail of the scene. Specifically this: “The ship crashed into the dock and the execution platform burst into a cascade of splinters, a blooming cloud of debris.”

  Now this requires some extrapolation by way of anecdote.

  One night, several years ago now, I’d done teaching my graduate seminar, and one of my more unnervingly well-read and eloquent students had stuck around to chat after class, as she often did. I had probably been going on about some documents of revolutionary thought that evening, and those students with the bug for that kind of thing will often want to maximize that discussion. This student had that bug big-time, and in fact I was beginning to fear that she was better read than I. In any case, she detained me after class with some questions, and although the Humanities building operated under a self-imposed curfew of sorts (most of us liked to flee immediately due to the proliferation of vermin that emerged from the nooks and crannies of the crumbling building once the clatter of students died down), I remained under the merciless fluorescents with her because her question was not about the reading, but about whether I could put her in contact with someone.

  She prefaced the question with some hemming and hawing having to do with the after-hours social life of graduate students that I did not care to learn about. She referenced a graduate student conference in some distant town. A bar she had been to. But then things got more interesting. She began to describe a conversation she’d had at this bar, in which someone—but, she confessed, she had been drunk and couldn’t at all remember who it had been—had mentioned a reading group. And she wished to know whether I knew anything about it.

  In fact I had not heard of this group, and at that moment, if I recall correctly, I tried to gently nudge her to walk and talk with me, as I was certain I’d heard rustling from the corner of the room.

  We emerged into the parking area shared by the Humanities building and ROTC, and so weaving between the ROTC instructors’ Hummers and BMWs—and the vehicles of the Humanities faculty (mostly 1991 Plymouth Neons)—she divulged that this particular group styled itself as one of “action.” It seemed their central principle was to take their fidelity to certain theoretical texts out of the classroom and into the streets. Well, not the streets, actually, but the archives.

  As we strolled to my Neon, she explained that the group had been most active in the early aughts and just after. Styling themselves somewhat after the ALF, but with books rather than puppies, they sought to liberate—or rather decolonize—those texts under ownership of university libraries. Late at night, during school holidays, a number of stacks nationwide had been infiltrated and—how to put this?—edited. The texts were not removed. They were simply improved upon.

  My student found those actions taken in accordance with Saidiya Hartman’s classic Scenes of Subjection to be of particular interest, and wished to write her term paper on this topic, if I could put her in touch with anyone in the group. She wanted to conduct some sort of decolonial ethnography of this group. Or so she said.

  I did not know of this group. I couldn’t help her, and said as much. But I am wondering now if this student was in fact a member of this reading group. Was she in fact trying to obliquely clue me in to something? Perhaps she had seen this manuscript. The one of which I am now in possession. More important, perhaps she and her comrades had performed an homage to Hartman in editing it? She cited Hartman by heart, those opening passages where she explains that she’s “chosen not to reproduce” the famous scene in Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: “the account of the beating of Aunt Hester.” Hartman declines to reproduce the scene, quoted my student, “in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often
they inure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity” (Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford University Press, 1997).

  I hadn’t thought about it then—and in my defense, the night was cold and I was tired after class—but I am now wondering: had this student—had this group—in fact been to my own University library and edited this particular scene? I do not know what might have been here originally, but I wonder now if, in addition to adding in the Douglass speech, the “cascade of splinters” and “blooming cloud of debris” were original to the text or added in as well.

  I say this because, if the reader has not already put two and two together, this “cloud” is unquestionably an homage to Douglass’s other major work, My Bondage and My Freedom. The reader recalls that in that volume, Douglass declines to give exact details of how he escaped slavery, instead inserting a metafictional address to describe the missing autobiographical material: “Disappearing from the reader in a flying cloud, or balloon…” It is speculated that Douglass replaced details of his escape with the “flying cloud” so as not to expose and thus hinder other, like-minded escapes.

  It’s impossible now not to conjure some image of that imaginary evening—somewhere up on the seventeenth floor, the spare lights of the Valley winking below—a cluster of excitable graduate students—the approaching footfalls of the campus police—the hasty stuffing of the manuscript back into the stacks, out of order. Years later…a book sale, an aging professor—well, you know the rest.

  Of course this is all speculation.

  And now, Reader, you’ll excuse me. I have to go.

  6.