Voices From The Other Side

by Brandon Massey

  Gonçalves himself made an appearance in this hatch above Owuda’s head before shutting it to all light. The passage would bring the ship south of the Sargasso Sea, he said in Portuguese. But they would stop, sail a zigzag like whalers—in the event they spotted something “extraordinary.” He didn’t elaborate on what he defined as extraordinary. “Witch doctor,” the captain said, “my ship’s surgeon has your sharp knives and tongs from your bag, lest you get any funny ideas. Keep the rest of your spells to treat the sick. I’ve lost enough money this year.”

  Something extraordinary occurred on the morning of the fourth day at sea.

  Gonçalves ordered all Negroes other than Owuda and the boys to be rinsed with lard-soap suds and cold seawater. The crew didn’t mind herding almost forty people onto a now heaving deck, given the smells in the cargo hold. Indeed, sailors flushed the hold as well. The filth settled into the bilge, seasoning the ocean as the pumps evacuated it. Owuda boiled bushia-bark extract into a tea to stanch diarrhea and vomiting. He brewed only enough for each person to take one sip. All but one responded in Goma or their native language, “Thank you, doctor” or “Bless you, brother.” The one who didn’t was the old woman, who growled, “Why can’t you just poison us all?” Owuda had thought of it. But he was a healer, not a killer. Once Owuda dispensed the tea, Kiriqui and the little boy who called himself Ademe acted as nurses, assisting him in tweezing maggots and salving sores. The boys halted when a crewman called to them in English. “Kevin, Adam! Come. Port bow!”

  He was a Yankee named John Brewster who was too lazy to pronounce either boy’s name correctly. Owuda despaired that his son and Ademe responded to these ugly tuabo names, but at least Brewster was kind to the little fellows, sneaking fruit or a carved ivory toy to them. Kiriqui quickly hollered for his father, and Owuda joined them to see a sea turtle—an adult Owuda reckoned to weigh at least two hundred pounds—bobbing atop the mountainous waves off the port side. It floated upright, not upside down, as anyone would expect a dead turtle to float. The top of its thick green shell had been ripped open, and all of its organs and meat had looked as if it had been sucked or scraped clean. Brewster fetched a billhook and snagged the carcass, yanking it to the port gunwale as spray from the heavy seas drenched the rail. Captain Gonçalves arrived with the master’s mate, both cursing at Brewster in English. They ceased when they saw the turtle’s shell.

  “Help stow the niggers below,” the captain snapped at Brewster. “Batten them in. Storm looks to be on us soon.” He turned to Owuda and spoke in Portuguese. “But you, doctor”—as he now called Owuda, rather than “witch doctor” or “nigger”—“stay.”

  The boys returned to their hole below the quarterdeck, just as the two nameless young girls who were loaded in Goma-ifo were separated from the others being slid back into the hold. Ademe related with a giggle that the girls—who both looked maybe thirteen or fourteen—received an extra cleaning and some sassafras to chew on, presumably to drive the puke smell from their mouths. Kiriqui frowned. He’d spied on his father while he had worked on both the girls the previous night, before the wind had gotten fierce. The tuabo made him do something between their legs. Stretch them wider, John Brewster had said, so they wouldn’t cry when the tuabo men lay down with them. Kiriqui told John Brewster about Fulani girls who’d get cut, and then they felt nothing when they lay down. John Brewster answered that the crew only wanted these girls cut a little bit. They wanted the girls to feel good between their legs, as he said that Negro girls liked to “crow and buck.” “Listen,” Kiriqui whispered sternly to Ademe as they were shut into their own dank space, “we’ll hear them scream soon, when the men start kissing them.”

  With most of the ship’s second watch thusly occupied with the girls, Captain Gonçalves had to help hoist the turtle carcass on deck. He kicked at the dead beast, but never peeled his glare from Owuda. A squall’s rains finally hit, driving the rest of the men up the rigging to trim the canvas.

  “So now you’ll be truthful with me?” Gonçalves asked. “I have seen this before . . . before Rodriego was pulled from the weed sea. No shark, no orca. No men could do this, even ones starved for meat. Empirically. ”

  Owuda was kneeling close to the gaping hole in the shell, and he squinted against the biting wind and stinging raindrops. He discerned the smell of ammonia. It was a by-product of digestion, found in human urine. But in this concentration? No, only large birds on land excreted this much—or soft creatures in the sea. Squid. Octopus. Big ones. He turned slowly, peered up at the captain. “No shark, no man.”

  Gonçalves beckoned him to get up. He pointed Owuda to the roiling gray clouds above. The wind was now blasting the ship broadside. “Nor’ by nor’west,” the captain muttered. “The winds are pushing us into the weed sea.”

  The blow died the following morning. And by the afternoon of the ninth day out from Goma-ifo, this ship was mired in the vast Sargasso Sea.

  The sun was high and hot, and it cooked the floating sargassum into a foul salad. In the hold, the cargo was silent. The tuabo thought they were asleep, but there were murmurs. Fretful murmurs. The Goma among them knew where the ship was. They translated to the others, and the others were frozen silent with fear. The crew wasn’t speaking much either, save for John Brewster. He stood above the small open quarterdeck hatch, passing the last of his molasses candy to the two little boys.

  “Your papa . . . he with the captain,” he assured the boys, combining English, Portuguese and a little Goma. “Captain like papa. Talk to him more than the master’s mate. Master’s mate don’t like that. Nobody like master’s mate anyhow!”

  “Father . . . he be come here . . . soon?” Kiriqui asked in broken English.

  John Brewster nodded. He didn’t tax the child’s newly minted vocabulary. “Captain just wants your papa to keep niggers healthy, is all,” he answered in Portuguese. “That’ll help once you all are sold. Sell you all as family. Him keep niggers right as rain and working hard, like prize stallions and mares, eh?”

  Captain Gonçalves poured more wine for himself. Owuda hadn’t touched alcohol in six months. The head tuabo toasted him anyway.

  “Here’s . . . to Doctor Owuda,” Gonçalves stammered. “Not a single nigger has been lost to sickness, not one has even jumped overboard. And that is good, as not all were bound for Brail.” When Owuda shrugged, the captain explained, “We were going to sell all the women and five men in Bahía to cover costs. Then we refit, revictual. You and the rest, along with nutmeg and mace, are going to Barbados, thence with raw molasses and what few of you remain, we go to Charles Towne, then Boston. Then I go back to that buffoon Djenu and start all over again.”

  “So we are to be sold in Barbados.”

  “Hmm . . . perhaps,” Gonçalves said, slicing off some sausage for himself and his guest. “Two hundred slaves a day die there in the cane fields. That’s worse than in Bahía. Owuda, your services would be valued. We could change the bill of lading and sell you in Carolina. Niggers treat ailments with spells and dances there, too.”

  “Seaman Brewster told me of Boston. I would like to go there with my boys.”

  The captain chuckled as he chewed, swilled wine. “First we make it out of here. And now that I’m no longer sober, explain this to me again. The sea beasts?”

  Owuda saved the sausage piece for the boys, then said, “Certain animals can grow to immense size in the deep ocean. Our fishermen, your sailors, all have seen whales bearing the scars of giant squid. Scars as on your man. The arms could easily be mistaken for a large eel, even an aquatic serpent. But these squid surface only to die. And they cannot destroy a ship.”

  “Then an octopus. You . . . you spoke of an octopus. . .”

  Owuda shook his head. As a child, he learned about the Witch. How God, whom the Goma called Otumere, cursed her, posted her at the edge of the world to guard against arrogant men sailing into the Sea of Heaven. She was an octopus. She was a silly myth designed to scare children and ignorant
fishermen. “In the deep water,” this physician and man of science began, “there are nutrients to feed the animals that a huge animal could then prey upon. It is cold down there. Yes, tolerable for a squid. But other soft creatures, no. The octopus craves warm water. Reefs, rocks, so it may den or use as a blind from which to pounce on slow creatures that do not live in cold, deep water.”

  “Doctor, the water isn’t cold in the weed sea, even at soundings a hundred fathoms down. There isn’t even a current. This I know.”

  “Perhaps there are caverns . . . plateaus under us. If there was an apparatus for a man to view the sea bottom, I myself would love to be the first man to go.”

  The captain stood and relieved himself in the porcelain pot under the table. “The size, Owuda—could such a beast live despite all you say?”

  Owuda told him of his outings in the clay hills a two-day walk from the river. There, he found the stony skeletons and imprints of plants and creatures both odd and terrifying. He surmised that the hill was once under a shallow, warm sea.

  Gonçalves sat back down, chuckling once more. That shallow sea was from Noah’s flood, he affirmed. How else could what was once underwater now be dry land? Owuda was acting less an educated semihuman and more a silly nigger! But Owuda ignored him and described a bizarre imprint in the hillside: that of a tentacled animal with a conelike shell that was as long as two oxen and just as thick. Including arms and head, the beast would have been the length of the ship’s mainmast. The captain ceased laughing. “Again,” Owuda concluded, “I need more empirical facts, observations. Will you give me some paper, a pen?”

  Now sullen, Gonçalves motioned with his head toward his cabin door. “Time to stow you,” he mumbled. “No hard feelings.” When Owuda arose and went to the door, the captain called, “Say nothing of our conversation to crew, the niggers.”

  “You mean the other niggers . . . sir. By your leave.”

  Gonçalves jerked a nod. “We carry more than niggers, Owuda,” he suddenly added. “Under where we keep you. That other hold is copper-lined. Know why? Can’t have a spark, can we, eh? Djenu and some of our client Tuareg, Hausa, Gozo . . . they defaulted on a payment for eight very big casks of powder, lock-fused in case buccaneers or the French try to seize us. Enough to blow us up to God and then back down to the Odd Place beneath the waves, and all resting under your ass, Owuda.”

  “Why are you telling me this, sir?”

  “All of us share risk in this passage. All of us are niggers of somebody.”

  On the evening of the twelfth day—four adrift in the weeds, awaiting a southwest wind on which to tack—all aboard were praying. Some canticles were for Jesus. Some, to she who swam below. Jesus wasn’t listening this night.

  A crewman named Lopes should have been on watch but instead had a girl pinned to the bow windlass. He shoved his fingers between her legs, his other hand cupping her breast. She was stone-faced as he nuzzled her throat, cooing only for effect. He backed off to loosen his pantaloons and dirty draws. The girl’s eyes widened as big as the moon above, and Lopes snickered. He figured he must’ve scared this negress—he always said he laid this angry cock against any nigger’s, and his was a hard fit for a quim or a mouth. But the girl was sinking to the deck, chest heaving. She was no longer a virgin, so Lopes cursed her fear. But then he saw a shadow move cross her face. Big, like a passing cloud would cast if it were day. He heard a whine, a splash of water. He turned.

  With a whoosh, the great arm smacked him to the pine deck as a hand would swat an insect. The suckers ground into his skin, lifted him skyward. Mercifully, the blow knocked Lopes unconscious. Unmercifully, he would awaken when he hit the water, just long enough to see the unblinking eye, then a chomping beak, then bubbles and his own blood.

  The girl’s hoarse screams shook the rest of the crew from its languor. In an instant, five other huge, suckered arms flailed at the bow. Glum laziness turned to utter horror. Amid the shouts and crack of wood and cordage came a loud hiss as water and air rocketed from the beast’s siphon. The ship lurched upward at the stern, jamming Owuda, Kiriqui and Ademe into one end of their cramped cubby. The boys cried as Owuda kicked at the hatch. After another violent heave, he heard the blast of muskets, more shouts. And then Gonçalves’ voice: “Bring the doctor now!”

  The hatch opened. The boys smiled because it was John Brewster’s face in the lantern light. But the boys just as quickly recoiled when a piece of the jib boom flew by the sailor’s head like a javelin. John Brewster tugged Owuda out. Owuda ordered the boys to stay in the cubby, no matter what. But keep the hatch open, he said.

  Owuda tumbled forward, as now the stern was dry out of the water. When he caught himself against the rail, he saw what was down at the other end of the ship, and his stomach plummeted to his knees.

  Two eyes. Arms grasping, crushing, breaking, squeezing. A snapping beak the size of the archway into Djenu’s villa. And within that maw, a great barbed tongue, dripping with poison and digestive juice, hanging with torn flesh and clothing. Owuda the physician and surgeon, the man of science, was silent. Owuda, son of Barinda and Kwame, circumcised and baptized to serve Otumere, whispered, “Ay-Koja . . .”

  And two gigantic eyes focused on him. Saw the black face. Stretched an arm. Tasted. Slapped Owuda down. Wriggling under the broken oars of the captain’s wrecked skiff—the only means of escape—Owuda avoided being taken. A crewman popping up to aim his musket wasn’t so lucky; the force of the grabbing tentacle severed his arm as the gun fired.

  Gonçalves was in the thick of the menace, waving his cutlass. Exhorting his men. Hollering for Owuda. But Owuda would not come to him. He scampered to the main hold’s cover. He could hear the wails and shouts below. That old woman could see him through the iron grillwork and called, “Do not save us, Brother Doctor!” And a man’s voice, also in Goma, shouted, “Let us die with dignity in her belly. Better than to serve the tuabo . . . like you, traitor, up there!”

  It was then that the master’s mate caught Owuda, pushed him to the captain’s side. The hull heaved up again, then twisted as if the monster was a mammoth dog ripping a lamb shank. Gonçalves yelled, “You, Doctor, where can we hit it to kill it? One spot! Maybe a harpoon?” When Owuda shook his head, backed away, Gonçalves struck him with his fist. “You owe me! You owe me! We’ll all die here!”

  Better than to serve the tuabo, Owuda muttered inwardly. But the timbers around the forward hold were cracking. The bottom decks were flooding, and the cries were louder in the night than the gunfire or the hiss of this creature. Tentacles were finding bodies therein, and bodies were going willingly, limply, into the wet and rasping mouth, as if sacrifices. Owuda could bear no more. He ducked the next swing from Gonçalves—this one from a cutlass—then landed a punch to the captain’s ribs. The cutlass dropped. Owuda scooped it up and tore back to the quarterdeck, which by now was rising higher as the monster dragged the bow into the sea.

  Owuda heard the boys whimpering for him, and there stood a quivering John Brewster, trying to ram a ball into his pistol barrel. Owuda seized the tuabo’s’s arm and sputtered in English: “Boys are Kevin and Adam now. Not animals. You save them!”

  Then Owuda released him. He didn’t understand what this Negro meant. Or what this Negro was doing with a cutlass. Or why this Negro didn’t run him through and jump with the boys himself. But when he watched Owuda smash away the latch to the powder hold with the blade, he knew. John Brewster genuflected, then leapt up to the hatch to pull the boys out and huddle them at the stern rail.

  With another cutlass blow, Owuda freed two of the kegs, each waist-high and as big around as the monster’s thickest tentacle. Attached to each like a spigot was a lock-and-flint hammer not unlike those on a musket. These contraptions were covered in greased cloth to prevent sparks; Owuda ripped off the covers and toppled the first cask onto its side. He hadn’t a clue from where came the strength to do so. His thighs, shoulders and back burned as if on fire.

  The first c
ask rolled and bounced down the inclined deck like one of Kiriqui’s toys, wedging at the sunken bow between a felled yardarm and the monster’s maw. Owuda tipped the second cask, this time controlling the fall with one of the severed restraining ropes.

  Owuda could not hear the captain’s curses or the prayers of drowning Brothers and Sisters from the hold. He could not hear the wail of his son or Ademe as John Brewster held both close, shielding them from what was to come.

  Two yellow eyes peered down on Owuda, and the flailing arms stilled for a moment. Owuda looped his fingers around the now-cocked hammer of the cask he’d rolled.

  Owuda spoke this in the few seconds before he died: “Ay-Koja, if that is what you are. Forgive me. But you can’t destroy one evil . . . with more evil.”

  The blast shot fire into the other cask, and it, too, detonated. After the shower of singed timber and flesh, only three souls remained to see the dawn.

  H.M.S. Achilles, on station against the French at the western edge of the Sargasso Sea, came upon the wreckage on the seventeenth day out from Goma-ifo. The warship’s captain would log that he’d found three survivors lying on a capsized skiff and other flotsam: John Brewster, age nineteen, of Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in service to the Portuguese. A Negro boy named Kevin, age nine. A Negro boy named Adam, age eight. As the children had no marks or brands, and no documents survived the sinking, the captain recorded his concurrence with Brewster that the children were not bound Africans. The Yankee seaman said only that the powder hold went up when the crew, grim and indolent from heat and foundering in the sargassum, smoked pipes carelessly. The captain noted that it was a shame that almost forty Africans worth of profit went to the bottom.

  But the joint stock owners and bankers who were the tentacles of the behemoth named the Royal Lisbõa Sugar Company had paid generous insurance premiums, as did all companies whose ships tracked the Middle Passage. This disaster would be forgotten, and the trade in flesh would begin anew. Feeding the monster of greed in the Americas and Europe. Feeding the monster of pettiness in Africa. Ever hungry.