Soulcatcher: And Other Stories by Charles Johnson | eBook

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CHAPTER 1

The Transmission

THEY WERE DEAD, and this was the boat to the Underworld.

In the darkness of its belly, the boy — his name was Malawi — lay pressed against its wet, wooden hull, naked and chained to a corpse that only hours before had been his older brother, Oboto. Down there, the air was curdled, thick with the stench of feces and decaying flesh. Already the ship's rats were nibbling at Oboto's cold, stiff fingers. Malawi screamed them away whenever they came scurrying through a half a foot of salt water toward his brother's body. He held Oboto as the boat thrashed, throwing them from side to side, and the rusty chains bit deeper into his wrists. But by now, after seven weeks at sea, the rats were used to screams, moaning, and cries in the lightless entrails of the ghost ship. All night, after the longhaired, lipless phantoms drove them below — the men into the hold, the females into the longboats and cabins, the children under a tarpaulin on deck — Malawi heard the wailing of the other one hundred captives, some as they clawed at him for more room. (Perhaps, he thought, this was why the phantoms clipped their nails every few days.) He couldn't always understand the words of the others, but Malawi gleaned enough to gather from his yokefellows that they were in the hands of white demons taking them to hell where they would be eaten. Many of the others were from different tribes and they spoke different tongues. Some, he remembered, had been enemies of his people, the Allmuseri. Others traded with the merchants of his village, men like his father Mbwela, who was a proud man, one wealthy enough to afford two wives. But that was before he and Oboto were captured. They were no longer Hausa, Tefik, Fulani, Ibo, Kru, or Fanti. Now they were dead, one and all, and destined for the Underworld.

Every day since this journey began, Malawi had lost something; now he wondered if there was anything left to lose.

They had been herded after their long trek from the lush interior to the bustling trading fort overlooking the sea. They came in chains, shackled in twos at their necks, in a coffle that contained forty prisoners, a flock of sheep, and an ostrich. When they arrived at twilight, their feet were crusted with mud and their backs stung from the sticks their captors — warriors from the nearby Asante tribe — used to force them up whenever they fell during the exhausting monthlong march. It was there, on that march, that the horrors began. Wearily, Malawi walked chained to Oboto. His father, Mbwela, and mother, Gwele (Mbwela's youngest wife), were shackled in front of him. His mother stumbled. One of the Asante struck her, and Gwele fought back,scratching at his eyes until he plunged a knife into her belly. In a rage such as Malawi had never seen, his father fell upon the Asante warrior, beating him to the ground, and would have killed him had not another of their captors swung his sword and unstrung Mbwela's head, but with a cut so poorly delivered his father did not die instantly but instead lay bleeding on the ground as the coffle moved on, with Mbwela cursing their captors, their incompetence, telling them how he would have done the beheading right.

How long it took to reach the fort, Malawi could not say. But he remembered their captors fired rifles to announce the coffle's arrival. Cannons at the fort thundered back a reply. Men fluent in several languages lifted their robes and ran to the fort's entrance to meet them. Their Asante captors chanted, Hodi, hodi, hodi, asking permission to trade. The dragomen replied, Karibu, meaning they could, and then Malawi and the other prisoners were driven toward the receiving house as people inside the fort pointed and stared. Like slices of walking earth, they must have seemed, so chalky from their long trek, a few stumbling, some bleeding from their feet, mothers long since mad, their eyes streaming and unseeing, carrying dead children, the rest staring round the fort in shock and bewilderment.

And Malawi was one of those. The bustling, slave market was like a dream — or, more exactly, like yet another nightmare from which he could not awaken, no matter how hard he rubbed his eyes. There were harem dancers in brightly colored costumes. Magnificent horses ridden by vast-bearded Arab traders who exchanged the cracking-fingers greeting of the coast. Bazaars. And musicians picking up the air and playing it on their Koras, as if everyone had come from all over the earth to an unholy festival. In this place human life was currency, like a cowrie shell. Starving families brought their children to sell. Slaves, stripped naked, were held down by other black men as the strangely dressed phantoms branded their shoulders with red-hot pieces of bent wire. They'd been shaved clean, soaked in palm oil. And when the wire touched their skin, burning flesh blended with rich food smells in the market and made Malawi cough until his eyes watered. Then, when his vision cleared, he saw along the beach, just below the warehouses, phantoms bartering for black flesh. They traded firelocks, liquor, glittering beads, and textiles for people from the Angola, Fula, Sesi, and Yoruba tribes. If they resisted or fought back, they were whipped until blood cascaded from their wounds. The phantoms forced open their mouths to examine their teeth and gums as if they were livestock and, laughing, fingered their genitals. They paid one hundred bars apiece for each man; seventy-five bars for each woman. Malawi, whose father had been a merchant, saw that what they called a "bar" was worth a pound of black gunpowder or a fathom of cloth, and he saw that they accepted no children under the height of four feet four inches.

What, Malawi wondered, had he and the others done to deserve this? And, instantly, he knew: Those being sold were debtors. They were thieves. They were tribesmen who refused to convert to Islam. Were guilty of witchcraft. Or refused to honor the ruling tribe in their region. Or they'd been taken prisoner during tribal wars, just as he and Oboto had been captured.

He saw a bare-chested ghost, one with a goatish laugh and reddish whiskers, arguing with an Asante trader chewing on a khat leaf, yelling that the wrinkled old man he'd brought to sell, who was sweating and looked ill, had been drugged to conceal his sickness. No, that one the ghost didn't want. Not the elderly. Only the healthy men who could work, the young women who could bear, and the children. He and his brother would surely be picked — Malawi was sure of that — or at least they would choose Oboto, who was strong, with tightly strung muscles and sharp features like the tribes of the far north. Yes, they would want a man as strikingly beautiful, as brave and wise, as his brother.

Oboto touched Malawi's arm just before they were pushed into the warehouse, and Malawi saw — away in the distance beneath a day-old moon — a vessel a hundred times the size of the thatch-roofed homes in his village, with sails like white bird wings and great, skeletal trees springing from its deck and piercing the clouds. This he heard the phantoms call the Providence. Then it was dark as they were shoved into the warehouses. Families in his coffle were separated — husbands from wives; children from their parents — so those in their cells, then later on the ship, could not talk to each other. By some miracle, one he thanked his ancestors for, they'd blundered and not separated him from his brother, who had seen twenty harvests, five more than Malawi himself.

That night their jailers fed them a porridge made from roots and grainy honey beer. As they ate, Oboto told him, "Don't be afraid, little brother."

Malawi was indeed afraid but did not want to anger Oboto. "I'm not, as long as you are here —"

"No" — his brother cut him off — "listen to me. Even if I am not here, you must not be afraid. Malawi, I have been watching these people who raided our village, and the ones from the ship ... They are not strong."

"But they have many guns," said Malawi, "and chains and great ships!"

"And they bleed when they are cut." Oboto moved closer to him as a guard passed their cell. He whispered, "I've seen them faint in the sun, and I watched one from that ship cry when he passed water, as if he was afflicted and doing so was painful. Did you see some of them up close? Their rotten teeth, I mean. A few are missing fingers. Or a hand. They touch others in places forbidden, and all the while they look afraid, fingering their rifles, looking over their shoulders. Their mothers have not yet finished with them. They are barbarians. Malawi, I don't think the spirits respect them. How could they? They smell bad. They are unclean. They are dead here" — he touched his chest above his heart — "not us. Some of the white men I saw, the ones with the whips, grovel before others in fear and have stripes on their backs as if they were slaves. The ones doing the hardest work, unloading crates from the ship for trade, don't understand as many tongues as you or I."

"Yes ..." Malawi nodded slowly, for his brother spoke well, as always. "I saw that." As a merchant's son, he'd picked up enough Ibo and Bantu to converse passably well when he accompanied Mbwela on trips to buy and sell goods. And he'd seen one of the phantoms, a young man close to his brother's age, fall down in the heat when unloading a crate of goods from the Providence, and because he was slow in rising, one of the other ghosts beat him, bloodying his mouth. He'd seemed different from the other devils. His nose was hooked like that of a hornbill beneath blue eyes that could have been splinters from the sky. This was probably his first trip to Africa and it seemed no one had told him that it was a good idea to take fluids all day, even a little, because your body was constantly losing moisture, whether you were perspiring or not. "But," said Malawi, "I am afraid of them. I'm sorry ..."

"Don't be sorry." Oboto touched Malawi's arm gently. "I was afraid too when I saw them burning the village. When our parents died. And I prayed to our ancestors to let me die — yes, I did that during the journey here — but they helped me understand."

"What?" said Malawi. "Why they have taken so much from us?"

"No, they showed me what they cannot take. And I will show you."

Malawi knew — as their captors could not — that before the raid on their village Oboto was destined to be a griot, a living book who carried within himself, like a treasure, his people's entire history from time immemorial. Its recitation took three full days. When he was a child all the adults agreed that Oboto's gift of recall distinguished him for this duty, and from his fifth harvest he could be seen trailing behind gruff, old Ndembe, who was griot then but getting a bit forgetful in his sixties, repeating after his teacher every chapter of their tribe's history. He learned their songs for war and weddings, the words they sang when someone died or was born. He learned the chronicle of their kings and commoners, the exploits of their heroes, folklore, and words for every beast, plant, and bird as well as the rhymes their women sang when they made fufu, taking into himself one piece of their culture at a time, then stitching it into an ever-expanding tapestry that covered centuries of his people's hopes and dreams, tragedies and victories. Now Malawi realized their village had not been wiped from the face of the world; its remains were kept inside Oboto. And during that night in the warehouse, while the other prisoners wailed or wept, Oboto began to teach his younger brother, transmitting all he knew, beginning with the story of how their gods created the world, and then the first man and woman.

Oboto continued after he and Malawi were bathed, branded, and brought on board the Providence. During the night they were kept below, tightly packed together, and forced to lie on their right sides to lessen the pressure on their hearts. Those on the ship's right side faced forward; those on the left faced the stern. Hatches and bulkheads had been grated and apertures cut around the deck to improve the circulation of air, though in those depths Malawi wheezed when he whispered back the ancient words his brother chanted.

Come morning, they were forced topside. The phantoms covered their mouths with rags, went into the hold to drag from below those prisoners who'd died during the night, and then by 9 a.m. cleaned this unholy space with chloride lime so it could be inspected by the ship's captain. Up above, more phantoms washed and scrubbed the decks and splashed buckets of salt water on Malawi and the others, then from buckets fed them a pasty gruel the color of river mud in messes of ten. And all the while, Oboto quietly sang to his brother — in a language their captors could not understand — how their people long ago had navigated these very waters to what the phantoms called the New World, leaving their hieroglyphics and a calendar among the Olmecs, and a thousand years earlier ventured east, sprinkling their seed among the Dravidians before their cities were destroyed by Aryans who brought the Vedas and caste system to enslave them. On and on, like a tapestry, Oboto unfurled their past, rituals, and laws in songs and riddles as they ate or when the phantoms shaved their hair and clipped their nails every few days.

Slowly, after weeks of suffering, it dawned on Malawi that this transmission from his brother, upon which he fastened his mind night and day like a prayer, was holding madness at bay. It left him no time to dwell on his despair. Each day the prisoners were brought together for exercise. To dance and sing African melodies beneath mist-blurred masts and rigging that favored the webwork of a spider. Week after week, Oboto used that precious time to teach, at pains to pass along as much of their people's experiences as his younger brother could absorb, though after six weeks Malawi saw he was weakening. His voice grew fainter, so frail that at night when they lay crushed together, Malawi had to place his ear close to Oboto's lips, catching the whispered words as his brother's chest rose and fell, each of his weak exhalations a gift from a world they would never see again.

When Oboto's wind was gone, Malawi held him close and chanted his brother's spirit safely on its journey to join their ancestors and he kept the rats away. The hatch creaked open. Sunlight spilled into the hold, stinging his eyes. The phantoms came below cursing — they were always cursing — and drove the prisoners onto the deck. One of them, the hook-nosed phantom, began unchaining Malawi from Oboto. "I guess he was some kind of kin to you, wasn't he? That's too bad. I've lost family too, so I guess I know how you feel." He removed the last of the shackles from Oboto, then stood back, waiting for Malawi to release his brother. "Go on now, you can turn him loose. He's dead."

Malawi did not let go. He tried to lift his brother, slipping his arms under Oboto's shoulders, but found him too heavy. The phantom watched him struggle for a moment, then took Oboto by his feet, and together they carried the body onto the deck, with Malawi still singing his people's funeral songs. They stepped to the rail, Malawi blinking back tears by then, the edges of his eyes feeling blurred. Then he and the phantom swung his brother overboard, dropping him into wind-churned waters. Instantly, Oboto disappeared beneath the roily waves. For a few seconds Malawi's heart felt so still he wondered if he might be dead, too, then involuntarily the words he'd learned came flooding back into his thoughts, and he knew there was much in him — beyond the reach of the ghosts — that was alive forever.

The phantom, his yellow hair flattened to his forehead by spray, was watching Malawi closely, listening to the lay on his lips. He was very quiet. Malawi stopped. The boy said, "Naw, go on. I don't understand what you're singing, but I like it. It's beautiful. I want to hear more ... C'mon."

Malawi looked at him for a moment, unable to understand all his strange words. He glanced back down at the waters, thinking that Oboto's songs had only taken him so far. Just to before the time his village was raided. His people's chronicle was unfinished. New songs were needed. And these he must do. Hesitantly at first, and then with a little more confidence, he began weaving the events since his and Oboto's capture onto the last threads his brother had given him.

Malawi sang and the phantom listened.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from "Soulcatcher And Other Stories"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Charles Johnson.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Soulcatcher: And Other Stories

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