THE BOOK OF NEGROES (40 page)

But Daddy Moses spoke up again. “Brothers and sisters,” he said, “this is not the time to argue. You all have eyes, and you see for me, so tell me this: Can anyone see five hundred homes already built for our weary bones? Do we have a house of worship? Do we have a system for gathering food and hunting game and sharing among ourselves until we are all self-sufficient?”

Nobody said a word.

Over the next weeks, we cleared trees and bushes, split wood for fires, emptied supplies from fifteen ships, rowboat by rowboat, ripped up spare canvas, and built simple homes out of mud, clay and thatch.

We depended on the Company for everything. Did we need a hammer? A bit of canvas sail for cloth? Salt pork? Molasses? Bread? Everything came from the Company, which owned the resources, the food, the means to build proper shelters—and which even seemed to own us. When we ached from the hours of working in the sun or were soaked by the sudden
storms, Daddy Moses reminded us that there were times to fight, but this was a time to survive.

For the time being, we had food. The Company had brought supplies in ships from England, and much was left over from our trip from Halifax. However, the cheese had turned foul, the butter rancid, and molasses had leaked out of rotting barrels and covered the floor of our warehouse.

Daddy Moses couldn’t do much work, but he sat where we congregated and threw out suggestions. We divided ourselves into work crews, and set out to collect drinking water, hunt, make meals, and erect temporary buildings. We also built a sick house. People caught fevers left and right, and in our first two weeks in Freetown, ten Nova Scotians and three Company men died. For a time, we had a person dying every day or two. In the mornings, it wasn’t uncommon for us to ask each other, “How many died last night?”

Clarkson warned us repeatedly not to leave Freetown. Outside the town limits, we were told, the Company could not protect us from slavers or potentially hostile Africans. Many of the Nova Scotians seemed content to build their homes and work for the Company, but I felt that being obliged to stay within town was like staying on an island off the coast: I wasn’t yet free to reclaim my homeland. Between building churches, houses, granaries and roads, we had no lack of work to keep us busy. But to me, all the sawing and hammering seemed designed to create barriers between Nova Scotians and the Temne people inhabiting the coastal region of Sierra Leone. We were no longer in Nova Scotia, but we were transplanting a good part of it. I felt that the colony we were establishing was neither one thing nor the other. But if Freetown was not what I had come to find in Africa, it was only right to devote myself to it for the time being, and to support the dreams of my Nova Scotian friends. For now, my own dreams would have to wait.

I managed to avoid the illnesses and fevers that took so many lives,
and made myself useful by caring for the sick, catching babies and working sometimes for Clarkson. I slept in dampness at night, and was tired all day. My bones ached and called out at night for a soft feather bed. I thought sometimes of the angry voices of white Nova Scotians warning,
“You have no idea how good you have it here.”
It was true that life was hard for us in those early days in Freetown—our shelters, churches, food and clothes were as rude, or ruder, than they had been in Birchtown. The Nova Scotians grumbled about the poor quality of supplies and our utter dependency on the British, and they appointed sentries and guards to watch out for possible attacks by slave-traders. Still, the colonists felt a quiet optimism about the new lives they were building, and that their security was less tenuous in Freetown than it had been in Nova Scotia or New York. Personally, I concluded that no place in the world was entirely safe for an African, and that for many of us, survival depended on perpetual migration. Now that I had finally returned to my homeland, I had no thoughts of leaving. But I didn’t know how long I would be able to live next door to a slave-trading post.

Although I had lived among the Nova Scotians for ten years in Birchtown, I no longer felt entirely at home with them. I sought out the community of the Temne, though many Nova Scotians called them “heathens” and said that they should not be allowed to trade inside our settlement. Some Nova Scotians seemed intent on taking all of the contempt that they had endured in North America and redirecting it at the Africans. I heard from John Clarkson that two Nova Scotians were so disgusted at having to live under the rules and regulations of the Sierra Leone Company that they ran off to work with the slave traders at Bance Island.

In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too. I certainly felt more Nova Scotian than African when the Temne
women clustered around me, grains and bound fowl and fruits balanced on huge platters on their heads. They knew that I had come with Clarkson and the white sailors, and by the way they squeezed my hands and arms, they seemed to think that I was just as foreign as the British.

I tried to speak to them in Fulfulde and Bamanankan, but they laughed and had no idea what I was saying. I couldn’t wait to learn their language well enough to say that I too had been born in Africa. I knew that the Temne did not see me as one of them and that they never would. Still, I felt a certain connection to them, and the easiest and most natural way to feed that sense of kinship was to learn their language. I memorized new Temne words every day and used them constantly in conversation. I began by learning the Temne words for the oranges, water, fowl, salt and rice that they gave me, as well as words for the knives, pots, beads, cloth and rum that I collected from the Nova Scotians to trade.

I learned how to count to a hundred, and how to greet a person in the morning, at noon and at night. I learned to ask,
How are your children? How goes the work? How stands the house?
and
It all goes well
and
Thank you very much
. I needed to learn those words. It would be impossible to travel inland without speaking to the local people.

But even as I learned new words and phrases each day, I wondered just who exactly I was and what I had become, after more than thirty years in the Colonies. Without my parents, my husband, my children or any people with whom I could speak the languages of my childhood, what part of me was still African? I would never feel truly at home again until I found my way back to Bayo.

WITHIN A MONTH, we had cleared the land for a townsite, erected tents or huts for all of the Nova Scotians, erected a few key Company buildings and finished a basic church, which became our community centre. For a
time, we took turns in the church. The Baptists had it first thing Sunday morning, the Methodists at noon, and the Huntingdonians later in the afternoon.

Within two months, we had hewed out four streets running parallel to the river and three streets perpendicular.

The Nova Scotians, led by Thomas Peters, asked repeatedly for land grants so that we could begin farming. But the surveyor died, succumbing like so many people—white and black—to this new climate. The Company used this misfortune to insist that the Nova Scotians devote ourselves entirely to fortifying the town and building company structures.

Thomas Peters tried in vain to rally the Nova Scotians against the Company. I admired him for trying. The British had given false promises to the Loyalists who fought in the Revolutionary War and travelled to Nova Scotia, and they had lied once again about what we would receive in Sierra Leone. They did not attempt to enslave us, but nor did they set us free. They did not give us the promised tracts of land or any other means of becoming self-sufficient in Freetown. We depended on them for our work, our sustenance and even the materials and tools to build our homes. And they set the rules by which we lived.

“They betrayed us in Nova Scotia and again right here in the land of our ancestors,” Peters said to a group assembled in Daddy Moses’ church.

“Give it time,” Daddy Moses said. “We are not yet free, but we are moving in that direction.”

I shared Peters’ disappointment that we found ourselves once again under British control, but anger did not burn in my heart. I believed that Daddy Moses was right—freedom would come to us, one day at a time. But I also had other things on my mind. Freetown, for me, was nothing more than a stepping stone.

Before leaving Halifax, I had imagined that the colony we set up in Freetown would blend in with African settlements, and that I would
rarely see Europeans again. As it turned out, the Temne people came daily to trade with us, but did not invite us to join them in their villages. And a steady stream of commercial, supply and military vessels plied the African coasts and brought sailors every week to Freetown. They stopped for provisions, trade and simply to rest, drink and eat, and thus our new colony in Sierra Leone became an unlikely mix of Nova Scotians, Africans, British officials, and sailors on leave from their ships.

As well, the captains and crew of slave vessels regularly took time out from buying slaves at Bance Island to come drinking and looking for women in Freetown. I worried, initially, that the visiting slave-traders might try to re-enslave the Nova Scotians in Freetown, and spoke to Clarkson about it.

“We’re better to let them have their fun than to try to bar them from town and incur their wrath,” he said.

“It makes the Nova Scotians uncomfortable,” I said, “and it puts me ill at ease too.”

“What are we going to do?” he said. “Identify every visiting sailor by ship?”

“They trade in slaves,” I said.

“Not here in Freetown.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“They can get all the slaves they want at Bance Island,” Clarkson said. “Trying to take people here would be messy, and cause problems, and they don’t want that. All they want is to drink and carouse. Bance Island is where the slavers go to work. This is where they come to play.”

FOR A TIME, I LIVED WITH A WOMAN named Debra Stockman, who had been pregnant on the trip from Halifax and whose husband died en route. I caught Debra’s baby several months after we arrived, and taught her to
wrap the baby around her back in the African style. I taught her to feel the straining in the baby’s legs and backside, so she could loosen the infant from her back, remove her waist clothes, and let her do her business.

Debra soon set up her own business—a curio shop for visiting sailors. With my help as an interpreter, Debra bought sculptures, masks, ceremonial knives, little wood carvings of elephants, necklaces and ivory bracelets from the Temne traders, and sold them at a profit to sailors who wanted to take trinkets back to England. The fastest-selling items were tiny sculptures carved out of camwood. The deep reddish brown colour of the wood appealed to the sailors. Debra polished the sculptures with palm oil—little elephants, alligators and monkeys. But sailors couldn’t resist the sculptures of young, bare-breasted women. They could rarely pay in silver, but they gave Debra rum, iron pots, small cauldrons, iron bars, or clothing from England, and Debra was always able to give these to the Temne in exchange for food, or firewood or building services. The Temne were quick learners in the art of building the wooden, often elevated houses that pleased the settlers so much—and as a result Debra and her daughter, Caroline, were soon established in their own house and they lived in it well.

Apart from trading with the Temne and visiting sailors, we also depended on supplies from the
Sierra Leone Packet
, a Company vessel that sailed back and forth between Freetown and England.

One day, a few hundred of us gathered by the wharf to watch a ship unload. We had been hoping for boxes of hammers and nails, but in the crates we found three hundred clay watering pots.

“What’s this?” Daddy Moses asked, when I put one in his hands.

“A clay pot,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“A watering pot. We just got three hundred of them. No hammers, though, and no nails either.”

“Girl, you need to write those white folks a letter. Tell them we don’t have any gardens, just yet, and that with all the rain we don’t need their clay watering pots.”

I never wrote to the Company, but I did write to Sam Fraunces and Theo McArdle, when Clarkson explained that the letters would be sent to America after reaching England. I liked to imagine my words travelling across the seas, and I hoped that one day a letter might come back for me.

THE COMPANY HIRED ME TO TEACH CHILDREN and adults how to read and write, and Clarkson—who said writing brought on his headaches—gave me extra work preparing reports to the directors in London. As his occasional secretary, I was sometimes rowed out to his ship to work with him in a large cabin that had been turned into an office.

“Would you not rather live on land?” I asked him one day.

“I am a Navy man,” he said, “and I find it more peaceful out here on the water. I have time to think, and people cannot just bang on my door and barge in while I’m concentrating.”

“If the Company asked you to be superintendent of the colony, why do you let the other managers take over almost everything?”

“I am happy to leave them to it,” Clarkson said. “And it would strain my good relations with the Nova Scotians if I had to enforce all of the Company rules.”

“They are not the rules you had anticipated?”

Clarkson lifted his palms in the air, but would only say, “One can’t anticipate everything.”

When my writing work was done, Clarkson invited me to sit with him for tea.

“It must be lonely for you, without your fiancée,” I said.

Cracking his knuckles, he acknowledged that it was true.

He encouraged me to read some of his London newspapers, and while I did that, he read a book. It was the first time in my life that I had felt connected to another person, merely by dint of our sitting in the same space and reading together. I felt that I shared a good moment with him, even though we didn’t speak much. Actually, I appreciated that he did not enquire into the state of my own heart. Returning to Africa could not bring back all the people I had lost. But in Sierra Leone, I found myself less burned by longing for my daughter, perhaps because I had stopped looking for her in every child I saw. Wherever May was, she certainly wasn’t in Africa.