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  Soulcatcher and Other Stories

  Twelve Powerful Tales about Slavery

  Charles Johnson

  * * *

  A HARVEST ORIGINAL

  HARCOURT, INC.

  San Diego New York London

  * * *

  Copyright © 1998 by Charles Johnson

  Preface copyright © 2001 by Charles Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887–6777.

  These stories first appeared in Africans in America by Charles Johnson,

  Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Research Team.

  www.harcourt.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Charles Richard, 1948–

  Soulcatcher and other stories/Charles Johnson—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  "A Harvest original."

  Contents: The transmission—Confession—

  Poetry and politics—A soldier for the crown—Martha's dilemma—The plague—

  A report from St. Domingue—The people speak—The soulcatcher—

  A lion at Pendleton—The mayor's tale—Murderous thoughts.

  ISBN 0-15-601112-3

  1. Afro-Americans—Fiction 2. Historical fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3560.03735 S64 2001 00-053950

  813'54—dc21

  Text set in Cloister Old Style

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  A Harvest Original

  First edition

  C E F D

  * * *

  Contents

  Preface ix

  The Transmission 1

  Confession 13

  Poetry and Politics 25

  A Soldier for the Crown 33

  Martha's Dilemma 41

  The Plague 49

  A Report from St.Domingue 59

  The People Speak 67

  Soulcatcher 75

  A Lion at Pendleton 83

  The Mayor's Tale 93

  Murderous Thoughts 103

  * * *

  Preface

  IN 1969, THE YEAR the first large lecture classes in Black Studies premiered at the Illinois college I attended, African American faculty were so scarce on campus that black graduate students from different fields volunteered to teach these courses, with undergraduates assisting them as leaders for small, weekly discussion groups. I was one of the latter. Reaching back, I recall cutting most of my own classes spring term in order to prepare for my discussion group by reading for eight hours a day John Hope Franklin's massive masterpiece, From Slavery to Freedom, and dozens of other texts (by black authors) on sociology, history, and literature. In the late 1960s, these works were no where to be found in the canon or curriculum at integrated colleges, secondary or elementary schools. In the universe of academia, they were "dark matter," invisible to the eye. And, yes, I was sometimes tempted to condemn the white teachers and professors I had had since the 1950s for not placing this history before me, but I realize now that they had not been taught this material—they never knew what they didn't know, and thus had nothing to transmit to the children of color who filled their classes when Brown v Board of Education went into effect after 1954 and who hungered for knowledge about themselves.

  What I learned as an autodidact, as an undergraduate teaching himself in those dizzying, early days of Black Studies, was that American history on every level imaginable—political, economic, and cultural—was simply inconceivable without the presence of black people on this continent from the time of the seventeenth-century colonies.

  So, while I have been a voracious student, and sometimes a teacher, of black American history and literature for over thirty years, I was (and continue to be) astonished by the wealth of research and perception-altering revelations about this country's past contained in the PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery and its beautiful companion book, which I had the privilege of co-authoring with Patricia Smith and the WGBH Research Team.

  However, in late 1996 when producer Orlando Bagwell approached me about writing twelve original short stories to dramatize the companion book's history, I was initially hesitant. Why? At that time, I was a year away from completing my fourth novel, Dreamer, a complex, multileveled philosophical fiction about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, 1966 Chicago campaign (and his fictitious double who appears during a riot). I had already devoted seven years of study to this difficult and endlessly demanding project The thought of committing my time and energy to yet another book that involved both scholarship and unflagging imagination made me feel weak in my knees. But, happily, Bagwell, a producer I've admired since the early 1980s for his professionalism and outstanding character, persisted. He and his team of filmmakers, who devoted a decade to bringing Africans in America to the screen, urged me again by phone, fax, and face-time at a Seattle restaurant to take on this unusual project, since I'd already traversed slavery's history in my third novel Middle Passage (a fiction that demanded seventeen years of research on the slave trade and another six on the vast lore of the sea). I fidgeted. I flinched, but at the end of the day how could I say no? I'd come to know American life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while writing my second novel, Oxherding Tale (1982), and through numerous historical teleplays for PBS from 1977 through the '80s. Finally, I agreed, though I had absolutely no idea exactly what stories I would write.

  Early in 1997 we all met at WGBH—Bagwell, Patricia Smith, Steve Fayer, who wrote the scripts for the television series (and was co-author of Prices of Freedom, the companion book for the award-winning PBS series, Eyes on the Prize), and those responsible for auctioning the proposed companion book. From the very first we agreed that, unlike some texts spun-off from TV series, this book would best serve readers (and viewers) if it could stand on its own as a unique publishing event. On that cold January day in Boston my only contribution to our discussion was to express my desire to generously deploy a variety of literary forms for the twelve stories. I wanted to create, if possible, a diversity of narrative styles that would make each story aesthetically vivid; I dreamed of dramatizing the history covered by the series, of course, but I also wanted to bring a specific technical challenge to every one of the tales, regardless of their content.

  But the long and short of it was that I still had no idea what I would write.

  For months, as I worked through spring and summer to complete my fourth novel, huge boxes of research compiled by WGBH's Research Team arrived on my doorstep. That fall, when I finished Dreamer and finally could pore over these reams of black-bound books and the drafts of Smith's poetically written chapters, story possibilities began to percolate in my imagination. Here, in these boxes crammed with primary and secondary source material, I was introduced to facts and historical figures essential for deepening our understanding of America's past and present; the frisson I experienced being no less than the delicious shock of discovery I'd known in the '60s. The research for the PBS series treated major historical moments—the Middle Passage, the Revolutionary War, abolitionism, and the circumstances that led to the Civil War—but in doing so it also unveiled the fascinating and often ambiguous anecdotes, ironies, back-stories, and paradoxes that inevitably arise when human beings for centuries live within an ex
ecrable social arrangement they know is unjust and fragile and ultimately doomed. Here, in the historical record, was marvelous grist for the mill of fiction: the slaves who fought in greater numbers for the Crown rather than for the Continental Army, in a desperate gamble for their freedom; the frightening (and wickedly funny) dilemma of Martha Washington after her husband George dies; the plague that descended upon Richard Allen's Philadelphia in 1793; the racist alarm Thomas Jefferson felt over Toussaint L'Ouverture's victory in Haiti. On and on, the material gathered by the research team made history I fancied myself to be familiar with suddenly unfamiliar and, therefore, exciting.

  All during the month of January, 1998, I did nothing but write, day and night. I cannot remember anything of that month in my life because I read no newspapers, books, or magazines; I put my everyday existence on hold, apologized to my wife, children, and friends for being physically present but psychically absent (I fear I've lived most of my life this way, what with dovetailing creative projects for the last thirty-five years), and retreated from this world to dwell every waking moment for thirty days in the unfolding world of my ancestors. In short, I was in heaven for a whole month.

  With that sort of concentration, remarkably like Buddhist dharana (focus), the stories flowed from me in a dreamlike rush. Each possessed its own particular form. "The Transmission," which was the first fiction I wrote, employed the most conventional of storytelling strategies: authorial omniscience (third-person-limited) to depict the harrowing journey of the African boy Malawi to the New World. "Confession" shaped itself as a third-person monologue (until the very end, only the slave Tiberius speaks). "Poetry and Politics" is a single scene entirely in dialogue without a line of description, because I heard rather than saw this exchange between Phyllis Wheatley and her mistress. "A Soldier for the Crown" is cast in second person, "Martha's Dilemma" in traditional first person, and "The Plague" rendered as fictitious diary entries by Rev. Richard Allen. An epistolary approach felt best for "A Report from St Dominique," and in "The People Speak" I could not resist (being an old journalist) the mock-newspaper article as the story's vehicle. By contrast, "Soulcatcher" uses full authorial omniscience as it switches from the viewpoint of a slave hunter to perching on the shoulder of his prey. In "A Lion at Pendleton," mixed prose and verse (George Moses Horton's "The Slave's Complaint") structure the narrative. The dominant feature of "The Mayor's Tale" is, obviously, the "Once upon a time" narrative voice usually heard in folk-and-fairy tales. And the final story, "Murderous Thoughts," is composed of alternating first-person monologues, each with a different voice and diction, delivered to an off-camera reporter.

  Rarely is a writer given the opportunity (like an actor) to climb into the skin of both Frederick Douglass and Martha Washington, to descend into the fetid hold of a slave ship and join an eighteenth-century slave revolt, to play Jefferson's consul to Haiti and inhabit the psyche of both a runaway slave and his pursuer. For this great privilege I thank Orlando Bagwell. Much credit, I must add, is also due to my superb editor, Jane I say, for her wise editorial work once these stories began rolling off her fax machine.

  Two years ago it was my hope that this repertoire of formal variations would bring a freshness to the illuminating facts in Africans in America which, to my knowledge, is the only history text that features fictions commissioned from a contemporary writer. And it is my hope today that these stories, now published separately as a collection in their own right, will serve as something of a time machine for readers, transporting them back to an African American past that in every way critically informed the on-going adventure of democracy and the creation of the republic in which we presently live.

  CHARLES JOHNSON

  SEATTLE, AUGUST 2000

  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 diffèrent 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 As ante 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 ot
her 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 "ibruba 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 did-n'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.