I

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

       Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
       sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
       horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:
               voyage through death
                               to life upon these shores.

       “10 April 1800—
       Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
       their moaning is a prayer for death,
       ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
       Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
       to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.”

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

       Standing to America, bringing home
       black gold, black ivory, black seed.

               Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
               of his bones New England pews are made,
               those are altar lights that were his eyes.

Jesus    Saviour    Pilot    Me
Over    Life’s    Tempestuous    Sea

We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,
safe passage to our vessels bringing
heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus    Saviour

       “8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick
       with fear, but writing eases fear a little
       since still my eyes can see these words take shape
       upon the page & so I write, as one
       would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding,
       but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune
       follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning
       tutelary gods). Which one of us
       has killed an albatross? A plague among
       our blacks—Ophthalmia: blindness—& we
       have jettisoned the blind to no avail.
       It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.
       Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes
       & there is blindness in the fo’c’sle
       & we must sail 3 weeks before we come
       to port.”

               What port awaits us, Davy Jones’
               or home? I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting,
               playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews
               gone blind, the jungle hatred
               crawling up on deck.

Thou    Who    Walked    On    Galilee

       “Deponent further sayeth The Bella J
       left the Guinea Coast
       with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd
       for the barracoons of Florida:

       “That there was hardly room ’tween-decks for half
       the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;
       that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh
       and sucked the blood:

       “That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest
       of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;
       that there was one they called The Guinea Rose
       and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

       “That when the Bo’s’n piped all hands, the flames
       spreading from starboard already were beyond
       control, the negroes howling and their chains
       entangled with the flames:

       “That the burning blacks could not be reached,
       that the Crew abandoned ship,
       leaving their shrieking negresses behind,
       that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

       “Further Deponent sayeth not.”

Pilot    Oh    Pilot    Me

       II

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one—King Anthracite we named him—
fetish face beneath French parasols
of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He’d honor us with drum and feast and conjo
and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
red calico and German-silver trinkets

Would have the drums talk war and send
his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
and kill the sick and old and lead the young
in coffles to our factories.

Twenty years a trader, twenty years,
for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested
from those black fields, and I’d be trading still
but for the fevers melting down my bones.

       III

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth;
plough through thrashing glister toward
fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,
weave toward New World littorals that are
mirage and myth and actual shore.

Voyage through death,
                               voyage whose chartings are unlove.

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
spreads outward from the hold,
where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

       Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
       the corpse of mercy rots with him,
       rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

       But, oh, the living look at you
       with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
       whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
       to strike you like a leper’s claw.

       You cannot stare that hatred down
       or chain the fear that stalks the watches
       and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
       cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
       the timeless will.

               “But for the storm that flung up barriers
               of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,
               would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,
               three days at most; but for the storm we should
               have been prepared for what befell.
               Swift as the puma’s leap it came. There was
               that interval of moonless calm filled only
               with the water’s and the rigging’s usual sounds,
               then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries
               and they had fallen on us with machete
               and marlinspike. It was as though the very
               air, the night itself were striking us.
               Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,
               we were no match for them. Our men went down
               before the murderous Africans. Our loyal
               Celestino ran from below with gun
               and lantern and I saw, before the cane-
               knife’s wounding flash, Cinquez,
               that surly brute who calls himself a prince,
               directing, urging on the ghastly work.
               He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then
               he turned on me. The decks were slippery
               when daylight finally came. It sickens me
               to think of what I saw, of how these apes
               threw overboard the butchered bodies of
               our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.
               Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:
               Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us
               you see to steer the ship to Africa,
               and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea
               voyaged east by day and west by night,
               deceiving them, hoping for rescue,
               prisoners on our own vessel, till
               at length we drifted to the shores of this
               your land, America, where we were freed
               from our unspeakable misery. Now we
               demand, good sirs, the extradition of
               Cinquez and his accomplices to La
               Havana. And it distresses us to know
               there are so many here who seem inclined
               to justify the mutiny of these blacks.
               We find it paradoxical indeed
               that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
               are rooted in the labor of your slaves
               should suffer the august John Quincy Adams
               to speak with so much passion of the right
               of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
               and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s
               garland for Cinquez. I tell you that
               we are determined to return to Cuba
               with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez—
               or let us say ‘the Prince’—Cinquez shall die.”

       The deep immortal human wish,
       the timeless will:

               Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,
               life that transfigures many lives.

       Voyage through death
                                     to life upon these shores.

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