Deacon and I had both been the recipients of scholarship prizes that took us to San Francisco College, where we met the young American. Our prizes had come out of the Fund that the ghost-Frenchman (my ancestral father) left when he returned to Napoleonic France in 1800. Jonah was two or three years older than we were. But he seemed even older. He intrigued us with fictions of whales, Moby Dick, whales that swallowed civilizations and threatened the Virgin Ship.
His sense of humour was broad, sometimes Whitmanesque, but threaded with anger and despair.
‘Survivor Ishmael,’ he said, ‘hangs on Aeneas’s Ship, on Jason’s Argo as well. He hangs in dread of a brothel of history. Is Medea a whore or a Virgin Queen? Aeneas betrays Queen Dido. He had promised her fortune and then he abandoned her. He was a hero and a monster. Yes, Aeneas betrayed her,’ Jones said and smacked his lips with a curious satisfaction.
A silence fell over us like a beam from the brothel of history. I nailed it nevertheless into the deck of the Virgin Ship.
Deacon was pensive. We listened to the young American with a sense of foreboding. Deacon was of Indian descent. His grandparents had arrived as indentured servants from South India.
‘Mind you,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘I am speaking of his adoptive parents who were rice farmers and rearers of cattle and horses. No one fathoms Deacon’s ancestry. He fell from the stars as an infant child. War in heaven, rebellions in heaven, it is said, in accordance with savannah folklore.’
Deacon was pensive. He had been affianced — in keeping with East Indian indenture custom — to the maiden Marie of his own age, when he left British Guiana to take up his scholarship. Would he betray her? Would he betray the young Marie of Port Mourant, the maiden, the Virgin Marie of Port Mourant?
‘Three Maries,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘appear in the Dream- book. Marie — this Marie — is destined to be Deacon’s bride. When I saw her myself on visits to the Courantyne I fell head over heels in love with her. I would have married her like a shot. I hated Deacon. I was jealous of him. Hate is too strong a word. But the truth is we were antagonistic to each other. Racial antagonism? Racial antagonisms between East Indians and Blacks and people of mixed descent? It’s rife in British Guiana. It’s rife in the Guianas — Dutch and French as well. Surinam. Devil’s Isle. Guyana.’
‘Will he betray her?’ asked Mr Mageye.
Deacon caught the drift of my silent conversation with Mr Mageye.
‘Never, Never,’ said Deacon. He bared his arm. On it was tattooed the Constellation of the Scorpion. ‘This gives me immunity to pain,’ he said. ‘Why should I inflict pain on my bride?’
‘All the more reason why you may,’I protested. I bared my arm. On it was tattooed an imprint of Lazarus.
Deacon glared at me. ‘Heroes are saviours of the people,’ he said. ‘They build strong gaols and fortresses and coffins. But in the end they save the people, don’t they? As for you, Francisco, fuck you! Lazarus eh? You are a ghost’s ill-begotten son. I shall take you under my wing. I shall adopt you as brother and son. I shall even give you my Mask to wear in times of Carnival. Then everyone will think you are me and you shall be honoured.’
I shrank from him. I had not a word to say. But I pitied poor Marie. She was the adopted daughter of the Doctor-God of the poor people’s hospital of Port Mourant. Her parents had died in a car crash on the busy road between New Amsterdam and Port Mourant.
‘The Doctor is your magus-medicine man,’ said Mr Mageye.
‘Deacon has taken him in,’ I said. ‘Deacon has persuaded him that Marie and he will give birth to a true Lazarus …’
‘But you,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘you …’
‘I may have magi within my book but I am a surrogate of the cradle of the Bone that will flesh all races into genuine brothers and sisters …’
Deacon may have overheard my silent conversation with Mr Mageye. He bit his lips savagely until blood came. Heroes eat the flesh of monsters in themselves to fuel life, to strengthen life.
The friendship, the curious enemy friendship between Deacon and Jones and me, was a phenomenon of the modern age, indeed of many past ages.
Jones’s terrible moods of anger fuelled our resolution to face the world, to withstand insults, racial insults in America.
‘All who aren’t white are black,’ said Jones. ‘I shall protect you. You are all one to me.’
‘Are Alexander and Genghis Khan one to you, Jonah? Would you have recruited them to sail on the Pequod? They were sons of gods, they were fallen angels like me. Brace yourself Jonah for a new peasant uprising across the Americas. All you need is one man who contains millions …’
‘God help that one man,’ I said, ‘when he opens the door of the cell in which the Old God resides …’
‘What Old God?’ Deacon cried. But Mr Mageye put his hand to my lips. His face became grave as an Enigma or the Sphinx. And I said nothing. Indeed I was plagued by uncertainties and my allusion to a Prisoner upon Devil’s Isle, or Old God, was rash in all the circumstances. Jonah was angry. Old Gods were useless unless they could bring time itself to a standstill.
Phenomenal as it seemed, peculiar in the light of common sense, a strange aspect of the fuel that drove us into forging a treaty or a pact — a pact between the white American Jonah Jones and racially mixed and uncertain ancestries within Deacon and myself — was anger.
Though I had said nothing when Deacon taunted me as a ‘ghost’s ill-begotten son’ I was angry as much with him as with myself, angry with Jones as well in some classic, elemental way. Jones’s antecedents had owned slaves, they had decimated the peoples of ancient America from the sixteenth century onwards. An astonishing factor in all this was that Jones appeared to be the most angry one of us. No wonder he revered Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. Such classics of anger seemed rooted in the cosmos itself.
Jones — in the Mask of the Whale into which he descended at times — raged at the prejudices, the biases, the hypocrisy, that were visible everywhere. His anger therefore appealed to us. But it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I did not like the way he savoured anger as if it were the sweetest dish in the restaurants of San Francisco. Anger became the seed of his charismatic pursuit of eternity, eternity’s closure of time.
I feared the gross enlargement of emotion, the enlargement or complex pregnancy of the male charismatic priest. He hunted women in brothels everywhere. He sought to fuck them, to fuck himself, and to become a pregnant decoy in a pulpit for the annihilation of his age through mounting apparitional populations, mounting apparitional numbers to be weighed on the scales of time, blended pasts and futures.
Anger at injustice everywhere could turn nasty and become an involuntary ape of imperial hubris rooted in the despoliation of the laws of conquered peoples. Involuntary apes are the ‘ill-begotten bridegrooms’ of deprived peoples led to the altar within military coups or rigged elections.
What was deeply alarming to me — in my crossing a chasm of years from dateless day in Trinity Street, New Amsterdam, back to San Francisco, United States, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour — was that such Jonesian anger, such common-or-garden apehood of hubris, appealed to us, fascinated us, fascinated both Deacon and me.
True, it also aroused a sensation of foreboding and Nemesis. But the fascination remained. A fascination rooted in an addiction to holocaustic sacrifice and rivalry that ran deep in antagonistic cultures around the globe. Jones, poor Jones, was as much their pawn as they were his.