To the girl I said, “How did you come to be in there?”
But she was not fluent enough in Portuguese to understand me readily. I realized then that she knew only a scattering of words, and had been rehearsing those most carefully, in the event that anyone drew close enough to the corral to pay heed to her. So I said my question again, more slowly, and doing a little dumb-show and miming with my hands to help convey the meaning. This time she comprehended, after some moments. She said a few words by way of reply, and I nodded and encouraged her, and she spoke again, more clearly, her confidence at the language increasing as she saw that I was inclined to be gentle and patient with her. And by slow and painful exchanges we did manage a fair degree of communication.
She said, squatting down to scratch a map of sorts in the soft earth, that she came from an inland province of the Angolan territory, a place called Kazama in the land of Matamba, that was tributary to the King of Angola. Jesuit missionaries had passed that way and built a small church and converted the people to the Roman faith, or more or less, and she had been baptized by them under the name of Isabel. She told me also her native name, but for once my ear for strange sounds did fail me, for the name was so awkward on my tongue, such a twisting sneezing clicking thing, that I was unable to say it after her, though she told me three times. I could not even put it down rightly on paper. So I called her Isabel, though I found it not easy to do, Isabel being so European a name and she being such a creature of the dark African interior; afterward I usually called her “Matamba Isabel,” and then just “Matamba,” which she accepted as her name even though in truth it was the land from which she came, and not a person’s name at all, as if she had wanted to call me “England.” But all of that came later.
She had fallen into slavery by double mischance. Two years before— so I think she said—a marauding band of Jaqqas had stolen her from her village, and would have made her one of their own kind—it being the Jaqqa custom to adopt into their tribe the boys and girls of thirteen to fourteen years of the villages they plundered, as I had already learned at the time of the massacre at Muchima. But she had slipped away from the cannibals in the darkness of the jungle and, wandering most boldly by herself, had drifted westward into some part of Angola where the folk of a settled village found her. These, to pay for certain goods that they desired, had sold her to an itinerant slave-trader. He in turn had brought her to the coast and conveyed her to the Portugals; who had branded her and had penned her here in São Tomé until such time as she could be crammed aboard one of those stinking abominable un-healthful slave-ships to be sent into servitude and early death in America.
“God’s blood!” I cried. “They shall not have you!”
I suppose it was wrongful of me to single out one girl from all these others and say that she should not be enslaved. Were the others not human as well? Did they not also have hopes, fears, pains, ambitions, and all that human cargo? Was not each of them the center of his own universe, a proud and noble creature of God? Why say, this one should be spared, this one is not deserving of such bondage, but those must remain.
Yet this one did seem superior to the others, and of such qualities that it was an evil thing to enslave her. I know there is an error of thinking in that. Slavery is not a condition to be imposed only upon the inferior. If it must be imposed at all, it should be handed round impartially to anyone, and if God has decreed that blacks be shipped in chains to America, why, then we should not pick out certain blacks that catch our favor and say, You are exempt, you are too fine for such service. And yet the injustice of turning this girl into a sort of pack-animal did cry out to me with a hundred tongues. She held herself so high, she seemed obviously to have such unusual qualities of mind and spirit, she appeared to be so far beyond the savages with whom she shared the corral, that it was most wrongful to my mind to let her be enslaved. I could not save them all; I did not even see the need or the worth of sparing them all; but I wished to spare just this one. That she spoke some Portuguese and professed herself to be a Christian already marked her, in my view, as someone to be exempted from slavery: for if we countenance the enslaving of Christians, why, there would be no end to it, and soon we would all be enslaving each other, as the vile Turks and Moors do enslave captive Christian mariners to row the oars of their galleys.
I think also I should confess it that I had noticed the beauty of the girl, her sleek limbs and high breasts and bold bright eyes. Yea, give forth all the truth, Battell! But though that surely did influence me in her favor, I swear that I did not purchase her with the idea of making her my concubine. It was only that beauty in a woman makes a powerful argument of its own in any debate, just or unjust though that may be. And although in my early days in Africa I had failed to comprehend the presence of beauty in black women, and had not had any sort of sexual commerce with any of them up to that point, I had by now spent more than four years under the hot African sun, and it had worked changes in my blood, no doubt upon it. In the Book of Solomon that is called the Canticle the bride of Solomon sings, Nigra sum, sed formosa, filiae Jerusalem, which is to say in English, “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,” and so was it with this Matamba Isabel, black but comely to my altered way of seeing. But by God’s teeth I vow I did not have the use of her body in my mind at that time.
The one-eyed churlish guard returned and said, “Have you had enough conversation with this slave yet? She must return to the corral.”
“Nay, she will not return to it.”
“And will you prevent it, then?”
“I intend to buy her. What is her price?”
The girl knew enough Portuguese to understand that, plainly: for she threw me a look of amaze and gratitude. But the Portugal only made a shrug and said, “It is not done, selling like this. You may not have her.”
“I am in need of a slave. Slaves are sold through this island. Tell me the price, and I will pay it.”
“I tell you, it is not done.”
Again my choler rose, and this time I seized him, bunching up his shirt in my hand so roughly that the flimsy sweat-soaked fabric tore away. I shook terror into him, making his one eye roll about in his head, and threw him from me and pulled free my sword, ready to use it if he swung that evil cutlass of his. But he did no more than to glare me his venomous glare, and slink a few steps back and attempt to restore his disarranged clothing. And at last he said, not meeting my gaze, “This is no domain of mine. Wait ye here, and I will inquire after her price.”
He limped away. The girl trembled beside me, all astonished and frightened. For a long while we stood together saying nothing. Within the corral, arms did wave desperately at us and voices cried out in half a dozen African tongues; for others in there had concluded that I was taking her out of that detention, and they prayed me to do the same for them. During this time three members of my crew came along, Oliveira and Cabral and a third whose name I do not remember, and, seeing me standing with a naked blackamoor girl, they came toward us, with many a lascivious leering expression. “A sweet piece!” cried that third one. “Let us borrow her, and take her to our camp tonight!” And he did put his hands to her, stroking the curve of her buttock and squeezing her breast. At once I caught him by the shoulder and spun him around, and gave him a cuff across the cheek with the back of my hand that knocked him four or five paces, and when he was finished reeling and staggering he turned to me looking both surprised and angered, with his hand on the hilt of his sword ready to draw.