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Cringle cleared his throat, coughing into one hand.

“We found this boy in the longboat, Skipper. He says he’s Rutherford Calhoun, a friend of Squibb. I thought perhaps—”

“You’ve rung the bell to change watch?”

The mate paused. “I was about to when I discovered th—”

“See to it, then. And shut the door behind you.”

The mate left, glancing helplessly at me. Standing alone, looking at the back of Captain Falcon’s sloping head, shining my boots on the back of my breeches to polish them, I thought that maybe racial savvy might see me through this interview. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but we all know it anyway: namely, that a crafty Negro, a shrewd black strategist, can work a prospective white employer around, if he’s smart, by playing poor mouth, or greasing his guilt with a hard-luck story. At least it had always worked for me before. In my most plaintive voice I told the captain how desperate I was for work, that I’d stowed away because gainful employment was systematically denied black men back home, that New Orleans was so bigoted a Negro couldn’t even buy vanilla ice cream.

“So?” said Falcon.

I told him about my mother’s death from overwork in the fields of Illinois when I was three. (She died in bed, actually, but I could trade on this version and liked it better.)

“So?”

And then I related the hardships I’d received at the hands of my religiously stern master, Peleg Chandler, who gave all his slaves two teaspoons of castor oil every Saturday morning, whether they were sick or not, and called that “preventative medicine.” (It may not seem like much to you, but to me, at age twelve, it was torture.)

“So?” he said again, this time swiveling full around to face me, his elbows splashed on the leather arms of the chair, and as his gaze crossed mine in the crepuscular cabin light, as I saw his face, I felt skin at the nape of my neck tingling like when a marksman has you in his sights, because the master of the Republic, the man known for his daring exploits and subjugation of the colored races from Africa to the West Indies, was a dwarf. Well, perhaps not a true dwarf, but Ebenezer Falcon, I saw, was shorter even than the poor, buggered cabin boy Tom. Though his legs measured less than those of his chart table, Captain Falcon had a shoulder span like that of Santos, and between this knot of monstrously developed deltoids and latissimus dorsi a long head rose with an explosion of hair so black his face seemed dead in contrast: eye sockets like anthracite furnaces, medieval lines more complex than tracery on his maps, a nose slightly to one side, and a great bulging forehead that looked harder than whalebone, but intelligent too — a thinker’s brow, it was, the kind fantasy writers put on spacemen far ahead of us in science and philosophy. His belly was unspeakable. His hands, like roots. More remarkable, I’d seen drawings of this gnarled little man’s face before in newspapers in New Orleans, though I never paid them much attention, or noted the name. He was famous. In point of fact, infamous. That special breed of empire builder, explorer, and imperialist that sculptors loved to elongate, El Greco-like, in city park statues until they achieved Brobdingnagian proportions. He carried, I read, portraits of Pizarro and Magellan on every expedition he made.

Now. . yes, now I remembered those stories well. Falcon, the papers said, knew seven African coastal dialects and, in fact, could learn any new tongue in two weeks’ time. More, even, he’d proven it with Hottentot, and lived among their tribe for a month, plundering their most sacred religious shrines. He’d gone hunting for the source of the Nile, failed, but even his miscarried exploits made him raw material for myths spun in brandy and cavendish smoke in clubs along the eastern seaboard. He’d translated the Bardo Thodol— this, after stealing the only scroll from a remote temple in Tibet — and if the papers can be believed, he was a patriot whose burning passion was the manifest destiny of the United States to Americanize the entire planet. Really, I wanted to take off my hat in his presence, but I hadn’t worn one. Never mind that his sins were scarlet. He was living history. Of course, he stood only as high as my hips, and I had to fight the urge to pat him on his head, but I was, as I say, impressed.

“Sit,” said he, motioning to the chair at his chart table. “I don’t like people looking down at me.”

I could understand that; I sat.

Falcon toddled over to his washbasin, poured water from a bucket half his size, and began to sponge-bathe under his nightshirt, speaking over his left shoulder at me. “And, generally speaking, I don’t like Negroes either.”

“Sorry, sir.” He was frank; I liked that. With bigots a man knew where he stood. “But I can’t help that, sir.”

Falcon half-turned, his eyebrows lifting.

“I know you can’t, Calhoun. It’s one of the things I learned about Negroes after living with the Lotophagi on the African coast. You don’t think too well, or too often. I don’t blame you for stowing aboard.” He squeezed out his sponge. “Poor creature, you probably thought we were a riverboat, didn’t you?”

I fell back against the seat. “This isn’t a riverboat?”

“I thought so.” Falcon wet his hands, then finger-combed his hair, shook off the water, and carried his basin to the door, throwing it out on a man who began cursing like. . well, like a sailor until he saw the captain’s face, and meekly tipped his hat. Slamming the door, Falcon fixed me again with both eyes. “ ’Tis a slaver, Mr. Calhoun, and the cargo awaiting us at Bangalang is forty Allmuseri tribesmen, hides, prime ivory teeth, gold, and bullocks, which comes to a total caravan value of nearly nine thousand dollars, of which the officers and I have a profitable share — quite enough to let me retire after this run or finance an expedition I have in mind to Tortuga or, if I’ve a mind, see my share tripled at the gaming tables of Franscatis in Paris. But if you sail with us to Guinea — that is, if I don’t decide to nail your feet to the floor — it will have to be without pay. Do you see that, Calhoun?”

“Yessir.” I nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

“Good.” After toweling his hands, he took a shirt with frills down the front and a pair of pantaloons from a chest by the door. “I don’t hold it against you for being here. Or for being black, but I believe in excellence—an unfashionable thing these days, I know, what with headmasters giving illiterate Negroes degrees because they feel too guilty to fail them, then employers giving that same boy a place in the firm since he’s got the degree in hand and saying no will bring a gang of Abolitionists down on their necks. But no”—he looked pained—“not on my ship, Mr. Calhoun. Eighty percent of the crews on other ships, damn near anywhere in America, are incompetent, and all because everyone’s ready to lower standards of excellence to make up for slavery, or discrimination, and the problem. . the problem, Mr. Calhoun, is, I say, that most of these minorities aren’t ready for the titles of quartermaster or first mate precisely because discrimination denied them the training that makes for true excellence — ready to be mediocre mates, I’ll grant you that, or middlebrow functionaries, or run-of-the-mill employees, but not to advance the position, or make a lasting breakthrough of any kind. O, ’tis a scandal on the ships I’ve seen, and hardly the fault of the poor, half-trained Negro who hungers like anyone else these days for the glamour of titles and position.” He was grimly quiet for a second, lost in thought, and though it troubles me to tell you this, I almost saw his point, yet only for an instant, for what he said next was enough to straighten a sane man’s hair. “Now that I think of it, you remind me of a colored cabin boy named Fortunata who was aboard on my first trip to Madagascar.”