When Parliament was in session Sir Reginald moved his establishment to town, accompanied by Johnson and a pair of liveried footmen. London was a ripe tomato. Johnson was a macaroni. He strutted down Bond Street with the best of them, decked out in his top hat, wasp-waisted coat and silk hose. Soon he was frequenting the coffeehouses, engaging in repartee, learning to turn an epigram with a barb in it. One afternoon a red-faced gentleman with muttonchop whiskers called him a “damned Hottentot nigger” and invited him to fight for his life. The following morning, at dawn and in the presence of seconds, Johnson put a bullet through the gentleman’s right eye. The gentleman died instantly and Johnson was incarcerated. He was subsequently sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. Sir Reginald exerted his influence. The sentence was commuted to transportation.
And so, in January of 1790 Johnson’s legs were once again shackled, spoiling the lines of his hosiery. He was put aboard the H.M.S. Feckless and deposited at Goree, an island just off the west coast of Africa, where he was to serve as a private in the military. When he stepped ashore an ancient thrill went through him. He was home. Two weeks later, while on late watch, Johnson appropriated a canoe, paddled his way to shore, and melted into the black bank of the jungle. He then made his way back to Dindikoo, where he married Nealee’s younger sister and settled in to repopulate the village.
He was forty-seven. His hair was salted with gray. The trees climbed into the sky and dawn came like a blanket of flowers. By night there was the shriek of the hyrax and the cough of the leopard, by day the slow drowse of the honeybee. His mother was an old woman now, her face cracked and dried like the faces of the mummified corpses he’d seen in the desert — the corpses of slaves who hadn’t made it. She pressed him to her bones and clicked her tongue. It rained. Crops grew, goats fattened. He lived in a hut, went barefoot, wrapped a strip of broadcloth round his chest and loins and called it a toga. He gave himself over to sensuality.
Within five years Johnson was providing for three wives and eleven children — fourteen mouths — plus an assortment of dogs, simians, rope squirrels and skinks. Still, he wasn’t exactly working himself to the bone — no, he cashed in instead on his reputation as a man of letters.
Villagers would come to him with a calabash of beer or a side of kudu and ask him to scribble off a few words in return. Each wore a saphie—a leather pouch the size of a billfold — tied round his neck or wrist. These saphies were the repositories of fetishes, charms against calamity: a pickled ring finger was considered proof against the bite of the puff adder; a hank of hair guaranteed immunity from mutilation in battle; the musk gland of the civet cat prevented yaws and leprosy. But Logos was the supreme charm. The written word could bring wisdom, sexual potency, plenty in times of want. It could restore lost hair, cure cancer, attract women and kill locusts. Johnson was quick to realize the market potential of his penmanship.
He would scribble off a line or two of doggerel in exchange for three pounds of honey or a month’s supply of grain. Or he’d quote Pope and purchase a pair of gold anklets for his youngest bride:
Three catcalls be the bribe
Of him, who chattering shames the Monkey tribe:
And his this Drum, whose hoarse heroic bass
Drowns the loud clarion of the braying Ass.
She was fifteen, and demonstrative in her appreciation. Johnson lay back and relished, the whole thing sweet as a fiction. Paradise Regained, he thought.
Then one afternoon a runner came from Pisania, the British trading colony on the Gambia. He carried a letter from England sealed with the Durfeys coat-of-arms (a goat ruminant). England — the clubs, the theater, Covent Garden and Pall Mall, the sweep of the Thames, the texture of the late afternoon light in the library at Piltdown — it all rushed back on him.
He tore open the envelope.
Piltdown. 21 May, 1795
My Dear Johnson:
If this missive should reach you, I trust it finds you in good health. I must confess that the news of your elopement from Goree pleased us all immensely.
I rather suspect you’ve “gone native” with a few of those honey-complected sirens you were forever rhapsodizing, what?
But to business. This letter is by means of introducing one Mungo Park, the young Scot we’ve commissioned to penetrate to the interior of your country and discover the course of the Niger. If you will consent to act as guide and interpreter for Mr. Park, you may name your price.
Yours in Geographical Fervor,
Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart.
Founding Member
African Association
Johnson’s price was the complete works of Shakespeare, in quarto volumes, just as they had appeared on the shelves of Sir Reginald’s library. He packed a bag, traveled to Pisania on foot, sought out the explorer and drafted an agreement of terms of service. The explorer was twenty-four. His hair was cornsilk. He was six feet tall and walked as if a stick were strapped to his back. He took hold of Johnson’s hand in his big buttery fist. “Johnson,” he said, “I am truly pleased to make your acquaintance.” Johnson was five four, two hundred ten pounds. His hair was a dust mop, his feet were bare, he wore a gold straight pin through his right nostril.
“The pleasure is mine,” he said.
They set off on foot. Upriver, at Frookaboo, the explorer stopped to purchase a horse. The horse was owned by a Mandingo salt merchant. “A real bargain,” he said, “for such a frisky colt.” They found the animal tethered behind a wattle hut at the far end of the village. It stood in a cluster of chickens, munching thistles and blinking at them. “Splendid teeth,” said the salt merchant. The horse was no bigger than a Shetland pony, blind in one eye, and emaciated in the way that very old men are.
Open ulcers, green with flies, spangled the right flank, and a yellowish fluid, like thin porridge, drooled from the nostrils. But perhaps worst of all, the animal was given to senile farting — great gaseous exhalations that swept the sun from the sky and made all the world a sink. “Rocinante!” Johnson quipped. The allusion was lost on the explorer. He bought the horse.
Mungo rode, Johnson walked. They passed through the kingdoms of Wooli and Bondou without incident, but found on entering Kaarta that the king of that country, Tiggitty Sego, was at war with the neighboring state of Bambarra. The explorer suggested a detour to the north, through Ludamar. Two days after crossing the border they were accosted by thirty Moors on horseback. The Moors looked as if they’d just cooked and eaten their mothers. They carried muskets, dirks and scimitars — scimitars as cold and cruel as the crescent moon, weapons that hacked rather than thrust: a single blow could remove a limb, separate a shoulder, cleave a head. Their leader, a hooded giant with a hyphenated scar across the bridge of his nose, trotted forward and spat in the sand. “You will accompany us to the camp of Ali at Benowm,” he said. Johnson tugged at the explorer’s gaiters and whispered in his ear. The horses stamped and stuttered. Mungo looked up at the grim faces, smiled, and announced in English that he would be delighted to accept their invitation.