PEARL K. BELL
491
as well as solemn, and anachronism can provide a link between past and
present.
In
New Orleans, Rutherford has been leading a merry and reckless
life whoring around, dipping into other men's pockets, and running up
huge debts. "I was hooked on sensation, a lecher for perception and the
nerve-knocking thrill, like a shot of opium, of new 'experiences.' " He is
determined never to become what he contemptuously calls "a gentleman
of color," and when he is faced with the impossible choice between a
lethal beating by his creditors and a dull life with a straitlaced school–
marm who offers
to
pay his debts if he will marry her, Rutherford runs
for his life and stows away on an illegal slave ship, the
Republic,
bound
for Africa.
As he quickly discovers, conditions on the ship are barbarous. The
foul and decrepit vessel is in constant need of makeshift repair, the crew
(Rutherford is the only black) a savage gang of "degenerates and dregs,"
the captain a cultivated but viciously bigoted and predatory dwarf who
cares only about his take for the slaves and the stolen artifacts he will
transport back to New Orleans. But it is only when the ship reaches the
coast of West Africa that the horror of its mission begins to sink in. The
inhumanly packed blacks in the stinking hold are the last survivors of the
Allmuseri tribe, and while Rutherford is disgusted by the cruel treatment
they've received, he gradually comes to understand on the long journey
home that he has nothing in common with the captives beyond the
color of his skin.
Though he casts his lot with the Allmuseri when they mutiny and
take over the ship, he does not feel he is one of them. A deeply spiritual
people who abhor "the madness of multiplicity" that will be inflicted on
them in America, they yearn for their homeland, though it has been
devastated by famine and disease. But Rutherford is a Yankee, and the
home that beckons him has nothing to do with Africa. As he tells us
toward the end of the terrible journey:
I desperately dreamed of home.... The States were hardly the
sort of place a Negro would pine for, but pine for them I did. Even
for
that
I was ready now after months at sea, for the strangeness and
mystery of black life.... There were indeed triumphs, I remembered,
that balanced the suffering on shore.... If this weird, upside-down
caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees and
former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds,
whoresons and fugitives - this cauldron of mongrels from all points
of the compass - was all I could rightly call
home,
then aye: I was of
it. There . . . was where I wanted to be.
