THOMAS DOHERTY
573
1745 in the central African kingdom of Benin, he was kidnapped into slav–
ery at the age of eleven by "stout mahogany colored men" of the Ibo tribe.
Still in the hands of "these sable destroyers of human rights," the boy was
brought from the interior to the Niger delta on the west coast of Africa.
Standing on the beach, he looked up and beheld a huge vessel commanded
by pale, demonic creatures with ruddy faces, long hair, and harsh voices. The
child's wide-eyed wonder soon gave way to stark horror. Capricious and
cruel, the chalky figures might be monstrous sorcerers or, more likely, evil
spirits come to earth to bedevil mankind. In chains, in terror, the boy was
transported, with hundreds of his countrymen, in the bowels of a slave ship
bound for the West Indies, human marketplace to the world. The nightmar–
ish hegira over the Atlantic Ocean, the "middle passage" from Africa to
America as cargo in the putrid holds below deck, was a phantasmagoria of
torment---starvation, disease, rape, flogging, murder, and suicide.
Equiano's participant-observer account of the middle passage is the most
reliable and articulate testimony of the slave's journey across the Adantic in
bondage. His is not a report from the captain's quarters or an oral recollec–
tion coaxed from an aged freeman, but a vivid and detailed re-creation of felt
experience. Grasping for words ("absolutely pestilential;' "intolerably loath–
some") Equiano evokes the full sensorium of foul smells and choking
atmosphere, whispered conversations and desperate speculations. For some
readers, then and since, the very intensity of the rendering cast doubt on its
authenticity, as
if
a childhood memory of trauma could not be vivid, tena–
cious, and true. Poring over Equiano's jump-cut transition from the Eden of
Africa to the hell of the middle passage, the modern reader will likely unspool
memories of Alex Haley's
Roots,
best-selling novel and television mini–
series-though, unlike Haley, Equiano never shrinks from indicting his fellow
Africans for complicity in the slave trade.
Corralled into the slave pens of Barbados, Equiano begins life in his new
world as a consumer itern. In a caricature of the mint julep image of Southern
slavery, he is first put to work as personal attendant to a convalescent planta–
tion owner. While fanning the man with a palm leaf, the boy keeps an eye on
a wall clock that he
thinks
is keeping an eye on him, ticking constandy and
tolling hourly, sounding sentinel on his servitude. Evincing a native brightness
and easygoing temperament, Equiano is spotted by a household visitor named
Captain Pascal, an Adantic seafarer with a good eye for merchandise. Pascal
bargains for and buys the alert child, saving him from the backbreaking toil of
the field hand for the open air drudgery of the deckhand. Over Equiano's
vehement protest, the Captain christens him "Gustavus Vassa," (the original
Vassa was a sixteenth-century Swedish king, the Nordic appellation a double
joke on the black African condemned to serve as "vassal" to the highest bid–
der). Thus newly labeled, Equiano sails to Great Britain, where he resides with
