Middle passage

Robert Hayden

1.
Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

  Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,

  sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
  horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:

 voyage through death

    to life upon these shores.

  “10 April 1800 –

  Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says

  their moaning is a prayer for death,
  ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
  Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
  to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.”

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

  Standing to America, bringing home
  black gold, black ivory, black seed.

    Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
    of his bones New England pews are made,

    those are altar lights that were his eyes.

Jesus Saviour Pilot Me

Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea

We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,

safe passage to our vessels bringing
heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus Saviour

  “8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick

  with fear, but writing eases fear a little
  since still my eyes can see these words take shape
  upon the page & so I write, as one

  would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding,

  but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune

  follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning

  tutelary gods). Which one of us

  has killed an albatross? A plague among

  our blacks – Ophthalmia: blindness – & we

  have jettisoned the blind to no avail.

  It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.

  Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.’s eyes

  & there is blindness in the fo’c’sle

  & we must sail 3 weeks before we come
  to port.”

    What port awaits us, Davy Jones’
    or home? I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting,
    playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews
    gone blind, the jungle hatred
    crawling up on deck.

Thou Who Walked On Galilee

  “Deponent further sayeth The Bella J
  left the Guinea Coast
  with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd
  for the barracoons of Florida:

  “That there was hardly room ’tween-decks for half
  the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;
  that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh
  and sucked the blood:

  “That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest
  of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;
  that there was one they called The Guinea Rose
  and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

  “That when the Bo’s’n piped all hands, the flames
  spreading from starboard already were beyond
  control, the negroes howling and their chains
  entangled with the flames:

  “That the burning blacks could not be reached,

  that the Crew abandoned ship,
  leaving their shrieking negresses behind,
  that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

  “Further Deponent sayeth not.”

Pilot Oh Pilot Me

2.
Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one – King Anthracite we named him –
fetish face beneath French parasols
of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He’d honor us with drum and feast and conjo
and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
red calico and German-silver trinkets

Would have the drums talk war and send
his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
and kill the sick and old and lead the young
in coffles to our factories.

Twenty years a trader, twenty years,
for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested
from those black fields, and I’d be trading still
but for the fevers melting down my bones.

3.
Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth;
plough through thrashing glister toward
fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,
weave toward New World littorals that are
mirage and myth and actual shore.

Voyage through death,
    voyage whose chartings are unlove.

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
spreads outward from the hold,
where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

  Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
  the corpse of mercy rots with him,
  rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

  But, oh, the living look at you
  with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
  whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
  to strike you like a leper’s claw.

  You cannot stare that hatred down
  or chain the fear that stalks the watches
  and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;

  cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
  the timeless will.

    “But for the storm that flung up barriers
    of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,
    would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,
    three days at most; but for the storm we should
    have been prepared for what befell.
    Swift as the puma’s leap it came. There was
    that interval of moonless calm filled only
    with the water’s and the rigging’s usual sounds,
    then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries
    and they had fallen on us with machete
    and marlinspike. It was as though the very
    air, the night itself were striking us.
    Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,
    we were no match for them. Our men went down
    before the murderous Africans. Our loyal
    Celestino ran from below with gun
    and lantern and I saw, before the cane-
    knife’s wounding flash, Cinquez,
    that surly brute who calls himself a prince,
    directing, urging on the ghastly work.
    He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then
    he turned on me. The decks were slippery
    when daylight finally came. It sickens me
    to think of what I saw, of how these apes
    threw overboard the butchered bodies of
    our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.
    Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:
    Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us
    you see to steer the ship to Africa,
    and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea
    voyaged east by day and west by night,
    deceiving them, hoping for rescue,
    prisoners on our own vessel, till
    at length we drifted to the shores of this
    your land, America, where we were freed
    from our unspeakable misery. Now we
    demand, good sirs, the extradition of
    Cinquez and his accomplices to La
    Havana. And it distresses us to know
    there are so many here who seem inclined
    to justify the mutiny of these blacks.
    We find it paradoxical indeed
    that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
    are rooted in the labor of your slaves
    should suffer the august John Quincy Adams
    to speak with so much passion of the right
    of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
    and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s
    garland for Cinquez. I tell you that
    we are determined to return to Cuba
    with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez –
    or let us say ‘the Prince’ – Cinquez shall die.”

The deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will:

    Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,
    life that transfigures many lives.

Voyage through death
      to life upon these shores.

Fonte (v. 1-7): Pereira, E. A., org. 2010. Um tigre na floresta de signos. BH, Maza Poema publicado em livro em 1962. (Uma primeira versão foi publicada em 1945.)