They made harbor on a pleasant, balmy day in Bridgeport, Barbados, and the captives were carried from the ship to the shore in low boats sent out from the dock, and taken to the market square where they were, by dint of a certain amount of shouting, and blows from cudgels, arranged into lines. A whistle blew, and the market square filled with men: poking, prodding, red-faced men, snouting, inspecting, calling, appraising, grumbling.
Wututu and Agasu were separated then. It happened so fast—a big man forced open Agasu’s mouth, looked at his teeth, felt his arm muscles, nodded, and two other men hauled Agasu away. He did not fight them. He looked at Wututu and called, “Be brave,” to her. She nodded, and then her vision smeared and blurred with tears, and she wailed. Together they were twins, magical, powerful. Apart they were two children in pain.
She never saw him again but once, and neverjn life.
This is what happened to Agasu. First theylook him to a seasoning farm, where they whipped him daily for the things he did and didn’t do, they taught him a smattering of English and they gave him the name of Inky Jack, for the darkness of his skin. When he ran away they hunted him down with dogs and brought him back, and cut off a toe with a chisel, to teach him a lesson he would not forget. He would have starved himself to death, but when he refused to eat his front teeth were broken and thin gruel was forced into his mouth, until he had no choice but to swallow or to choke.
Even in those times they preferred slaves born into captivity to those brought over from Africa. The free-born slaves tried to run, or they tried to die, and either way, there went the profits.
When Inky Jack was sixteen he was sold, with several other slaves, to a sugar plantation on the island of St. Domingue. They called him Hyacinth, the big, broken-toothed slave. He met an old woman from his own village on that plantation—she had been a house slave before her fingers became too gnarled and arthritic—who toM him that the whites intentionally split up captives from the same towns and villages and regions, to avoid insurrection and revolts. They did not like it when slaves spoke to each other in their own languages.
Hyacinth learned some French, and was taught a few of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Each day he cut sugar-cane from well before the sun rose until after the sun had set.
He fathered several children. He went with the other slaves, in the small hours of the night, to the woods, although it was forbidden, to dance the Calinda, to sing to Damballa-Wedo, the serpent god, in the form of a black snake. He sang to Elegba, to Ogu, Shango, Zaka, and to many others, all the gods the captives had brought with them to the island, brought in their minds and their secret hearts.
The slaves on the sugar plantations of St. Domingue rarely lived more than a decade. The free time they were given—two hours in the heat of noon and five hours in the dark of the night (from eleven until four)—was also the only time they had to grow and tend the food they would eat (for they were not fed by their masters, merely given small plots of land to cultivate, with which to feed themselves), and it was also the time they had to sleep and to dream. Even so, they would take that time and they would gather and dance, and sing and worship. The soil of St. Domingue was a fertile soil and the gods of Dahomey and the Congo and the Niger put down thick roots there and grew lush and huge and deep, and they promised freedom to those who worshiped them at night in the groves.
Hyacinth was twenty-five years of age when a spider bit the back of his right hand. The bite became infected and the flesh on the back of his hand was necrotic: soon enough his whole arm was swollen and purple, and the hand stank. It throbbed and it burned.
They gave him crude rum to drink, and they heated the blade of a machete hi the fire until it glowed red and white. They cut his arm off at the shoulder with a saw, and they cauterized it with the burning blade. He lay in a fever for a week. Then he returned to work.
The one-armed slave called Hyacinth took part in the slave revolt of 1791.
Elegba himself took possession of Hyacinth in the grove, riding him as a white man rode a horse, and spoke through him. He remembered little of what was said, but the others who were with him told him that he had promised them freedom from their captivity. He remembered only his erection, rodlike and painful; and raising both hands—the one he had, and the one he no longer possessed—to the moon.
A pig was killed, and the men and the women of that plantation drank the hot blood of the pig, pledging themselves and binding themselves into a, brotherhood. They swore that they were an army of freedomrpledged themselves once more to the gods of all the, lands from which they had been dragged as plunder.
“If we die in battle with the whites,” tWfy told each other, “we will be reborn in Africa, in our homes, in our own tribes.”
There was another Hyacinth in the uprising, so they now called Agasu by the name of Big One-Arm. He fought, he worshiped, he sacrificed, he planned. He saw his friends and his lovers killed, and he kept fighting.