Forty-six years old

Time away from one’s diary is as valuable as a little time away from one’s lover. Absence not only softens the tender feelings toward the belovéd other, it also provides the benefit of perspective, that renders the object of affection so much more precious and beautified. So, too, with quill, ink and leaf – I reunite my body with my mind and the pleasure this act gives me has grown rather than diminished. For I speak and write to purpose, now. I seek to lay forth a history that speaks of all the truths of my life up to this present day. To survey – like the architect of my own life – the line I have followed that brought me here – my history. Not chaotically rendered – as in my earliest diary entries – no, as I see them now – put together – to make sense of the whole.

This, for you, my son – William Leach Osborne Sancho – born last Friday the twentieth day of October – exactly at half past one in the afternoon – my second son – my only living son. I will speak to you as you will be – as I see you in my mind’s eye – when you will find these pages carefully concealed in my old room at Windsor Castle. I speak to Billy, the gentleman. The instructions for finding these will be given to you before I pass. I know with a certain knowledge that I will not live to see you at man’s estate. So, here am I – addressing the man, Billy Sancho.

‘Know thy father – and forgive him…’

I will not stint on necessary detail but have no time for flights of fantasy or anecdote not pertinent to my aim, neither. Which is no less than to render the truth of a complex web of a life – a life lived in many kingdoms – or so it seems to me presently. I am now a shop-owner. ‘But hold … enough.’ I gallop ahead and must grasp the reins of my memory more firmly.

Much of the following comes from my diary entries over the years – I will record my retrospective interjections – these may be useful in aiding my Billy to navigate the story of your father’s life thus far.

This rendering may benefit Older Sancho, too – when time has eroded precision in recollection of even the most momentous twists and turns of a long life. I began writing a diary in earnest at the age of seventeen – those entries will appear in these pages as I see fit. For the present, I will begin at the beginning.



1729

Origins

I had, on reflection, little right to survive. Born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean on what is quaintly described as the middle passage. I now say a slave ship is neither in a passage nor does it navigate the middle of anywhere. It sails straight to the heart of hell.

My future articulacy would have astounded my master, standing a safe distance from the helpless African girl of unknown origin. A daughter of Eve, from somewhere along the Guinea Coast. Neither would it have occurred as a possibility to my terrified boy-father – traumatised by the last days’ events and near paralysed – emasculated – by fear of the unknown. In contrast, his wife – my mother – is simply – luckily – lost in the bewildered agony of a painful breech-birth. Lucky to be together at all, these child-parents, captured and sold as slaves, I would guess, by a rival tribe’s chief. The human spoils of war.

Lucky!

A charnel house of black flesh, this – cramped and rank with rat droppings and the spillage of a thousand filthy slop buckets. Filth – amassed over the fifteen years of this ship’s barbaric life. A life spent plying its brutal, unfeeling trade between the pestilential slaughterhouses of the Guinea or Slave Coast, and the slow death of plantation life in the Americas which awaited the cursed souls who were doomed to never return home. Neither they nor their offspring. A permanently lost tribe.

* * *

Let us roam. Leaving the child-parents to their agonies for a moment, let us venture to the next deck down. No – not that lower, mezzanine deck, that one is for the piccaninnies. They can really pack them in there. Conveniently small, these little ones; they hardly complain at all but simply lie in stupefied terror. All the better. Much less trouble that way. Quieter. No, we need to look at the lowest deck.

We find the men’s quarters, quite the largest space in the ship. Roomy. Or at least it would be, if three hundred men were not crammed head-to-toe so tightly that no room can be afforded for the slightest movement, without feeling the calloused skin of a stranger’s feet – or the tangled, woolly roughness of the hair of one’s neighbour – pungently ripe with sweat – and the acrid smell of fear and death. The rhythmic rolling of the ship, accompanied by the groans of hundreds of men who cannot speak or understand each other’s languages. Divide and rule starts early in the seasoning process. That shameless word for the conditioning for a life of slavery, that the white and black traders along this treacherous coast give to the slave apprenticeship. An apprenticeship that starts in earnest once the enslaved soul has reached their destination. Usually, a plantation of one kind or another. Cotton, sugar cane, tobacco: crops that bring ready money. Commerce – where will your cruelty end?

* * *

Let us hurry back up to the birth cabin. Our young mother-to-be is about to bring our main subject forth. Past the mid-deck with the women and young girls’ deck, half the area of that of the men, and made more uncomfortable for them by the fact that some are in stages of pregnancy akin to our lady above – who, now we see, has expired … There is the dumbstruck master – the Surgeon charged with midwifery duties, guiltily sullen – the near-catatonic gaze of the frightened boy-father – now without a soul who knew him free … He has the fleeting notion to bolt from the room – perhaps, to fling himself overboard – broken by the loss of his wife, his life’s companion. Futile. He will be shackled below with the rest.

What of the debris left in the wake of this storm of grief? The mewling, puking infant boy – soon baptised Charles Ignatius, after the father of the Jesuits, and growing strong and round – always round – in New Granada.

* * *

On arrival, Billy, when first my father – your grandfather – saw that the colour of the majority of labourers on that benighted dock matched his own, he set his eye on a dozing overseer’s unguarded scabbard – seized the man’s sword – then swiftly slipped the blade from his own guts to his heart, before any had time to register the act. He died in merciful seconds and my world contracted, yet again.

This – the story I have pieced together from the fragments I harvested from servants’ gossip – the indiscretions of my guardians – my own meditations – my nightmares. My story is just that – a story. Neither better nor worse than any enslaved orphan of Afric’s.


Copyright © 2022 by Paterson Joseph