#abolishion

Its my firm belief that symmetry and its inevitable break breeds our superstitions. Why are there figures in the forest we can never explain?  Why does the sun rise with such predictability but eclipse without warning?  Why do the rains come seasonally but the tide shakes the ground and destroys our cities?  This planet we have is a broken puzzle dangling from the clouds, stretched black at night and dotted by the heavens we’ll never see. To think like the negro, his rolling black skin covering a continent that baffles him in every right.  To wake far away and die in our fields left to rot like our rubbish. This is the dissonance when we meet, a world of cruelty soaking in like the negro and their mulatto--the ghosts that exist in the mezzanine between man and African--is the specter that screams from the woods, that bleeds the acrid smoke from the sweating sugar cane fields.  In all this our Lord’s saints peering down at the hunger and violence stand indifferent.  For this ambivalence I rejected them and relied on our enlightened reason to unwind this swollen mystery of a world until that reason swung past the bounds so that I, like the Africans, and the feeble people of the new worlds am left huddled in terror from my ignorance.  I’m Jean-Pierre LaCon and in case this story never leaves my room know the words I put down are the truth.  I’ve seen the first god in a plantation on St. Domingue.   At the crest where native and alien reside, where white and negro meet.     I always asked my father who was here before the Taino and he told me the animals, and when I asked him who was here before the animals he said the sugar cane and when I asked him what came before the sugar cane he said the water and nothing came before the water.  One by one they breach from one imposition after another. We know ourselves as the masters of the new world stepping on the old taking our rightful place on a peg above our predecessors.  What I never asked was, “who would be here after us?”.  My father, the quiet man, would have no time for such a question.  These things, these mysteries abound in the new land were to be my own study.     At first the buzzing from the fields felt normal, some cries by the slaves, their hunger and neglect living aloud.  They have no souls they told me, their suffering is a facade, one that even ants can have.  For their black shadows in the field barely living longer on our land than a year the exist in my young memories as furniture.  Our initial beast of burden was the indigenous people known as the Taino.  They knew nothing of the yoke of ownership until we gave it to them, they bore our development and our regal advancement as we clawed from the ground their birthright to stand our fortunes and while my father told me they were long gone but I know one last ruby skinned black haired mystery came to me as a child.  It was the buzzing, louder than usual and the smell of skin brought to its threshold of heat filling my room that I made me alarmed.  The fields opened slightly and gifted me a narrow path to the clearing where the fire burned the last Taino.  He stood there, his black audience holding their chains, chattering with delight, the brief moment of clarity before the pain overtook him he met my eyes.  The final brew of a people too dull to preserve themselves.  I ran home never to speak of this, not even alone to the host of sleepless nights that awaited me.  I was ten years old and I saw God in those soggy fields, behind the lurid flames of this mans last moment.  For all our greatness, for all our chastity the white peoples built their kingdoms high and then wide to reach wherever heaven could hide were ignored by our own god, foregoing us to live in the primitive people of the fields the dying man’s gaze gave me the glimpse as the flame preserved his skin in my memory.  The buzzing lowered and blended with insects and the roll of the ocean, never to happen again.       I returned to the field the next day with no clearing made for me.  Even more astounding was the noon hour three days later  flooded our groves with bright red flowers that then turned white reflecting the sun on green moths I’ve never known.  They blocked out the midday heat only to dissipate in minutes.  By the late afternoon all of the bushes withered to their usual hue never to happen again.       *     Administering medicine to a negro is forbidden but it made no difference in the sunken hulls of my ship.  Africa is further than the moon, there is no laws here.  We purchase our slaves from other blacks on the coast.  They speak a baffling tongue that they don’t even seem to understand.  I’ve learned a little.  Enough to ask them about how they came here.  The negros just take their own and sell them like animals doing their very best to conceal their methods but in time, we’ll take the merchants too to rot in our fields.

 The sunken hulls of my ship insulated with a thousand nameless packages show little expression.  I saw one beheaded for attempting to hit a sailor.  In other instances they wear a muzzle with deep cutting hooks that slash their shoulders.  The fetid rust water stings their eyes and the passages are filled with maddening heat and a deafening crying.  This is my job, I give a little tonic to a withering sick woman.  She won’t make this trip alive and if she did, would be discarded because of her infirmity.  The tonic dulls her fever and she drifts off. Despite all this suffering I’m compelled to spend some of my evening away from the other officers to stroll the passages to see something I call Aphora.  This, like the doomed token of the Taino, is the bright glimpse forged from suffering animals, a pocket for which god sees his insects.  By my estimates one in every thousand negroes strapped to our ship held to agony by his iron brace rises up in the stormy sea.  Dragging the chain, a filthy cargo of dead africans eyes the color of the moon stands impossibly on our deck.  Immune to exhaustion and starvation can take a dozen bullets from our rifles before plunging to the sea, never to be seen again. The man or woman (They are more often women) don’t notice my fellow sailors, just me and in my deepest thoughts I beg them to put their weapons away to reach for this man animal to preserve this message from above. Not much talk is spared about the arrival, only panic to prevent it from happening again.  As the medic aboard I’m consulted at every occurrence, I just concede the myth of the caged animal’s dying strides.  They believe me I hope but I do not. Us, in our regrettable ignorance, see no shame for the reckless murder of all who share this water and ground shed the burden of second thoughts with every trigger pulled.  This wrecks my trip and after ten years in the trade I resign, to return to the island where I saw a god the first time.  

*

A small fountain in the middle of Port Au Prince reminds me of my earliest childhood memory.  There many years preserved in the knee deep mud, walked in front me a woman in all white.  She floated over road, untouched by the swollen July heat.  The imperfections of this stained island slid off her.  Her frame ignorant to the burdens of the fields and face barely wrinkled at the sight of hardship stood about, masked in a bubble, my fondest memory, not a day passed in my youth I did not try to stand by the fountain in case she returned.  Polly, I called her, fills my head even now, at this fountain in my lonely old town.  The fields that raised me belong to another family, my neighbors are gone or dead, my shops don’t know me anymore.  That wretched continent we mine for labor has tainted me.  They’ll own the slaves but I’m not one of them anymore, their blackness is seen on my skin and their blood on my hands. My people can see it even when I can’t.  I’m supposed to find my way again.  With my medical background I will move up north to the country, the proper new world for even the ghosts that haunted the sugar cane haven’t waited for me.  

    In all my travels piecing the Africans language together to form simple sentences was one of my many great feats.  I learned what they thought as best I could.   They are a superstitious people like us, but for them, their horror was summoned from their great jungles and towering mountains, such a mighty continent for the great mysteries it holds.  To some, as they passed over the ocean would pray in unison. The Christian faith maintains a heaven outside of this world, for we are bend this planet to our uses.  For the African the heaven is an island they would say, an island deep below the ocean.  In their direst times they would pray for the ship to sink and take them there together.  I wish it were so, my route to the new world found me on an island above the ocean.  The only survivor other than myself a slave.  I  feel no need describe him too deeply.  He’s large and black.  He’s draped in a scratchy garment, his teeth are better than mine and he speaks english and french.  The storm that took our ship took us here, this baffling world has many untouched islands and this is one.  I’m to die here, I’m to die with a negro as my only companion is all I can think of.       I remember now after the wreck.  Him pulling me from the ocean asking for my state of health in french and then english.  We established french as our common language.  English, I learned for the purpose of selling slaves to Americans, is a vulgar boring language filled with too many indirect debris, I’m of english descent but it was our french connections that built my life in a french colony, like my companion.  He says his name is Jacque.  My Intent initially was to order him to change it, but on this island, the animals, the water and the plants as our subjects he is my equal.  My equal for the first time.  The ascent of the negro is the future I believe.  Only to be found when they finally ask “why am I a slave?”.  As a medicine man I see no distinction in the anatomy of the negro to anyone else, nothing in our blood I can tell separates us, a sick negro and a sick white man can be treated with the same tonic.   To me, we should shove off to a new island where the white and negro can start anew, to live and share a city as equals.  The long lonely days on this island have led to me to believe that we could some day share a country.   I would pay the negro to work in my business, he would buy from my company, he would live in my neighborhood.  We could attend parties together.  Maybe if another new world is discovered west of America this could be done.  This concept is complicated, I don’t think it would suit America.       Weeks pass on this island, fish and fruit are available but no merchants pass through here.  We stumble upon a cache of rum and guns.  Pirates, merchants, or worse, the demons I hear that ravage the trade routes and eat the flesh of christian men.  Jacque insists this is a trade route, that a ship will arrive.  As a seafaring slave he is anxious to return to the sea.  This astounds me, he knows no appreciation for the freedom he’s received here, one that I can’t give or revoke.  As luck would have it, a ship does dock and meet us. Although an English trader I’m pleased to be leaving.  I assume Jacque as my slave and promise proper compensation to the sailors for our travel.  Jacque does not speak to me during the trip.  I offer him some cover for when we arrive.  We can take a ferry up the river and I’ll find work in the country.  I have a contact in New Orleans, I’ll find her when we arrive, Jacque and I.       New Orleans was a good choice for me, work was easy to find and housing is fairly cheap.  Jaque lives with me, maintaining my house and preparing a plan to return to the sea.  I know it stirs in him, staring at the seamless fields of water, to flow with the life of the planet.  This is a paralyzing addiction, the ground is where we draw our discontent, no borders or nations in the ocean just the confusing whims of a deeply troubling water world.  In the hulls the nearest to the ocean I could get in our slave ships my mind would wander to the bottom of the ocean, all that lies down there, hundreds of meters never touched by living man.  Could at the bottom be a sea people living as we do?  Letting the infinite stretch of water be our only border our ships and rubbish will fall on their cities, their symmetry broken by our arrogant travels.  I fear our meeting, for in these terrible times when cultures meet, they must always take the place of another.  They would enslave the whites and the blacks together, work us on our own land and harvest all they need at our expense, the final fulfillment.  They would mock our bestial ignorance I’m sure of it as we sweat to death on the land our fathers gave us.       The city bores me still and with Jacque parting I take for the country.  Georgia they would call it.  I take up work for a wealthy man who owns much of this country.  His plantations and their grain I’ve never seen the likes of.  The rolling crops remind me of the sea, the world I once had.  What I didn’t know is this is a trap.  I’m subjected to the chains of a slave, living in the unsanitary shacks, beaten by the the heat and the whip.  This new master knows no distinction between black and white, only the satisfaction of dominion over the land and the hands that mull it.  For all my hard work I’m comforted forgetting that with the clash of black and white is the curse I’ve learned as a child.  The New World has its own version of the Taino, its own slaves that have never seen africa.  This worries me and in the evening, I hear that familiar buzzing. Altered for the language barrier, here the slaves know their master’s tongue too well and when I hear them at night, the age old acrid smoke drifting me awake I know this is to be my last encounter and I leave the plantation in the middle of the night.