Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Notes Between the Silences: Philip Quaque

2022; Saint Louis University; Volume: 55; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/afa.2022.0025

1945-6182

Gale Jackson,

African history and culture studies

Notes Between the Silences:Philip Quaque Gale Jackson (bio) The society in which Quaque was born and lived his adult life was a special creation of Afro-European relations in the era of the slave trade." From "Philip Quaque of Cape Coast," in Curtain, Africa Remembered, 1967. I Cape Coast Castle Ghana 1741 Hush, hush, somebody's calling my name hush, hush, somebody's calling my name Oh lord, oh lord, what shall I do? In the dungeon below the castle of my skin a woman prays in the sonorous language of the Akan, her voice one with the clap and spray of waves breaking against this rock strewn shore memory fugue lamentation a song reeding through the scuff of bare and yet bound feet, the hiss and slap of whips, groans, the curses and "cries of our fellow men," a child's inconsolable wailing wailing wailing the clang of irons her invocation an insistent whisper perambulating the foundations of this edifice of stone and bone, and climbing the stairs, from the prison cells below, through the soldier's quarters, to the nest of officers' chambers, alongside the steady up and down patter of our resident children, born of African women and Europeans here stationed in the service of trading in souls stolen and taken in all manner: roped, chained, in wooden cuff and harness like oxen, in lines of metal collars connected by leagues of irons, or one by two by three with nooses around their necks, and led, with blades, and whips, and muskets at their backs, like sheep, to the slaughter. ravished in the taking Here, in the Chaplain's rooms, three floors above a warren of tombs, where the condemned await the next horrific sentencing, as my English wife lay dying, the ceilings leak, the walls have ears, her breathless incantation pierces what sleep might be had in such a place, and the restless dead wash up on the shores of my dreams… [End Page 230] II 1754 a Fante to London Sounds like Jesus somebody's calling my name Sounds like Jesus somebody's calling my name Oh lord… I was one of three boys chosen to be sponsored by The Society to Propagate the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Company of Merchants Trading in Africa (a nefarious pairing) to receive a missionary education in London or, some say, one of three boys pawned as security in a treaty between the British empire and the Fante nation Was her black swan's song with me even then? Mammy Wata. Siren. My mother reciting obligations to ancestors in a tongue I have since forgotten? What I will ever recall is Thomas, William Cudjoe, and I, three wide-eyed boys in our blue school pants and shirts, wading into the surf, riding the rolling tide in Kwaku's long boat, between wheels of tobacco and bags of yam, to the big ships hovering like dragonflies in sea lanes slick with the blood and guts of our kin. Us distinguished from those in ropes and chains only by our uniforms and our delusion of difference. The choreography of a coast town A market woman announcing palm oil, peppers, and plantains. Market crowds parting as another caravan of misfortune arrives Dust rising. Our families seeing us off Lines of relations A vortex of barnacles as the viper pulls anchor. The coast, the town, the forest, retreating The sea's endless mouth A big man ranting The thunk of the water as it swallows him Shouts. Fights. Other thunks. Us boys, curving into ourselves like spiders Stars, howling, and silence Drowning in a dead language An archipelago of terror A patch of land they call Barbados The air rent with screams And then the cobblestone streets of London wet with the bells of the Angelus tolling. [End Page 231] Of we three only I stayed the course to return, after twelve years of religious education, a young man of twenty five, as the newly appointed "chaplain to Cape Coast castle," "missionary and catachist to the Negroes," the first African to be ordained a priest of the Church of England. Thomas died with tuberculosis that first winter. William Cudjoe soon...