I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery. I have come to be bored because so many boring people have talked about it. So many artists and writers and thinkers, mediocre and genius, have used it because it’s a big, easy target. They appropriate it, adding no new insight or profound understanding, instead degrading it with their nothingness. They take the stink of the slave hold and make it a pungent cliché, take the blood-soaked chains of bondage and pervert them into Afrocentric bling. Parroting a vague “400 Year” slogan that underestimates for the sake of religious formality. What’s even more infuriating is that, despite this stupidity, this repetitious sophistry, the topic of chattel slavery is still unavoidable for its American descendants. It is the great story, the big one, the connector that gives the reason for our nation’s prosperity and for our very existence within it. But still, aren’t there any other stories to tell? So many have come to the topic of slavery because they think the subject matter will give them gravitas, or prizes, or because they find comfort in its familiarity. To be fair, something so big (nearly 20 million slaves kidnapped), for so long (from A.D. 1441 until the end of the nineteenth century) is nearly impossible to dance gracefully with. But still. That is the source of my love for the slave narratives: they are by their nature original, even when they draw on the forms of earlier literary sources. They are never duplicitous, because they all have one motivation: to document the atrocity of chattel slavery and thereby assist in ending it. Their artistry is surprising, considerable, devoid of pretension and with passion in its place.
Turns out though that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave. In fact, it did quite the opposite. The amount of real manual labor these prehistoric snow honkies expected me to do was insane.* The day after it was revealed that we had no connection to the outside world, and worse still of course that the outside world might not exist anymore, the Tekelians came for us. We had spent the night discussing our situation as Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter kept trying to contact the mainland, trying to get someone on the radio, thinking as much of our own situation as of that of the rest of humanity. Nothing. They found nothing—no email, no text, no call. No signal, no satellite. At first it seemed like it was just a delay. After a while, the dread grew. There was nothing out there. And then, after hours of desperation, came the banging on the outer door. Slow but hard. Steady. Unavoidable.
Gathering our warmest garments, we were forced to leave behind all but what we could carry, as the hulking Tekelians insisted that we follow them on foot. Even my most prized possession, Dirk Peters’s antique skeleton, which I kept in an oily green canvas sack, had to be left behind in my room for now. Given minutes to reduce our belongings, unsure of how long our stay was to be, excess baggage and clothing were thrown across our break room floor.
“Don’t let fear take hold of you. We go into the unknown but not the unconquerable,” Booker Jaynes addressed the now downturned heads of his crew. I tried to take my cousin’s advice, but I wasn’t sure if I could carry the load with his flinty determination. Each of us had been withdrawn all night, whispering our private concerns and suspicions, I with my cousin, Angela with Nathaniel, the engineers in their coupling. Gone was Garth Frierson, who after the situation of our being forced into servitude by our creditors was revealed, quietly removed himself from the ensuing discussion. I saw Garth whispering for a few moments with Pym, but thought little of it at the time, or truly of Garth in general for the rest of the stressful night. At half past three in the morning, giving up on the hope of intercepting a radio signal from the world to the north, I passed Garth’s door on the way to my own. Stopping in the hall, I was struck at that moment not by what I heard from his room but by what I didn’t: no snoring. Garth suffered from the worst sleep apnea I had ever heard, his bass snores started loud and then built toward industrial levels before waking him for a few seconds of lip-smacking incoherence before repeating the chorus. But there was no such solo; instead I heard movement, and the crinkling of more wrappers than I was willing to imagine. Despite my suspicions, morning revealed that the sound was not the product of an epic preslavery pig-out, but was the sound of strategy. As the rest of us did the last of our zipping and the massive Tekelian warriors crouched in our low-ceilinged break room as they waited to take us away, Garth appeared before us comparatively unclothed. Dressed in just his bathrobe and long johns, the big man held before him a large box, a box I immediately recognized as one of the bulk containers of Little Debbies from his storage unit. Not looking at us, and particularly not looking at me, Garth lumbered over to the closest and the largest of the shrouded guards and handed the freight to him. The guard, for his part, took the gift without bark, concealing it within his robes as if it had never been there.
Garth Frierson sheepishly turned around and was quickly walking off toward the hall when I grabbed him by the fatback of his shoulder.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded.
“Um. A couple things. Some Cosmic brownies, some Swiss cake rolls, a few Devil Squares, and some Banana Twins. Actually, mostly it was Banana Twins: I ordered those by accident” was all Garth said back to me, trying unsuccessfully to build up enough momentum to break my grip. Accepting the futility of this action, he continued. “Look, dog. I’m sorry. I paid off my portion of our debt with a box of snack cakes, okay? What can I say? I’m so sorry.”
Nathaniel Latham, having also witnessed the transaction, interrupted excitedly. “Sorry? Don’t be sorry. If they’re willing to barter for the remaining debt, you can pay it off for all of us! You must have two dozen boxes of that candy crap in there, I saw them the day you loaded them. That’s enough to pay off everyone. Hell, that’s probably enough to get ourselves a few servants.”
“I’m sorry ’cause I ate the rest” was Garth’s reply, and it made me sad to hear the big man’s voice crack like that. Nathaniel tried to strangle him, and it took both Jeffree and me to pull the lawyer off of the big man.
Garth had bought his freedom, but I figured the rest of us would be in servitude together. I found out soon that this was not to be the case. When we reached Tekeli-li’s cavern once more, the Creole crew was dispersed. Before much discussion on our part could begin, we were being divided, urged through pale hand motions and the Tekelian guttural barking to follow others among the small crowd of the creatures that awaited us at Tekeli-li’s cavernous center. Angela protested when she realized that she and Husband II would not be taken together, but even those complaints were relatively muted considering the amount of anxiety present in those moments. They were less pulled apart than physically urged into opposite directions, massive, freezing hands put firmly on shoulders and arms until resisting would be a noticeable act of violence. For the most part, we didn’t fight the monsters. We didn’t complain or try to assert our own agenda because we didn’t truly understand what was going on or have a clue as to the penalties for noncompliance.
At least I recognized the creature in whose care I was now placed: none other than Krakeer, one of the two Tekelians we had claimed ownership of only a day before, the specimens we had intended to present to our world. The entirety of my debt, Pym explained, was owned by him. Despite my lack of familiarity with the species, Krakeer was easy to spot in a crowd. He was exceptional. Most of the Tekelians had long, nearly luminescent teeth that were so narrow they looked as if the creatures might ritually pull them down from their gums as some sort of beautification exercise. But Augustus—as I chose to rename him in honor of Pym’s fallen shipmate and my own morbid passive aggression—had teeth that seemed to go down at odd, unrelated angles, each bit of fang with its own dental agenda. The only two of his teeth that seemed to coordinate were a pair that turned in as if they were talking to each other. Augustus’s hair, or at least his lack of it, was distinctive as well. He wore the same shroud as the rest of his group, but he lowered his hood for a stretch to itch his scalp as we walked back in silence through the long frozen corridors. The hair there appeared in barren patches, the skin it failed to cover was the gray of dog bellies. And those chewed fingernails, devoured to the point that even the flesh around the nails had been eaten. Augustus’s wretched fingernails were utterly unique to him among his breed; all of the others I saw had long talons that they clearly took pride in. It was also clear that Augustus took little pride in anything. My only consolation in this whole affair was that, by the time we reached his dwelling, a half hour later, the creature was breathing so heavily from the effort of the journey that I knew, if the situation warranted it, Augustus was also probably the only Tekelian I could whup. Even the small, ghoulish children of this race that taunted both of us as we marched seemed more of a threat, wiry little things as feral and gray as squirrels. One, no higher than four feet in his little shroud, threw a snowball directly at Augustus’s head and offered only wheezing giggles when my captor turned to feebly bark a complaint before slinking away.
Augustus’s lair was what I expected for a large hominoid, similar in my mind to the descriptions of the much speculated upon North American Sasquatch (who I suspect might be a relative of this southern breed). The room was a dark cave with almost womblike overtones, the floor scattered with debris that had become embedded in the ice in sedimentary layers where the floor was bare and in clumps in the furs that provided partial cover. Despite the low temperature, the space had an overpowering musk and an unmistakable odor of flatulence, which I took to be the stank of Tekeli-li. Later, however, I came to understand that this hygiene issue was particular to Augustus, and that most of the other Tekelians lived under the ice hygienically.
Soon after we arrived, after catching his breath and informing me with hasty hand gestures of a task I was to do, Augustus went to the far side of the room, lay down in his robes, and went to sleep. I started to theorize that the Tekelian metabolism must necessitate extended multiple rest periods throughout the day to conserve body heat, but the nap thing also turned out to be another quirk unique to Augustus.†
The task which Augustus had signaled for me to do was simple, and with nothing else to distract me, I gave it my full focus. The Tekelian’s pantomimed instructions were easily understandable. There was a frozen tub of loose fat, presumably taken from seals above. My job was simply to smash it with a pestle. The tool was the height of a small man and made from what I assume was whale bone. Although the actual manipulating of this fat cauldron was different, it reminded me instantly of the preparations of fufu I’d seen during my vacation travels through Ghana.‡ Similarly krakt, which is the closest I can come to capturing the Tekelian name for it, served as a staple diet. While fufu is a firm, doughy paste served along with stew, krakt was more like porridge in consistency, or a mushy rice pudding, composed entirely of squashed animal fat. Prepared properly (and this I never actually managed to do, not that Augustus seemed to mind), smashed utterly and chilled by the natural climate, the paste achieved a taste similar to that of unsweetened ice cream, or a mayonnaise without the vinegar. The fatty, unsweetened custard was packed with energy, fitting a normal human’s daily protein requirement in only a few swallows. Krakt was a meal that satisfied your hunger, or at least extinguished it: every time I ate that paste I never wanted to eat again.
My first night in the compound, while Augustus snored, I explored my surroundings. The dwelling was in a tunnel like the ones we had been in when we first came down here, only a hole had been burrowed into the side and beyond that a room carved. Along the way, we had passed several other residential holes, giving the hallway the appearance of the interior of a flute, and in these I saw others of these creatures going about their lives. Despite my novelty here, I was ignored by all but the children, who would stop what they were doing in order to taunt me. Surrounded by the little monsters, I was struck mostly by how utterly alone I was in this world. No sooner had this thought appeared in my mind than I saw a flash of brown, similarly engulfed by a gaggle of toddlers.§ It was her. Angela. Despite the distance we’d traveled, fate had placed us on adjacent properties, and when she saw me approach her, the look on her face said that she seemed to rejoice at this.
“Have you seen Nathaniel? Is he with you?” was the first thing Angela said when she saw me. The last time I saw her second husband, he was being pushed into the exact opposite direction. Whether Nathaniel reached his destination shortly after or had kept moving far off into the reaches of the outer tunnels I had no idea, and I didn’t care. It seemed to me that we were on the extreme outskirts of this village. If we weren’t in the rural area, then certainly we had landed in the Tekelian suburbs. Or maybe, off in this well-worn frozen backwater, inconveniently remote from the main area, we had landed in its ghetto.
“Chris, this is crazy. These things expect me to clean up after them. They’re disgusting. I tried kicking loose what I could, putting it into a pile, and this bitch in there—I mean I think it’s a female, it looks like it has tits—just keeps pointing at the frozen-in bits going ‘Ung!’ Pointing at stuff stuck to the ice for god knows how many years, how many inches down. I’d need an ice pick to get it out.”
“Wait.” I calmed my excitement over the fact I could do something to the benefit of her. Retreating to Augustus’s quarters, I reached through my backpack for one of the only possessions I had deemed worthy of taking with me. Pressed in my reading edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, stuck right by the page where Richard Parker was being served up for dinner, was a nineteenth-century bronze letter opener that had served as my favorite page holder since I had bought it off Benjamin. Without a statement about its history, either sentimental or antiquarian, I made a gift of it to the lady. The gift Angela Latham gave in return, a relieved smile, was greater.
“You’re always there for me, Chris. I always knew that, always loved that about you.” Angela poked the Tekelian air with her little saber as she winked at me. “Look at this thing. I bet Nathaniel could stab a couple of these bastards with this in his hand.”
I didn’t expect to stay the whole night in this Augustus’s hole, huddled for warmth inches away from the site of my labor. I expected Garth to appear in a matter of hours, declare that our communications with the world had resumed, and that we were all shortly going to be getting out of here. I didn’t know how Garth would get this information to me, but I was certain our situation was just temporary. Unfortunately, it didn’t go down like that. The first night was one of suffering. The diet of krakt, as rich as it was, proved quite a shock to my system, the result of which was that I discovered the Tekelian form of plumbing: a visual nightmare that consisted of a hole in the ice (one can only guess how it was excavated) and a Lovecraftian horror within it. It was the following morning, after retreating from this communal commode, which in a bit of olfactory fortune was far down the hall from where Augustus had us staying, that I saw Angela being led by her family of Tekelians.
“Come with me,” she urged, grabbing my hand. Her own temporarily gloveless palm was a skinny thing, I could feel her bones through skin as light as oiled papyrus, yet nearly as cold now as the ice that surrounded us. She was too good for this—I would have felt more guilt in inviting her down here if I wasn’t so relieved to have her near me. With Augustus napping for the second time this morning (Was it morning? I don’t know. There certainly had been a slight ebbing and receding of the glow), I chose to join Mrs. Latham as she walked down the tunnel toward town with her captors. Her hosts apparently accepted the addition of my presence to their party, because after a few hundred yards the monsters were poking and prodding me in their desired direction, just as they were doing to Angela.
At the market, strutting amid the stares of so many of these robed creatures, we quickly noticed the presence of both Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter in the distance. They had been fortunate, it appeared: they were the only two who had been selected for labor together, their bond so visible that perhaps even these alien creatures could recognize it instantly. Despite this, the men’s demeanor did not indicate that their hosts had given them much consideration at all.
“We got to get the fuck out of here” is what Jeffree said to me when we approached him. Jeffree was one of the darkest-skinned among the Creole crew, but his melanin count did nothing to hide the bruise that had welted along the side of his face, punishment for what offense I couldn’t imagine.
“I’ll admit it, I thought we could just hang here for a few days, wait for the next shift of workers to sail in from Argentina, get some footage for the site, some anecdotes for the talk-show circuit. But this is bullshit, man. We got to break out. If they think, they think Brother Jeffree is going to put up with this treatment for another night, then they got another thing coming.”
“Have you seen Nathaniel? Or Captain Jaynes? Has anyone heard anything from the mainland?” Angela tried to press him, but whatever affront Jeffree was reacting to was still spinning behind his glazed brown eyes.
“Man, we ain’t seen nobody, I ain’t heard nothing, and we ain’t about to hear nothing down here either. They even took my man’s camera. Tell them what they did to your camera, Carlton.”
“They took my camera,” Carlton Damon Carter explained.
“Can you believe that? What’s the point of being here if we don’t get it on tape? Forget news of the outside world, we got to make our own news, sister. And the news is freedom. Fuck this!” Jeffree declared, nearly yelling.
“Word!” Carlton Damon Carter echoed behind him, and it was this one loud declaration from the quiet man that made all three of us turn to note the anomaly.
“It doesn’t have to be that bad,” I tried to calm them. “Garth’s still at camp, at the radios: when he hears something, when the satellite malfunction or whatever is resolved, I’m sure he’ll come get us. Think about the story here, think about the experience you’re having, this priceless material falling into your lap, Jeffree. When the world comes back, and it’s got to, think of how many hits you’re going to get on the blog. You’ll have to increase your bandwidth. Think of the movie rights.” This last bit was for Angela, and it seemed to work, because she paused from darting her head around in search of a sign of Nathaniel to look at me. “Right, you’re right.” She nodded the affirmative before her attention drifted off again.
“Yeah, okay. Okay, man. You right. I guess, I guess I can—” It was just in that first moment of Jeffree’s pacification that his host, a creature whose draped figure I’d previously assumed to be a curtained wall, turned around. What fierce, dead-eyed monsters these were, I thought, staring at it. This one was the most horrific beast I’d seen among them, a full head taller than the rest of his colossal kin and that damn sausage nose, like it had been chewed by a bear before being judged inedible and abandoned. While the overgrown homunculus I called Augustus seemed soft and harmless, like a rotting marshmallow, looking at Jeffree’s sausage-nosed specimen, I was reminded of the ferocity of these barbarians. Without warning and without letting Jeffree finish his sentence, the creature shot out a hand toward Jeffree’s bald head, the impact causing the cowrie-shell necklace that Jeffree always sported to clack like a rim shot.
“Motherfucking kielbasa-nosed prick!” Jeffree responded, and immediately I knew where his welts were from. Jeffree pulled his hand back as if to use it for punching but, taking in the size of his target and the hopelessness of his task, dropped it again in frustration. For his part, Mr. Sausage Nose paid him no mind, merely walking farther along the village path as he had just urged Jeffree to. Carlton Damon Carter, giving his partner a tortured glance, smartly started following the beast, but this had no effect on Jeffree, who after wagging his head several times, turned to me instead.
“You stay here. You put up with this, I’m going. I’m going back to join that fat bus-riding bastard, and I’m going to get somebody up on that radio, and then we are all getting the hell out of here.”
“Don’t you think—” I started, but having made his decision, Jeffree began walking off. Back toward the tunnel we had first come through on discovering this place, in the opposite direction of his personal monster.
“RKARKKARKIV,” Sausage Nose roared with such a violent collection of consonants that my own body froze up. First the sound hit, then the air that made the sound. Angela’s petite hand flew to her equally diminutive nose to shield her from what came out of the screaming creature: the breath of a lifetime diet of lard processed through the body of an ape. Jeffree may have smelled the aroma too, but by now he’d walked pretty far away and made no motion to stop. Clearly infuriated, the beast repeated his roar, leaving poor Carlton Damon Carter to curl his arms over his ears and head in response. It was then I noticed that the other Tekelian breed, those that had been casually walking past us and stopping only to give us curious stares through their albino eyes, now had come to a complete and expectant halt as they waited to see how this situation was resolved. It was Jeffree himself who gave them an answer, although I doubt that the creatures had any understanding of what the raised middle finger signified, or of Jeffree’s verbal instruction to “sit on it and rotate.” What the crowd did understand, what it was impossible to misunderstand, was the meaning of Jeffree’s creature’s response. When Mr. Sausage Nose shot his hand out from his robe, I assumed it to be another violent hand gesture in response, but it was violence itself. The dagger, which is the only word I can think to describe it, was clearly made of bone that had been sharpened on one end. Thrown from fifty feet away in a blur barely visible, that point went directly into the socket that held Jeffree’s left eye. When Jeffree collapsed on the ice, red pooling into the ground around him in an unexpected burst of color, the crowd decided it had seen enough and moved on.
Close up, the wound was even more grizzly, even more so for Jeffree, still being unmercifully alive. It was only the angle that saved him from death—the dagger exiting at his temple instead of depositing in his brain. Judging from the blow, he should have been dead, but we knew he was alive because of how loud he was screaming.
After a few minutes, Angela and I had to pull Carlton Damon Carter off his lover, because Sausage Nose still demanded his attention. It took all of us to get Jeffree off the ground: he was stuck to it. In just minutes his own blood had frozen his soaking clothes to the floor.
“My eye,” Jeffree kept saying as he staggered to standing. “We’re sorry,” we kept saying back to him. And then in a sudden movement Carlton Damon Carter grabbed the knife poking out of Jeffree’s head as if the weapon might fly away, just as quickly yanking it free. I thought Jeffree would pass out from this, but he didn’t. To his credit, he stayed conscious and was still screaming a good ten minutes later, stopping only when his captor returned. That’s when Sausage Nose shoved some fabric in Jeffree’s mouth, then threw him over his massive shoulder like Jeffree was a bag of brown rice. Carlton Damon Carter trailed them as the monster stomped off again.
I found my captain, my cousin, not an hour later, having pantomimed his beard to a horrific assortment of beasts until enough pointing fingers added up to his location. Booker Jaynes was crushing a collection of glacial ice by stomping in a basin of ice shards.‖ Just past him, noting his progress, was a Tekelian form at rest, reclined on a slope carved into the wall behind. Leaning as it was, with its robes hanging back across its body, I realized that this beast was the one they called Hunka, the first creature I’d noticed to be clearly female: the collapsed gown held the shape of what appeared to be engorged breasts.a After seeing me, Captain Jaynes paused in his march, but when he heard his host’s guttural exclamation from behind, Jaynes resumed his motion, crushing the ice cubes beneath him with his boots as if he was stomping on grapes south of Napoli.
“That is the way of it. That is the way of our bondage. He’s lucky he just lost an eye” was his reaction to the news of Jeffree’s maiming, and this came after a long pause that seemed to offer even less than that paltry response.
“Booker, what if the ships never come back for us? What will we do if it takes a week for telecommunications to be restored? What if it takes a month? What if we can’t reach the world for years?”
“Then we will do what our people have always done: we will wait for our chance. And we will endure,” Booker Jaynes shot back, the words filled with disdain and disbelief that I would need this answer found. Returning to his crushing, he seemed more at peace in it than I had seen him in any of his Creole desk duties. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Stomp, stomp, stomp. That was his only answer. There was another overtone to his statement as well, one that I digested in the long, cold walk back to my own tunnel, my own servitude. There was relief in his voice. As if the man’s worst fears in life had been realized and justified all in the same moment.
* I realize honkies is a racial slur and the Tekelians might not even technically count as human, but this was the word that Booker Jaynes kept using and as such was stuck in my subconscious as well. In addition, the noises that the creatures made to communicate did have some literal honking sounds, which made the slur that much more difficult for me to shed.
† There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can’t even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest. In Augustus I sensed immediately which one I had.
‡ Fufu is a starchy paste made of boiled yams or cassava that comprises the staple of the Akan peoples. It is also used as glue for minor automobile repairs by tro-tro drivers in parts of Accra, Tema, and Kumasi.
§ Unlike the young of most mammals, the Tekelian children managed to be diminutive and large eyed and yet still utterly unendearing by my human standards. Their little white piranha teeth helped.
‖ This process I would soon be acquainted with as a method of preparing drinking water.
a The way she was sitting, leg up and leaning on her arm, disgusted me. Later I realized it was a mockery of the Farah Fawcett poster many of my white friends had when I was a child.