Racists

by Kunal Basu

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

1855: the most ambitious experiment in race science begins on a deserted island, where two infants, a black boy and a white girl, are raised together in the wilderness. 1855: the most ambitious eugenics experiment begins on a deserted Mediterranean island, pitting a British craniologist, Dr Samuel Bates against his French rival, Jean-Louis Belavoix. Two infants, a black boy and a white girl, are raised on the island by a dumb nurse (Norah), away from all human contact but monitored twice yearly by Bates, Belavoix and their assistant, Nicholas Quartley to study their development. Bates claims the white child would show signs of natural superiority, while Belavoix claims the two races would be equal, with each side showing the urge to conquer and ultimately destroy, the other. Bates and Belavoix turn into rivals for Norah's attention but she and Quartley are secretly in love, which fuels even more intense competition between the three men. Doubts surface in London over the scientist's real intentions at a time when Darwin's evolution theories begin to emerge. Soon, Captain Perry, responsible for supplying a ferry service to the island, agrees to help Norah and Quartley escape with the children; however, before Perry returns to the island to rescue them, an 'accident' turns their reunion into tragedy.

Release date: May 27, 2010

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Print pages: 181

Sample

A boat on a sea. A tiny speck out on a lazy drift, basking under a sun that tantalises. She appears content, anchors drawn and awnings spread, as she skims the waves, folds and unfolds the sails passing a string of islands close to the coast – suitors encircling the dark queen. Bence, Gorée, Santiago, Arlinda, Anamabo. She cruises La Petite Route, that classic passage from Europe to Africa, holds a steady course till Cape Verde, waiting to scurry down the pirate coast and strike east into rivers with inland ports to land and load cargo. It’s a well-travelled route. Traders have known it for centuries. Cotton, wool, iron, gunpowder have come down these waters, and much has flowed back: ivory, gold, beeswax, hardwood. Slaves.

A trader she isn’t, more a flute-ship by her looks, or a refitted man-of-war. A few dozen hogsheads of rum, a score barrels of wine, kegs of water biscuits, a reasonable supply of gammon, hoops, calavance and black-eyed peas, a firkin of butter and sides of beef in her hold won’t tempt an eager chief waiting ashore or his half-caste agent. The crew numbers a mere twenty, and that includes the captain, the mates, the surgeon, the cooper and the carpenter. Not enough hands or guns to foil a raid, should pirates chance their luck.

Nor is it a négrier, one of those stinking floats packed deck upon deck with black gold, carrying the necessary evil to America even after the trade has been banned, flying the flags of their smuggling captors – a Portuguese Bom Jesus, a French Minerva, or a British Charming Sally.

Up close, the Cupid figurehead gives her away – the Rainbow, a perfect beauty, guns and binnacle shining. Her captain is more famous even than her looks – Captain Perry, a gentleman dilettante with not too gentlemanly a past, a veteran of both traders and slavers. He is the lion of these waters, rumoured to have carried everything, from the corpses of a dead garrison to the English Queen, as indefatigable spinning his yarns as he is resourceful, on sea and on shore. A busy raconteur. Show him a man, it is said, and Perry will have him in fits!

A lull in the passage brings the captain out of his coop. He struts up the foredeck to amuse the most eminent of his guests, Professor Samuel Bates of the Royal College of Physicians, the master craniologist. With typical aplomb, he announces their passage through the islands, telling a juicy tale or two about each to the professor. Gorée’s scandal, with its slave prison passing off real apes as slaves! Santiago’s brothel, finer than the finest of Liverpool. His guest barely listens, frowning at a passing island as if it were a deviant student in his laboratory, eyes fixed on the banks of dark shadows cast like blemishes on its slopes.

Spurned by Bates’s silence, the captain starts to go below deck to find his other eminent guest, the Frenchman, a member of the Société Ethnologique de Paris, a traveller no less travelled than himself. He stops, knowing that Monsieur Jean-Louis Belavoix will already be asleep, snoring, fully dressed on his bunk as if about to deliver a long and important speech to the Société. Used to a roaring audience, the captain grumbles at his luck – the Rainbow turned a ghost ship by the deathly silence. Only Nicholas Quartley, Bates’s English assistant, will be keen, stopping his inspection of their precious cargo – boxes of scientific instruments riding the hold – to flash his obedient smile and listen to the captain. He could have Quartley to himself for a few minutes, before the young man returns to his scraping and scrubbing, delicately opening a box’s lid to check whether an instrument has suffered from last night’s swell.

Even on the long shipboard evenings, with the door of the spirit-locker open, the captain has not been able to capture his audience, the three far too immersed in their own thoughts to rise to his hints and teasers, offering a resolute defence to his yarns. The same thought swirled in each of them – the one that has set them off on their journey, to an exceptional venture unlike the usual run of traders and slavers.

In the faint evening light, the captain observes his other guest, the nurse travelling with the three scientists. Norah, forever in motion, marching the deck from end to end, clutching her two bundles to her chest. A short but appealing figure, with a slim waist, brown eyes beneath fine brows. Her neat features flawed only by a sad mouth. He watches her closely to see if she is immersed too, eyes on the wooden deck marking out her own thoughts. He wonders if she’ll stop, put her bundles down, if she will change trajectory and come up to him, to listen with her eyes only. He feels sorry for the girl, her mute lips unable to utter a single word.

A week is all it takes for the Rainbow to reach her destination. Halfway down La Petite Route she has changed course to cruise the islands, waiting at an inlet for favourable winds to draw near the tiniest of them all: Arlinda. It is a plain and unlikely stop. The grinding anchor stirs the scientists finally to life, brings them out on the foredeck to watch the captain lower the outrigger. The assistant is the first to go down with the boxes, followed by Bates and Belavoix, and then the nurse joins them on the boat. All eyes are on her two bundles, strapped firmly to her side, now twitching in the fresh sea air as they make their way over to the island. She rocks them gently to soothe the moaning and whimpers, parting the wraps for a glimpse of what’s inside. They see the babies.

A black boy and a white girl.

Rising from the sea, the island resembles a catamaran with green sails floating between two layers of white – a line of breakers and a band of clouds. Closer still, the horizon stretches out into the surf, the beach and the forest. Nothing in the shape of a harbour can be made out. Neither smoke nor any sign of human life is visible, not even a fisherman or two. Just an empty coast lying motionless by the sea. As the light summer breeze brings the ship within sight of landing, the island appears to her visitors exactly as it did when they glimpsed her for the very first time on Captain Perry’s Rainbow. Each recalls his first voyage down La Petite Route, and the several that have followed since, Arlinda turned familiar by their visits over the past five years.

The fears have faded now. Of an ambush along the way. Fear of the island – of disease, wild beasts and unexpected visitors. The shadow of the Dark Continent no longer stretches across the luminous sea to worry the scientists. Arlinda is safe, just as Perry reassured them even before they set foot on her for the first time. A few hundred nautical miles south-west of Gibraltar, she keeps the company of notorious neighbours. But even with the slave islands breathing down her neck, she is free of the troubles that come with the black gold. Her size is her flaw, and her saviour. Circum-navigated in less than a day, she is small compared to the other islands that dot the African coast, lacking the flat stretches needed to build barracks and fort, church and brothel of a proper slave colony. With an easy approach and a pleasant climate, she tempts many a venturer, but her beauty is worthless. The rocky landscape arrests the eye, but turns its back to seeding and cropping, refusing the settler a regular staple. None has thought to bring animals here to start a farm, or their favourite creatures to raise as game. An island without food, without sport – nothing to capture a passing captain’s interest. Even her coast is too open, without an estuary or lagoon, leaving no place to hide from pirates. Arriving on the Rainbow, the scientists found a barren Arlinda, just as promised, free from the smell of humans or animals.

Dropping anchor, they gaze upon the wild red flower, the African tulip, the island’s only prize – the ‘flame of the forest’, as Captain Perry taught them to call it. It brings a smile to each face, knowing that the days of crawling bugs and nights of nausea are now over.

When the sun rises, it leaves one half of the island in shadow as it lights up the other. Early beams run into dark slopes of what’s more than a hill but less than a mountain: a hill with a modest crown keeping an eye out for the whole island. A solitary ridge, steep and treacherous, the only birthmark left by the sea’s eruption. For the most part, the foliage hides the loose rock that makes up Arlinda’s crust. The forest is dense and prickly round the lower parts of the hill, rising comically to halfway up in circles, like an army of lofted fists. The trees are evergreen and many bloom all year round, including the arlinda after which the island is named. It yields a fruit with a kernel as hard and dark as loose rock and just as inedible. It rots on the forest floor. Portuguese merchants once collected a few sacks and made a poison to kill ship rats. But it didn’t kill them – turned them blind instead, made them run helter-skelter and fall into the sea.

A sulphurous stream borders the foot of the hill on one side, separating it from the patch of land that runs into the beach. Where it comes from, no one knows. It collects rocks, covering them in moss, and keeps them warm. It’s a witches’ cauldron, hissing with lizards and frogs and snakes that stay coiled up around the stones, rarely moving for years. There might once have been a colony of birds on the island, but most have disappeared except for the gulls that turn endless circles around the beach. Otherwise there’s no sign of life, not even the small animals one would expect to find burrowing under the shrubs, likely repulsed by the poisonous fruit.

The two camps are set a mile apart. One is lit by the morning sun, while the other is still in the shadow of the hill, one on the rising flanks halfway to the top, the other close to the beach. The stream flows between them. A goat path, narrow and winding, leads up to the visitors’ camp on the hillside with its clear view of the other below it. Built for the three men – Professor Samuel Bates, Monsieur Jean-Louis Belavoix and the assistant – it’s just what a shipwrecked sailor would need as he waited for the natives to repair the hull of his stricken vessel: a log cottage with three rooms in a row under one roof, joined by an open veranda. An adjoining shanty serves as the sanitary lodge. The smell of oil-soaked wood fills the rooms, a cloying odour that masks the fecund soil beaten into a hard, slaty floor throughout the camp. The rooms are dark but airy – a curious geometry of turrets cut into the wooden walls facing the veranda. Each is fitted with a trunk, a mattress and a tin-pan lamp lit by palm oil. A clay jar for water stands by the door of the cottage. A hammock, the only mark of leisure, lies rolled up like a ball of rope in a corner of the veranda.

Bates is always the first to rise, eager to make the best use of the first morning in Arlinda. The journey seems to affect him least. With a rap on his assistant’s door, he marches off to the sanitary lodge, barking out commands over his shoulder. The boxes of new instruments are to be taken out of the ship’s canvas bags, the log is to be marked carefully where the last entry was made six months ago. He orders Quartley to be ready in the blink of an eye. Then, stamping back to the veranda, a foot struggling inside his breeches, he examines his face in the mirror – features heavy with impatience.

It is a face to scare any assistant. A cranium of exceptional size, sporting dark eyes and a square jaw. At fifty, a full head of hair and sideburns. Scars over the brows from thinking things out. A wrestler’s neck, constantly alert for a glint of opposition. A face that has fitted all the names given him over the years by fearful assistants.

Nicholas Quartley senses his master’s impatience. He is an unlikely assistant for a scientist like Bates, a simple village boy with a clever pair of hands, a specialist in cadavers, a frequenter of morgues. He has won Bates’s favour, impressed the craniologist by keeping his eye on the object – whichever object has caught his master’s fancy over half a dozen years at his London laboratory.

‘Don’t forget to string the goniometer’s needle.’

‘No, sir.’

‘And balance the orbiostat before—’

‘Before we take measurements, sir.’

‘It’d be a mistake to assume the samples’ familiarity with procedures. We may have to repeat everything we did last time.’

Quartley nods. ‘And what if they turn violent again?’

Bates narrows his eyes. ‘They weren’t violent.’

‘Well, sir . . .’

‘They were . . . suspicious.’

In his mind, Quartley tastes the trickling blood on his fingers. ‘We must be ready if they become suspicious again, sir.’

Polishing his pince-nez and raising them to squint at the sun, Bates resumes his examination. ‘And what instructions are you to bring down to the nurse?’

The young man searches for words. Does Bates mean the things she must do while they are here on their visit? Or is he quizzing him on the rules? He rehearses these quickly. The rules are to remain unchanged for the full twelve years of the experiment, and the nurse is obliged to follow them, observe them scrupulously with their two samples. The rules that she has learned on her voyage down to Arlinda on the Rainbow. Does Bates wish him to remind her of them?

‘I’ve to tell her not to swinge the children, not even if . . .’ He starts to recite the list, before a frowning Bates cuts him short.

‘I don’t mean the Ten Commandments.’ With a quick look at Belavoix’s closed door, he gets ready to leave. ‘Never mind about the instructions, Quartley. You’ve clearly forgotten. Just mind your way with the boxes.’

With his assistant stranded on the veranda, a box in each hand and the log precariously under an arm, he repeats his command: ‘Don’t dither, Quartley!’

As they set off down the goat path, Bates striding resolutely ahead and Quartley struggling a dozen steps behind, they hear the Frenchman call after them.

‘Wait!’

Bates strides on. Afraid to stop, Quartley turns for a quick glance. He sees a monk in a cassock, arms waving frantically from loose sleeves, limping down the cottage steps.

‘Have you forgotten me? You’re leaving your friend behind, Mr Bates. Mr Bates . . . !’

With Bates still set on his course, Belavoix starts to hobble down, pleading with the two to slow their pace. ‘Ah! This path . . . it is dangerous. One mistake and that’ll be the end! It’s fit for the chevreau . . . the baby goat, not men. Tell me, why must we live up there –’ he points back at the scientists’ cottage – ‘when we’re so interested in what happens down there?’

The Frenchman carries a heavy sack over his shoulders. It is full of notebooks, some filled, most still empty. Only his face betrays his youth – a prominent nose, a head of boyish curls. A fashionable Parisian moustache kept waxed to a point at each end. A giant and suffering frame holding up a disproportionately sweet face. His chin quivers as he comes up behind Quartley, grumbling at Bates’s silence.

‘How English! Punishing himself for no reason.’ He raises his voice once more. ‘Why can’t the two camps be closer together? Was it your idea to put them so far apart, or the mad captain’s? You’re trying to keep me from Norah, aren’t you? – like Romeo from Juliet!’

Suppressing a laugh, Quartley offers to carry Belavoix’s sack, inviting a suitable protest before he accepts with obvious relief.

‘The English assistant is kind . . . much kinder than his master,’ Belavoix mutters under his breath, glancing slyly at Bates. ‘And smarter too, I’ve been told!’

The stream slows Bates down, having him cross a bridge of stones they themselves laid on their first visit. Stuck firmly on the loose bed, the steps appear undisturbed by the currents or the assorted life around them. The stream has bowed to the visitors’ intention, covering the rock steps with a thin layer of moss. It is more a trick than an invitation – a slip sure to land the intruder in its bubbling cauldron.

The three of them are together now, each treading with caution over the bridge. Belavoix seems relieved, barely a step behind Bates. He pants almost into his ear.

‘It’s too early to rush down . . . No? Too early for work?’

‘Rubbish.’ Bates points up at the sun, now illuminating all of Arlinda.

‘Ah! But you slept well on the ship. You drank French claret with the captain and snored in your cabin. I heard you, Mr Bates!’

Bates gives him a puzzled look.

‘Your mind is fresh . . . as alive as the fishes –’ Belavoix points down at the stream – ‘ready to gobble up our samples!’ He makes a gesture of helplessness as Bates strides ahead once again, now barely yards away from their destination.

‘I didn’t sleep a wink on board. Not for a whole week! A horrible rash covered every inch of me . . . a case of minor scarlatina. Quite dangerous!’

‘Nonsense!’

The cottage at the other camp is larger than the visitors’, but not by much. A substantial kitchen at its heart, there are three smaller rooms as well, two on one side and one on the other. The steps lead straight into the kitchen, which is bare but for a table of solid oak in the middle and a few cane chairs. An iron stove with grates for burning twigs holds a far corner, a bench or two around it. A partition screen hides a modest larder. The door at the back of the kitchen leads not to a garden patch but to another small chamber, which looks like a locked cupboard. It houses the instruments. Although the walls are built of the same oily wood as the visitors’ cottage, they smell different, of stove smoke and food.

The camp is fenced on all four sides and surrounded by an overgrown hedge whose prickly leaves are easy to burn. Piles of logs stand next to a vegetable garden, a vain effort betraying the cultivator’s plans, some recent, some failed ventures.

This is Norah’s camp and cottage, where she has lived with the two children since they arrived five years ago in Arlinda. For them, unlike the visiting scientists, the island is home – a home they have never left for a single day, not even for a leisurely sail on the luminous sea. She and the children are the only human inhabitants here, their camp well hidden by the tall arlinda trees from passing slavers and traders.

This is her room by the kitchen, where she spent the first night ashore with the twitching bundles. She pulled her blanket over them that night to stop the roaring sea from reaching their tiny ears, suckled the babies every time they woke. She spent her first sleepless night on the island, worrying not over her tasks but about the dark sea and the dark night, and the days ahead when the scientists who accompanied her would leave. She knew that the cottage would be hers, the camp, the island.

The kitchen has been her fort from the beginning. After a few false starts, she has learned to guard it against dwindling stock and decay. She has mastered the trick of passing messages, leaving the list of things she needs each month in a small hut by the beach and raising a flag over it. Then she’d wait for one of Captain Perry’s ships to replenish her larder with supplies, bring her food and fresh water. She’d ask for tinctures and drops, clothes, provisions for her cottage – everything to keep her going on the barren island. She’d leave a letter for Bates as well with her list, her monthly report on the children. In the five years, the camp has turned her into an invisible trader, a letter writer and a nurse.

From her kitchen window she sees Bates arrive at the fence. He leaps over the waist-high rampart, followed by Nicholas Quartley and a struggling Belavoix. Although the sun has risen high, the camp seems brighter than the island’s other parts, somehow more open. The eye is free to roam through the slender tree trunks towards the horizon. The sea near by makes it alive, the unbroken surf and the squealing gulls. The wheezing breeze. The hedge attracts an army of black flies. Like the garden’s cultivator, they have plans that baffle the observer, rising up in tall columns or swooping down on the pile of logs wet with morning dew. The arlinda trees have thrown a canopy of branches over the cottage, a touching gesture that’ll soothe when the sun is even higher. But the undergrowth is kept free of the poisonous fruit.

At the cottage steps they find the boy crouched on the ground excreting worms, each about six inches long, a dozen of them coming out in a looping coil. Seeing Bates, he leaps up, runs and catches hold of his hand, shrieking and blabbering through his full lips like a glib-tongued monkey. He greets Quartley and Belavoix in turn, pointing and gesturing with his hands. Ignoring the boy, Bates walks up the steps to the kitchen and enters. He ignores Norah at the table, heading for the cupboard that houses the instruments. The boy clutches Belavoix’s cassock, buries his little face in the billowing folds. With Quartley out of sight, the Frenchman takes the boy’s hand, kneels down to blabber back to him. The two set off on a trail around the prickly shrub, the boy leading, pointing at the swirl of black flies. He makes as if to leap up and catch them, taking a tumble after a few tries. Then, perched on Belavoix’s shoulder, he returns to the cottage, all stirred up to see the camp from this new height, wriggling like a rare beast in an exotic forest.

The sound of boots as Bates and Quartley enter the cottage brings the girl out of her room. Barefoot, wearing a scanty dress, hair roughly tied back. To the visitors, both children seem to have grown a few inches since they last saw them half a year ago. Both, at first, appear to be of the same colour: a dull sun-burnt brown. Up close, the girl looks a touch fairer, her upper . . .