Middle Passage

Three days pass. Sickened by the tight, miserable conditions in the hold, where the Allmuseri are packed in a too-small space, Rutherford concludes that Falcon is Satan. Three days later, Rutherford nearly cuts off his own hand after the captain forces him to toss the rotting corpse of a young Allmuseri boy over the side of the ship. Ngonyama stops him, and Rutherford realizes at that moment that the experience of slavery and the middle passage have irrevocably changed the Allmuseri. They are “[n]o longer Africans, yet not Americans either” (125) and are now capable of anything because of the “horrors they experienced” (125).

Moments later, Cringle tells Rutherford to break into Falcon’s cabin: The mutiny has begun. Rutherford is paralyzed once he enters the cabin because of the burden of responsibility he has to others, including Baleka. Rutherford is standing in the cabin crying when the mate named Fletcher bursts in with a deep head wound and a broken nose. Fletcher starts to tell Rutherford about who attacked him, but Fletcher accidentally trips the wire of one of Falcon’s booby traps and sets off a bomb.