Forty-One Bales

by David Livingstone, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I have changed the names, and I have left the village off my map, because a map is read by all sorts of men and some of them read it for what a place will carry. The rest I have left as it was, or as it was so often that one telling stands for the others.

The first thing I did at Chisomo's was pull a boll to pieces. I did it before I had said good-day. I have done it in every cotton country I ever entered, and I cannot help it; I was ten years old when the feel of the stuff went into my fingers, a piecer in the mill at Blantyre, on my feet from six in the morning to eight at night, tying the broken ends on the spinning-jenny while the overlooker walked behind with a strap. A man who has done that can tell a good staple in the dark.

It was the cold season of 1863, the river very low, and the Pioneer had touched ground twice in a week below the marsh. I had left her in my brother Charles's charge and walked up the bank for a day and a half with Moloko, who was a Makololo and had come with me out of the old country, and who carried the medicine chest and complained about it in two languages. The village stood a mile back from the water on a rise of dry black ground. Nineteen huts, a granary on stilts, a fence of thorn against the hippopotami. The cotton lay between the village and the river, and I saw it from a long way off, because in that country in June nothing else is white.

Chisomo was in the field with the children. She was a widow of perhaps forty, with a hoe-callus on each palm like a pad of horn, and she knew me at once and said so without any ceremony, which is how I know she was a woman of sense. She said I was the Doctor who had left the seed in the biscuit tin. I said I was. She said the tin was a good one; it kept her needles. Then she turned her back on me and went on picking, and I understood that I was to follow her down the rows if I wished to be told anything.

I will set down what the rows told me.

There were eleven of them nearest her door, and these were mine, or rather the Manchester Cotton Supply Association's, which had sent me the packets from Lancashire in good faith and good paper, with a printed paragraph on the cultivation. I had given her the seed in the last wet season, and I had told her to plant it in lines, a yard apart, and thin the plants. She had done it exactly. I do not think I have ever been so exactly obeyed. The plants stood higher than her own and the bolls were large, and when I pulled one open the lint came away in a long soft hank, an inch and a quarter by the joint of my thumb, as fine as anything I had seen from the Southern States. I held it up to the sun and it shone. I was very much pleased, and said so to Moloko in Sechuana, and he said in the same language that I had better look at the plants and not at the lint.

Beyond the eleven rows were her own beds, which she had put in as she had always done, in a close crowd, three or four stems to a hole, with the maize between them and the weeds half hoed. Her plants were low and brown at the stem and untidy. The lint was a short staple, not an inch. But every plant had bolls on it, and they were open, and the children's baskets beside them were heavy.

On the American rows the bolls had dropped. A red bug had been into them, a small thing with a black spot, the size of a grain of maize, and it sat on the green boll and drank until the boll blackened and fell. She walked me down a row and showed me. Two plants in three had lost their crop. She did not say a word about it. She stood with a boll in her hand and looked at me.

I counted. It is a habit that has kept me from a good many follies, and from some of the worst of my own. Eleven rows of my seed gave her what four of her own gave her, and the four were not the best four. I wrote it in my book. I wrote, The native cotton is the surer, and I underlined surer, because I wished to remember that I had been told something.

"Next year," I said, in my halting Chinyanja, "I will bring you a better seed. One the bug does not eat."

She said, "The bug will be here next year."

I said that was true, and that there were Englishmen who studied such creatures.

"Is it for them that the cotton is wanted?" she said. "Or for the cloth?"

I had to ask Moloko to put it again, and he did, and I told her it was for the cloth. I said there were people in my country, many thousand, who had no work, because the mills stood idle. They had always made their cloth of cotton from the far west of the great water, where a war had closed the ports. The mills were silent. The people were fed by gifts. And so every pound that could be had from any country, and above all from a country where free men would grow it, was a pound that put a man back at his machine.

She listened as she listened to everything, with her eyes on her hands. When Moloko had finished she said, "How many are in the village where your mill is?"

I said I did not know the number. Thousands.

"And they sit and wait for my cotton?"

"Not yours alone."

"I have forty-one bales," she said. "I do not mean mine alone. The village's. Nineteen houses. I count them because the man who comes counts them."

This was the first I had heard of any man who came.

I will not make a speech of what I thought. I thought it good, and I wrote it down so. Forty-one bales from nineteen houses, in a country where, two years before, I had been told that the natives would not trouble themselves to grow a boll for sale; and the answer to that had been standing in her field the whole time, in the tin I had left. I had written home more than once that free natives would cultivate cotton in large quantities if they could find purchasers. I had the sentence nearly by heart. And here, it seemed, was a purchaser, coming up the path.

She took me to the loom first. I ought to say that. She did not take me to the bales.

The cloth is woven by the men in that country, and the women hoe, which is the reverse of what I was brought up to. Her husband's brother Msiska sat under a thatch beside the granary with the frame of it fixed between two posts and the warp stretched out to a peg forty feet away, and the shuttle going. He did not look up. He wove a strip a hand and a half wide, and when it was long enough he sewed the strips edge to edge, and that was a cloth. It was close, grey-white, and strong as a sail. I took the end of it and tried it and could not tear it. They had been making that cloth in the valley for longer than the Portuguese had been in Tette, and carrying it up the hills to the iron-workers and coming down again with hoes. When I opened my book to ask Msiska how many strips went to a cloth and how long a cloth took, he said, through Moloko, that it took as long as a cloth took.

I had a pocketful of English calico with me. A fathom of it, printed with a pattern of red roses on a yellow ground, would buy a goat on the Zambezi. Msiska looked at it and fingered it and gave it back to me. It was thin. I held it against his strip and I could see daylight through the English cloth and none through his.

He said something. Moloko did not translate it, and when I asked him he said it was only a remark about the Queen's weavers, and I let it go, because I thought I could guess.

---

Senhor Pais came on the third day, in the afternoon, when the heat was going out of the ground. I heard the line before I saw it. It makes a noise, a line of that sort; not a loud one. A sort of clinking, steady, like a clock that has a stone in it.

He was a small, neat man of fifty, in a straw hat, a white coat and boots he had somehow kept clean. He was in the employ of one of the Tette houses and had been in the valley eleven years, and he spoke English well enough to be amused by his own mistakes in it. I had met him twice before, and I did not dislike him. I put that down because it matters. He asked after my health, and my wife, which was a kindness from a man who knew very well that she was buried at Shupanga, and then he asked after the Pioneer, with a face as long as his coat.

"Aground," I said.

"Aground," he said. "She is always aground, your steamer. She is a beautiful creature and she draws too much water." He lifted his hat to Chisomo, and she did not acknowledge it, and he did not mind. "Doctor, you have taught these people to grow what I can buy. I thank you. I would thank you more if you would lend me a hold."

I said I could not. I said the Pioneer was at present carrying less than her own weight in coal and stores, and that I would not give her an ounce more to float on. He nodded, with sympathy, as if it were a thing he had already counted.

Behind him the line had come in under the trees and set down its loads and was standing.

There were thirty-seven of them. I counted twice. Twenty-six were men and the rest women, and a few hardly more than boys, and they were of the highland people, Manganja, some of them, as I could tell by the marks on their faces, and some were from further. The women had their hands free and a thong about the neck, knotted behind. The men had the stick.

I will describe the stick, because I have been asked to by people who were certain I would exaggerate it, and I do not. It is a limb of a tree, six or seven feet, forked at the end, and the man's neck goes into the fork and an iron rod is riveted across it behind, so that he cannot draw his head out; and the long handle of it is carried by the man ahead, or by the one behind, so that the whole line is joined together, and if one man falls the rest go down with him. A man in a stick cannot lie down properly. He cannot run. A good many do not live to the end of the journey, and I have seen what lay behind the lines I have seen, and I will not write it here.

Each of them had a load. I am bound to say that. Salt in mats, hoes bound in bundles of ten, folded cloth in bark-rope slings, perhaps sixty pounds to a head, all of it Pais's pay for the valley's cotton. They had come three days from somewhere beyond the ridge, and the first thing they did when the loads were down was to sit, in the dust, in a row, and look at the ground.

I went to Pais at once. I do not know what I said first. I know what I said afterwards, because he answered it.

"They are contracted men," he said. "From the house at Tette. They are free."

I said that I had eyes.

"They are free," he said. "They run away, Doctor. This is the whole matter. You know the bush; a man who runs in it from a line like this one is dead in six days, from hunger or the lion or the Mazitu. I keep him from dying. It is a charity."

I said that was a lie.

He took off his hat. He was not in any way offended. "Then let us say that the road is long and it must be carried by something. I have not the canoes; the river is low; the canoes are on the sandbank at the marsh these three weeks. Your steamer cannot go. Who carries it? Mrs Chisomo? Her nineteen houses?"

I said that in a year it would not need to be carried. In a year, I said, a steamer would lift the cotton from the bank at her door, a light one, that drew little water, and the whole of it would go down to the sea in a week and there would be no need of lines or sticks or anything else. Such boats could be had. I had written for one.

He listened with every sign of respect. "In a year," he said, "I shall be very glad to see it." And he put his hat on.

I should like to say that I turned that over in my mind. It is possible I did. I will say what I did. I went back to my tent and I drew up an order on the Association for such bales as the village would sell me, to be paid in Manchester at the price of the day; and I took from my store eight fathoms of the roses-on-yellow, which I could ill spare, and a pound of beads for the children, and I went to Chisomo.

She had been standing at the edge of her field all this while with her arms folded. When I held out the order she took it and held it as she would a fish that had been dead some days.

"What does it say?"

I read it to her in Chinyanja, as well as I could.

"Where is this place?"

I said it was across the great water, and then by road.

"And who will be there when I come?"

I said no one would come. It would be paid to me, or to whoever held the paper, and I would see she had it in goods.

"When?"

"When the steamer comes." I said it with all the firmness I had. "A year."

She folded the paper once and gave it back. Not rudely. As one returns a thing one cannot use. "The man with the stick pays today," she said. "He pays in cloth and salt and a hoe for each house. Nineteen hoes. I will sell thirty-seven to him. Four I will sell to you, for your calico, because you left the tin."

I could have said a good many things. I said none of them. I took the four.

Msiska went among the bales that evening with a little pot of charcoal and a feather, and put a mark on each, a hoe with a bar through it, so that the bales from this village would be known. This is the custom. A man in that country puts his mark on the thing he has made, and I have seen it on pots and on paddles and on the doors of granaries. The marks went on the forty-one bales one after another in the firelight, and Pais's clerk wrote the number in a ledger of his own, and the weights were called out, and I wrote the same weights in mine. The line of men sat in the dust with the sticks laid across their knees. Behind the thatch the loom was quiet. It was the only evening of the three that I did not hear the shuttle.

---

They went in the morning, a little after the sun was up, because Pais wished to cover the first stage before the heat.

I went down to the edge of the field to see them off. I do not know why. I will say that I wanted to be seen there. I was the Doctor, the man who had made the road, and I wished it known on that road that I stood at the end of it.

The line formed in the order it had come. The women first, with the thong. Then the men, joined by their forks, and the long handles resting on the shoulders of the men in front. Each of them had a bale of the village's cotton on the head, mat-wrapped and rope-bound, and both hands up to steady it, so that they went with their elbows out, and the sound they made was the sound I have already told you, the iron, the clink in the rod, going away.

Chisomo walked down the line. I had not seen that she would. She had her hoe over her shoulder, as if she were going out to the field, and she walked from the first woman to the last of them and she looked each in the face. Not for long. A moment each, no more. She did not speak, and no one looked back at her, except one of the women, near the front, who raised her eyes and held them there for the space of two steps and then lowered them.

The boy Tambala followed his mother with a gourd of water. It was for the line. The men with the sticks could not lift their heads to drink, and so he held the gourd up to each in turn, and each drank, and he went on to the next. Pais allowed it. He stood beside his clerk with his boots clean and his hat on and said that it was a good thing to do, and that it was the custom of the valley.

The last in the line was a boy of Tambala's size. He had no stick; they do not put it on the very young. He had a bale on his head that came down nearly to his eyes, and under it his arms were shaking. Tambala held up the gourd. The boy could not take it with his hands up, and Tambala, who had not been told what to do, put it to his mouth. The water ran down over the bale, over the charcoal mark, the hoe with the bar through it, and made the mark run.

Then the line was past me and past the end of the field, and out upon the path through the dry grass, getting smaller. The clink went with it a long time.

I opened my book. The cotton stood white all round me, as white as the day I came, for the last bolls were opening on the American plants that the bug had not touched. I wrote the date. I wrote 41 in the column, and the weight, and the price in calico, and under it, because a book should balance, the sum.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Dāvīde Livingstoniō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

David Livingstone, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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