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Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Gavin Jones

Of course it would be difficult to argue that African languages are not in use on the San Dominick. At one point the narrator describes the use of "some African word, equivalent to pshaw" (76), and it is beyond doubt that the "low, monotonous chant" (50), the "queer cry" (71), and the "unknown syllable" (79) of the oakum-pickers all correspond to a misheard African language. It would be equally difficult to argue that the Ashanti hatchet-polishers do not have at least some role in maintaining the mechanism of rebellion on the ship, a fact that becomes obvious toward the end of the tale when they ring the "tocsin," or signal bell, for violent rebellion (98). Yet the real question must surely be, not whether there are African languages in use on the ship, but whether an African language is shown to be effective as a lingua franca, a pan-tribal means of rebellious talk, in the particular context of Melville's tale. In other words, the hatchet-polishers might be talking to each other in the language of the drums, but are they talking to anybody else?

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For Sundquist's reading of communication in "Benito Cereno" to work, we must assume that the "drum-script" of the Africans is a common language, that the slaves on board the San Dominick are part of a homogeneous drum-speech-community. This necessity leads Sundquist to assume that, in addition to the six hatchet-polishers, the four oakum-pickers who act as "monitorial constables to their countrymen" (54) are also "native Ashanti" (Sundquist 168). The story itself, along with its source-text, Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), seems to offer little justification for this point of view. In Melville's version of Benito Cereno's "deposition," only the hatchet-polishers are identified as "Ashantee," the oakum-pickers and the women slaves being designated as "African"; and in the 1817 version of the story, Cereno's declaration simply mentions "twelve full grown negroes, aged from twenty-five to fifty years, all raw and born on the coast of Senegal" (828). The general repugnance of the Ashanti people to the doctrines of Islam would exacerbate their isolation from the Moorish Africans, whose presence on the slave-ship is implied by the tale's many Islamic allusions. Indeed, when they first appear in Melville's tale, the six Ashanti hatchet-polishers are unequivocally described as being "unlike the generality" in having "the raw aspect of unsophisticated Africans" (50). Instead of implying racial sameness, Melville clearly demarcates ethnic boundaries, dividing the slaves into several groups: "Negroes" who have lived for a number of years among the Spanish (Jose, Francesco and Dago); a general group "born in Africa" (the "oakum-pickers"); the Ashanti ("the hatchet-polishers"); a former African king (Atufal); a "small negro of Senegal" (Babo); and a larger group whose origin is unknown (104). The reader who assumes that the majority of the slaves on board the San Dominick are of the Ashanti tribe is in danger of being subverted by a key misreading of the embodiment of what Sundquist calls cultural "misperception" (6): namely, Amasa Delano and his belief, on seeing the women-folk pull and sing at the ropes, that these "must be some of those Ashantee negresses that make such capital soldiers, I've heard" (92).

Melville complicates his source-text by moving toward a vision of increased cultural heterogeneity that parallels a developing practice among West African slavetraders during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to J. L. Dillard, these slavetraders learned from experience the dangers of mixing Africans from similar cultural and linguistic groups. Dillard cites an early example of this realization from Captain William Smith in 1744:

As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other; which, if rightly consider'd, is no small Happiness to the Europeans who go thither to trade for slaves . . . I have known some melancholy Instances of whole Ship Crews being surpriz'd, and cut off by them. But the safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel. (73-74)

Melville's tale echoes this logic: as African tongues correspond to tribal and cultural divisions, then the increase in ethnic boundaries must necessarily exacerbate the situation of polyglottism. Rather than revealing a slave-group of communicative oneness, Melville's tale seems a case-study in the very practice of ethnic mixing that would frustrate the possibility of a shared African spoken (or drummed) language among the slaves.(1) The effect of this can be seen in the ineffectual linguistic control of the oakum-pickers, who "could do little or nothing toward establishing general quiet" aboard the ship (54), and whose "earnest cries" are powerless to prevent the violent dashing of a white sailor to the decks (70).

Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Gavin Jones

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