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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Gavin Jones

Yet there is a fundamental problem in discounting the notion of an African spoken or drummed language as the predominant mode of expression among the slaves. A situation of increased linguistic variety would inevitably create a chaos of incomprehensibility on board the ship. How could the sustained and nearly successful revolt against a dominant colonial power - the virtual completion of a rebellious "Tower of Babel" - be possible without a common means of communication among the Africans?

When Benito Cereno jumps from the San Dominick into Amasa Delano's escaping boat, he calls out "in tones so frenzied, that none in the boat could understand him," and, half-choked and shrinking away from his pursuer, he communicates "with husky words, incoherent to all but the Portuguese" (98-99). This incident is recounted at least four times in Melville's source-text for "Benito Cereno". In his deposition, Benito Cereno tells Delano "by means of the Portuguese interpreter, that they were revolted negroes" (833), a fact repeated by Delano's own statement that he acquired the knowledge "through the medium of an interpreter, who was with him, and a Portuguese" (837), a fact finally validated by the testimony of the midshipman, Nathaniel Luther (840).(2) We have no reason, either from Delano's or Melville's narrative, to doubt Delano's linguistic competence in Spanish (during the trial in the 1817 version of the story Delano even suggests that his Spanish is superior to the English of his Spanish-English interpreter [825]), thus lessening the possibility that the Portuguese are translating from the Spanish. Instead, both tale and source-text leave plenty of room for the inference that, on jumping from the slave-ship, Benito Cereno relinquishes his native tongue; that, for some reason, he calls out to those sailors remaining on board his ship in Portuguese.

A possible reason for Don Benito's mysterious avoidance of his native tongue becomes apparent from the point at which Captain Amasa Delano initially boards the suspicious San Dominick. Upon climbing the side of the slave-ship, the American is immediately surrounded by:

a clamorous throng of whites and blacks, but the latter outnumbering the former more than could have been expected, negro transportationship as the stranger in port was. But, in one language, and as with one voice, all poured out a common tale of suffering; in which the negresses, of whom there were not a few, exceeded the others in their dolorous vehemence. (49)

Delano is met with a chorus of linguistic homogeneity, a tale of fever, storm and starvation, presumably delivered in a competent version of Spanish (at least, we are not told differently by a narrator elsewhere keen to denigrate black speech), by a group of people whose ethnic origin is predominantly African. In addition to the details of time and place, the narrator's paraphrase of this "common tale" includes a use of metaphor ("their lips that moment were baked") which suggests a degree of linguistic command beyond the simple realm of literal facts. We might conclude that the narrator is simply ignoring the specifics of African language; that he is avoiding the problem of having people speak in little-known African tongues by displacing African speech altogether, replacing it with the tale's supposed English translation of Spanish. Yet, in the context of the assumption that, for some reason, Benito Cereno has a definite desire to avoid the use of his native tongue when jumping from his ship, a second hypothesis offers itself: that the narrator is suggesting a high level of linguistic competence among the Africans on board; that it is not only the rebellion's ring-leader, Babo, who has what Sundquist calls a "precise and nuanced command of Spanish" (168-69).