The Slave Dancer (10 page)

They bickered back and forth but they spoke in whispers, perhaps to spare me their noise. I paid no attention for my emotions were changing from second to second, and I had no interest in anything else as my rage against Ben Stout gave way to hopelessness at the thought of the weeks ahead, and hopelessness in its turn was vanquished by the intense pain that spread out from my back until my very toes throbbed with it.

They left me to myself at last, but not before Purvis had offered me beer, saying it would cure me entirely—which it didn't. It was only then my brain steadied. I think it must have steadied, for I felt an extraordinary sad tranquility, that same sad and empty calm the sea had on certain cool mornings when you knew it would look the same if you weren't there to see it.

I knew Stout would come creeping about with some explanation, so that when he did, I was not surprised.

“I laid the rope lightly on you, Jessie,” he said. “You know, don't you, I could have done much worse? Well—I can see that you're angry with me—and I would be the same if it had been you—”

“I don't want to hear you speak,” I said as coldly as I could. “Not now, never again.”

“I wouldn't be so impertinent if I was you, lad,” he remarked softly. “I have the Captain's good will, and there's none else on this ship that has!”

“Who else
would
he fancy except you?” I replied. He could do me no worse than he had done, and right now I didn't care if he tossed me into the sea.

He sighed and shook his head, then smiled down at his own hand as though only he and it could comprehend my backwardness.

My wounds healed. But the ship and its crew, among whom I once imagined I had taken root, learning each man like a new language, and even developing some skill in small tasks about the ship, had become as remote from my understanding as were the lands that lay beneath the ocean. I became cautious. I observed the sailors with as little pity as they observed the blacks. As for them, I shuddered at the barbarousness of chance which had brought each of them to our holds, although, as I had good reason to know, chance often wore a suit of clothes, and sometimes chewed tobacco, and carried a pistol.

Except for Ned, who held all living men in low esteem, I saw the others regarded the slaves as less than animals, although having a greater value in gold. But except for Stout and Spark and the Captain, the men were not especially cruel save in their shared and unshakable conviction that the least of them was better than any black alive. Gardere and Purvis and Cooley even played with the small black children who now roamed the deck with relative freedom, the sailors allowing themselves to be chased about if the Captain and Spark were not watching, giving the children extra water from their own slim rations and fashioning rough toys of wood to amuse them.

As for Spark, I concluded he was entirely brainless and evil only in the way that certain plants are poisonous. The Captain was dangerous, driven to hateful actions by his passion for what he described as “business.” But Stout was like no one else. He could not be shamed; he would not show anger. And I could not help watching him, though I itched with irritation, and wearied my brain devising plots to catch him out in the open.

To relieve my feelings, I spoke of them to Purvis.

He listened soberly for once, and said, “I suppose you're right, Jessie. He's a bad one. You know he was tormenting that female we dropped overboard, don't you? Did you know it was him that drove the poor creature mad?”

I was astonished to hear him use the word
poor,
and it confused my sense of what he was saying.

Seeing by my expression that I was baffled, although not guessing the cause, he exclaimed impatiently, “The nigger woman, the nigger woman!”

“But what did he do to her?” I asked.

“I didn't see it, but Isaac told me he had her up on deck during his watch. He was speaking to her in that language of theirs, and she was weeping and wailing, then Stout would strike her across the face, then speak some more until she fell on the deck in a fit. God knows what stories he was telling her! It's a curse for the blacks he speaks their tongue. You can be sure he addles their minds with his tales.”

“But why didn't the Captain interfere?”

“The Captain! He cares nothing for what's done to them as long as they can still draw breath. And he doesn't know about Stout and the nigger woman. Why, I believe he'd have the dead ones stuffed if he thought he could sell them so! And when he loses a few, he still has the insurance. He can always say he jettisoned the sick ones to save the healthy. And he'll collect! He always has. And if they're
all
sickly when we get where we're going, there's many a trick for hiding their condition. Anyhow, the planters will buy them no matter what, for if they drop dead in the fields, there's an endless supply of them.”

We hit a spell of bad weather. There were fitful winds, and days with no wind when the sea lay around us like a brazen platter. The fights among the crew were louder than those among the slaves. Our rations were minimal. The ship echoed with a noise such as crows make battling for tree space. Between the wet and wind of squalls, and the heat and haze of windless days, there was not a moment of ease.

My stomach rebelled. I was ill all the time. Barely able to stand, I danced the slaves, seeing how the men's ankles had been gnawed at by their shackles as though the metal things were vicious and alive. They could hardly move to my tunes. Often, only Stout and myself attended the grim ceremony in the morning. I hated what I did. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that, at least, it gave them time out of the hold. But what was the point of that or of anything else?

The Moonlight
had long since lost her sleek look—the deck was filthy, the ship stank to the heavens, the men dressed themselves in what lay closest to hand, the drinking started again, and the drunkenness spewed itself out in anger and bewilderment.

I remembered one of the seamen telling me one could get used to anything. There was a half truth in that—if you were on a ship and there was no way off it save to drown. But I found a kind of freedom in my mind. I found out how to be in another place. You simply imagined it. I recalled every object in our room on Pirate's Alley. Each day brought with it the memory of something else until I think I could have counted the floorboards, traced upon the air the cracks in the walls, counted the spools of thread in the basket by the window. Then I would step outside and see the houses across the way, the cobblestones of the street, the faces of neighbors.

When I was thus occupied, winning liberty from the ship, I boiled with rage if someone spoke to me. I could no longer trust my tongue, but though I feared I might, all unknowing, snap at Cawthorne himself, I could not relinquish my dream of home.

Then, one morning, it began to penetrate through my fog of recollection that the young black boy was paying me heed. Aware of his eyes, I tried to move out of their range. Next time, he seemed as he lifted his feet to be moving close to me. I saw that Stout's attention, for the moment, was directed toward Ned who was half lying across his bench. I can't think what impulse moved me, but I took the fife from my lips and whispered my name to the boy. Only that.
“Jessie!”
And as I whispered, I pointed at myself. I began to play at once. The boy's eyes never left my face that morning.

There were days when one might have thought all was peaceful, when the wind was steady, the sun shone warmly from a cloudless sky, when the small black children tumbled and ran about and even laughed among themselves, when the holds had been cleaned, and the slaves sat quietly beneath the tarpaulin while the seamen gazed pensively across the rolling fields of the sea. It was a piece of magic, and for an hour or two I forgot the heat and smell and pain and had no cause to trouble myself with pictures of home. It never lasted long, and was itself like a dream.

Before we began our turn toward Cape Verde, several events occurred which affected the rest of our voyage. The first was the death of Louis Gardere on one of those dead calm mornings that filled us all with despair.

He had been at the wheel, the Captain at his side. Suddenly Gardere's face seemed to move off its bones; one shoulder twisted and turned as though it were not part of him. Then he dropped to the deck, his body twitching. Ned, clearly sick himself by this time, examined Gardere. He died an hour later, clutching his chest with his powerful hands and mumbling words we could not make out.

Purvis spoke of it all night, reviewing each moment, telling Ned it could not have been a heart seizure but was undoubtedly some fever Gardere had caught from the blacks.

As though to confirm Purvis, six blacks died that night. Ned, held up by Sharkey and Isaac Porter, examined their bodies.

“Fever,” he said through pale dry lips, and fainted dead away. He was taken below where after a few minutes, he regained consciousness. He watched us with unblinking eyes. I felt the fear of the men, and my own fear. It was like the smell of the ship—it ran into every crack and cranny of my mind.

The crew sobered up. The ship made headway for several days and the men grew more cheerful. But Ned became thinner as though his substance was leaking away through his hammock. He would drink water now and then, or hold a bit of a biscuit soaked in wine in his mouth.

“What do you have, Ned?” I asked him.

“A touch of death,” he whispered. I spilled the cup I had been holding to his lips. A faint grin stretched his mouth.

“Haven't you heard of the wages of sin?” he asked in a quavering voice. “Did you think they were gold?”

The day we changed our course for the northwest, Nicholas Spark took leave of whatever senses he had.

That morning, he'd indulged in one of his savageries, bringing his heel down on the feet of a black man who'd spat out his food. Before my eyes could take it in, the man leaped at Spark and gripped his throat in such a way the Mate could not get at his pistol. If it had not been for the intervention of Stout, Spark would have been strangled.

The black man was flogged until he was unconscious. At the first stroke of the whip, I'd gone to the galley and found Curry picking worms out of a piece of crusted beef. I shuddered in the greasy dark as his parrot fingers plucked and squeezed at the horrible white things. When, no longer able to bear Curry's hunting, I returned to the deck, I saw the beaten man hanging against the ropes that bound him to the mast. The blood was leaking from his back in dark streams. Stout, the whip in his hand, was speaking to the Captain, and Purvis was at the helm.

I had started toward our quarters when I caught sight of Spark staggering from the stern, his pistol held straight out in his hand. He fired at the black man whose back burst into fragments of flesh. Cawthorne spun to face the Mate, his face red with fury.

I don't know whether Spark was still dazed from his near escape from strangulation, or whether he really meant to point his pistol at the Master of the ship. But the Master had no such doubts.

In not much more time than it takes to tell it, Nicholas Spark was bound with a rope and pushed to the rail and there dropped over. Just before he disappeared beneath the water, I swear he took three steps.

I ran to hide beneath Ned's hammock. In the silence, I listened to his labored breathing.

Finally, I spoke. “Ned,” I whispered. “The Captain's had the Mate thrown overboard.”

“I ain't surprised,” said Ned.

Then Purvis joined us and told Ned the whole story. Ned said nothing, but I said I'd never seen a man so angry at another man as the Captain had been at Spark.

“I should say so!” exclaimed Purvis. “Why he dared to shoot that black!”

“But I thought it was because he pointed his pistol at Cawthorne,” I said.

“Oh, not at all, lad,” replied Purvis. “Old Cawthorne's been through mutinies before. He never lost a hair! But Cawthorne knew the black would recover—they can survive floggings that would kill a white man a hundred times over—and Spark killed him. Don't you see?
There went the profit!”

I heard a strange sound in our seabound cave, a sound like wind rustling dead leaves. It was Ned, laughing.

The Spaniard

“Have you ever watched a cockfight, Jessie? You'd never guess a fowl had so much life in it till you saw one with murder in its eye. It moves so fast you can only tell where the beak struck when the blood spurts! It's the finest sight in the world! I'd like to have my own fighting cocks someday. I've devised a plan to make the viewing better. There's always some who can't see the pit over the heads of the others, but here's how I would do it—”

“Cooley, leave off with your birds!” Sam Wick interrupted. “It's only savages who'd take pleasure in such a spectacle. We've outlawed it in Massachusetts. As for owning anything, you'll be fortunate if you end your days with something over your head to keep off the rain.”

“They've outlawed everything in Massachusetts,” retorted Cooley without much fire. The two sailors fell silent. Both stared at the horizon which appeared to rise and sink as the ship rolled. I looked at their eyes, so wide, so empty, like the sea itself in that moment when the last colors of sunset have faded and darkness begins. So had they witnessed—if it can be called that—the casting overboard of Ned Grime's body that morning, and later, when the holds had been emptied, the discovery of eight of the blacks dead, five men, one woman and two children who had followed Ned into the waves. There was no one to say what anyone died from now.

That Sam Wick was from Massachusetts, my mother's birthplace, held my attention only a second. They had all come from somewhere, after all. It made no difference to me. I didn't care if in New York or Rhode Island or Georgia, the crew had wives and children, or parents, or brothers and sisters. We were all locked into
The Moonlight
as the ship herself was locked into the sea. Everything was wrong.