The Slave Dancer (9 page)

“But the children don't battle, do they?” I asked.

“The chiefs kidnap the children,” he replied. “The slavers give good trade goods for them because they fetch such high prices in the West Indies.” He looked contemptuously toward the now distant shore, more like a low-lying cloud than land. “The African was tempted and then became depraved by a desire for the material things offered him by debased traders. It's all the Devil's work.”

I looked at him curiously. “But you're a slaver, ain't you, Ned?”

“My heart's not in it,” he said flatly. I wondered about his heart, imagining it to be something like one of the raisins Curry used to slip into the duff.

We hadn't had such a good thing to eat as duff in many weeks. Being on a ship and eating from its stores was like a man burning down his house to keep warm.

I had not yet been seriously afflicted with the thing called sea-sickness. But early the next morning, we hit a strange turbulence in the sea so that
The Moonlight
pitched forward, then rolled sideways in such rapid alternation that my stomach did likewise. I took only a swallow of water. I felt that if I didn't keep my mouth tightly closed, I should be turned inside out like a garment that was to be laundered.

If the ship's wild pitching made me ill, it drove the blacks below into frenzies of terror. Howls and cries rose out of the holds unceasingly. The ship herself seemed to protest the violence of the water, whining and creaking more loudly than I'd ever heard her.

Ben Stout, the Captain and Spark appeared untouched by the suffering of our cargo. I can't say the rest of the crew took pity on the miserable creatures in their dark places below the deck, but the men were silent, and avoided the holds as much as they could.

The Captain had had his chair lashed close to the wheel and did not leave it until we were free of this convulsion of the sea. Spark had joined Stout near the holds, wearing his pistol and carrying the same tarred rope with which Purvis had been flogged. Spark never looked down no matter what sounds issued from below. Then I forgot my sick stomach, forgot everything.

As he left his chair, the Captain shouted, “Tell Bollweevil to get his pipe.” Gardere glanced briefly at me from his position at the helm. I could not read his expression.

With a small smile, Stout said, “Get ready to play your music, lad,” then reached out his hand to pat my shoulder. I moved back quickly as though a cotton-mouth had struck in my direction. I saw, as clearly as I could see the cat-o'-nine-tails in his other hand, those fleshy fingers gripped around the ankle of the dead little girl.

I went below and got my fife, but stood unmoving in the dark until I heard them shouting for me.

The slaves from one of the holds were being hoisted one by one to the deck. Only the women and the youngest children were unshackled.

In just a few days, they had become so battered, so bowed by the fears that must have tormented them, that they could barely stand up. They blinked in the bright white light of the growing day. Then they sank to the deck, the women clutching weakly at the children, their shoulders bent over as though to receive the blows of death.

All hands were present; even Ned was ordered to leave his workbench and stand to attention.

The slaves were given their water rations and fed rice with a sauce of pepper and oil. When they saw the food and water, sighs rose from them like small puffs of wind, one following so close on the other that in the end, it seemed one great exhalation of air.

“Some of them think we eat them,” whispered Purvis to me. “They think that first meal was only to fool them. When they see we intend to keep on feeding them, they grow quite cheerful.”

I saw no cheer. The adults ate mournfully, the food dribbling from their lips as though their spirits were too low to keep their jaws firm. The children spoke among themselves. Sometimes a woman held a child's head as though she feared its voice might draw down punishment upon it, and rice from the child's mouth would spill across her arm.

When they had finished their meal, the Captain said to Stout, “Tell them to stand up. And tell them we have a musician for them and that they are to dance for me.”

“I can't tell them all that, Sir,” Stout replied. “I don't know their words for dancing or for music.”

“Then tell them
something
to get them to their feet!” cried the Captain angrily as he flourished his pistol.

Stout began to speak to the slaves. They did not look at him. Some stared up at the tarpaulin as though there were a picture painted on it; others looked down at their feet.

We had formed a circle around them, dressed, shod, most of us armed. Many of them were naked; a few had ragged bits of cloth around their waists. I glanced at the sailors. Ned's eyes were turned upward toward heaven. I supposed he was reporting to God on the folly of everyone else but himself. But the rest were staring fixedly at the slaves. I felt fevered and agitated. I sensed, I saw, how beyond the advantage we had of weapons, their nakedness made them helpless. Even if we had not been armed, our clothes and boots alone would have given us power.

There was something else that held the attention of the men—and my own. It was the unguarded difference between the bodies of the men and women.

I had told no living soul that on some of my late walks through the old quarter at home, I had dared the chance of hell fire by glancing through the windows of certain houses where I had seen women undressing, and undressed. I can only say that I didn't
linger
at those windows. Sometimes, after my peeking, I had been ashamed. Other times, I had rolled on the ground with laughter. Why I was chagrined in one instance and hilarious in another, I don't know.

But what I felt now, now that I could gaze without restraint at the helpless and revealed forms of these slaves, was a mortification beyond any I had ever imagined.

At the increasingly harsh shouts of Ben Stout, some of the black men had risen, swaying, to their feet. Then others stood. But several remained squatting. Stout began to lay about him with the cat-o'-nine, slapping the deck, flicking its fangs toward the feet of those who had not responded to his cries with even a twitch. At last, he whipped them to their feet. The women had risen at the first word, clutching the small children to their breasts.

“Bollweevil!” called the Captain.

Ned suddenly lit up his pipe.

I blew. A broken squeak came out of my fife.

“Tie him to the topmost crosstrees!” screamed Cawthorne. Stout, smiling, started toward me. I blew again. This time I managed a thin note, then some semblance of a tune.

The cat-o'-nine slapped the deck. Spark clapped his hands without a trace of rhythm. The Captain waved his arms about as though he'd been attacked by a horde of flies. A black man drooped toward the deck until Spark brought his heel down on his thin bare foot.

I played on against the wind, the movement of the ship and my own self-disgust, and finally the slaves began to lift their feet, the chains attached to the shackles around their ankles forming an iron dirge, below the trills of my tune. The women, being unshackled, moved more freely, but they continued to hold the children close. From no more than a barely audible moan or two, their voices began to gain strength until the song they were singing, or the words they were chanting, or the story they were telling overwhelmed the small sound of my playing.

All at once, as abrupt as the fall of an axe, it came to a stop. Ben Stout snatched the fife from my hands. The slaves grew silent. The dust they had raised slowly settled around them.

That morning, I danced three groups of slaves. In the last, I saw the boy who I thought had looked at me when I cried out at Stout's heaving the child overboard. He wouldn't stand up. Spark dealt him a mighty blow with the tarred rope which left its tooth on the boy's back, a red channel in the tight brown flesh. He stood then, moving his feet as though they didn't belong to him.

It was to perform this service every other morning that I had been kidnapped and carried across the ocean.

I dreaded the coming of daylight. I listened without interest to rumors—that two of the slaves had fever, that the ship we had seen to windward was an American cruiser in pursuit of
The Moonlight,
that Spark had suddenly taken to drink, that Stout was the Captain's spy among us, that a black child had the pox.

In the harbor of São Tomé, in the sickly haze of a morning when I'd been relieved of all my duties save that of emptying the latrine buckets, I wondered if I dared leap overboard and take my chances on reaching the shore. But what would I find there? Other men who might use me worse than I was being used? Or a captain who tortured his own crew? God knows, I had heard of such things!

Now the slaves were fighting among themselves. The immediate cause was the latrine buckets. Many of them could not reach them quickly enough across the bodies of the others, for there was not a spare inch of space. Most of them had what Purvis called the bloody flux, an agonizing affliction of their bowels that not only doubled them up with cramps but made the buckets entirely inadequate.

One night as we lay at anchor, waiting for the morning when fresh supplies would be loaded on the ship, I heard a scream of inhuman force, of intolerable misery. I began to weep helplessly myself, covering my mouth with an old cap of Stouts for fear one of the crew would hear me.

We sailed from the island shortly, with no regrets on my part. It was as though I was trying to swallow the long days ahead, to stuff them down my throat, to make them pass with a gulp, thinking of that hour, that minute, when I would be let off this ship.

When we were two days out on our westward course, I heard once again that cry from one of the holds, a woman's scream, hair-raising, heart-squeezing. I had been dancing a group of slaves, and at that terrible sound, Spark signaled me to stop my tune. Stout ran to the hold from which the cry had issued. He disappeared down it. Not a minute later, a black woman was tossed upon the deck like a doll of rags.

“Over!” said the Captain. Spark and Stout lifted the woman, who was alive, carried her to the rail and swung her up and over. We didn't hear the splash she must have made when she hit the water, but then we were making speed before a fair breeze.

“She had the fever,” Stout said to me as he passed, “and was dying and would have infected the rest of them.” He was not trying to excuse himself. No, it was only his usual trick. He knew I thought he was evil, but he liked to suggest that beneath that I held another opinion of him, that, in fact, I admired him. It was a complicated insult.

The slaves were all looking at the place where the woman had been thrown overboard. Sick and stooped, half-starved by now, and soiled from the rarely cleaned holds, they stared hopelessly at the empty horizon.

I found a dreadful thing in my mind.

I hated the slaves! I hated their shuffling, their howling, their very suffering! I hated the way they spat out their food upon the deck, the overflowing buckets, the emptying of which tried all my strength. I hated the foul stench that came from the holds no matter which way the wind blew, as though the ship itself were soaked with human excrement. I would have snatched the rope from Spark's hand and beaten them myself! Oh, God! I wished them all dead! Not to hear them! Not to smell them! Not to know of their existence!

I dropped my fife on the deck and fled to my hammock. I would stay there until I was forcibly removed.

Which I was, soon enough.

They sent Seth Smith to get me.

“Get down!”

“Damn you all!” I said.

“If I have to carry you, it'll go hard for you.”

I gripped the edges of my hammock. He turned it over with one movement of his hand, then caught me round the waist and took me to the deck.

The slaves had been returned to the hold. Captain Cawthorne was holding my fife in his hand, turning it idly. Standing next to him was Ben Stout. The fife reflected bright bits of sunlight.

“We won't have none of that,” the Captain remarked. I recalled Purvis' mad song to himself about some of this and some of that. Purvis was nowhere to be seen. Ned was bent over his bench, a piece of chain in his carpenter's vise. I only noticed now that he was extremely thin, and that he looked ill.

“You're not so young you don't know what an order is,” the Captain said. He shoved the fife at my chest and poked about with it as though trying to discover what I had concealed beneath my shirt.

“Stand to the rail,” he ordered.

I did. The sea was blue today.

“Five,” said the Captain.

Five times, Stout brought the rope down on my back. I had been determined not to cry out. But I did. It hurt more than I could have imagined. But I was not ashamed of my cries, for each time the rope fell, I thought of the slaves, of the violent hatred I had felt for them that had so frightened me that I had defied Master and crew. My eyes flooded with tears. The taste of salt was in my mouth. But as the blows fell, I became myself again. That self had gone through such transformations, I could not claim to be altogether familiar with it. But one thing was clear. I was a thirteen-year-old male, not as tall though somewhat heavier than a boy close to my own age, now doubled up in the dark below, not a dozen yards from where I was being beaten.

Seth Smith did not look at me as he carried me back to my hammock. Through the red haze which at the moment afflicted my vision I saw a stupid determination in his face like that I had observed on the features of drunken men who fight at any excuse.

Later, Ned came to tend my back, and Purvis showed up, scratching himself and snorting and making every effort to appear at ease.

“Don't feel too bad, Jessie,” he said. “There's not a sailor living who's not felt the lash.”

“Don't tell him such nonsense,” protested Ned. “Don't make out it's an honor to be beaten. It's all because of greed and its festering excuses.”