The Slave Dancer Read online

  “Get to it!” he shouted crazily. I thought I saw pale giant sails suspended off the starboard side like a curtain dropped from heaven, but The Moonlight lurched forward again, and the sails vanished as had the small boats. The black boy slipped behind the mast. We were still alive here, but in the sea, slaves and rowers were falling into the silent dark depths. Smith began to beat the air with his fists. I realized he was waiting for me to say something, do something. I stuck my foot in a coil of rope, then made as if I was trapped. “My foot’s caught!” I cried. Smith ran off. I hastened to the boy who was clinging to the mast. I took hold of one arm, but he shook me off. His breathing had a dire sound to it, and I thought he might die of sheer terror. I took hold of him again, determined to hold on no matter how he struggled. Suddenly he gave way. I felt his breath fluttering against my face. I released his arm then, and motioned in the direction of the forehold. Then I got down on my hands and knees. He did the same. We crawled along beneath the main staysail that strained above our heads. I heard the Captain’s shouts but not what he said. The wind howled.

  We gained the hold and dropped down into it. In the dark, I found the boy’s arm again. We went as far as we could from the open hatch. Between a nearly empty cask and the great root of the foremast, we crouched. Our breaths mingled. The boy whispered something. “I don’t know,” I said. He was silent. Then, to my horror, I saw the solid hatch cover descend over the hold, remembering at the same moment that the hatches were always closed in foul weather.

  The hideous stench made breathing difficult. My legs began to cramp and every bone in my body ached. Something furry brushed against my hand. I got to my feet, cracking an elbow as I rose. The boy got up too, and we stood for a long time. I felt the ship heeling over as though a giant hand were pressing her to her side. Sometimes we sat, sometimes I dozed. Once, the boy took my hand and pressed it against the cask. I felt moisture. He directed my damp fingers to my mouth and I licked them. We took what wet we could, our fingers crossing the surface of the cask like moles. When the ship yawed, we were flung back against the timbers. Sometimes we clung to the cask to keep from landing on our heads. But as terrible as the storm was, it would be worse when the hatch was opened and we were discovered. I thought of Stout’s face, how he would look, how he would smile when he saw us.

  The boy spoke to me. I answered. Neither of us knew what the other said, but the sound of our voices in the dark held back dread as the thunderous violence of the storm broke all around us. There were moments when I wanted only to give way, to become a noise, a thing, so as not to know the terror I was feeling. We plunged and pitched through the sea—I know the ship made great speed those first hours, but it was the uneven lurching speed of a crippled runner.

  We both slept. What I sensed as a long time grew immeasurable. These could not be hours passing, but days. As I sat, braced against the howling, crashing chaos above, taking some comfort from the small but steady sound of the black boy’s breathing as he slept, I couldn’t imagine night and day, dark and light, only the storm, the ship plunging through it like those stars I’d seen fall through heaven in late summer.

  Once I woke to hear him crooning to himself. God knows what his words meant! But the sound of them! It will be like that, the last sound of the last soul on this earth. I shook his arm to make him stop and he laughed. It was then I felt a pang of hunger and remembered the biscuits Cawthorne had given me. We each had two. Though damp, they were fine biscuits and did not require to be broken by a hammer.

  We often held our strange conversations, each waiting for the other to finish as though we actually understood. Once, there was a terrible crash above. A violent shudder passed through the ship and entered my bones. I waited for the sea to rush over us. But it didn’t come. And all the while, I scratched my legs frantically where the salt damp was biting my skin.

  Then, long after we’d finished the last of the biscuits, at a time when I’d lost all sense of whether I was awake or dreaming, the hatch cover disappeared as though lifted by a mighty hand. I saw daylight. I saw a gray turbulent sky stirred by the wind. The boy and I looked at each other. In his sunken eyes, I saw the questions that must have been in my own.

  I crawled among the casks until I found a piece of the rope ladder which still hung down from the deck. As I gripped it, water the color of the sky rushed into the hold and tossed me back to where I’d started as if I’d weighed no more than a gull’s feather. I heard canvas flapping, the creaking of straining wood. I went back and took hold of the rope again and pulled myself up to the deck.

  The first thing I saw was the ship’s small boat smashed to bits. The mainmast lay athwart the deck, broken and twisted, its sails all rags. Beneath it lay Purvis, one leg free of the mast and floating in the water that advanced and retreated. The ship was awash to the hatches—the great wheel which had guided us such distances was now useless, floating among the ship’s debris. Only the mizzenmast still stood, its sails whipping back and forth. I was drenched instantly. I rolled myself to Ned’s bench and clung to it.

  The water stung my eyes and filled my ears. It came again and again across the deck as the ship, slack and lifeless, rose and crashed down. Nothing stood still in all the gray bawling world.

  I raised myself up and flung myself across the bench. Through my blurred sight I caught a glimpse of what I could not believe was there. Land! But even as I drew breath, the ship plunged down into a trough between giant waves. When it rose, I saw palm trees, their topmost branches combing the sky as though on the very point of being yanked out of the earth and carried heavenward. I had never felt such fear—no storm in the great ocean was so awful as this—to see land, to be so near the shore …

  I heard a moan, muffled like the cry of a sea bird in a heavy rain. I raised my head then ducked as a wall of water rushed toward me. I felt the weakness of my fingers gripping the soaked wood of Ned’s bench. Then I saw Benjamin Stout caught like a huge fly in a tangled web of rope. He stared blindly at the sky. Another wave came across the deck. I looked for Stout. He was gone along with all the rope which had trapped him. I saw land again. I made out the foam crests of the waves breaking against the shore, and I cursed the light that let me see. If it had only been dark!

  It must have taken an hour for me to move my hands to the bench leg, to lower myself through the battering wind to the deck. Coughing, unable to see, I felt my way back to the hold. Inch by inch, I advanced. Once I grabbed at something only to feel it give softly in my fingers, the feel of cloth and bone and flesh traveling up my arm. I shouted with horror and my mouth filled with water. I choked and sputtered and tried to see whose leg I had grabbed. I thought it was Cooley but could not be sure. I thought I heard a cry for help but the wind mimicked distress so perfectly there was no way to tell. The ship hit the bottom of another trough just as I reached out and took hold of the rope. I could not move. It was hopeless. I had no strength left to brace myself against the elements which would soon send the ship and her cargo of corpses to the bottom, to the depths where no wind blew.

  I felt a monstrous convulsion traveling through what was left of The Moonlight. I opened my mouth and shouted with all my might as though such a pitiful squeak, lost in the smash and crack of the wind and sea, could bring the storm to a halt. An instant later, the ship listed so far to her side it seemed that only the wind kept me plastered to the deck like a bug blown against a piece of bark. But the shudder had moved me forward a foot, and I was able now to fling myself over the edge of the hold.

  My head and shoulders were hanging down into the darkness. I heard isolated pings of dripping water in that strange stillness below the deck. Then I saw something waving, something living. A dozen frights rushed through my mind until sense came back to me and I knew it was the black boy reaching up. I gripped his fluttering fingers. Then, as I edged myself down, his arm came to guide me.

  Squatting, we held each other’s arms. He was trembling, as I was. He spoke to me. I gripped him more strong
ly and nodded. A wave hit. We fell and rolled among the casks, holding on to each other as we gathered bruises and splinters. We lay against the hull in a pool of warmish water that had its own small tides as the ship rocked back and forth.

  Then, gradually, the pounding on the deck grew less; the wind receded; the rattling and thumping of the ship’s gear—the very stuff of the ship herself—diminished to a low quarrelsome mumble. There were little easings and movements I barely noticed through the hull. I realized the ship was settling upon something, a reef, a rock, something upon which it would rest briefly before plunging to the bottom. The boy took my wrist. I felt rather than saw the motion of his hand as he gestured toward the hatch.

  We made our way to the deck. It was nearly dark. Waves washed placidly across the ship. I could see the shore now, the narrow beach, the line of palms. I glanced at the boy. He was gazing intently at the shore, his mouth slightly open, a look of eagerness on his face. Did he think we had come to his home? I caught his arm and shook my head. The light left his face. I wondered if we were looking at Cuba.

  Then I nearly jumped out of my skin. A wild choking laugh erupted from what was left of the aft quarters. I heard the distinct sound of a bottle smashed against wood. Cawthorne was not dead.

  The laugh ended abruptly. There was only the soft gathering rush of water, the hush beneath the dying wind. The boy gestured toward the shore. We slid down the deck, bracing our feet against what was left of the main rail. A piece of the boom lay close. I touched the boy, and pointed at the length of wood. We worked away at it, disentangling it from the sail that was wound around it. I could not estimate how far we were from the shore. But I knew we’d drown if we stayed on the ship.

  I heard another shout. Cawthorne lay against the mizzenmast, the angle of the ship such that he was nearly horizontal. I thought he had seen us, but no. His gaze passed over us without recognition. Perhaps he could see nothing. I looked back at the water. I could only swim like a dog. It was the way I’d learned. I didn’t know if it would carry me—pawing—all that way. And I didn’t know if the boy could swim. But what choice was there?

  We flung the piece of boom into the water and slid in after it. I lost sight of the boy almost at once. My lungs took in water. I sank. A hand touched mine. I rose sputtering. He was there, his head bobbing a few feet away. We managed to take hold of the wood, and kicking our feet, we made for the shore.

  I turned my head once. I saw, against the cloud streaming sky now streaked with an earthen glow, the Captain, his hand clawing the air. The ship was sinking slowly from view. For an instant, I felt a twinge in my ear as though Cawthorne’s teeth had closed upon it once again. I wondered if, with all the brandy I was sure he’d taken, he’d know the difference between breathing air and water.

  I don’t know how we reached the shore which had looked so close yet ever receded as we swam toward it. The darkness came down all at once like a thick black cloth. I don’t remember when we lost the boom, how often we reached toward each other and found only the water, or how many waves broke over us and lifted us to terrifying heights.

  How long it took us, I’ll never know. But even now I can feel the urgency of our struggle, the hope that delivered me from the depths and brought me up to air again and again as though most of my true life had taken place in that stretch of sea.

  The Old Man

  When we awoke, it must have been in the first light of morning. The tranquil sea was turning from gray to a mild blue as the sun’s pale rays spread out over the water.

  I breathed in the land smells, earth and trees and the sharp salty aroma of sea wrack.

  But chickens! I suspected my own hunger had made me imagine I smelled them. I lay still, grateful for the thin warmth of the sun. Something ran across my ankle. It tickled, and I sat up and saw a crab no bigger than my thumb. The boy, still dressed in the woman’s undergarment, lay a few feet away. He was sniffing the air.

  “Chickens?” I wondered aloud. The boy said a word in his own language and smiled. We got up, both of us brushing off patches of sand that had dried on us. He started to pull off the garment when something caught his attention in the long defile of palms above the beach. I looked. Behind the palms was the thick dark green of what appeared to be impenetrable underbrush. There was no wind at all, only a great stillness.

  Chickens! It was no imagining. Out from the trees, bobbing its head as it clucked came a large yellow hen. People, I thought. My knees began to tremble. That feathered lump meant farm and man, and I was afraid.

  I stood poised for flight, waiting for the chickens owner to make his appearance, armed with pistol and whip—God knows what else! The chicken scratched the sand. I grabbed the boy’s arm and pointed down the beach. But he continued to stare at the creature as it advanced in our direction. Suddenly he grabbed up a stone, then looked at me inquiringly. How I wanted to nod yes! It was such a plump chicken! But I shook my head vigorously and waved at the trees. He took my thought and dropped the stone, then he hitched up the skirt of the undergarment and we started off down the beach. We had nearly gained the point, when a voice called out, “Stop!”

  But we kept right on going until we were on the small neck of land and could see to the other side. I saw with dismay that there was no beach, only a line of steep-faced rocks covered with hair-like ferns. We stopped dead. There was no place to go except into the water. Dreading what I would see, I turned. To my astonishment, an elderly black man stood watching us from near the place where we had slept, and where I could still make out the faint outlines of our bodies in the sand. Beside him was his harbinger, the yellow hen, her head cocked. She grabbed up something, and I guessed it was the crab which had so recently ascended my ankle.

  I looked at the boy. His face was radiant. But the glow was gone almost instantly. He must have realized that although the old man’s clothes were ragged, they were those of white men.

  The old man began to come toward us with slow steps. We went to meet him. I could not think what to say, how to explain the circumstances which had brought us to this shore. I wished the boy and I had landed on one of those uninhabited islands Purvis had told me about—out of the reach of others—for I found a bottomless distrust in my heart for anything that walked on two legs. It was the old man who broke the silence.

  “Where you going? Where you come from?” He looked at me quickly, then away. I observed how carefully he began to study the black boy. Then, when I hadn’t answered, not being able to find words, he said, “Well, master?”

  “No!” I croaked. “I’m not his master.”

  The old man reached out and took the boy’s arm and turned him around. Then he pulled the woman’s garment off him. He touched some old scars on the boy’s back.

  “Our ship sank in the storm,” I said. “We swam to shore.”

  The old man nodded and released the boy. “Where are the others?” he asked.

  “There was the crew,” I said. “They drowned.” I looked out at the sea. There was nothing.

  Everything marched at dead measure. The sun’s heat had grown stronger, and I was suddenly aware of my thirst.

  “We haven’t eaten for a long time,” I said. “We’ve had no water, either, and we don’t know where we are.”

  “You in Mississippi,” said the old man, looking at the boy. “He don’t say nothing. Why is that?”

  “He speaks his own language,” I replied, wondering if we would, at least, get something to drink. There must be food and drink there in the forest. The old man had come from some place. “But he’s not learned our language yet,” I added.

  “Our language …” echoed the old man.

  “My name is Jessie Bollier,” I said desperately. The old man seemed to be weighing us, deciding …

  “What’s his name?” he asked.

  I touched the black boy’s hand. He tore his gaze away from the old man. I pointed to myself. “Jessie,” I said. Then I pointed to him. “Jessie?” he questioned.

 
“What’s your name?” I asked the old man. He looked out at the water. He would not find a trace of The Moonlight. During the night, it must have been carried off whatever had held it up and was now resting on the bottom. He had not answered my question. I turned again to the boy, pointed at myself and repeated my name. Then I touched his shoulder. This time he said clearly, “Ras!”

  I walked away from him. “Ras!” I called. “Jessie,” he answered.

  The old man made up his mind. “You come with me now,” he said. He walked up toward the palms, grabbing up the chicken without changing his pace. It squawked with rage. We followed. There was nothing else we could do. He might give us something to drink.

  I would not have imagined there was anything like a path in the forest, but there was, just a slight indentation wide enough for a foot. The old man kept looking back at the boy. He took special care to see we were not whipped by the close growing branches, holding them until we had passed. He led us for perhaps a quarter of a mile, then halted for no apparent reason and dropped the hen to the ground. She ran off into a thicket, clucking indignantly.