The Slave Dancer Read online

  Toward morning, I overheard a conversation.

  Smith said, “You handed Purvis over to that beast.”

  “He would have done the same in my place,” said Stout.

  “You’re a damned foul creature, Stout.”

  “No different from you or anyone else,” Stout said mildly from his hammock.

  “You’re one with Cawthorne,” Smith said. “No difference between you except he’s ambitious.”

  “That may be true, Seth,” said Stout. “I wish I had Cawthorne’s ambition. I would have made a fine rich man,” and he laughed.

  Then I heard Ned asking who had informed on Purvis.

  “Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Stout himself,” said Seth Smith.

  “No, no. I didn’t do that,” said Stout. “I expect Spark saw me. But then, you see,” he continued amiably as though discussing the best way to splice a rope, “Purvis and me has sailed with the Captain and Spark before, and I believe they favor me a bit over him.”

  It was more than I could take in. My head felt swollen and my cheeks on fire.

  Why hadn’t Purvis denied the theft of the egg? I couldn’t find a word to put to Stout’s actions. Why didn’t the rest of the men seize him and toss him overboard? Why didn’t they go to the Captain and inform him of the real culprit? Why was Stout so calm, even satisfied as he lay there in the damp dark, accused of dreadful treachery by a fellow sailor, unmoved, unashamed, and now as I could hear plainly, snoring contentedly?

  Sharkey and Smith brought Purvis down in the morning. Ned took a bottle of salve from his medicine chest and rubbed it into the wounds on Purvis’ back as he sat hunched over on his sea chest. I brought him a mug of tea and rum and he drank it down slowly, his face creased like rumpled parchment, as white as though the wind had blown the blood out of him. He looked at me over the rim of the mug. His eyes had sunk into his head.

  We were alone for a few minutes. I stood looking at him, unable to tear my gaze away. He groaned softly now and then, or shook his big head as though something was flying about in his hair and bothering him. Then he let the mug fall into my hands.

  “I’ll be all right soon, Jessie,” he said in a cracked thin voice.

  “But—it was Stout!” I cried.

  “Oh, yes. It was Stout.”

  “But why didn’t you say?” I pleaded, beside myself with rage at the injustice.

  “There would’ve been no use in that. The officers of this ship would not care what the truth was. Get me a plug of tobacco, will you, Jessie? It’ll make me feel human.”

  I fetched it for him. With great effort, he broke off a piece and stuck it in his mouth. “Ah …” he sighed.

  “But if it wasn’t you—” I began.

  “The Captain had it in his mind that it was time for a flogging—to remind the men.”

  “To remind the men? Of what?” I demanded.

  Purvis clasped his hands and leaned further forward.

  “No more talk now, Jessie. I’ll rest,” he said.

  Stout handed me a piece of cheese that morning as I sat near Ned’s bench sewing a piece of canvas. I took it and heaved it over the side.

  Stout smiled gently as though he couldn’t blame me.

  The Bight of Benin

  Ned the carpenter had been unusually busy. The result of his labor was a platform on which squatted a nine-pound carronade, black as a bat, absorbing sunlight or the white glare of sunless days, an iron presence which Nicholas Spark touched each time he passed it as though for luck.

  I didn’t need Purvis to tell me we were soon to meet up with other men. The armament was enough.

  An American flag on the signal gaff would discourage the British from boarding us. The carronade would warn them we belonged to ourselves. Purvis had heard there was some kind of American warship that was supposed to prevent the trade, but with thousands of miles of coast to patrol, there was small chance we’d meet up with it. “Besides,” he said, “there is the matter of the flags.”

  “What flags?” I asked.

  “The flags in the Captain’s quarters,” Purvis said. “It’s this way, Jessie. If an American patrol should signal us and demand to board the ship, we’d run up a Spanish flag. And if they persisted, we’d show them a full set of papers that would prove The Moonlight to be of Spanish ownership.”

  “But anyone could tell we’re not!”

  “I tell you, such things are decided by papers!” Purvis declared. “If the papers are in order, nothing else matters. It works both ways. The Spanish slavers hire an American citizen to take passage with them. Then, if they’re boarded by the British, the American puts on a captain’s hat, takes command of the ship, flourishes his ownership papers and threatens to sue the British naval officer who’s dared to set foot on his deck! There’s not so many willing to risk the penalty for boarding a ship and finding neither slaves nor equipment on it. I sailed once under a master who, though he grew rich from slaving, wasn’t caught for ten years. When he was finally boarded at the mouth of the Volta River, he was dropping slaves over the port side of the ship while his Portuguese servant was dressed up in captain’s clothes, cursing the British as they scrambled up the starboard side. They couldn’t prove a thing against him!”

  “But there are many against the trade,” I said, irritated that Purvis was so satisfied with his arguments.

  “Oh, Jessie! Don’t you see? The British like to provoke us because we don’t belong to them any more!”

  “But they’ve outlawed slavery in their own country!”

  Purvis stroked his chin and narrowed his eyes. “You can be sure,” he said with conviction, “that they wouldn’t have passed laws against slaving if they hadn’t found something else as profitable. That’s the way of things, Jessie. But you’ll see! You’re bound to get a bit of a share yourself at the end of this voyage!”

  I felt the force of truth withheld and hidden behind Purvis’ grin and so, perhaps to remind him of an event that he couldn’t so easily smooth out and explain as British law, I asked, “Does your back still pain you?”

  He scowled and threw out his fist.

  “Never mind that!” he growled.

  I crawled into my hammock with much on my mind.

  Life had turned upside down. My friend was a man who’d pressganged me. I disliked the man who’d befriended me. For all that talk of papers, I could see clear enough that two governments were against this enterprise, even though my own was, according to Purvis, weak in its opposition. Purvis had said the native kings sold their own people willingly, yet he’d also told me there were chiefs who would sink the ship and kill us all if they had the chance.

  “Play us a tune,” Purvis’ voice floated up to me with a certain melancholy note. “We haven’t had a tune from you all these weeks, and soon enough you’ll be playing, but not for us.”

  I peered over the edge of the hammock. Smith and Purvis were looking up at me expectantly. I took my fife and jumped down and played as fast and loud as I could. The two men danced in the small space, circling each other like two dreaming bears, their faces as serious as though they were reading from the Bible.

  We entered the Bight of Benin at midday. By nightfall, we were off Whydah. There, I heard the cable strike the deck as the anchor rushed downwards, hooking us to that whole unknown land greeted earlier by Sharkey from his foretop lookout with a shout of, “Land, ho …”

  I looked eagerly toward the shore as though with a glance I could take in the feel of solid earth, the comfort of it, after all these days on the roiling back of the sea.

  But the land was on fire. Sheets of flame as red and jagged as the wounds the rope had opened in Purvis’ back flew upward into a darkening sky. Clouds of smoke mixed with low-lying rain clouds. It seemed as though a great forest was dying.

  “It’s the barracoon,” remarked Seth Smith, who had come to stand beside me at the taffrail. “The British devils have set it afire.”

  “Barracoon?” I asked, but
Smith rushed on impatiently. “The British, the British!” he cried. “They’ve set the barracoon on fire, and the damned niggers that have been held for us have run off and escaped!”

  I asked him what a barracoon was.

  “That’s a confined place where the chiefs keep them chained and ready for trade. And the British, who pretend that they own the entire world, sneak ashore, let them loose and destroy property that ain’t theirs.”

  “Then we won’t be trading—with the slaves all gone?”

  He laughed loudly. “The slaves are never gone!” he exclaimed. “All of Africa is nothing but a bottomless sack of blacks.”

  “Will we land soon?”

  “We won’t never land,” he said angrily as though I’d been impertinent. “It’s the Captain who takes samples of our rum to the chiefs. He’ll go at night in the small boat and leave Spark to see to the ship and us. Now, look over there! You see those ships?” he asked. “That’s some of the British Squadron, waiting to pounce. They’ve done their day’s nasty work on shore, and now they’ll rub their hands at the thought of this tasty little ship coming all this way only to have to sit and wait.”

  “They know what we’re here for?”

  “Lord! Of course, they know. They’ve had a glass on us since we entered the Bight. It’s cat and mouse now. But Cawthorne will do it. He’s a fierce man.”

  I looked away from the distant cluster of ships, back at the enormous fan of fire. Only through Purvis’ stories had I been able to imagine the destructive power of the sea. Our voyage had been, except for a few days of calm and a squall or two, without special incident. But I knew the horror of fire. Only three years ago, 107 houses had been eaten up by flames in New Orleans, and the smell of charred wood, the smoke, the fire that ran where it would, had frightened me so much that for many weeks I would not sit near the candles in our room. When they were lit at night, and I stared into the little eye of the flame, I would see myself running through molten lakes like those our parson described when he shouted at us about the hell awaiting sinners.

  “He’ll go up and down the coast here,” Smith continued challengingly as though daring the distant British ships and their crews. “Yes, he will! And along with the rum, he’ll carry the shackles the chiefs will require for the slaves. Then, one night, there’ll come to our ship a long canoe filled to the brim with blacks—and the next night, another canoe, so quiet, you won’t know it’s alongside until the slaves are on deck, wailing and weeping and biting their own flesh. They’re all mad, the blacks! And the British will sweat with rage, for they have no right to search us. The only danger for us is if the British are able to notify the American patrol. But I tell you, such a ship is only here to protect us against any abuse by the damned English! For as everyone knows, our whole country is for the trade, in spite of the scoundrels who cry and fling themselves about at the fate of the poor poor black fellows. Poor indeed! Living in savagery and ignorance. Think on this—their own chiefs can’t wait to throw them in our holds!”

  “But what can the British do?”

  “They could try to blockade us if we were so unwise as to sail up a river. They could force us, once we’ve taken on slaves and unloaded our cargo, to put on so much sail we’d be in danger if they gave chase.”

  “You’ve been on slavers before,” I said.

  “All of us have,” he replied. “It’s nasty work. And it’s not everyone has the nerve for it.” His mood suddenly changed for he gave me a big grin. “Perhaps you’ll be carrying a pistol yourself, runt that you are!”

  “A pistol!”

  “Aye. We’re all armed as long as we’re in sight of the coast. If the blacks try anything, it’ll be then, when they can still see where they came from. Oh, they’ve done terrible things I could tell you about! Killing a crew and a master and all, then flinging themselves back into the sea, even shackled!”

  I thought suddenly of the stories I had heard at home about slave uprisings in Virginia and South Carolina. My breath came short—here, within eyesight, was the very world from which such slaves had been taken. Here, on this small ship, we would be carrying God knows how many of them, and I, without at this instant being able to conceive in what manner, was to make them dance.

  “Why must the slaves dance?” I asked timidly, for fear of annoying Smith. At that moment, I was afraid of everyone on The Moonlight, just as I had been when I first set my foot upon her deck.

  “Because it keeps them healthy,” said Smith. “It’s hard to make a profit out of a sick nigger—the insurance ain’t so easy to collect. And it makes any Captain wild to jettison the sick ones within sight of the marketplace itself after all the trouble he’s gone to.”

  Smith went off and left me to my apprehension. It didn’t let up much until the next dawn when I saw land clearly for the first time.

  Green and brown and white, trees and shore and waves. I thought of home. At the same time, I was overcome by a dreadful thirst.

  I thought I had grown accustomed to doing without everything that was familiar, accepting small rations of water and food without question. But the sight of the land, a longing to set foot on something that didn’t rock and pitch and groan and creak, made the room on Pirate’s Alley the only place in the world I wanted to be. To sit on a bench there in a private patch of sunlight and slowly peel and eat an orange! At that moment, I glimpsed Purvis dragging an enormous tarpaulin across the deck.

  I hated him!

  “Give me a hand with this, Jessie,” he shouted.

  I didn’t move.

  “Just take up the end of it,” he called again.

  Still, I remained unmoving, nearly senseless with rage.

  “Get to it!” said the awful dead voice of Nicholas Spark.

  Not for the last time, I considered casting myself over the side and confounding them all! But I submitted, convinced there was no one on the ship who would throw me a rope and rescue me from the water. I went slowly toward Purvis, feeling a shame I’d never felt before.

  With my help and Gardere’s, Purvis set up a tent on the deck. He volunteered the information that it was for the slaves to sit under when they had their meals. I had not inquired, and I made no comment. I wasn’t much better off than the slaves would be, I told myself. I felt utterly alone among the men now. I couldn’t even smile at Curry’s peculiar mutterings as he went rooting about in his galley, cooking up the foul messes which I would have to eat or else starve.

  Benjamin Stout, who had not ceased to speak kindly to me despite the cold way I behaved toward him, followed me around asking why I was wearing such a scowl.

  “Leave me be!” I cried at him finally, after he’d tracked me right to my hammock.

  “If he speaks to someone, it won’t be to an egg-stealing cockroach like yourself, Ben Stout,” said Purvis, his head hanging above the ladder to our quarters like a moon that’s been roundly punched. “It won’t be a man who lets his shipmate hang in the shrouds for him.”

  “He’s in such a dark mood,” Stout remarked in a pleasant tone as though he were conversing with a friend. “I was only worried what was bothering the boy.”

  Stout was surely the worst creature I’d ever known or heard about, worse even than Nicholas Spark.

  “Worried,” jeered Purvis. “You, worried! It’s only that evil curiosity of yours that makes you want to poke and pry and fiddle! Jessie, come up on deck. Come on now! There’s a good boy! Don’t sulk so! It makes us all worried, to be near the shore like this and not able to walk on it. But think, the voyage is half over. You’ll be home, if the trade winds are good to us, in just this time again. And richer too!” I didn’t move. “Well, if you won’t speak, I can’t hang here like a ham for smoking.”

  Ham. Oh, ham! And a cask of water!

  I stayed for a long time below, and I was left alone. Perhaps Purvis took pity on me and saw to it that I was not sent for. I softened a little in my feeling toward him partly because he’d spoken my very thoughts about the l
and teasing me there, so close, so out of reach.

  Time hung on us. Three days we sat there like a wooden bird. The sky threatened rain but rain never fell. Sharkey got into the rum and staggered about the deck shouting and cursing until Spark laid him flat with a belaying pin. The blood ran from the wound, then dried. I stared at his head with a hard heart. No one should have the advantage of me any more. I cast a murderous look at Spark’s back. I kicked the mast and cursed. No one took notice.

  The great cauldron I’d seen Curry scrubbing was brought up on deck. The Captain called all hands together and handed out pistols, but not to me or Purvis.

  “Not you, you serpent,” he said to Purvis. “You might put a bullet through the head of my last hen.” He said nothing to me.

  There were more than Sharkey who got into the rum. At night, the ship rang with snatches of blurred song, of shouted angry words, of broken silly laughter, and sometimes, of blows given and taken. Only Ned and Ben Stout stayed sober, Ned observing the goings-on with an indifferent eye, Ben, reading his small Bible by oil lamp with an aggrieved but forgiving look on his face. Once he assured me not to fear his mates. I hadn’t asked him for any assurance and told him so.

  On the fourth night, the Captain came aboard from wherever he’d been, followed by a tall thin coffee-colored man.

  Purvis and I watched them go into the Captains quarters. “That’s the cabociero,” said Purvis. “He’s a Portuguese black, what you could call a broker. The Captain must pay him a tax for our anchorage here. Then they’ll get down to the trading.”

  There was only one ship left of the British Squadron. Its port and starboard lights glimmered prettily in the dark. I supposed the other ships were out blockading a river or chasing a Spanish slaver. They had not approached us.

  “How is it the British haven’t gone after the Captain on his trips ashore?” I wondered aloud.