The Slave Dancer Read online

  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.

  The slaves were nearer death than the crew, although what they ate was not much worse than what we ate, and none of us, except the Captain and Stout, who had now assumed the duties of Mate, was ever free from thirst except when it rained. But we could walk the deck. I wondered if, in this circumstance, that was not the difference between life and death. And although Ben Stout could and did increase our misery with his captious orders, there was a limit. There were courts of inquiry to which the Captain would have to answer for unusual cruelty toward his crew—if a sailor had the endurance to pursue justice. If any of us ever saw the shore again …

  Our northwestward course was steady except during one violent downpour. Though we were out of the doldrums, Purvis never left off exclaiming at our luck in not having been becalmed for weeks. His voice was fevered; his eyes bulged as he tried to convince me—perhaps, only himself—that it would be clear sailing ahead, only a brief passage now until he collected his wages and his share of the profit from the sale of the slaves.

  “I’ll never ship on a slaver again,” he would say, over and over again. “Never, Jessie! You see if I don’t keep my word!”

  I danced the slaves under Stout’s watchful eyes. He always found time to observe me at my task. I was determined to show no emotion in front of him. I gazed blankly at the rigging as though I was alone with a thought. But in truth I was so agitated I could hardly make my fingers work on the fife. Despite my intention, I could not help but see the wretched shambling men and women whose shoulders sank and rose in exhausted imitation of movement. They were all sick. I could count the ribs of the boy to whom I had once whispered my name.

  It had been some time since the little children had played on the deck. I think they were too weak to crawl or run about. God knows how the slaves slept. I wondered if they hastened toward sleep as I did, for it was only then the hours passed without reckoning.

  Once, on a night when Sharkey was making a commotion because of cramps in his belly, I went on deck and looked down into the forehold. I thought they’d all died. I heard not a sound. The Moonlight herself was bathed in moonlight. Sam Wick, on watch, passed me without a word. A small pool of yellow light shone near the Captain’s quarters. I supposed he and Stout were in there, drinking brandy and eating decent grub. The dark water was streaked with the pale light of the moon. I thought that now I understood the phrase, “lost at sea.”

  I had, until that moment, been racing ahead of the ship to the door of our room, to the welcoming cries of my mother and Betty, when all this would lie behind me as unsubstantial as the moonlight. But now I felt no such certainty. A great timidity possessed my thoughts. There was nothing sure on earth except the rising and setting of the sun—and, when the sky was quilted over with black storm clouds and there was no line between earth and heaven, who could tell what the sun was doing?

  Did the black people have any idea of what was ahead for them? If the ship made Cuban waters—if we were not overtaken by French pirates out of Martinique—if we escaped the British patrol and the United States cruisers—if they survived fever and flux and starvation and thirst?

  “Stay away from the holds, lad,” said the poisonous sweet voice of Ben Stout. “It disturbs them to be watched. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  As though he cared for what disturbed them! I slunk away toward our quarters, hoping Sharkey had quieted down by now, that Purvis had found something in Ned’s old medicine case that had eased him. But I did not get far.

  “Wait!” Stout commanded in his official voice. I stood, my back to him.

  “I’d like a word with you,” he said, wheedling now. I turned slowly. “I’m concerned about the crew,” he said. “I want them in good spirits. We’re well out of the Gulf of Guinea. It won’t be long till we reach the trades. There’s reason for good cheer.”

  “Not for some of us,” I replied.

  “There’s always loss,” said Stout. “It’s taken into account by any sensible officer. But you’ll be fine, Jessie. You’re young and strong.”

  “So was Gardere. So were all the black people who died.”

  “Gardere!” he exclaimed and laughed loudly. “Gardere had eaten himself out with rum before you was born. As for the niggers, lad, they’re actually better off drownded, if you think about it. Nothing more to worry them. You could look at it that way.”

  “I’ll look at it the way I choose.”

  “I like your honesty,” he said softly. “There’s no one else I’d trust on this ship. That’s why I asked you about the crew’s spirits.”

  But he hadn’t asked me.

  “You want me to spy for you?” I asked. Ben Stout looked forgivingly up at heaven. What was he up to? Did he want to discover what Curry mixed with the cabbage to make it taste like swamp grass? Would he like to know that Cooley’s ambition concerned fighting cocks? Or that Isaac Porter bit his nails like a man playing a mouth organ? Or that Purvis snored and mumbled in his sleep? Or did he want to know what I thought of him? Was I to spy on myself?

  “Take you,” he said. “How are your spirits?”

  “I can’t answer that,” I said.

  “But you must know how you feel!” he exclaimed, a touch of heat in his voice. I was surprised.

  “I feel this way and that way,” I said, “but never the way I once did when I lived at home in New Orleans.”

  “I want a plain answer.”

  “I hate this ship!” I said with all the force I could, with what little courage I had in the face of Stout’s menace.

  “Ah!” he sighed. A second later, I saw his teeth gleam. “That must mean you hate me too.”

  “I didn’t say so,” I said.

  “Hatred poisons the soul,” he observed. “It is an incurable ailment.”

  “I would like to go below.”

  “I’ve been so good to you,” he continued. “I don’t understand your ingratitude. They’ve all talked against me. I suppose that accounts for it.”

  I would say nothing further to him. He stood silently looking at me. I grew uneasy. Something weakened in me. There was a quality about his stillness, his silence, that was like a huge weight pressing against me. I took one step away. He held out his hand toward me. I remembered the slave woman he’d tormented, and I scrambled down the ladder. Sharkey was hunched over himself, rubbing his belly. Purvis shot a glance at me.

  “You’re as white as salt, Jessie! What is it?”

  “I wish Stout was dead!” I cried.

  “But he is dead,” said Purvis. “He’s been dead for years. And there’s one of him on every ship that sails! There’s someone makes little dolls of him and sprinkles them with gunpowder and steals along the docks and places a doll in each ship—and when it’s out at sea, the doll grows and grows till it looks just like a sailor man, and it takes its place among the crew and no one’s the wiser until two weeks at sea when one of the crew says to another, ‘Ain’t he dead? That one over there by the helm?’ and the other says, ‘Just what I was thinking—we’ve got a dead man on the ship—’”

  Sharkey gave out a dog’s yelp of laughter and at that, Purvis grinned broadly.

  Whenever I saw a sail on the horizon—which was not often—I would pretend it was a British cruiser not afraid to displease the United States Government by boarding us. I imagined the slaves set free, the rest of us taken to England where Stout would be hanged, and Purvis and I sent by fast ship to Boston. From there, I would make my way home, and one day, in the freshness of a morning, I would open the door and step inside, and my mother would look up from her work, and—

  But we were not pursued. And if we had been, it is unlikely The Moonlight, with all her sails stretched, could have been captured. Only pirates might take us, French pirates undeterred by any flag, eager to pounce on a tattered dirty little ship with a cargo of half-dead blacks, and a b
unch of ailing seamen as hard and dry and moldy as the ship’s biscuits they gnawed on.

  When, one morning, I could not find my fife, I thought Cooley or Wick, longing for distraction, had hidden it from me. They swore they had not touched it. And no one else had either, said Purvis, because he would have heard anyone sneaking about and reaching into my hammock where I always kept it. But Purvis had been on watch the night before.

  I searched frantically throughout the ship. Porter came looking for me and told me I was wanted on deck. I found Stout waiting aft, the Captain standing a few feet away looking through his spyglass at the horizon. There had not been a word between Stout and me since the night I’d run away from him.

  “We’re going to bring up the niggers, Jessie,” he said. “Where’s your music maker?”

  The instant he spoke, I knew Stout had made off with the fife.

  I was dumb with fear; it rushed through me like heat from a fire.

  “He’s not got his pipe, Captain,” Stout said gravely.

  Cawthorne turned to look at me.

  “What now?” he asked impatiently.

  “I say, the boy is refusing to play—”

  “I’m not!” I cried to Cawthorne. “It was beside me in my hammock last night! It’s been taken from me!”

  “Taken?” repeated the Captain. He scowled. “What are you bothering me with such foolishness for, Stout? And what is this creature howling about? Take care of it yourself, man!” With that, he went back to his spyglass.

  “Come along,” Stout said to me. “We’ll look for it together.”

  I caught sight of Purvis watching us from across the deck. He’d been mixing up a batch of vinegar and salt water with which we sometimes cleaned out the holds. But he’d stopped his work to keep an eye on me. Without even looking in his direction, Stout called out, “Get on with it, Purvis!”