The Slave Dancer Read online

  “I’ve already looked everywhere,” I mumbled without hope.

  “I can’t hear you, lad,” said Stout.

  “I’ve looked everywhere!” I shouted.

  “Well … I think it’s in one of the holds,” he said. “Yes. That’s what I think. Someone has taken it and dropped it down to the niggers so’s they can play their own tunes.” As he spoke, his thick fingers circled my throat. He pushed me to the forehold.

  “You go down there and fetch it up,” he said softly. “You’re sure to find it there. Purvis likes such tricks, you know. It would be just like Purvis, wouldn’t it? To have dropped it down there? Say you agree with me!”

  He gave me a mighty shove and I fell to the deck.

  “Hurry, Jessie! It’s no good, your resting like that!”

  I clung to the hatch coaming. Stout bent down and loosened my fingers. “Just drop down,” he whispered. “They won’t hurt you, lad.” He swung me to my feet and pushed me so far I could not but look down. A patch of daylight washed across the twisted limbs of the slaves. I saw nothing that was not flesh.

  “Hurry, now!” said Stout. Suddenly, Purvis was at his side.

  “I’ll look for it,” he said.

  “No. No you won’t. He must take care of his responsibilities, Purvis. And what do you mean, neglecting your own, and listening in on what doesn’t concern you?”

  The hope that Purvis would save me had made me go slack. Then Stout lifted me up in the air the way a heron grips a fish, and suspended me over the hold.

  “Oh, Lord! Don’t drop me!” I screamed.

  “You’ll climb down as I want you to,” he said. “And you’ll look here and there until you find your pipe. After that, we can get on with things.” As he spoke, he slowly brought me back to the deck. I caught sight of a black face turned up toward the light. The man blinked his eyes, but there was no surprise written on his face. He had only looked up to see what was to befall him next. I went down the rope knowing my boots would strike living bodies. There was not an inch of space for them to move to.

  I sank down among them as though I had been dropped into the sea. I heard groans, the shifting of shackles, the damp sliding whisper of sweating arms and legs as the slaves tried desperately to curl themselves even tighter. I did not know my eyes were shut until fingers brushed my cheeks. I saw a man’s face not a foot from my own. I saw every line, every ridge, a small scar next to one eyebrow, the inflamed lids of his eyes. He was trying to force his knees closer to his chin, to gather himself up like a ball on top of the cask upon which he lived. I saw how ash-colored his knees were, how his swollen calves narrowed nearly to bone down where the shackles had cut his ankles, how the metal had cut red trails into his flesh.

  All around me, bodies shifted in exhausted movement. I was a stone cast into a stream, making circles that widened all the way to the limits of the space that contained nearly forty people.

  Suddenly I felt myself dropping, and I heard the wooden thunk of the two casks which I had, somehow, been straddling. Now I was wedged between them, my chin pressed against my chest. I could barely draw breath, and what breath I drew was horrible, like a solid substance, like suet; that did not free my lungs but drowned them in the taste of rancid rot. I tried to bend back my head, and I caught a blurred glimpse of Stouts face in the white sunlight above. With what I was sure was the last effort of my life, I heaved up the upper part of my body, but my legs had no leverage. I sank down. I began to choke.

  Then arms took hold of me, lifting and pushing until I was sitting on a cask. I couldn’t tell who’d helped me. There were too many entangled bodies, too many faces upon which not even an acknowledgment of my presence was written. I peered into the dark.

  “You’ll find it, boy!” Stout’s voice floated down.

  I sat without moving. To search the hold meant that I would have to walk upon the blacks. My eyes were growing accustomed to the shadowed corners not reached by the light from above. But my brain slept, my will died. I could do nothing. I felt a soft surge of nausea. I clapped my hand over my mouth as I tried to keep in whatever it was that so violently wanted to come out. Then, through my wet eyes, I made out a figure rising from the throng. It sank, then rose again. In its hand, it held aloft my fife. In the steaming murk, I recognized the boy. He pointed the fife at me. Another hand took hold of it, then another, until a third passed it to the man on the cask who managed to free one hand, take the fife and drop it on me. Someone groaned; someone sighed. I looked up to Stout.

  “I was sure you’d find it, Jessie,” he said.

  I stood on the cask and flung out the fife. Stout reached down and took hold of my shoulders and dragged me up until I lay upon the deck.

  “Now that you’ve found your instrument, we’ll get on with the dancing,” he said. “They must have their exercise.”

  I danced the slaves, aware that the shrill broken notes which issued from my pipe were no more music than were the movements of the slaves dancing.

  Later, too weak and miserable to climb into my hammock, I sat on Purvis’ sea chest, my head cradled in my arms. I heard the men moving around me but I did not look up. When someone touched me, I cried out.

  “It’s me, Jessie, it’s me!” said Purvis.

  I raised my head.

  “Look here,” he said.

  Every finger of his hands was stretched. String was looped around each finger and it formed a design in the space between his hands. I think, for a second, I did not know where I was, remembering Betty holding out a cat’s cradle to me in the candlelight. It was me who had taught her to take the strings from my hands, so forming a new cradle. Together, we’d invented a few, then I’d grown too old for such games. She would sit sadly by herself, the string ready to be transformed, waiting, until my mother, setting aside her work with a sigh, would go and turn the cradle inside out and Betty would smile.

  “Take your thumbs and the first finger of each hand, see, and pinch these strings,” Purvis said, wriggling his thumbs, “and pull them up and over. You’ll see something startling!”

  I stared up at him dumbly.

  “Jessie! Do as I say!”

  I took the string on my fingers. He rubbed his hands together and grinned, then delicately took hold of the string and brought it back to his own fingers.

  “I see you know how,” he said. “Again.”

  So we played cat’s cradle until I lost one end off my little finger and the cradle snarled.

  “I’ve brought you tea,” he said. “Although it’s cold as rain, drink it anyhow. It’ll be sweet to your throat.”

  I drank it down.

  “Listen, Jessie. We’ve hit the northeast trades now. It won’t be long … three weeks, maybe. I wouldn’t lie to you, would I? Only three weeks.”

  “I’m afraid of him,” I said. I found no comfort in Purvis’ news. The worst was always about to happen on The Moonlight. What would it matter if it was only three days? Misery hasn’t got to do with clocks.

  “I won’t let him beat you,” Purvis said fiercely.

  “It’s the other things he can do,” I muttered.

  “Sharkey’s warned him,” Purvis whispered. I thought it a measure of Stouts power to dismay that though he wasn’t around, the very idea of him subdued Purvis, made him whisper, made him glance over his shoulder uneasily. “Sharkey’s told him what we’ll do to him when we get ashore. He’s told him we’ll track him down to wherever he goes if he harms you.”

  I felt a deep thrust of fear, although I couldn’t tell if it was for Sharkey or myself.

  “I saw you flinch,” Purvis said. “You mustn’t let him see that! He sups on the fear he rouses up. Don’t give him that! Go about your tasks. I’ll see to it myself you get home. My word on that. You’ll have land beneath your feet, Jessie, and no one to stop you from what you want to do. You go up on deck now and get the fresh air and make yourself strong again.”

  He swayed a little with the movement of the ship. I saw how thin
he had grown, how his trousers hung shapelessly on him like that blanket Ned Grime used to keep about his shoulders. He scowled with concentration as he wrapped the bit of string around his fingers, then slid it off so it was like a little spool.

  “You’re a tidy man,” I said suddenly.

  “I am that,” he replied.

  I often recalled how Purvis had wrapped that string around his finger. It calmed my spirit and made me smile. It was comic, I told myself, to be so careful with a few inches of string on a voyage like this one.

  Claudius Sharkey did not truly recover from his cramps. He bore the pained expectant expression of a man preoccupied with a sickness which he suspects will finish him off. It meant more work for the rest of the crew. Sharkey faltered on the rigging, cursing himself as he went aloft so slowly that he drew Stout’s harsh attentions. But Sharkey bore jeers and threats with eerie patience.

  “Is it always like this?” I asked Purvis.

  “Worse,” he said. “I sailed on a ship with 500 slaves in the hold and 30 crew. At the end, there was 183 slaves alive and 11 crew. The boatswain killed the cook with his own carving knife a foot from a water cask. The rest died of disease. The Captain took his Bible and left that ship—and the sea. I’ve heard tales that he’s a walking preacher now, goes to towns and villages and gets up on a box and tells people the world is going to end any day, and if there ain’t no people, he tells the trees and the stones.”

  We ran steadily through the days. I remembered as if it was another life the first weeks I had spent on The Moonlight, how sunlight and waves and wind had held me fast during my waking hours in a kind of spell, how I had felt that I, too, was dashing forward, feeling the strength of my own body as though I’d never known before what it meant to rise in the morning like an arrow shot from a bow. But not now. There was only labor and thirst. Sometimes I leaned against Ned’s bench and wondered why that old man had let his life run out into the sea, when he might as well have done his work on land and had a little house for his trouble, with a church nearby where he could’ve gone and comforted himself. There must have been something mad in him. It seemed to me that men who went to sea were all mad, pitting themselves against such hazards to win out against dying when death would take them anyhow.

  From that bench one afternoon, I caught sight of a strange stirring in an otherwise calm sea. Running to the rail, I saw, turning slowly on their backs, hundreds of great white maggots with crescent mouths upon which were stitched horrible teeth. “Sharks,” said Cooley. “Snap us up like flies.”

  And the next morning, I came on deck to find the ship, its sails furled, at rest on a gently rolling sea. Off the starboard side, gleaming in the sunlight as though each grain of sand on its shore held its own tiny sun, was a small island. Above, seagulls circled our naked masts ceaselessly uttering their begging cries. I looked at the empty shingle, counted six stunted palm trees and measured my height against a low bluff rimmed with sea grass.

  “You’d like to get off there, wouldn’t you, Jessie?” asked Purvis. “You wouldn’t be happy for long. There’s nothing to eat or drink. It’s just a bit of land only fit for birds and crabs.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Whatever name you want to give it … there’s bits of land like that all over this World. They don’t belong to no one. I don’t care for the look of them myself. It’s not right they should be so empty.”

  For the first time in many weeks, I wondered if I might truly reach home. Then, as I strained to get a closer look at the island, a thing flew up out of the water, a fish with all the colors of the rainbow playing among its scales. I gasped and pointed as another sprang from the sea, then another …

  “Flying fish,” said Purvis. “There’s peculiar creatures in these waters.”

  “My mother has a sewing box,” I said, “and just such a fish is carved on it, but I thought it was an imaginary thing.”

  “I’ve heard the Indians eat them,” said Purvis. “I wouldn’t want to eat anything that hadn’t made up its mind whether it belonged in water or air.”

  “I don’t wish to disturb your rest,” a familiar voice broke in. “But there’s work to be done.”

  Ben Stout was standing behind us holding an iron file. Purvis looked at him as though he were a piece of decking. Then he said to me with an air of great confidence, “We’ll be in Cuban waters in a day or so, and not long after that, we’ll be on land again where men is the same height.” And he shot a ferocious glance at Stout who took notice of it with a wistful smile.

  “That’s a worthy thought,” Stout said, “and I’ll think hard on it. Meanwhile, take this file.” He held it out to Purvis who snatched the tool from his hand and left.

  “You won’t be dancing the slaves in a regular way no more, Jessie,” Stout said to me. “But that don’t mean you can take your ease.”

  I wanted to cry, Get on with it! but didn’t dare. I ground my teeth instead.

  “The buckets!” he shouted suddenly. I jumped. “The buckets!” he repeated. “I thought your heart bled for the niggers! See how you neglect them, lad!” He grabbed my arm before I could get away. “I haven’t told you which hold, have I?” he asked gently. “You do have a bad temper, don’t you, Jessie?”

  I wondered if he would break my arm. All at once, he let go. “Go help Cooley in the forehold,” he said without even looking at me.

  When I reached the hold, I found two buckets waiting for me. I emptied them over the side, and went back to get more. Cooley was just hoisting a third bucket onto the deck. It was filled with dead rats. I guessed the slaves had killed them by breaking the beasts’ necks with their shackles. I emptied the rats over too.

  Later, when I had a moment to myself, I went back and stared at the island again. The shadows from the sea grass had lengthened and the sand had lost its morning glitter. The tiny bit of land looked cold and lonely. I went to where Purvis was kneeling in front of a black man. He was working away at the shackles with the file Stout had given him. There was blood on it. Behind the man stood a dozen or so others waiting their turns.

  By midafternoon all the slaves were free of their shackles. They were on deck, most of them staring at the island which the ship’s bowsprit wavered toward like a compass needle. I watched Isaac Porter scouring the shackles. Sharkey, who was standing next to me, shook his head.

  “Cawthorne’s a fool to hang on to those things,” he said. “He knows better—he knows a slaver ain’t just a ship carrying slaves. If we’re caught with some of what we’ve got on this ship, we might just as well be caught with the slaves themselves. I know of masters who’ve burned their ships once they’ve unshipped their cargo—just to make sure there was no trace left of what they’d been doing. But Cawthorne’s so greedy—he’s like a man choking on one chicken bone while he’s grabbing for another.”

  I looked at the black people standing silently on the deck. “Thirty must have died,” I said. “Maybe more.”

  “It’s a great day for them,” Sharkey said, “now we’ve taken off their restraints.”

  “They could kill us …”

  “Oh, no! It’s too late for that. They’d not have been turned loose if there was any such danger.”

  “I wonder where they think they are,” I muttered.

  “They don’t think much,” responded Sharkey. “You can be sure they’re glad to be alive! Ain’t we all glad?” he asked, and clapped me on the back.

  The hatches were left open. The slaves moved about the deck as freely as their physical distress permitted. I thought it strange that they touched nothing. The very youngest had such swollen bellies that if you’d not seen their hollow eyes, their legs as thin and wrinkled as the limbs of old people, you might have thought them overfed. They showed no surprise at this new turn of events. They were beyond surprise. When they spoke, they kept their heads close together and their lips barely moved. At night, they went below to sleep. During the day we cleaned out the holds as thoroughly as we
could while Stout bellowed down at us from the deck pretending we were not working as hard as we should.

  “It’s an utter waste of time,” Purvis complained. “You can’t ever get the stench out.”

  Three days after leaving the island, the Spanish flag flew from The Moonlight, giving us, declared Purvis, the right to anchor in Cuban waters off a serene stretch of coast that showed no sign of human habitation. “We’re a Spanish ship now,” he said, “and no American warship will take the chance of searching us and risk getting into trouble with the Spanish government.”

  “But if we’re seen by a British warship?”

  “Then we’ll run up the American flag.” His tone made it sound so easy, but his expression was grim.

  “We’re in danger from now on, aren’t we?” I asked.

  Purvis hesitated a moment, then said, “We’ve never been out of it. But it’s worse when we unship the cargo.”

  We began to wait—as we had off the coast of Africa. There were lookouts posted day and night. On the second evening, I saw a light flicker from the beach. At the Captains command, Sam Wick signaled back with a lantern and, like an idling star, the light flickered once again.

  At midnight, a boat drew alongside us. The night was warm and damp, and I’d come up to sleep on deck hoping that Cawthorne and Stout were sufficiently preoccupied with the approaching sale of the slaves not to bother about me and where I chose to berth. By lantern light, I observed the Captain standing by the rail grinning hugely into the dark as though to persuade it to smile back at him. A minute later, a tall black-haired individual sprang upon the deck accompanied by a black man who kept his head bowed as though it had grown that way. The tall individual was wearing a shirt so frilled and lacy that his chin appeared to be drowning in sea foam. The Captain bowed to him as if he were a lord. He did not return the bow, only looked about him with disgust. The two of them went to the Captain’s quarters in front of which the black man stood like a sentinel.