The Call of Zulina (13 page)

One time, when Grace was a child and she saw her mother whipping a slave, Grace had asked, “Who are the slaves, and who are the masters?” Lingongo had answered, “The ones with the power are the masters, and the weak ones who can be beaten down are the slaves. That is why you must always have the whips and the guns on your side.”

Cabeto didn’t have a whip or a gun, but he did seem to have power on his side.

“Are you a slave?” Grace asked in a trembling voice.

“No,” Cabeto answered, struggling to keep his voice under control. “I am not a slave. But my kinsmen are.” When Grace didn’t respond, he continued, “In the middle of the night, slavers attacked my village. The young men who slept at the village gate only had time to call out an alarm before they were killed. My people are strong and brave, but they could not stand against the
slattee
's muskets. Your father—”

Grace jumped to her feet. “You accuse my father of kidnapping and killing people in your village?”

“No,” Cabeto said, “it was Africans who came. Africans from tribes we did not know.”

“Well, then—”

“But your father paid them for what they did. And you tell me this: if it was your father's beads and muskets and gunpowder that brought the attackers to us, then who really crushed my people?”

Grace opened her mouth to speak, but Cabeto didn’t give her a chance. He wasn’t finished.

“The
slattee
's men bound our feet and hands and locked us together in chains. When my brother, the firstborn of my father, tried to protect his babies, he was struck down with a knife. He died at his wife's feet. Tungo is angry, yes, but he is not alone. I am angry as well.”

“But you admitted my father wasn’t even there,” Grace protested. Tears welled up in her eyes again. “He isn’t a bad man. My father is a respected ship's captain.”

“What do you think he packs in his ship?” Cabeto countered. “Sweet potatoes and millet?”

“I … I don’t know,” Grace stammered. “I have never actually been to the harbor.”

Cabeto pointed an accusing finger. “You are not an innocent child,” he insisted. “You are a woman. You live where this prison stands between you and the setting sun. You can hear, can you not? You can see, can you not? You can smell, can you not? When the very ground cries out with the misery of my people, you cannot tell me you know nothing.”

“Many people are slaves,” Grace sobbed. “The ones who are weak—”

With a look determined and hard, yet profoundly weary, Cabeto stared straight into Grace's eyes. “All along the horrible march, I thought about ways I could escape. When we arrived here, our captors unlocked our chains and brought us before your father. They tore the clothes off our bodies so he could look us over carefully, from our feet to our teeth to our hair. Then he paid the ones who brought us in. Your father gave beads and muskets and cloth and gunpowder to those who captured us. That's what he said my people were worth. And then your father burned his mark into each one of us.”

Cabeto pulled off his shirt. He took Grace's hand, and though she tried to pull away, he forced her fingers up to his bare shoulder to the jagged scar. She jerked away as though she herself had felt the rage of her father's red hot branding iron. But there was no mistaking it. JWL. It was indeed the personal mark of the Winslow family—a mark seared into every one of the slaves who passed through their compound.

Grace sank to the floor and buried her head in her hands. What was there to say? Her head throbbed from the never-ending wails around her. It seemed that a multitude of captives together screamed out accusations against her family … accusations against her. She did not even look up when Cabeto left and pulled the door shut behind him. Not even when the iron bolt slid back into place.

After a painfully long time alone, the door once again scraped over the stone floor and roused Grace from her nightmarish blur of thoughts. Even though only the faintest shade of light now shone through the opening at the top of the wall, she could make out Tungo's angry face.

“We must prove to her father that we mean what we say,” he was saying, evidently to Cabeto, still outside the door. “Unless the slave trader believes we will do what we say, our words will mean nothing.”

Tungo pulled a knife from under his shirt and held it up before him. The dim beam of light hit its nicked blade.

“O
h, Lord, have mercy on my poor girl!” Mama Muco moaned. Her low, husky voice rose in anguished wails as she rocked back and forth and wrung her hands in distress. “Lord, Lord, have mercy!”

“Stop that noise!” Lingongo ordered. “I cannot think!”

Mama Muco slunk away to a far corner of the room where she slumped her sturdy body down onto the green and gold brocade settee. Never would she have dared to do such a thing in normal times, but these times were far from normal. Muco grabbed up a feather pillow and buried her face in it. She contined to beseech God on Grace's behalf, but her muffled prayers faded into a mournful background croon.

Lingongo paced back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Each time she whipped around, her agitation increased. Suddenly, she stopped and turned on her husband. Joseph trembled at his desk and stared in horror at the bunched-up pile of bloody fabric before him. He wouldn’t have recognized the blue fabric were it not for the silvery filigreed ferns. It was the self-same rich background that had first caught his eye in the London shop.

“You must be a gentleman of fine breeding,” the shopkeeper had told him. “Such a man cannot resist genuine woven silver.”

Joseph had immediately bought the fabric and instructed the dressmaker to make a stylish dress for his daughter's eighteenth birthday. Or was it her nineteenth birthday? Either way, it seemed an age ago.

“We will not give those savages anything!” Lingongo exclaimed. “Not one thing—except the firing end of a musket!”

“But, me dear,” Joseph ventured, his voice quivering, “Grace be our darlin’ daughter! And if ’em ’eathen devils gone an’ done this to ’er … !”

Joseph Winslow—
Admiral
Joseph Winslow—had gone positively green in the face. He cast a furtive glance at the terrible thing that lay partially exposed on his desk, and a whole new wave of horror rose up in him. It wasn’t possible that one of the trustees—one of
his
trustees—could be capable of such an atrocity! Yet here the evidence lay before him, right on his desk. How could he deny what his own eyes could clearly see?

Someone to whom Joseph Winslow had generously extended extra responsibilities and privileges—someone he had
trusted
—had betrayed him! As if it wasn’t enough to kidnap his daughter, that animal—that
rat
—had actually slashed off half of Grace's gentle finger and had wrapped it in a piece of cloth ripped from her dress! Then in the middle of the night, that someone had left the horrid package in his courtyard. Scaled right over his wall of protection and crept up to his very door, the rotten bugger had!

Joseph picked up the scrap of paper, and for the hundredth time he squinted at the illegible scratches the savages intended as a ransom note. He’d had to ask Mama Muco to decipher it for him:

Amatsewe family captured by Mandingo two day after last

no moon to be freed

They be named Sunba, Ayi, Okaile, Ayikaile, Ama.

5 box musket

10 barrel gunpowder

10 bar gold

today by sunset—east gate—take all guard away else daughter

die cut throat

Joseph took a deep breath and willed his hands to stop shaking. He absolutely must keep his wits about him. He must think clearly and act wisely and decisively.

“Grace is an idiot!” Lingongo fumed. “A disobedient simpleton! She brought this on herself by disobeying our orders and leaving the compound. She brought this on all of us!”

“I fault Athaway fer not bringin’ ’er back ’ome by force,” Joseph said. “’E ’ad the chance an’ ’e didn’t do it!”

Mama Muco threw her head back and once again cried out, “Oh, if I’d only known! Lord God, have mercy on our Grace!”

Lingongo wheeled around and thrust her finger into Mama Muco's face. “Out, slave!” she ordered. “Out of this room and out of my house!”

Muco gave a start, and her voice froze in midcry. She looked around, perplexed at finding herself in her master's office—and spread out across his sofa at that! She pulled herself up and hurried away. Once she was out the door, her agonized cries and prayers echoed back into the room, but already her mind was beginning to race.

Lingongo turned her outrage onto her husband. “My father would never allow such a contemptible insult to go unchallenged!” she declared. “He would not rest until he regained his family's honor. He would call his warriors together, and he would lead them right up to the traitors’ refuge. He would grab up the ones who had so offended him, and he would make every one of them pay for their crimes with their lives. Then my father would personally throw their worthless remains onto the garbage heap and leave them for the hyenas to tear apart and devour.”

Joseph pulled back from his wife, cringing in spite of himself.

“We’ll give ’em the five slaves they asks fer,” he offered. “We kin spare ’em. When the wars start, we’ll git us plenty more. Ye said so yersef. An’ we kin let go th’ muskets an’ powder they's demandin’.” Then his voice hardened as he added, “But we ain’t givin’ ’em no gold! No, sir, that's where I draws me line. No gold!”

“You are an even greater fool than I thought you were!” Lingongo fumed. “If it gets known that slaves can set themselves up as bosses over us, that they can make threats and we will bow to their demands, where will it stop? No! We are the ones who have the power. We will give them nothing!”

“But, me dear, they’ll kill Grace,” Joseph protested.

“We have paid too dearly for what we have to lose it all now,” Lingongo said. “Both of us.” Then she turned her back. There was no more to say.

Joseph hefted himself up from his chair. As the color rose to his face, the blotches on his cheeks and nose burned a fiery red. “Aye, too dearly,” he said. “But she's still yer daughter.”

Lingongo swung around to face her husband. “I am the firstborn princess of an ancient and noble people,” she stated, “the daughter of the great ruler who alone has the power to rest his feet on the
sika’gua
. Grace Winslow, with her English name and her washed-out skin and her rusty hair—Grace Winslow, with her fancy clothes from London and her books and her ideas to do whatever she wants and go where she does not belong—Grace Winslow is your daughter, Joseph, not mine.”

“She be me daughter, then. Me English lass,” Joseph answered. “An’ since she's set to marry Jasper ’Athaway, soon I will ’ave me a ’igh-class English son o’ me own too. One with ’oldin's and gold aplenty. Then I won’t never agin ’ave to …”

Joseph raised his hand and rubbed it across the fiery scar on his left cheek.

“Won’t have to what? Do you think Jasper Hathaway will just hand over gold for your games and your drink? He is too clever a man for that. Without my help, he will take your hand-raised English lass, and he will take your slave house too. Then he will throw you to the harmattan wind.”

For some time, Lingongo and Joseph stood face-to-face
—
both with jaws clenched, both with eyes aflame.

“We will not give ’em gold!” Joseph repeated.

“We will not give them one single thing!” said Lingongo.

H
ow Grace longed for the endless screams to stop! The noise made her head ache; it trapped her in a twilight of smothering heat and spinning blocks of stone. As consciousness slowly returned, she discovered to her astonishment that the screams came from her parched lips. Despite the agony of pain that enveloped her entire body, she tried to pull herself up, but she could not. Then she struggled to cradle her throbbing right arm, only to find that she couldn’t move it more than a few inches from its uncomfortable position, which was stretched awkwardly out to one side.