The Call of Zulina (6 page)

Dark-skinned men gripping clutches of birds pushed past Grace. Women set aside their head loads of firewood and baskets of cola nuts and shook the grit from the lengths of cloth that covered their bodies. Grace stepped off the road and pulled uncomfortably at her tightly buttoned bodice. No more a quiet morning, market day around the baobab tree had grown into a harmony of chatter and squawks and the clap of eager feet on the hard ground.

Clusters of two or three people moved together into ever larger groups in front of wagons fully loaded for the market that lined the side of the road. Grace looked at each wagon for some identifying mark, but they all seemed much the same with their loads of groundnuts and cassavas and sweet potatoes. It was impossible to tell whether one of them belonged to her father. So she turned her attention to the men. Hurrying from one group to the next, she searched each young man's face for a glimpse of Yao's sharp nose and the distinctive tuft of tight black hair on his chin.

“Oh, Yao, please be here!
Please
!” Grace pleaded under her breath.

For the first time that day, a knot of fear tightened in her stomach. It never occurred to her that she might miss Yao. Connecting with him was her whole plan. It wasn’t as if she could march into town and look up a … a friend.

On the far side of the baobab tree, the main road made a sharp right turn and then led on down to town. Surely, that was the route Yao would take to the market. Perhaps he decided that this day he wouldn’t stop at the tree. Or maybe he was delayed, and to save time, he went straight to town. Or it could be that he was early and had already come and gone. Grace might have missed him. Of course, in this crowd …

As she frantically searched every face, Grace struggled to fight back tears. So many people! More than a few with sharp noses, and even some with hair on their chins. But none with half an ear on the right side. None of them was Yao.

When Grace had whispered her plan to Mama Muco, Mama asked, “You told Yao you would be there, Child?” And because it all seemed so right, Grace immediately responded, “Yes! Oh, yes!” But the truth was she never actually talked to him at all.

What difference did it make now? Grace refused to allow herself to consider the possibility that Yao had found a way out without her. If he was not at the baobab tree, she would follow the road to town and find him at the market. One thought did stop her cold, however. The wide road that led to the market also led to Jasper Hathaway. And if it led to him, it would undoubtedly lead her—firmly gripped in his fat arm
—
right back up the road and back through the gate in the stone wall. Back to Joseph Winslow. Back to Lingongo.

Still, what choice did she have? Grace looked up at the other road—the narrow, rock-strewn trail that wound slightly uphill. That road led to Zulina. She could see its sprawling edge from the front upstairs window of the London house.

All of her life, Grace had lived in the shadow of the ancient, sprawling fortress. And all of her life Zulina had been shrouded in ominous wonder. “It's so big,” she once said to her father. “Can I go up there sometime?”

“Ye go up an’ ye won’t never come down again,” Joseph Winslow had threatened darkly. Then he added: “An’ no one’ll be goin’ up to fetch ye back, neither!”

Whenever she asked Mama Muco about Zulina, Mama shut her up quickly. “It's a bad, bad place,” Mama said. “A girl like you's got no business looking at it or talking about it. I won’t listen to any more about that wicked place.”

The wind chose the moment of Grace's quandary to rouse itself and blast up to the fortress. It grabbed up haunting cries and dreadful moans, whipped them into a furious howl, and roared them back down in a whirlwind. Under the baobab tree, business stopped and everyone fell silent. Although most people kept their eyes averted, a few, in spite of themselves, glanced up at Zulina. A chill crept down Grace's back and sent a violent shiver through her.

“Well now, look at ye! Could ye be the admiral's gal?” a young sailor called out from his loitering spot in the shade of a lashed-bamboo goat pen across the road.

Startled out of her trance, Grace looked to see who could be talking to her. A greasy-haired sailor with a foolish grin, dressed in the rough pantaloons and blouse of a common English seaman, swaggered over. He couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than she. Right behind him was his mate, a tall, skinny lad with a gaunt face badly in need of a shave and eyes that looked Grace over in a manner more befitting a barmaid.

“I said, could ye be Admiral Winslow's gal?” the greasy-haired sailor persisted.

“Yes,” Grace mumbled, stepping away from the two.

“Me's Tom and this ’ere's Reggie,” the sailor continued. “We sailed with yer father once on a time. On ’is ship, we was. ’E talked about ye and yer African mother.”

Tom grinned, as though he expected Grace to welcome them as old friends. She said nothing.

“What's ’a matter with ye?” snapped Reggie. He was distinctly unpleasant, and the vicious scar across his left cheek did nothing to encourage Grace's confidence. “Too good fer the likes of us, is ye?”

Grace opened her mouth, but since she could think of nothing to say, she shut it again.

Reggie looked her up and down. “Jist look at ye,” he spat with disdain. “’Eathen Negro, dressed fancy and pretendin’ to be white!”

Tom pushed Reggie aside and bowed low to Grace. “Come, now, cain’t ye let two gentl’men escort ye to town?”

“Good day,” Grace mumbled, unable to disguise her uneasiness. Her eyes darted anxiously down the road to town and then back up the way she had just come.

“Come, m’lady … ,” Tom began.

“M’lady!” Reggie sneered. He spat on the ground. “She ain’t no lady! And she shore ain’t too good fer me. I’ll ’ave ’er if I wants ’er, I will! And I won’t be askin’ ’er fer permission, neither!”

Reggie reached out and grabbed hold of Grace. But Grace darted sideways and tore loose from his grasp. All Reggie had to show for his effort was a handful of ripped blue pocket spangled with silvery filigreed ferns.

But Grace was not free yet. To her dismay, Tom had positioned himself in the middle of the road between her and town. Her only choice was to turn around and sprint back up the very path down which she had just come.

No!
she determined.
I will not go back home! I will not go back to being a slave!

With no time to think, Grace made a dash for the narrow road that wound up the hill—the road to Zulina.

A
s the stubborn sun blazed overhead, searing the African plains and sizzling the water in the harbor, a battered ship with the name
Dem Tulp
painted across her hull in peeling blue letters limped in from the wind-whipped sea and dropped anchor at the foot of Zulina fortress. Seven crewmen were still alive, three of them well enough to make their way without assistance into the longboat that rushed to their rescue. One of these was the captain, Pieter DeGroot.

Just three weeks and three days earlier, DeGroot, a lanky giant of a Dutchman, had sailed from Zulina with a crew of twenty-seven men and a cargo of 258 Africans bound for the slave markets of the New World. The plan was to stop first at the island of Antigua, then, if the price for slaves wasn’t to the captain's liking, he would sail on to Charleston, South Carolina, in the Americas where riches were assured. Before DeGroot could get the order out of his mouth to raise the ship's anchor, an old priest wearily puffed his way onto the deck to bless the journey. Pieter would have greatly preferred that someone other than a papist perform the ritual, but it was the custom at this particular slave house to allow the old priest to do the honors, a leftover legacy of Zulina's Portuguese past. Being a peaceable man not prone to push his own way, Pieter DeGroot swallowed his objection and made no argument.

“May God's hand be on this vessel and on all who sail aboard her,” the priest had intoned. “May the winds be calm, and may God protect these seamen from attacks by the treacherous heathen on board. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

It was the same blessing the priest had no doubt said hundreds of times before
—
perhaps even thousands. When the priest made the sign of the cross, Pieter winced. He couldn’t help himself.

While the old man wove his way back to dry ground, the harmattan winds rose up out of nowhere, whipping priestly robes around knobby priestly knees and swirling gritty sand across the ship's deck.

“Sign o’ the devil, it be!” toothless seaman Jack Barnes had hissed.

“You mean, a breath of relief from the searing heat,” Captain DeGroot snapped. “You should all give thanks to the good Lord for that wind.”

If there was one thing Pieter detested more than the business at hand, it was the foolish superstitions of the sea. Still, truth be told, an uneasy foreboding gnawed deep within him too. Already he wished he had not given in to the promise of slave riches and had chosen to fill the hold of his ship with bales of cotton, with fine silk from China, or with beeswax or Indian spices or rare African wood—with anything in the world except the men, women, and little children who lay crammed below decks moaning in terror and misery. It was Captain DeGroot's first voyage on a slave ship, and the wails and shrieks of human agony ripped through him, piercing his soul.

“Them cries won’t bother ye a-tall once ye gits yer money fer the Africans at the slave market!” Joseph Winslow had called out jovially. With a laugh and a wink and a friendly thump on the back, Winslow had bid the new captain farewell. “Cain’t never make yersef sech good money wi’ trade goods,” he added. “Ye’ll be back. I guar’ntee it
—
ye’ll be back!”

Well, Captain DeGroot was back at Zulina, all right, but not for more slaves to trade. Things had not gone at all as he had intended. First came the attack of jungle fever. Before he was even out of African waters, half his crew was sick with raging fevers and shaking fits. As if that weren’t enough, the captives clamped their jaws shut and refused to eat. Within days, the first ones began to die. In desperation, Pieter herded all the Africans up on deck in the belief that airing them out in the sunshine would increase their appetites. How could he have known that they would promptly heave themselves over the railing? That they would rather drown in the sea than take their chances aboard his ship? His crew panicked. In an effort to force the captives to stop killing themselves, the crewmen turned their guns on them. That's when the Africans fought back. Well, why shouldn’t they? They had absolutely nothing to lose.

“What a tragedy,” Pieter murmured numbly as he stumbled over the uneven ramp planks, blinded by swirling sand. “What a waste. What a terrible, terrible waste.” Again and again he repeated this lament, and every time he said it, he shook his head in shocked disbelief.

When he returned to Zulina fortress, Pieter DeGroot didn’t talk to Joseph Winslow because the owner of the slave fortress was nowhere to be seen. But
Dem Tulp
, Pieter's wreck of a ship, certainly attracted plenty of attention from the assortment of crew members of the other ships anchored in the harbor. They seemed to have little to do but hang around the docks, and every one of them was eager to toss a bit of advice Pieter's way.

“Too soft, ye was,” one old captain stated bluntly. “Pack ’em Africans in tight and chain ’em hard to each other. And don’t never let ’em up on deck. ’Tis the onliest way to do it. If they refuses to eat, force their mouths open with a stick and poke the gruel down their throats. Ain’t a choice they gits to make. They's yer property, and they does what ye tells ’em to do!”

The others nodded in unanimous agreement.

“Wrong crew,
señor
, that was
su problema
.” It was Capitán Alfonso DeSalvo who offered this bit of advice. He was captain of a Spanish ship preparing to set sail for Barbados. “You must make
los Africanos duros—
make them tough.
Sí
, some maybe become troublemakers. But
es importante
that you make them
duros
. That way they no curl up and die. They be no good to you
muertos, señor
. You get paid no
dinero
for dead men.”

The African sun blistered Pieter's fair skin, and the dry wind cracked his lips until they bled. Endless clouds of voracious mosquitoes poked through his clothes and punctured his arms and legs until they were raw. And the tortured moans and wails of captives locked in Zulina's cells never let up their cries of misery. Those cries framed the background of every one of Captain DeGroot's days and nights at Zulina. As one day passed, and then another and another, and as the days stretched into weeks, he could bear it no more. He absolutely could not bear it one more day.