The Call of Zulina (7 page)

“Does anyone have a ship leaving Africa?” Pieter begged one captain after another. “I’ll fill any crew position. I’ll go anywhere and I’ll do anything. Just get me far away from this cursed land.”

But one after another, the captains shook their heads.

“Ships ain’t filled with slaves yet,” each one said. “Ain’t enough good Africans fer us to make a profit at the slave markets.”

Still, Pieter DeGroot continued to plead.

“Times is hard,” he was told. “Traders is havin’ to go farther inland to find good cargo. Ye’ll jist have to be patient like the rest of us.”

By the time Pieter finally made contact with Joseph Winslow, his patience was in tatters. “What about all the people you have chained up inside the fortress?” he demanded. “Why can’t you fill up a ship with them? Then at least one ship could be on its way.”

Winslow shook his head. “No, no. Most o’ ’em slaves ain’t fer sellin’,” he insisted. “Them's me breeders.”

Pieter stared at him. “Your breeders?”

“Me most valu’ble ’uns—me very best. Big an’ strong an’ ’ealthy, they is. I keeps ’em fer me own use. Ye knows.” Joseph grinned and winked.

Pieter stared uncomprehendingly.

“Ye ain’t been a slaver long, ’as ye?” Joseph said. It was a statement, not a question.

Pieter shook his head.

Joseph sighed and continued. “Breeders. They's the ones wot lets us grow the most valu’ble slaves right ’ere at Zulina. They's our own and they's our best. It's ’ow we gits top price fer our special slaves.”

“And you never sell the … the breeders?” Pieter spit out the word as though it was bitter on his tongue.

“If’n I does, me lad, ye kin be sure ’tis fer a good ’igh price. And I don’t take nothin’ but gold fer ’em, neither!”

Joseph Winslow and Lingongo didn’t summon Captain Pieter DeGroot to their compound and allow him to settle himself onto their comfortably upholstered mahogany chairs in the London house. Nor did they invite him to pull himself up to their imported English dining table with the carved legs and ask him to share dinner with them. And they certainly did not introduce him to their most valuable asset—their eligible daughter, Grace. The disgraced captain of one single wrecked ship? A Dutchman who humiliated himself by begging for employment as a common sailor in exchange for passage home? Obviously, he was not a man of financial means and not one with any valuable contacts or social standing. As for his attitude about the slave trade, that, too, left a great deal to be desired. So there could be no possible reason for the owners of the powerful Zulina slave fortress to waste their time, energy, and quality food on the likes of Pieter DeGroot. Mercy, no!

So Pieter took his meals in the fortress galley with the assortment of other seamen of various ranks whose ships lay anchored at Zulina—and on occasion with Capitán Alfonso DeSalvo, even though Englishmen did their best to keep a respectable distance from Spanish captains. One time, although Joseph Winslow scolded him soundly afterward, Pieter even ate with the African trustees.

“Slaves, they be!” Winslow chided. “Good workers, I grant ye. Me right ’ands, they is. But still, they jist be slaves! At Zulina, we eats wi’ our own kind. Ye’d do well to keep that in mind.” Selected from among the captured African people, trustees were indeed slaves, albeit freed from their chains, awarded privileges, and allowed to live much better than their fellow captives. Sometimes, after they had proved themselves, they were allowed to carry muskets. All they had to do to earn such generous benefits was to work as traitors against their own people.

“If we don’t do it, others will do it to us,” a trustee named Adisa responded defensively to Pieter's pointed question about his complicity with the white traders.

“We still be in Africa,” another, called Badu, pointed out. “And as you can see, we still be living.”

Pieter had to admit that he did have a point.

The very next day after Pieter's discussion with the trustees, the day after he shared a loaf of bread and a pot of porridge with them, two newly arrived captives—a young woman and her mother—attempted to run away from Zulina. It was foolishly hopeless to be sure; the women were chained together at the neck. Pieter's dinner partners saw them go, and both hollered for the two women to stop. But when the trustees yelled out to them, the women's eyes glazed over and their mouths fell open. Desperation consumed them, and with a jerky urgency they sprinted in a frantic bid for freedom. Adisa raised his musket, aimed, and fired. The older woman crumpled. But the younger one kept running, dragging her mother along behind her, still chained to her neck. Then Badu took aim and fired. That time the daughter fell.

Pieter DeGroot did not eat dinner that evening. He went straight to the small cell-like room that Joseph Winslow allowed him to use as he awaited passage home. He climbed onto his bunk, pulled his knees up to his chest, and wrapped the rough blanket tightly around his shaking body.

Why would a man raise a gun and shoot someone so like himself? What would make someone take the life of a person who had done absolutely nothing to hurt him? To kill another whose plight he could not help but feel from his very own experience? Someone whose desperation he had to know and understand full well? What would make a man do such a thing?

Fear, Pieter reasoned. A man might kill out of fear. Especially fear for his survival.

Power. Oh, yes, there was no limit to what human beings would do in their quest for power.

And revenge. Certainly, revenge could drive a human being to kill another in cold blood. How well Pieter knew that.

Fear, power, and revenge. Pieter could think of nothing else that would drive a sane person to raise a gun and shoot another like himself. Trouble was, every one of those three existed within the stone walls of Zulina, all in desperate abundance–desperate, hopeless abundance.

Yes, that was it! Desperation. Hopeless desperation. That, above all else, could drive a person to unimaginable actions.

Pieter looked around at the stone walls of Zulina.

But what of those stone walls? What of a slave fortress, with locked cells and manacles and chains? What would drive civilized, God-fearing people to risk their lives to sail around the world, to pronounce a whole civilization less than human, to wrap them in chains and beat them, to turn them against their own people, and then to utterly destroy them and wipe out their way of life? What could so steal the hearts and souls from people who were otherwise good and loving and decent and just?

The dream of riches.

Pieter grew up in comfortable circumstances in the Dutch countryside, the youngest child and third son of a prosperous landowner. Although he had wanted for nothing physically, he had always known his was not an enviable birth position. From his earliest days, his father made it clear to him that he would inherit none of the family's land. Neither would Pieter's middle brother or either of his two sisters. Everything would go to his oldest brother, the strutting bully Andreas.

“It's not that Andreas is the best of all my children, nor is he the most loved,” his father had explained matter-of-factly in answer to Pieter's protests. “It's just the way things must be. Otherwise, our ancestral land would be broken up into ever smaller and smaller parcels. Within a couple of generations, no one would have enough to support a family anymore. The land must be kept together. In order to do that, it must pass intact to only one child—and by law that is the firstborn son. It is the way the land came to me, and it is how it will go to Andreas. There is no other way.”

The second son, Pieter's brother Jacob, chose a life of service to God and became a preacher. At his father's urging, Pieter went to sea.

Spices and fine silk, cotton and rare woods—such was the cargo Pieter had collected from around the world on his previous voyages. But at every port he heard sailors brag about the fabulous riches to be made in the booming slave trade. And all that talk got him to thinking:
Just two or three profitable voyages, and I could buy a nice piece of land of my own. A green veldt on the Dutch countryside all for myself. I could marry me a wife and raise a family. Then I would have something to leave to a son of my own, or to divide up between my sons, the way a good father should
.

Decent men had always done unspeakable things for material gain. And they were capable of astonishing explanations for their actions, all beautifully crafted in civilized Christian words. In time, they actually came to believe their justifications.

Despite the sweltering room and the woolen blanket, Pieter DeGroot shook uncontrollably as the wind roared outside.

J
oseph Winslow's two-story London house, painted stark white with bright red window shutters, looked as out of place on the parched African savanna as Grace Winslow looked picking her way along the dusty road in a blue English day dress, a bonnet on her head, and embroidered kidskin slippers on her feet.

“Me ’ouse ain’t African,” her father always pointed out to visitors, as though anyone would have reason to think otherwise. “’Tis a real and true English place, it is. Glass in the windas too!”

He may have to live in Africa, Joseph Winslow had decided long ago, but by God, he would live like a proper Englishman. He was especially proud of the opulent library and its assortment of leather-bound books, and of his study, where brocade drapes set off intricate wainscoted walls and deep-set bookshelves. No visitor managed to make it out of the house without admiring those decorative touches of European extravagance. It had cost Joseph far too much money to miss an opportunity to prompt envy among his neighbors.

Usually, however, it was from his study and not the library that Joseph had the leisure to pull the greatest praise from his guests. For, years earlier, Grace had claimed the library as her own. Most days that was where she could be found, sitting cross-legged in a corner, surrounded by the books her father had brought back from his travels—books for prestige and for her. Truth be known, Joseph could barely read a sentence, though he made a show of pretending otherwise. Not so Grace, who from the tender age of six had the benefit of a tutor.

Joseph Winslow's intention to build himself a fat and protected future by raising a well-bred English gentleman son was not to be. What he got was a half-breed daughter. But the day Lingongo held the baby up to the light, looked behind her tiny ears, and pronounced that her skin would be “English,” Joseph decided he might yet have a chance to grasp the the comfortable, respected life he craved. He would raise an English lass, one who would be snatched up by a well-bred and well-attached English gentleman.

On this day, however, the books remained neatly stacked on the library shelves. But then on this day many things were not as usual in the London house. No pot of vegetable stew bubbled over the kitchen fire. Nor did Mama Muco sing the songs of her people, the way she usually did while she halfheartedly waged her endless battle against the gritty dust that Joseph Winslow cursed whenever he discovered it in the carved crevices of his fancy furniture. Mama delayed the discovery that Grace was missing just as long as she possibly could. When Lingongo found her daughter's bedchamber empty, Mama made a point of looking in the library. Then she insisted that Grace was surely wandering through the garden practicing birdcalls, or maybe ducking through the fields distracting the slaves from their work. Of course, Grace was none of those places.

No, things were not as usual. Not at all. And the strangest thing of all was that after the original flurry of searches and blames and accusations, Lingongo and Joseph refused to speak of the matter.

Lingongo marched through the parlor and into the study where her husband sat surrounded by his maps and sea charts. He pulled a map up close to his weak eyes so that he could examine it more closely, and when his wife entered, he didn’t even bother to look up.

“Joseph!” Lingongo accused. “The shed remains empty! Where are the muskets and pistols you bragged about to Jasper Hathaway? I see only one barrel of gunpowder as well. Where are all the others you said we had?”

“Storage crates up in the fortress is full to overflowin’,” Joseph answered without taking his eyes off the map. “Got us powder an’ guns aplenty. We ain’t needin’ to cart more down ’ere.”

“How do you know what is in the storeroom up there?” Lingongo challenged. “Your favorite slaves are the only ones who know about the fortress these days. Now you spend your time at the docks throwing dice and playing cards—and losing
my
gold! Bring those guns and powder here to the compound where I can see them. I want to know you are not losing them to our enemies in your gambling games.”