The Slave Dancer (5 page)

“Bite them back,” he replied. “And when it rains, you'll help set out the casks for fresh water. The worms and the beetles can make off with our stores—we can survive a storm with broken masts, but without water, we're a dead ship.”

He told me then that we must all share one bucket of water a day for our washing, and the longer the voyage took, the less drinking water we would be given. “The Mate doles it out once a day, not a drop more than the Captain allows.”

“And does the Captain get rationed too?”

Ben snorted. “The Captain of this ship would drink your blood before he'd go without. Haven't you noticed his chicken coops? The boxes of vegetables he's got growing there aft?” I shook my head. I had no wish to go near the Captain. My ear was still sore. Ben gestured at the hold.

“That's where the slaves will be stowed,” he said, “right on those casks, and in the aft hold when we've unloaded the rum.”

“But there's not room for a dozen men!” I exclaimed.

“Captain Cawthorne's a tight packer,” Ben said.

“I'm what!” roared a voice.

We turned from the hold to discover Cawthorne himself standing not two feet away.

“Sir,” said Stout smartly. “I was explaining his work to the boy.”

“Were you indeed? I thought you was describing
my
work to Bollweevil here. That's your name, ain't it, lad? Yes. I'm a tight packer, as neat as a pin, stack them up like flannel cakes, one top of the other. Ah—it's the British who've forced me to be so ingenious, Bollweevil, for we must have speed before all else, and speed means a ship without the comforts, stripped down, a ship like a winged serpent. You see—” he held out his arms, and I ducked, thinking he meant to mark my other ear, but he dropped them to his sides almost at once, shook his head, and muttering something about studding sails, stomped off aft.

I sighed mightily.

Ben Stout said, “You can't never tell about him …”

He was about to replace the hatch cover, when, perhaps because of some slight change of wind, I caught a powerful whiff of that ugly smell mixed with something else. I sniffed, thinking to myself what a comical human habit it was—how often I'd observed someone who, offended by an odor and proclaiming loudly how awful it was, continued to sniff away as though, in fact, he was smelling a rose.

“That's chloride of lime,” Ben said.

“What's that?”

“What we sprinkled in the hold after our last cargo of slaves was unloaded.”

“Why?”

Ben put his foot on the hatch. “To clear out the stench. But it never quite goes away.”

I felt a thrill of fear as if a bottle had crashed next to me, and the bits of glass were flying toward my face. I asked him nothing more.

Claudius Sharkey was at the helm and he let me look at the ship's compass. It seemed to me to be the finest looking thing aboard although I understood it no better than I did the time divisions marked by the ship's bell.

Curry had made a spice duff for our supper. I amused myself by amassing as many raisins as I could before Purvis snatched them up and thrust them in his big mouth, grinning at me and chewing at the same time. I wanted to stay and watch Curry knead the flour paste in his kneading trough, but Stout ordered me to get below and to my hammock.

I felt the ship's movement in my very bones as I lay there, rocking back and forth. I thought of the rigging, the yards, the ratlines up which I'd seen the seamen move as easily as though they'd been walking on level ground, and I hoped I'd never have to set foot on those precarious spider webs. The ratlines began to blur and extend into a wake of rope as sleepiness overcame me. Suddenly I heard a great shout. I peered over the edge of my hammock.

There was Purvis sitting on a sea chest, drinking from a mug.

“‘And I'll have none of that,' he says. ‘And I'll have some of that,' she says. ‘And we'll none of us have none of that,' we say,” he roared. Then he grew silent and peered up at my face. By the weak light of the oil lamp, I saw a benign smile stretch his big mouth.

“Did you hear something, Jessie, lad?” he asked gravely.

“Why, yes,” I replied. “I heard you shouting about some of this and some of that.”

“You're mad!” he cried, rising to his feet. “There wasn't nobody here but me, and I was only quietly drinking my little tot of warm wine.”

I fell back, breathing as softly as I could, praying he'd forget I was there.

It began again—“‘and we'll none of us have none of that,' we say …” Silence.

“Did you hear anything, lad?” asked Purvis in a wheedling voice.

“No, sir, nothing at all!” I replied hastily.

“Then you're deaf as a post!” he exclaimed, and clapped his hand against the bottom of my hammock with considerable force.

I lay motionless, my hands over my mouth to muffle my laughter. Once I let it out, I knew I'd not be able to stop, such had been my fear, such was now my relief.

The Shrouds

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other. I was on a ship engaged in an illegal venture, and Captain Cawthorne was no better than a pirate.

At first, these hard facts had been clouded over by the crew's protestations that the sheer number of ships devoted to the buying and selling of Africans was so great that it cancelled out American laws against the trade—“nothing but idle legal chatter,” Stout remarked, “to keep the damned Quakers from sermonizing the whole country to death!”

All the crew protested, that is, except Ned Grime the carpenter, who talked as if he lived a mile from the earth and had nothing to do with the idiot carryings on of the human race. But when I discovered that Ned, too, like all the rest of the men, held a share of the profit to be realized from the sale of the blacks, I paid little attention to his pretense of aloofness.

It was Sharkey who told me that not only the British cruisers made the slave trade hazardous. United States Revenue Cutters patroled our own shores after privateers, and the smugglers who landed small groups of blacks in Georgia and Florida. I learned then that there were American laws, too, against the importing of slaves. He spread his hands as wide as he could to show me the money the smugglers made after they'd taken the slaves inland and sold them at the slave markets in the larger southern cities.

Those first days, the weather was splendid and we sometimes made a speed of 14 knots. Captain Cawthorne rolled about the deck, hilarious and noisy, hitting members of the crew out of sheer high spirits. Once I saw him do a strange little dance on the poop deck, holding up the skirt of his jacket and kicking out his legs.

“Pray the weather holds,” Stout said to me. “The Captain's so stubborn he won't take in sail no matter how fierce the wind—not so long as he can see the bowsprit!”

My days were full. I was everybody's boy. But I had time to myself now and then, a moment when I was not fetching the Captain his tea and rum, or heaving waste over the side, or learning to mend a sail while Purvis howled at my clumsy fingers, or tracking the rats which, not content with the food stores, would gnaw ropes and sail if not caught. Then I would find myself a corner on the deck and stare at the sea, or the distant coast line of Florida which we followed until we passed through the straits which separated it from Cuba.

How strange it was to see another ship! A taut sail in the distance like an unknown word written across the vast expanse of sky; a ship carrying a crew like
The Moonlight'
s and perhaps someone like me.

There was no getting used to it for me—living the ordinary life of an eating and sleeping creature but on a thing that always moved, a wooden thing whose fate could be changed by a shift of wind, a sudden piling up of briny water, by currents and rain.

One morning I told Ned my thoughts.

“The earth itself moves,” he said in his chilly way.

“That may be,” I replied. “But I don't feel it.”

“Why should you!” the old man snapped. “God has no wish to share his secrets with Adam's descendants.” He loosened the vise around a piece of wood he was smoothing. He looked straight up at the heavens. “Once there was a garden where all was known,” he said in a odd dreamy way.

My sister, Betty, had once embroidered a piece of linen with a bright blue sea and a little brown boat like a pecan. But the sea was not only blue. Sometimes it was a color that was like the smell of salt wind. And at the end of the day, the sun could stain the water yellow as cane stalks, green as limes, pink and orange as shrimps.

I did not brood upon them much, my mother and Betty. They had sunk quietly to a place in the back of my mind. When I did picture them, they moved silently about, doing the things I had seen them do all my life, sewing and cleaning, washing and eating, going to market. It was only now and then I would feel a sharp thrust of pain and worry when I told myself that they must think me dead.

Once, during a rain squall, while the sea groaned about us, bearing upon its heaving back great forks of lightning, I wished most desperately to be off this ship, to be anywhere but on it. A kind of breathlessness shut my throat. I thought I was choking to death. It was Purvis who picked me up and shook me as I began to sob with terror. He hit me about the shoulders. If I didn't stop, he shouted, he'd have me up in the shrouds where I'd get more than air in my lungs.

That night, I lay in my hammock, a sorry thing soaked through to its bones. All the hatches had been closed against the rain. The smell of wet wool stuffed my nostrils, the pickled cabbage I had had for my midday meal seemed to have reformed itself in my stomach, and finally the thick mumble of complaint from Sharkey and Isaac Porter, who were always arguing, drove me up on deck.

The rain had abated. We were moving like an arrow, like a sky ship, among the points of light which were stars.

I knew it must be Purvis on the watch, for while I was idly counting stars, a great wad of vile brown stuff flew by my ear as he expelled his gob of chewing tobacco over the side. I ducked and heard a dark chuckle, its human familiarity overcoming the sound of the speaking ship, the creaking masts, the great thunk and slap of the sails, the breathing sea.

Perhaps the night and the sea leads a person to thoughts of his life. It did me. I thought about how the only grown people I had really known up to now were women—I wouldn't count the parson, who was a stick notched with pious sayings, or the doctor at Charity Hospital who treated my sister with tonics and ointments—and here there were no females save the Captain's hens. I had not known that among men there were such differences. That thought led me to wonder why I didn't like Benjamin Stout. I surprised myself. I hadn't known till that second that
liking
mattered—what had mattered before was how I was treated. And Stout treated me kindly, showing me things the rest of the crew wouldn't have troubled themselves with, getting me extra helpings of rice and beef while Curry had his back turned, steaming away his brains over his cook stove.

But it was Purvis whom I was eager to see when I awoke in the morning, Purvis, with his horrible coarse jokes, his bawling and cursing, Purvis, whom I trusted.

The Captain had settled on the name Bollweevil, and I winced when I heard him call it out. Some of the crew had taken it up but when they used it, I turned my back. The Captain was still cheerful; I listened to him sing out his commands while the wind held fair. I learned some of the words of his song but had great difficulty connecting them up with the lengths of canvas to which they applied. Purvis said a sailor must know every sheet and brail and halyard so that on the darkest night he wouldn't make an error which could cost the life of the ship and the crew. I especially liked the words, skysail and moonsail, and turned them over in my mouth as though I was licking honey. But the sailing of the ship was something so far beyond my powers of understanding that I didn't trouble my mind about it. Although I found most of the crew rough men who were often cruel, I could not help but admire the fearless way they swarmed up the ratlines and hung over the yards as sure of their perch as birds on a limb.

As for the Mate, Nicholas Spark, against whom Stout had warned me, I had little to do with him. He kept to the Captain's side like a shadow. He had a brooding look on his face, and when he spoke, his voice sizzled like a hot poker plunged into water.

We had been at sea now for nearly three weeks when one morning after the deck had been holystoned, the wind dropped entirely. No one appeared surprised except me. But then I knew nothing of the sky and how to read its signs.

For several days,
The Moonlight
made little progress, and that little because of a brief fierce blow that strained every sail. Certain changes had been taking place aboard which I had barely noticed, but the becalming of the ship brought my attention back to it. Gratings had replaced the solid hatches over the holds. A huge cauldron had appeared in Curry's galley, and one morning I found John Cooley working intently on an object which, though I'd never seen one before, made me shiver.

It was a whip with nine knotted cords. As I approached, he began to fasten the cords to a handle. I didn't want to look at it. But I couldn't keep my eyes from it. Cooley looked up. Our eyes met. He laughed.

I turned away and discovered Spark staring at me from the helm. Cooley laughed again. A sail flapped somewhere nearby. Spark's frozen glare never wavered. The sun seemed impaled by the mizzenmast. I felt hot and cold. Then Purvis slouched by, calling over his shoulder, “Jessie, I'll put a hitch in your arm if you don't get below and catch up with the rats! They're about to overtake us, boy.”

The moment passed. When I glanced back at Spark, he was saying something to the helmsman, and Cooley was getting to his feet. Just before I dropped down into the hold, I saw Cooley flick the whip and nod to himself.