“Where’s Ma?” I asked Patience. I got a cuff across the back of my head for it.
I saw Pa and August and Rafe coming, tied hands to neck just as were the African slaves. Surely, Ma would appear similarly bound. No one dared speak. So, if Ma had been there, mixed in, and tied, and afraid, she could not speak. I told myself she was there. Doing just that. Staying shushed. She would find me in a while.
It seemed as if we waited hours on the beach. I shivered, sometimes almost faint, my teeth chattering. I looked for Ma as much as I dared. At last they allowed us to sit, though the sand wet our skirts through to the skin. Fingers of pale washed-silk green sky moved through the smoke that rose over our plantation. Slivers of light gold reflected in the misty air. They had lit the cane fields and they had burned the house and kitchen and all the slave houses. If I had hid in the cribs in the kitchen loft I might have had no other fate than to roast there like a goose.
Men came from the smoke, blackened with soot and carrying crates and sacks filled with our household goods. I felt the small casket in my pocket and the jewelry sewn into my clothing. Ma always sat with sewing. I never looked at nor cared what she made in recent days, as I was always laboring over my own embroidery stand, wishing for my carefree days before I was expected to learn it. When had Ma done these things? Why had she created such a cloth for me, like nothing I had laid eyes upon? I had never before had such a garment. It was heavy and thick as if I had been clad in mud. I whispered to Patience, “My embroidery. What is to become of it?”
Patience’s face reddened and puckered with sorrow and she began to cry.
“I will make another,” I said, to comfort her.
“Are you blind?” she asked.
I studied her eyes for a moment then turned my face from her to our burning house. No, I was not blind. I only meant that we had lost all. Down to the smallest things. My things. And here I sat tied like a pig held for slaughter. I had been stolen; we had all been stolen, as if we were gilt furniture or a chest full of linen and purple-dyed cloth. I pulled myself into my clothes, shrinking from her chastisement. I received a shove from a foot behind me, pushing Patience and me as if we were indeed a pile of goods that must be kept aright.
I turned to see who had kicked me. I said, “We are being held by hideous, pitiless gargoyles that are not decent enough to speak the queen’s English.” The man felt nothing of my reproof, though, and kept on watching over our heads toward the ship in the bay.
CHAPTER 2
October 1, 1729
Tidewater receded and the galleon listed, her foredeck thrust upward in the morning light, masts angled against the sky. Indeed, someone on board may have been surprised by the great uplifting, for even I could have told the pilot not to moor her so close. I had seen ships careened before but this one looked in danger of tumbling over. The coral at that place is so near the top that at low tide August goes there with Pa and standing waist deep they fish with gigs for my favorite lovely white-meated fishes.
From the deck, men tossed ropes thick as stumps and climbed down the treacherous rigging, some getting into smaller boats, some just hanging there at the side of the ship. A few stood in the water on the shoal. Soon the sounds of scraping and banging filled the air as barnacles flew off the hull. One man made excited motions with his arms and pointed to the water nearby. Several of them shouted something like “Oh-ho!” just as one of the working men fell into the water. I saw his knife rise in the air. He struggled and fought near the fin of a shark. He had met his fate.
As the tide went out they worked on and on, and the day grew warm. I slept, leaning against Patey, and I dreamed of lying in a hammock full with comfits and warm bread. Eating sausages in cream.
As I began to taste the sweets I awoke. Patience had tears running down her face. She stared into the distance, so I followed her gaze to the ruins of our house. I marveled that there were girls seated nearby, no taller than I whom I had never seen before, but there were always whole groups of people we did not house living in the brush shacks and cane brakes, besides those we did. I supposed I should feel sad. Or afraid. All I felt was hunger gnawing at my insides. Ma might have brought something if she had had a chance, but then we were not here for a picnic. The African slaves next to us seemed almost nonchalant about being held as we were. These brutes saw all of us as nothing more than booty. The image of sausages came back to mind a few minutes later and made my mouth water. I could have eaten sausages, even without a proper dish.
In the bright sun, Patience’s skin was sure to freckle. Oh, la, I thought. She had hair of deep auburn, given to waves; she was always brushing and fixing it with combs. Mine was a mix of red hues with yellow, and quite curly, so that when it was clean and brushed into finger curls, it seemed at times like faded pink roses. Sometimes Pa called me his “old rose,” and said to me to never forget who I was. I did not know at the time what he meant by it. Then, I only thought my face was already feeling the sun. My lashes and brows were almost invisible, compared to Patey’s nice brown ones. Her skin was whiter than milk and when she blushed it seemed wine had infused the milky satin. My skin freckled despite the various bonnets and hats I wore. I rubbed my face with milk and honey each day. My eyes were pale, the color of a shallow pool, so that all my features seemed quite plain and faded in appearance.
The tide turned and the scraping of the hull finished. A man came to us and hoisted Patience to her feet, compelling me to follow, prodding others behind me. He pointed to the shallop, and when I paused at its edge, he lifted me up without so much as a by-your-leave, and dropped me into it. They made me sit in the reeking damp hull. Some other girl wearing rags far inferior to my gown, soiled though it was, sat upon me as if I were a cushion, perched upon my drawn-up knees. She looked down upon me and made a noise, wrinkling her nose. “Ach. Ye be ’ant so fine now, Mistress.”
I recognized the accent more than the face. One of the red-haired Irish slaves bought out of the gallows, as Pa would say. Uncle Rafe always added that it proved more merciful to work them to death than to pile their corpses in the lochs. If I could have moved, I would have found that needle under my skirt and poked her right in her so high-and-mighty rump. I jerked my knees and hoped the bones gave her a poor chair.
The tide began to rise. Four men rowed us nearer the ship. As we reached the reef’s edge, that hulk righted itself in the bay with a loud creak and a rush of wake that raised our smaller craft by two feet so that the rowers had to fight to keep from circling. I knew that once Pa came by, he would help us find Ma. Patience sat upon a seat at my back, and I said to her, “Can you see Ma from there?”
A man holding a curved blade longer than his own arm shouted something at me. I shrank away from his cutlass and deeper into the muck, and wept. My gown had been blue. It would never be blue again. It had a nice silken flounce with a wee farthingale made just for me. My slippers were almost gone, wet through, and my stockings had fallen down. I wondered if Ma would be upset. Surely she would not find me at fault for the ruination of this gown. Surely she would come soon.
When we reached the side of the galleon my mouth opened. I had never been so close to a ship this size. She looked to be a thousand tons. Maybe more. Rows of openings marked decks loaded with cannon. From far overhead, rope nets slid down her sides, looking for all the world like a gigantic version of Ma’s plaited silk hair coif.
They untied our bindings and held us at knifepoint. As if we were rats in a harbor, all the maids in my boat climbed the rigging laid on the sides. I could have gone faster, but a woman above me could barely get up and she seemed not to have balance for the swaying of it. Her bare feet were callused, but they were not used to climbing. I felt the little casket banging against my legs and for a moment entertained the thought that a four-shilling piece in the hands of one of these pox-eaten devils might be all that it took to get us back on land. Of course, I did not have enough shillings for every man, so I kept climbing. On reaching the deck I chided myself
for my haste. I have always felt a hurry to get things done. If I must take a medicine, I would gulp it, rather than sip it and prolong the misery. If I must climb a rope scaffold, I would as soon get it climbed.
We had scaled the ship all that way to be led across the deck and down three sets of stairs into the pitch and dark of a hold where they herded us into compartments made of iron. One by one the doors clanged shut. The air smelled of sewage and cattle and rot. The gloom felt so cloying that the dim light of our jailer’s lantern did little to break it, and the thought that it shone full morning outside made it seem all the more mysterious.
Patey stood beside me, as we could not have sat without stacking ourselves like so many chairs. When the last iron had been shut and locked, the men filed up the stairs and dropped the hatch over our heads. At that sound many of the women and girls around me began to cry; first whimpering, it turned to angry wailing. Patience joined them, crying aloud, holding my shoulders. “Patience,” I whispered, “do not cry. Call Ma. She’s full well got to be in one of the other cells.”
I felt Patey’s hands cross my face, fumbling, feeling, as if she had become blind and was using her fingertips to see me. She slapped my cheek soundly and said, “It’s only by grace that we are not all dead. Do not be daft, Ressie.” She hugged me to her bosom and I clutched at her. I began to cry, my heart joining the bedlam about us. How long we huddled together and moaned, I could not say. Our cries began to wane when a great banging and shouting came from overhead followed by scuffling, then men’s screams.
I heard the distant clanging of iron bars. Over our cries, over our heads, many men, maybe Pa and August, maybe even Rafe, were put into cells gated with iron. A man grunted, loud and hard, and others cried out. I heard swords clanging and more grunts followed by groaning. A woman on our deck screamed and cried out, “It’s blood! I be covered in blood from above. The devil Saracens are killing ’em all!”
A wail rose from our deck like a great wave. “Saracens—!” The word sprang from all around, followed by curses and prayers. There was no one my pa feared more than Saracen pirates. Were we now in the hands of minions of Satan, our fates were sure to be monstrous. I cried out in earnest, calling for Ma, reaching for Patey but not sure I had her; I slipped from one form to the next until the voice in front of me confirmed her presence.
“Pa!” I screamed with all my strength. All the girls and women on this deck began to call for their men and boys above. The noise grew to deafening. Out of the shouts came a steady banging, a drumming that vibrated through the ribs of the ship.
I heard Lucy’s voice! She called from a far corner, “Don’ you be calling all at a time. Everyone, you be still, now. You be calling out de names one after de other. Starts here. Call out de name if you mens be up above.” I felt the ship begin to move, as one by one, some meekly, some heartily, women’s voices called names of men and boys. Others repeated the names up and down the length of the deck, so the pattern of it became a ribbon of hope strung from one cell to the next. After a while, the men above began to hear us and rapped on the floor in answer. I wondered how were we to know that a knock meant the man was dead or alive, but I heard a woman call “Bertram? Bertram Willow?” Silence followed. She cried out his name again, and “Bertram Willow” echoed from cell to cell but when no knock answered her, she wept softly.
As I listened to the rhythmic calling, the names became for me a chantey, a sea song, and the ship began to rock with the movement of names round the despicable place. And I realized that at least some of these women knew how to do this. They were no strangers to captivities and bars. The deck rolled and I knew we had left the bay and made for open sea.
They might take us to Kingston. Houses all along the beach had been beset by thieves, far back as I could remember. Indeed, Pa had fought off others, but these he could not prevail against. A striking pain went through me as if I had been stabbed from my shoulders to my knees in one thrust, with the thought that we might not be headed to Kingston but to some faraway island.
I heard Patience call out, “Allan Talbot? August Talbot?” The names echoed from lips down the way. Now it seemed I could make out the length of the place, having grown used to the dark, and the ship turned east so that sun came in through small openings and a single porthole. Patience shouted again, more loudly, “Allan Talbot? August Talbot?”
I held my breath. At last, two raps. “They’re alive!” I said, pushing my hands against my face. “Pa!” I shouted. I turned to Patience. “Call for Ma. Your voice is louder than mine.”
“She is not here, Resolute.”
“She escaped, then!”
Patience sighed but answered not. “Do not make me say it, sister.”
Crushing our petticoats to the side, we nestled together and managed to make seats for ourselves as the whole lot of weary women sank to the floor.
The ship rocked with the comfort of a hammock. Weariness took me. Sounds around me, the heat, the stench, nothing could keep me awake.
Patience later told me that the day and the night had passed before I awoke. A man in a dirty turban came with a great tub of cold gruel that he slopped into a trough in each cell. It seemed we were supposed to lap it up like dogs. “Sir? Oh, sir,” I called. “A spoon, sir, if you please?” No one seemed to hear me. Some women fought over it, scooping the stuff with their hands into their mouths. I did not get any. Within a few minutes those who had eaten the most began to be sick. I did my best to resist, but with people packed so tightly, I became ill with the rest of them.
The next two days or more were lost to me as I groveled there in the bowels of that ship. The wretchedness cannot be described, so dire became our misery. After two days three women had died and later, upon reflection, I think perhaps our heathen captors either had mercy or began to worry that their cash bounty on our heads might disappear if they did not feed us. They brought in crockery jars of rum and tow sacks full of hardtack. That day they also brought two of the men from above, both prisoners but neither of whom we knew, and showed them how to work the pumps. While the captives pumped, our deck flooded with several inches of freezing seawater, complete with small fish and octopuses and other creatures I could not name. They opened drains and let the spilth run off, then flooded us twice again.
We were sopping and sick, and I, nearly out of my mind with torment. Why would Ma not answer me when I called? Had she escaped and stayed on the plantation? Had she run to the kitchen to hide and there escaped the fire? In anguish, I knelt beside Patey and cried against the iron bars, a deep and terrible sort of sobbing that made me feel helpless as a babe. I could not stop. I cried myself to sleep. I roused when a dark brown hand came through the bars and shook me. The man offered more rum and hardtack. I took the tack from his dirty hands and clutched it close to my chest, drank the fiery rum in one swallow, and passed the cup back to him. I took a small nibble of the hardtack and tucked it into my cheek, putting the rest into a fold in my bodice for later. Not even a plate! Ma and Pa would hear about this roughness, I promised myself.
I dreamed, then, of games of hide-and-seek with Allsy, dashing through the herb garden by the kitchen, filling our noses with the smells of trampled oregano and mint. I proffered my cheek to her for a kiss then pulled it back, and when she laughed I kissed her cheek, instead. We danced jigs on a plank set up for a bench. I gave her my lavender chemise for Hogmanay Day, and since she had just learned to weave basketwork, she gave to me a small, patterned basket. Before she put it in my hands, she said, “Look-a dis, Missy,” and interwove our fingers, light and dark. She pointed to the leaves of the weaving, light and dark, as patterned as checked cloth. “Oh, la,” I said, “it is you and I!”
I opened my eyes and smiled, for these were not dreams but memories. “Allsy, I miss you,” I said in the darkness.
“Pray, did you call me?” Patience’s voice came into my room in the darkness, and for a moment I thought I was at home sharing my bed with her.
I asked Patienc
e why we had not yet reached Kingston, and we talked about where we might be going if it were not Kingston. The Tortugas? Or the opposite direction and far worse, Barbados? “As far as Turks and Caicos,” one woman declared. I knew nothing of that place. I wanted my own fireside and bed and Ma and Pa and August and Patey. Allsy. Without sunrises and settings, every hour seemed eternal. I ached. My teeth hurt. On and on we sailed. Sometimes people got sick with the pitching, but I did not unless I could not hide my eyes and ears and nose from their seasickness.
Then one time, with night coming on after another day we could measure only by glimmers of light through the single porthole, men came down. Five of them came straight to our cell. Patey slept in a corner, being sick now as many were, with the beginnings of scurvy, but she roused upon hearing the lock clicking and the door open. One pirate held a lantern aloft and looked us over. Like fluttering doves all the women cowered away from his glare. His lips curled around his three off-centered teeth, and he reached straight for me, clutching a large handful of my gown. I screamed with force I hardly believed came from me. Patience wrapped her arms about me and pulled back mightily; I became a rag between two mad dogs.
Patience rolled me to the floor and flattened herself upon me, crushing the breath from my bones. She bellowed, she kicked, and she thrashed, and pulled other women off their feet. Our clamor rose and we writhed together, fighting for our lives, trying to get the hoard of women to hide us. His grizzly hands drew girls apart like baggage. Between the slime on the floor and the lengths of cloths that made up every skirt and petticoat, we made a knot of shrieking females that closed back as soon as he tore us asunder.
Men from the deck overhead began to yell and curse, too, cheering us on. On my feet for a moment, Patey banged me against one of the massive ribs of the hull, and though I did not lose consciousness, my eyes rolled upward. I could neither resist nor stand any longer. Patience grabbed an arm and shoved someone else before us, and the man’s claws let go of my clothes.