The rowing stopped and I was carried up a rope ladder that swayed precariously down the side of the ship.
As I looked backward one last time toward the coast, the dark forest seemed to charge toward the sea—a legion of black stallions racing to my rescue.
Then I caught sight of birds swooping down into the sea, making little splashes as they dived underneath the water in a carefree display of aquatic ballet.
It was darling.
Water glistened on my eyelashes.
I blinked to release it.
The ocean streamed soundlessly down.
THE SHIP WAS a slaver manned by the blak men. It weighed some two hundred tons with six cannons mounted on her gun deck. I craned my neck at the proliferation of nets and ropes that stretched high into the sky to secure the billowing sails being hoisted toward the trade winds. They were like the wings of the white albatross of legend, ready to carry us to a strange new place.
I was carried on board over the shoulder of one of the men, my hands bound, my body bruised and sopping wet. As the ship rolled from side to side in a gathering wind, I shuffled from foot to foot trying to remain upright. Goats, sheep and chickens in coops were winched bleating and squawking on board. Water caskets were hauled up over the sides alongside sacks of wheat and clumps of cowhides and more captives arrived dripping water over the poop rail, while others were being shoved down the hatch into the hold.
Garanwyn managed to sidle next to me. He was at least a foot taller than I, and his bulbous knees bolted his much thinner legs into place, while his knobbly shoulders tried to shrug off a childhood that had not yet arrived at the manhood that would bulk out his frame and settle his proportions.
Yet, like the man he wanted to become, he took my limp, damp hand in his confident clammy one and gripped it. I squeezed back. Warmth charged into me.
Captain Wabwire, the man in charge, leaned against a rail, watching the activity on board his ship, one leg casually crossed over the other.
In the shadow of a sail, his eyes appeared as bottomless hollows.
He swiveled a polished wooden cane between the slender fingers of his hands.
Unlike the sailors, who wore their hair shaven, cropped or stuck up in uncombed bushes, his was plaited into neat cornrows. A pristine white wrappa wound around his slim hips, the ends flung over his shoulders with the usual voluminous flourish.
I was mesmerized.
He was a long-necked, snootv-nosed peacock, standing aloof from the chaos of loading his cargo.
He caught sight of me peeping at him through a gap between the waists of two male captives. We were both transfixed. I wanted to drag my eyes away but a fresh deluge of tears poured down my cheeks.
He ruffled his wings, turned and strutted toward the cabins on the quarterdeck, the cane now spinning furiously.
Sightings of this exquisite bird were rare after that.
The seamen’s bodies and words had a strange physical presence. Their muscles were crisply defined and densely packed and they spoke a language unlike any I’d ever heard. Clicks and clacks were interspersed between words-sounds made by sucking the tongue against the roof of the mouth. They chucked wide, open vowels into the air while hard consonants rode on the spine of their own reverberation and shuddered down my vertebrae, making me shiver.
I gaped at the nicks of their facial engravings and at biceps imprinted with black-inked tattoos of naked women whose exaggerated buttocks enlarged when they flexed their muscles. One of them pissed over the side of the ship. The others snortled when the wind slapped it back so that it showered a group of us captives.
I winced, not realizing such uncouth behavior was nothing compared to what these lions of the sea would get up to once out at sea.
The men who worked the slavers were the lowlifes of the seafaring community because even their chance of surviving the Middle Passage was low. Those who had been press-ganged into it had no choice but to sink to the slaver’s moral code, which was-Anything Goes.
As I stood there amid the chaos, a sailor cuffed his barnacled hand around my neck with such force it propelled my legs toward the hatch.
I tumbled down the narrow wooden steps into the lamp-lit darkness while my mind scuttled straight back up again, leaped over the poop rail into a yawl, rowed to the shore at great speed and ran through the forest for home.
BELOWDECKS THE STORAGE SYSTEM was both unisex and utilitarian: planks of wood formed shelves that ran in six parallel rows the entire length of the hold.
The shelves were space effective and cost effective, I later found out. There were two available options: the Tight Fit, which allowed for an extra thirty percent of cargo, but with a downside of increased fatalities. Or the Loose Fit, which offered more space per person but resulted in reduced profit.
I WAS ASSIGNED MY SPACE on a shelf and secured with leg irons bolted to the wood. I wasn’t handcuffed; the women weren’ t. No fancy bracelets for us; only the men wore chains that connected the irons on their ankles with those on their wrists.
A minor discomfort were the maggots that dined on the festering gashes caused by the constant chafing of iron on skin. Unfortunately, it was impossible for the men to reach down to pick the moist little squidges out of their ankles.
My ankles were almost thin enough to slip through the irons.
Our shelf was reserved for the female of the species only, and we were to spend nearly all of the trip lying prone upon it. We lay on our sides as Captain Wabwire had opted for the Tight Fit—more cargo, less space.
If one of us turned we all had to.
Headroom of less than eighteen inches made sitting up impossible for all but the tiniest.
WHEN I LAY ON MY RIGHT, my face was squashed into Hildegaard’ s back. Her spongy, creamy skin lifted easily off the bone. She became my mattress and my pillow.
When I lay on my left, my nose prodded Samantha’ s spinal column.
Hildegaard came from a nation that was not my own. I never worked out which one because we never got past the hold’s lingua franca of sign language.
She had two long blonde plaits that wrapped around her head twice. Lice crawled all over her scalp, as they did all of ours. We scratched our heads until they bled and became infected. The men were shaved but a woman’s locks raised her market price. We picked out the lice of the head in front. Behind the ears were favorite breeding grounds. It was quite effective as displacement activity.
It was a shock, though, to discover your neighbor had died during the night and the lice were still burrowing.
Like the time I woke up.
And Samantha didn’t.
Samantha had been a milkmaid on the Throgmorton Estate, some distance south from my family home.
She was bony where Hildegaard was fleshy, freckled where Hildegaard was unblemished, had a head of shoulder-length auburn coils compared to Hildegaard’s endlessly circumnavigating plaits.
Samantha told me that she was seventeen and had been married a year with a one-month-old daughter, Rosie-May. Her husband, Wilf, had been hired out by their master to a neighboring farm, but walked over to see his wife and daughter every Sunday after church. He’d gather them both in his arms and hold them for the longest while.
With the advent of summer, the master, Lord Thurston Throgmorton, began his seasonal visit to the hovel she shared with seven other women on the estate.
Those who resisted were no match for his strength.
But Samantha was now married; a wife and mother.
She left him rocking on the ground cradling his crotch, sending the foulest curses out into the night.
A few days later she was on her way to the dairy, Rosie-Mav strapped to her back, whistling the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” noticing that the moss on the heath had turned the loveliest shade of green, marveling at how the days were warming up very nicely indeed, when two six-footers appeared around the bend, wearing brown capes and high leather boots. They blocked both her path and the sunlight.
Their eyes were flint in the act of ignition.
They ripped Rosie-May from her back and dropped her. Just like that.
Samantha was dragged away toward the valley at the foot of the hills.
When she managed to look back, there, standing in the middle of the track, was Lord Throgmorton.
Triumphant.
The lump at his feet was her little girl.
IN THE FOREST they took it in turns—although she never felt a thing.
Spent, her kidnappers rearranged themselves, bound her with twine, set her on a horse in front of the rider, his arms around her waist as he made haste for the coast.
She could feel him up against her, hard, and every few hours he set her down to relieve himself in her.
They took it in turns.
And so it went on until they reached the coast.
AS THE SLAVER PROGRESSED toward the tropics, it became unbearably hot. Fresh air entered through the wooden gratings and air vents but there was never enough of it. When it rained, we heard the dreaded shout, “Batten down the gratings, fore and aft!”
If a storm raged for days, my bruised lungs wheezed like an asthmatic’s.
Mealtimes we were fed pulped horsebeans with yam mixed with slabber sauce.
Women and children were allowed to sit on the floor and eat from a communal tub, each with our own wooden spoon.
Samantha didn’t have much of an appetite.
She gave me what she didn’t eat herself.
I counted more of her bones becoming visible.
Her eyes never traveled far from that warm English morning.
I was the girl her child might have become.
When she stroked my cheek, it was her daughter’ s.
When she looked into my eyes, she didn’t see me.
When she spoke, it was to Rosie-May.
In the absence of family, we all became surrogates.
HILDEGAARD PILED SO MUCH FOOD onto her spoon it teetered toward her trembling, puckered mouth. Her moist pink tongue slid out and guided it in without spillage. When she dipped in for a fifth or sixth helping, her adversary, a woman called Bethany who matched Hildegaard for size and voracity, flicked the offending spoon away from the pot.
Slaps, punches, pulls and kicks turned into a free-for-all among the women. The crew crowded into the hold, cheering, goading and roaring as Hildegaard head-butted Bethany so hard her forehead split open and Bethany wrapped her fists around Hildegaard’s plaits, trying to pull them out.
I wished the food Hildegaard put in her throat would catch and choke her.
We were all starving.
I BEGAN TO REGURGITATE what I ate.
I was becoming a sliver.
One day I slipped my feet out of my irons.
I put them back in and looked around to see if anyone had noticed.
THE CREW TOOK ASIDE those observed to be not eating.
The punishment was to place hot coals so near the offender’ lips that they blistered.
It didn’t always do the trick.
The males of my species were kept shackled for their gourmet experience. Food was fed to them from a ladle. If they were too weak to lift their heads, they had to eat prone and sometimes choked, a couple of times to death.
When we were good, and the weather was stable, we ate up on deck.
WE FOULED OURSELVES. Of course we did. It ran between the slats onto the people lying underneath.
Large, conical buckets at the end of the platforms filled up quickly.
If there was a terrible storm, we weren’t able to muck out the hold. (You can imagine.) One gale lasted eighteen days.
Just as well we’d been stripped naked after the first week.
Fresh water became my new god.
And where was He when I needed Him?
We prayed and sang hymns and hoped for the miracle that never came.
BEDSORES, CUTS, MAGGOTS, HUNGER, dehydration, asphyxiation, my own filth-I disgusted myself.
In the early days I tried holding my breath in a childlike attempt at suicide.
MY DREAMS WERE FILLED with wintry breezes.
My dreams were filled with tumblers of homemade lemonade.
My dreams were filled with the laughter of my sisters, who had lost all irritating personality traits.
My dreams were filled with my mother and father’s love.
My dreams were filled with the aroma of honeysuckle and baking bread and the lavender bush behind the cottage from which we made mothballs and the sharp, refreshing aroma of grass after a night’s rain.
When I took a trip into my dreams, I didn’t want to come back.
DR. NWONKOREY, THE SHIP’S SURGEON, was the oldest person on board. He had white froth over his patchy brown pate, white foam for a mustache, white weeds for a beard and remarkably white teeth. A layer had formed on mine that only a shovel could scrape off.
Dr. Nwonkorey worked his way through the nauseous fug of the hold with a strip of lime-soaked muslin tied over his mouth. He complained that the hold looked like a slaughterhouse with slicks of blood, watery shit dripping everywhere, slimy mucus running down the noses of men who could not reach up to wipe them-and the sweat, the fever, the dysentery, the vomit, the despair, and a floor so treacherous with human detritus he had to be careful not to slide from one end of the hold to the other.
He had a soft spot for us children and at first would practice a hearty laugh on us. When we merely stared back with dead-fish eyes, he dropped the act and met us with the same.
When he spooned vinegar into my mouth to prevent scurvy, he would pat my forehead with a damp cloth, and sigh, his boozy breath lingering as he moved on.
Up and down the aisle he’d go, naked belly wobbling over his white cotton wrappa as he brandished scissors and blades and cotton thread and poultices and potions and delivered magic spells and incantations, all the while muttering, “It’s hopeless! Useless! What can I do? What the hell can I do?”