Voyage of Midnight (20 page)

The worst attempted remedy, though, was the lime juice. I thought that if lime juice could prevent scurvy, perhaps it’d cleanse the eyes and heal blindness. So I lay upon my bunk, braced myself, and ordered Oji to squirt it in my eyes.

“It will hurt,” he said.

“I know.”

And it did. A knife stabbed in the eyeball couldn’t have hurt any worse. I screeched and thrashed as Oji pried open my eyelids and rinsed my eyes with seawater. An hour later all I’d accomplished was to drench my corn-husk mattress.

“You are brave,” pronounced Oji.

“Or daft.”

“You are like the man in my village who goes to hunt the lion.”

I removed the wet towel from my eyes, staring through the darkness as if I could see Oji sitting beside me on my mattress. “You’ve hunted lions?”

“I was eight years old when I was taken from my village. Boys do not hunt lions. Only men.”

“I hardly think squirting lime juice in my eyes compares with hunting lions.”

“You are still brave.”

“So you were only a boy when your village was attacked?”

“My village was not attacked.”

“But—but you were captured as a prisoner of war. Weren’t you?”

“A boy setting traps to catch animals is not war. I was kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped? But Uncle told me—” And before I’d even finished my sentence, again I knew Uncle had told me another lie. I tossed the towel against the hull and cursed.

Oji leaned across me, fumbled about, and then placed the towel back over my eyes. “Cursing does not go well with you. Leave the curses to your uncle.”

Later that day, Oji and I stood at the bow, where the spray misted over the ship, tormented by the never-ending cries issuing from the hold.

“I was happy that day,” Oji told me, speaking in his own language, for the dialect I’d been learning was his native tongue, and he was now my teacher. “Come moonrise, my village planned to have a feast and dance. All day the drums beat. I was almost finished checking and setting my traps when arms grabbed me and a bag fell over my head and the sun disappeared from the sky.”

“What happened?”

“I kicked and screamed and cursed, but no one from my village heard me.”

“Because of the drums?”

“Yes. I was chained with many others and made to walk for three full moons until I reached the river’s shore. I never saw my village or my family again.”

“Until you found Ikoro.”

“Yes.”

I wondered what it would’ve been like to have been stolen from one’s family, from everything familiar. Even worse, I imagined, than having one’s parents die at an early age and going to live in the workhouse under the guardianship of Master Crump.

Oji’s voice tightened. “Every day I think about my village. I
remember my father’s vast yam fields, and how the smoke from the cooking fires smelled, and how sometimes it rained so hard you could not tell sky from ground. I remember the stories my mother used to tell—about the tiger and the monkey, about how the tortoise got his shell and how the pigeon learned to fly.” Oji sighed. “Even today my mother watches the horizon, waiting for my return. She will watch every day until she is buried and cannot see through the dirt.”

A thought came to me. “Then you were chained in the hold as well … as they are.”

“For many days and nights. I thought they were going to eat us.” He paused. “Today, when I hear my African brothers and sisters cry in the belly of the ship and I can do nothing to help them, my heart is full of holes.”

I picked at a bump on the rail, picked and picked, as a heavy shame settled on me, each desperate cry from below searing my heart as with a brand. I could never know what it must be like. To have one’s very self stolen away and then to be treated worse than an animal.
Yes, a heart full of holes
. “I’m sorry, Oji.”

“Why?”

“I—I’m sorry for taking you again on this voyage. I’m sorry for locking you up again. I’m sorry for everything.”

“You are wrong. You think it was your decision. But it was my personal god, my
chi
, who made it happen. For I was able to see my father again. One last time. And to hear that my grandparents, my mother, my brothers and sisters, are all well. Someday I will return to them.”

I imagined Oji returning to his village, and the thought eased my shame. I said in English, “I’ve a family too. Well, they’re not my
blood
family, but they love me like a son. They’re waiting for me to come home. Like you, I’ll return to them someday.”

“Then I wish you success in your journey.”

I paused, not certain how to say next what I’d been thinking except just to come out and say it. It was something that I’d been pondering for some time. “Oji, you’re not my slave any longer. I release you. You’re free now.”

To my surprise, Oji laughed, but it was a laugh without humor. “Even you, Philip, cannot release what was never yours to begin with.”

And he left me then, silently. He left me alone by the rail, left me groping in the spaces about me, calling “Oji? Oji?” and finding nothing except the thick of darkness.

We estimated that we’d been sailing blind for three weeks now.

God only knew where we’d drifted, or what the filthy state of our vessel was. Our water had turned nasty, tasting like bog water.

On one particular day (I knew it to be daytime, for the sun was hot on my face, hurting my sensitive eyes), I was lying near the bow. Oji was beside me, and our conversation had faded to nothing. Waves slapped heavily against the hull. My tongue was thick, my mouth pasty, for we were allowed only a quarter cup of water per day. As I lay there, I imagined drinking a cold glass of water straight from the workhouse well. Glass after glorious glass. Droplets of water glistening on the outside of the glass, sliding down.

Then from over the sea came an odd sound. At first I didn’t notice it. But as the sound grew closer, I stopped dreaming and listened. The creak of wood, the snap of canvas, the slap of water against the bow … coming closer, closer.

I sat up, my pulse quickening. “Do you hear that, Oji?”

“Yes. They are coming.”

I
jumped up and screeched, my voice cracking. “Sail ho! A ship’s approaching! Off—off the port bow!”

In just moments a mass of sweating, stinking bodies jostled and pushed into position beside me.

And then we were silent, listening.

There it was.

The unmistakable sound of another ship at sea.

Closer, much closer.

Joy burst from my heart as a simultaneous cry erupted from every throat. And in that instant our cry was answered from across the water.

They’ve seen us!

A part of me wondered whether perhaps
this was a warship come to capture us, but I was beyond caring.

We dissolved into a frenzy of sobbing. Someone grabbed and hugged me. Then someone else. I was jumping up and down.

“Praise God!”

“They see us!”

“We’re saved!”

Then Uncle was hollering through his speaking trumpet. “Ship ahoy! Ahoy! What ship?”

“The
San León
of Spain. I am its captain.”

We’re saved
, I thought.
And praise be to the saints, it’s not a warship
.

“Where from?” asked Uncle.

“From Old Calabar, in the Bight of Biafra.”

“Then you’re slavers?”

“Aye. We have a full cargo.”

“As do we!” replied Uncle. “Please, then, I implore you, as one slaver to another—”

But before Uncle could say more, the captain of the
San León
cried, “Help us, for God’s sake! Before it is too late! Before we sail past one another and all is lost!”

There was a slight hesitation in Uncle’s voice. “We want help ourselves. We—”

“Please, please help us! We are dying of hunger and thirst. Send us some provisions and a few hands to work the ship, and name your own terms.”

“We can give you food,” said Uncle, “but we’re in want of hands. Come aboard our ship and we’ll exchange provisions for men.”

“Gold! Gold!” replied the captain of the
San León
. “We will pay you in gold, a thousand times what the food and hands
are worth, but we cannot send any men. We have slaves on board; they have infected us with ophthalmia, and we are all stone-blind.”

At this announcement, a silence fell among us. A silence pure and deep as death. It was broken by a fit of laughter, and then all of us were laughing, an awful hysteria like that of a man marching to the gallows, knowing he no longer had to settle his debts. My sides hurt from laughing. Tears streamed down my face. I could scarcely catch my breath, but when I did, when our horrible laughter subsided, we could hear, by the sound of the curses that the Spaniards shouted at us, that the
San León
had drifted away.

That night, a storm blew in.

The wind howled. The
Formidable
shrieked as if it were alive. Every timber groaned. Masts creaked. I cowered in my bunk, hearing things rip apart, the sails bursting their bonds with a sound like musketry, imagining the unmanned wheel spinning wildly from side to side, the waves dashing across the decks, sweeping away everything not tied down.

“The gods are angry,” said Oji. “We will die in this great lake of water.”

I feared the ship would burst apart and water would rush into my cabin, and that I’d sink into the deep and die in the darkness, not even knowing where I was or what day it was. I thought of Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher. Of their waiting year after year, finally realizing that their little English boy was never coming home, then being laid in their graves, never knowing how much their foster son truly loved them.

Home
, I thought, and for the thousandth time wished I were there.

Again and again the bow of the
Formidable
rose as the vessel
climbed a monstrous wave; I tumbled in a heap at the foot of my bunk. When the
Formidable
reached the crest of the wave, there was a moment of hanging, indecision, almost—and then down she plummeted into the trough between this wave and the next one as I slid to the other end of my bunk, banging my head and crunching my neck. Screams of terror echoed throughout the ship.

And mixed with those screams, I heard a cry.

A baby’s cry.

A newborn.

Just one cry, then nothing.

And as I crashed from one end of my bunk to the other, waves hammering the bows like thunder, I hoped I’d imagined it. I knew what happened to babies born aboard the
Formidable
.

Moments later, to my anguish, I heard the cry again. It was cut off quickly, as if a hand had been placed over its mouth. It would’ve been easier for me to cover my ears, to pretend that the cry had been lost in the storm’s rage. But I couldn’t. “Oji, did you hear that?”

“Yes.”

“We must find it before my uncle does.”

“Yes, and we must hide it. Quickly.”

The women’s hold reeked of vomit.

We were surrounded by shrieks of terror, sobbing, children crying for their fathers and mothers in their African tongues.

And because they weren’t chained like the men, many women and children were lying in the aisles. Tossed from side to side, I lurched down the passage, stumbling over and between them, my gorge rising. Oji followed, his hand gripping my upper arm with a strength of which Ikoro would have been proud.

Then Oji asked in a loud voice where the baby and its mother
were. As he spoke, it seemed to me that the shrieking abated. No doubt the women were surprised to hear the voice of a male, and not just a male, but a native African. He told them to trust him, not to worry. That we were there to help them.

Someone called out to Oji—a woman’s voice, speaking in a dialect I didn’t completely understand, though I recognized a few of the words.

“This way,” Oji said to me, and he pulled me in the opposite direction, until I was completely disoriented. All the while, Oji conversed with the woman and her voice grew closer.

And then a baby was in my arms. A scrawny, bony baby.

“The mother wants to know where you are taking them.”

“Them?” Until that moment, it’d not occurred to me that I’d need to take the mother too.

But Oji voiced what I should’ve known: “A baby belongs with its mother. It will die without milk.”

The baby moved. Let out a mewling sound. I shielded it as the
Formidable
pitched, tossing me into the tiers and bruising my shoulder. Fresh screams pounded my ears.

“The mother says one of the girls has broken her leg. And a little boy his wrist.”

“The infirmary,” I replied, surprised at the steadiness in my voice. “No one goes in there anymore. Can you carry the girl with the broken leg, and can the boy and the mother follow?”

Again Oji spoke to the women, then said to me, “Yes. Let us go.”

It was a long way to the infirmary. Three times the baby cried and I had to clamp a hand over its mouth. Twice we lost our way. Once we bumped into a fellow whose voice I recognized as Roach’s, but he merely carried on about how we were all going to die miserably, that he didn’t know how to swim and that his father and his brother had both died at sea. After that burst of
wretchedness, Roach pushed past us, leaving us alone in the corridor.