James Nelson - The Blackbirder

James nodded. It was a sensible thing to do. Each individual tribe would be expected to hang on to the hierarchies that the pirates had shunned.

“I…Kusi and me… have told them what we decide, that we all vote where we go, what we do.”

“Good, good. We best talk on it then, and then we vote.”

Madshaka and Kusi turned to the assembled men, began talking, fast, in the odd and incomprehensible languages of West Africa. James leaned against the binnacle box, arms folded. Hoped that he looked calm, in control. He was in fact quite uncomfortable. All this talk, and he understood not a word.

Heads nodded, men spoke to one another, the translators moved on to the next group. Twenty minutes of this and they were done, and the deck was filled with the babble of discussion, debate. Madshaka and Kusi stepped back, flanking James once more.

One man sitting near the mizzen fife rail leapt to his feet, held James’s eyes, spoke loud, passionately. In James’s ear, Kusi said, “He say you the captain, when we fighting, just like Madshaka say the pirates do.”

James nodded. Kabu Malinke prince to slave to freeman to pirate. Royalty to outlaw.

Kusi continued. “He say we must go back to home…he mean Africa…must take all the people back to their homes.”

Madshaka translated the words for the others, switching from one tongue to another, and heads nodded and voices rose and one did not need to understand the words to catch the tones of agreement and assent. Africa. They would go back to Africa.

James’s clan did not look so sure. “ Africa?” Good Boy said. “What we do in Africa?” James imagined that Good Boy was, at that moment, as far from Virginia as he had ever been in his life.

“I don’t know,” James said, talking low. He did not want Madshaka and Kusi to overhear him, though he was not sure why. “We got to do it, for these people. Then, I don’t know what we do. We think of something.”

The four men muttered agreement. It seemed more like resignation.

More fast talk, translated arguments, hands waving, impassioned speech. Madshaka said, “They argue over where in Africa to go.” He turned back to the group, called out something, the men were silent. He called out again, one language at a time, and the men of each tribe in turn responded. Voting, deciding. James felt entirely removed from this process, as if he were something less than a member of the group.

At last Madshaka turned back to him. “We go to Kalabari. It is decided, we go there, and these people go home, upriver, overland.”

Kalabari, in the heart of the Niger River delta. Far from the slave factories of Whydah and Popo and Sierra Leone. There the people could use the great Niger River to carry them into the heart of their lands, and from thence over the savannahs to their homes. It was decided. James had not even understood the debate.

“Very well…”

Africa. The name whirled around in James’s head. Africa. He never thought he would see it again.

A prince when stolen, what was he now? He did not even know if his city was still standing, if his people still existed. He had not seen either for twenty years. The Malinke might have been wiped out years before, for all he knew.

Twenty years, and all that time he had fantasized about this moment, when he would return to Africa. And now that that dream was taking form and substance he did not know how he felt about it, did not know what if anything there was for him now in his motherland.

“We gots to get the boat sailing,” Madshaka urged him, gently.

James nodded. “Yes, we do.”

He would think about Africa later. Right now they had to get under way. For more reasons than the others knew.

James knew, had realized it even as they were voting on their destination. It had dawned on him as he had wallowed in his regret at missing the chance to go privateering aboard the Elizabeth Galley.

They would blame Marlowe for this, those people in power in Williamsburg. There would be no letter of marque, not for a man who had brought this terror on the colony of Virginia.

There would be only one way for Marlowe to regain his precious place, and that would be to hunt the black killers down, to bring them back. He would not want to do it, would recoil from the thought, but in the end he would agree because he would have no choice. He would do it for Elizabeth.

“Get them men together.” James turned to the grumete. “Madshaka, get them in three groups, we’ll organize them by mast. Cato, Joshua, you each go with a group, show them how to do what I say. Madshaka, Kusi, you all translate what I say. If we going to live we got to start learning these people how to sail this ship.”

They had to get the boat sailing, the half-rotten, festering, leaking tub. Because in their wake would come the Elizabeth Galley, new, fast, well armed, determined.

Elizabeth knelt on the lawn at the edge of the flower beds, sunk her hands in the moist dirt. She could feel the dampness creeping through her skirt and wool stockings, but it felt cool and good, with the sun beating on her back and her wide straw hat.

She picked up a spade and scooped the loose dirt out until she had a hole ten inches deep. Then she carefully, lovingly picked up the little rosebush and set its roots in the hole before pushing the dirt in around it.

Playing at agriculture. Sometimes that bothered her. All over the tidewater people broke their backs working the soil, slaves and freemen alike, just to eke out a living or to make someone else rich. But she just played, like the noblewomen in France who found amusement in pretending to be simple country girls.

But those were just minor concerns, because she loved to work in the gardens, loved to make Marlowe House a more beautiful place. More her own.

She had lived there since coming to the New World with Joseph Tinling. But the house had not been her home, it had been merely a place to endure Master Tinling’s brutality. After his death she had sold it to Marlowe, then a newcomer to Virginia, had moved to town, happy to be shed of those echoing rooms and their horrible memories.

But after she and Marlowe wed she had moved back, and now she was exorcising those demons of her former life, remaking the wretched Tinling house into the Marlowes’ ancestral home. New furnishings, new carpets, new portraits, fresh paint.

The gardens were a big part of that, Elizabeth ’s chief contribution, because unlike the furniture or the paintings, which were just items to be purchased, the garden was something that she could do herself, something pure and organic. Coaxing beauty and nourishment from the earth.

It was midmorning but she had been at it since just after sunrise. She needed the garden’s cathartic influence, the release of tension that comes with physical labor.

She had seen Thomas and Francis Bickerstaff off in the predawn hours. Before, she had been angry about his going off privateering, abandoning her. She was angry that Thomas had grown bored with the home she was trying to make.

But that all changed the moment Sam blurted out his awful story.

It was a very different departure than the one she had envisioned. There was none of the suppressed excitement, none of Thomas’s feigning disappointment in leaving when in fact he was aching to be under way, none of the footloose buccaneer that made Thomas so equally loved, hated, feared, and appreciated in the tidewater.

Rather, it had been a somber moment, and Thomas had been genuine in his desire not to go. But go he must, they both knew that.

And Elizabeth, who was no fool, was not insensible to the fact that he was going after James more for her than for himself. Thomas could have told Nicholson to sod off, but for her sake he had told the governor “Yes, sir.”