James Nelson - The Blackbirder

It was no more than a minute or two before they heard them, men coming up the trail, talking loud, voices of hunters who had no fear of being hunted themselves.

“Keep your eyes open, keep your eyes open, them Negroes is hard to see!” someone yelled, and then the sound of brush being beaten and then “What’s this! Mr. Dunmore, over here!”

Elizabeth met Plato’s eyes but neither spoke. The hunters had found the tent and the dunnage. They knew they were on someone’s trail.

“Come along, come along! Spread it out!” Dunmore ’s voice, and then men crashing through the undergrowth, coming closer. Elizabeth and Plato sunk a bit lower in the water until the stream lapped over their lips. Elizabeth was conscious of her breathing, aware of the noise it made, forced herself to take shallow, silent breaths.

They could see figures moving through the woods, following the stream, making a great noise as they went. They were on foot-the horses could not penetrate that thick wood-and they had no dogs, which was a relief. Elizabeth could see homespun coats, battered hats, and then the white coat and white breeches of Frederick Dunmore.

And another man. Elizabeth did not see him right off. Unlike the others he did not stand out in the woods, but seemed to blend into the browns and greens, squatting, examining something on the ground. Buckskin clothing, long black hair. Saquam, the one the whites called Powhatan. Better than a dog at tracking, less likely to be fooled. She felt her stomach sink, felt a flash of panic, willed herself to be calm.

“Hold up, hold up!” Dunmore roared, and the men stopped, no more than fifty feet from where the fugitives hid in the stream.

Dunmore pulled his long periwig from his head, revealing dark stubble beneath, and wiped his brow with his sleeve. It was the first time Elizabeth had ever seen him bareheaded. “God damn your eyes, Powhatan, I thought you said we could surprise these niggers and take them in the field!”

Saquam stood, and with elaborate care turned to Dunmore. “I said no horses. You ride horses through the woods, no surprise anyone.”

“Yes, well I say you did a damned poor job leading us to their camp. I can’t say I’m certain where your loyalties lie, but I’ll tell you this much. If we don’t get any of those black bastards you’ll see not another penny.”

Silence, save for the water rushing down the streambed, the breeze in the canopy overhead, the heavy breathing of hunters recovering their wind. Saquam turned and moved up the riverbank, slowly, stepping silently, looking at the ground as he moved. Thirty feet away, then twenty, and at last he reached the bank opposite them, ten feet at the most.

He knelt down, scooped water into his hand, drank, then scooped more and ran it over his head. He looked up at the trees overhead. Elizabeth watched, taking tiny breaths, motionless as she could be in the current. An odd expression came over the Indian’s face, a puzzled look. He glanced up from the stream, his eyes sweeping along. And then he was looking straight at them, his dark eyes piercing through the tree boughs, searching into the dark. Fixed on Elizabeth, on Plato.

And then, to Elizabeth ’s surprise, he cocked his eyebrows, as if to ask “What are you doing there?”

She looked at Plato. The black man gave a little nod of his head, gesturing upstream. And Saquam in turn cocked a single eyebrow. A hint of a smile played over his lips.

And then Dunmore ’s voice. “Come along, come along, damn it!” Hats returned to heads, the tired men huffed along after Dunmore, who was following after Saquam.

The Indian stood, and without a word headed off through the woods, upstream, leading the hunters away.

It was half an hour at least after the sounds of the hunters faded that Plato finally spoke. “We best get out of here, we’ll catch our death.” He stood, bending low under the overhanging branches, the water streaming from his shirt, and helped Elizabeth to her feet. Her ankle was quite numb, and though there was a stab of pain when she put weight on it, it was not the overwhelming agony it had been. With Plato’s help she hobbled to the far side of the stream and sat down heavily on the warm pine needle bed of the forest floor.

She sighed. “Plato, I am absolutely useless to you people,” she said at last.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Marlowe, that ain’t-”

“Stop it,” she ordered, and Plato was silent. And then after a pause she said, “Do you think you could help me get back to Marlowe House?”

“It would be hard. Hard on you, mostly, but yes, I could get you back.”

“Good. Then once it is safe we shall go. I am no more than a burden here. Perhaps in my own element I can be of some real help.”

Madshaka sat on the quarterdeck rail, all the way aft. The three big lanterns on the taffrail were lit, as they were every night, because the Africans were not entirely comfortable with the darkness and the ocean all around, but he was in the shadows just below them.

He looked down the side of the ship, at the wake foaming white in the moonlight. He looked up at the sails, towering overhead, gray patches against the stars. Lovely, lovely, all of it.

Gone was the stinking hold, the smell of close-packed people and lingering death that had permeated the blackbirder. Gone were their worries over food and water. The French merchantman was stocked full of food and water, as well as clothing, wine, rum, and guns. Her hold was packed with silks and sundry other bolts of cloth, olives in barrels, hides, spices.

She was six days out of Havana, bound for Le Havre, or so they had learned from the mate they had taken hostage. Within those wooden walls were luxuries such as many of the people had never known.

It had been a nice day, a calm evening. They had stood the deck for hours: James, Madshaka, and Cato, who had the watch, informal as it was. They said little. They did not have much to say to one another.

There was tension to be sure. No way to avoid that. James was no fool, he could sense the subtle shifts in power, but as long as he, Madshaka, was careful there would never be anything substantial enough on which to hang an accusation.

And even if James did suspect, who would he tell? Madshaka smiled at that thought. Cato? Good Boy?

From forward drifted the soft singing of the women as they finished their day’s work. The people, the Africans, had no knowledge of ships, no prior framework into which they could fit such a thing as a sea voyage. For most of them their first view of the ocean had come when they were loaded aboard the blackbirder.

So rather than adjust themselves to life at sea, they adjusted life at sea to what they understood: the family units, the tribes, the rhythms of life on land, sleeping and waking and eating.

The women were up well before dawn, stoking the fires in the galley stove just as they might have in their own fire pits in their own villages. They cooked the strange food they had on hand, and fed their husbands and their children. In the late mornings they did their washing, singing their ancient songs while their children played around them, as their people had done for thousands of years in their native rivers.

And the men, rather than hunting or tending cattle or clearing earth, stood their watches, trimmed the sails, laid aloft to fist canvas.

In the evenings they would build a fire in the portable cookstove and sit around it and sing and joke and tell stories, each to their own tribe, each in their own tongue. It was a genuine community, or a clutch of communities, a replica of their former life in Africa, only set on the alien, floating, wooden ship in the middle of the vast sea.

An hour before the sun set into the sea, the white mate came on deck, as he did every few hours, instruments in hand. He shuffled in his walk, head down, afraid to look at and possibly offend his captors. There were dark rings around his eyes, a few weeks’ growth of beard. He had not bathed or changed clothes since his capture, and when he was not performing those duties for which he was kept alive he remained huddled in his tiny cabin.