James Nelson: The Blackbirder

At another time James might have let his eyes linger, might have teased himself with the sight of his wife. But at that moment he was in command of the Northumberland, and his inspection of Lucy as she hurried toward them became just a part of his overall assessment of the vessel and her people.

King James was more mariner than husband. He understood that, did not necessarily see it as a flaw.

His gaze moved past her, inboard, to the six men on deck. Cato and Joshua, casting the last of the lashings off the foresails, were sailors. They had been part of the sloop’s crew for nearly a year now.

William, Good Boy, and Quash were passengers. Good Boy and William were carpenters, natural talents with wood, and Quash an experienced blacksmith. Along with material, James was transporting the skilled people who would transform Marlowe’s new wilderness. They were strong and smart young men, all somewhere around twenty years old, all former slaves like himself, freed by Thomas Marlowe.

He felt like an old man around them.

It would have been worse, were it not for Sam, the only white man among them. Once a blue-water sailor, Sam now considered himself too old for deep-sea voyaging and was happy making short trips around the bay.

James loved the sloop, every inch of her, the sweep of her sheer, the elegant curve that the bulwarks made as they met at the bow, the mast, straight, solid.

Sometimes in the curve of Lucy’s hips he saw the Northumberland’s tumble home, in the taper of her bare leg he saw the bowsprit jutting out over the water.

The little ship was freedom and the dignity of command. In making the sloop his, he had met and defeated the horrors of his first taste of the sea and ships, the Middle Passage.

“Come along, woman, we’ll miss the tide!” James called out as Lucy came huffing up to the dock.

“Wouldn’t be so late if one of you was a gentleman, would help a lady with her things,” Lucy called back, but she was smiling and James was smiling. It was just banter.

“Forward there!” he called out as Lucy was helped aboard. “Let’s go.”

No more needed saying. They had been sailing together for three years, two of those years under James’s command. Cato and Sam clapped on to the jib halyard and hauled away. The sail jerked up the forestay, flogging slightly in the breeze.

“Stand by that bow fast, there,” James called out as he slipped the becket from the tiller with his foot.

And then, from forward, Lucy’s voice, shrill, with an edge of panic. “No!”

Everyone aboard the sloop froze. Lucy was standing in the waist, her eyes wide, staring at nothing. She took a step back, toward the rail.

“What, Lucy, what is it?” James hurried forward.

Lucy shook her head in mute protest.

“What?”

“I got a bad feeling. Something ain’t right.”

“What? What you talking about?” There was nothing wrong that James could see, and if there were, he would certainly notice it before Lucy did.

“Something ain’t right…,” Lucy said again. It was the best she could do, by way of explanation.

“Girl, you are being foolish. Now get aft and stop this nonsense.”

“No, I ain’t going!” She turned and stepped up onto the rail and onto the dock before James could stop her. “I ain’t going and if you was smart you wouldn’t neither!”

James scowled at her. This was insane. Lucy could be flighty at times, but he had never seen anything like this.

“Goddamnit, girl, get back on this boat!” James shouted, but Lucy only shook her head and backed away. He glanced forward. The others were watching, wide-eyed. Losing an argument with his wife was not helping his authority.

Worse still, he could see that his men were getting spooked by all this. If they believed whatever premonition Lucy thought she was having, then soon he would be without a crew.

“Fine, then, you walk back to the damn house and we’ll talk about this when I gets back!”

He spun around and walked aft, head up, and his men avoided meeting his eyes.

Joshua slipped the bow fast off the piling, pulled the line aboard and coiled it down.

The forward edge of the sail came taut and Cato and Sam sweated the last bit of slackness out and belayed and Joshua hauled the canvas out by the sheet. The breeze caught it and the bow of the sloop swung away from the dock and out into the river.

James stamped aft, swung the tiller out to starboard. Joshua jogged after him and slipped the stern fast off the piling. A minute later the sloop was on her way downriver, leaving Lucy behind as she stood on the dock, watching.

Damned foolish, foolish woman. But in fact James was spooked too, by her fear, so clearly genuine.

A minute later and they were passing down the larboard side of the Elizabeth Galley. Through the quarter gallery windows James caught a glimpse of Marlowe, leaning back in his chair, feet up on the mahogany table. The table that cost more than half a year’s worth of the wages that Marlowe paid one of the black men that worked for him.

But James could no longer be angry with Marlowe. The anger at his enslavement was still there, of course, the knife edge of rage, fast and lethal, but it was no longer poised to strike.

Marlowe’s releasing him from bondage had not released him from the anger as well. James had not believed Marlowe’s words about freeing his people and paying them. He had not been impressed when Marlowe spoke to them in the patois of the African coast.

It had not occurred to the others that Marlowe might have learned that language as a slaver himself, but it had occurred to James.

His rage had not been quelled by Marlowe’s keeping his promise, or Marlowe’s making James majordomo of the household. A white man’s trick to exact the best labor from the best people. And it had worked.

It was the Northumberland that had done it at last. Pushing James to the challenge of learning seamanship, setting him aboard a ship, a cursed ship. Giving him responsibility. Giving him weapons and asking him to fight aboard the guardship, side by side with white men. It was treating him like a man that had done it at last.

He understood Marlowe now, knew the real reason that Marlowe had freed his people. Knew that Marlowe had fought side by side with black men during his days as a pirate, that most egalitarian of communities. The only rich white man in the tidewater to ever have called a black man an equal.

James loved him more because of his history, his motives. Marlowe freed his people for pragmatic reasons, not for some lofty intellectual ideal such as Bickerstaff might espouse. Now James wanted nothing more in life than to plunge into battle again, at Marlowe’s side.

The Northumberland was gathering way, carried by the tide and pulled by the breeze in the jib. At the base of the mast the crew tossed off peak and throat halyards and made ready to raise the big mainsail.

Five minutes later the mainsail was set and drawing, the halyards faked out on deck for running, and the sloop settled down for the short, pleasant trip downriver. The Elizabeth Galley and the bright spot of color that was Lucy, standing on the dock watching them, and what was left of Jamestown fell astern, and then were lost from sight as the Northumberland swung round Hog Island and James turned her more southerly for the reach downriver to Hampton Roads.

It was there, just below Hog Island, that the Plymouth Prize had fought to the death with the pirate LeRois. The governor had unknowingly set a thief to catch a thief when he had sent Marlowe after that murderer and sea robber.

The charred remains of the two ships were still visible at low tide. James had got to know them well during the past months as he oversaw the salvage of the cannons from the wreck.