James Nelson - The Blackbirder

At last Sally spoke. “Now you see why I wants to help you.”

Billy nodded. “This is more than we had hoped for, much more.”

Even though he had no stake in this affair, Billy was quite involved. “But we need proof of some kind. Going back with rumors is not enough.”

Elizabeth nodded. This story would destroy Dunmore, completely discredit him, but Billy was right. If they were going to blackmail Dun-more into desisting, they had to convince him that they had some proof of his crime, or at least of his mixed blood.

The law could not help them. The thought of having Dunmore arrested in Virginia for a crime he might have committed five years before in Massachusetts was absurd. The letters, the warrants, crossing back and forth from London -they would all die of old age before anything was accomplished. Elizabeth did not even know what the law was, regarding the murder of a slave. Marlowe’s people needed help now.

But merely circulating old rumors would not do either. They needed something else.

“I don’t know as there is any proof,” Sally said. “I don’t even know if it’s true that Dunmore has Negro blood. But them papers in the chests in the Reverend Dunmore’s office, they’s all the records of everyone was born or baptized or died, going back to when Richard Dunmore was minister. I ain’t got my letters, so I don’t know what they says, but it might be written there.”

“Perhaps,” said Elizabeth, “but I don’t think Reverend Dunmore will be inclined to let us look through them.”

“Oh, Lizzy, Lizzy,” said Billy, smiling for the first time since Sally arrived. “I doubt that the good Reverend sleeps in his office. And I will wager, that if it will help destroy that murdering bastard Frederick Dunmore, Sally here might just be able to find a key that will get us in of a late hour. Am I right, Sally?”

Sally looked at Billy, then at Elizabeth, then she nodded her head.

They made their way back down the trail in the dark, stumbling, cursing, following James. Twice he heard one of them fall, swear, get to his feet again. They gasped in surprise when some animal made a sound not so far off.

These men of his, Cato and Joshua, these natives of Virginia, could belay, coil, and hang a line in complete darkness, could lay out on a yard and stow sail with their eyes closed, could tuck an eye splice in under a minute. Good Boy could wield hammer and saw, and Quash could pound raw iron into whatever he wished, but they were not accustomed to this sort of thing, making their way through the forest in the dark.

James was not so accustomed to it either. He had spent most of his adult life as a field hand, working tobacco crops, and more recently as a sailor. It had been a long time since he had had to navigate the African forest in the dark. But the memories were embedded deep in him, in his head and his legs and his feet and his eyes, and they stirred now and awoke and allowed him to make his way almost as if his life among the Malinke had never been interrupted.

It took them two hours to arrive back at the beach, stopping every ten minutes or so, standing silent and listening, straining to hear any sounds of pursuit. But there were none, and that was proof to James that Madshaka thought he and his men were among those unhappy people trapped once more in a slaver’s prison.

“James?” Cato’s voice. Uncertain. James considered how shocked the young men must be by the rapidly spinning events.

“Yes?”

“What was Madshaka about? Locking them people up?”

“He going to sell them again.”

“Sell them? You mean, sell them as slaves? After all that?”

“That’s what I mean.”

There was silence after that, and James listened to the sounds of the night, but there were none that might indicate men coming after them. Then Quash spoke.

“But Madshaka, he was a slave himself. He was sold out of that very factory, he say so. Why he selling his own people?”

“He’s not.” These men-boys, really-were children of the New World. They did not understand the ways of ancient Africa. “Madshaka, he’s Kru. He kept the Kru with him. The rest-the Ibo, the Aja, the Bariba, all of them-them he lock up.”

James listened for a moment more, then continued. “Madshaka knows that factory too good to have just been a slave there. I think he was slaver. I think the white people betrayed him, sold him, and now he take his revenge.”

More silence as the others digested this. “Damn me,” one of them said. Joshua. Then Quash said, “Now what we do?”

“Go back to the ship. Get her under way,” James said, and it was not a suggestion but a statement.

In the dim light from the stars that filtered through the trees, he could just make out the others’ faces, and he could see there was relief there. They were glad that James was in charge again, making decisions, leading them. They were relieved that the James they knew was back.

They continued on down the trail until at last it opened onto the wide beach, a great stretch of white sand, dull gray in the starlight, that ran off east and west as far as they could see. The surf made a great thunderous roar, with the white edges of the breaking waves foaming high above the level of the sand, then crashing down and racing far up onto the shore.

The surf made James uncomfortable and it gave him confidence, all at once. It overpowered all other sound, made it impossible for them to hear anyone approaching, which was not to his liking. But on the other hand it was the ocean, his element, not Madshaka’s, and it gave him an edge, despite Madshaka’s overwhelming numbers and local knowledge.

But they would not get to sea that night, would not get further than the beach. As soon as they stepped from the trees he knew it. The wind was blowing ten knots and steady, right off the water. It was churning up the surf, making it more dangerous than ever to negotiate. And even if they made it through, there was nothing they could do with the ship. The five of them and a shipload of women to whom they could not speak could not hope to claw the heavy merchantman off a lee shore. They would have to wait for the morning’s offshore breeze, which would blow them away from the land under whatever canvas they could set.

“We’ll go into the forest, sleep for the night,” James said. Even if they could manage to get through the surf and out to the ship, they would be trapped there if Madshaka and his men followed. “You men sleep; I’ll keep watch.”

The others made no protest as they stumbled into the dense woods and flattened out a place in the undergrowth where they could sleep. It was not terribly comfortable, not for men unaccustomed to sleeping on the ground, but they were so completely exhausted that ten minutes later they were asleep and snoring, and James at last was grateful for the overpowering volume of the surf.

He left them where they fell, and moved to the edge of the clearing and squatted by one of the great arching palms and watched: watched the head of the trail, watched the beach, watched the dim white water breaking on the tops of the waves, watched the stars wheel overhead. It was his homeland, his Africa. Why did he feel such a stranger there?

He shook off such selfish considerations and turned his mind instead to what he would do for the others. A prince had to put his people before himself and that he would do.

Those poor people whom Madshaka had fooled, and he was one. He could not suffer them to be sold into bondage again. He had thrown away his own life in freeing them from the blackbirder, his life and those of the men with him. He could not allow their sacrifice to be for naught, could not allow his own life to be worth nothing in the end. He could not let those people endure the Middle Passage once again.