James Nelson - The Blackbirder

A blackbirder: slave ship. And the smell, that of human beings packed in and battened down. Piss and shit. Blood. Pleading, desperate fear. The unknown. Worse, far worse than quiet death.

Not for twenty years had James smelled that stink, but with one breath it all came back to him, and all the rage he had locked away in some small cage of his soul came tearing free again.

The Northumberland was charging down on the slave ship, making right for her bows, and if something was not done immediately she would smash headlong into her.

Someone was standing on the slaver’s bows, waving. A warning or a plea, James could not tell.

He pulled his eyes from the battered vessel, pushed Cato from the tiller, grabbed it, swung it a bit to larboard. The sloop turned until she was on a heading to run down the blackbirder’s leeward side. The wind came over the sloop’s transom, the mainsail by the lee, fluttering, the boom right on the edge of sweeping across the deck in a great destructive arc, but James did not care.

They passed under the blackbirder’s jibboom, just missed fouling the sloop’s shrouds on the spar, and passed down the ship’s side. Now, to leeward of the vessel, the smell enveloped them entirely, like a fog, so strong it seemed they should be able to see it. And from the hold- muffled and quiet-the screams, the cries, the rattling chains.

James pushed the tiller harder over, swinging the sloop away from the slaver.

“Damn it, James, be careful, you’ll jibe the damned…,” Sam started, got no further.

“Shut it! Shut your gob!”

James felt a wild anger, an anger that did not care what it destroyed, that tried to cause some destruction, some injury, if just for the release.

And then, just as the big mainsail was ready to jibe and tear the sloop’s rigging apart, he swung the tiller back the other way. The sloop described a great arc, swinging back toward the slave ship, turning up into the wind, the sails flogging. She came to a stop at the base of the slaver’s boarding steps.

James pushed his way through his gawking men to the bulwark that bumped against the high-sided blackbirder. A white face with equal measures of soot black and filth brown looked down at him, a man standing at the slave ship’s gangway. Clothes torn, hair wild, streaks of blood on his filthy shirt. Pistol in his belt. The face of a man who could not recall his last rest. But more defiant for it.

James stopped, looked up. The man looked down. Then the man said, “Where is the captain of this sloop?”

“I am the captain.”

They held each other, stare for stare. James could see the narrowing eyes, could hear the debate in the man’s head.

A nigger? A nigger coming to our aid?

“Cast off,” the white man said. “Leave our ship. It is no concern of yours.”

Nigger.

And then another man was there, just as haggard, but with the defiance beaten out of him, and the other man said, “For the love of God, Captain, let them aboard if they can be of some help.”

The captain turned, shoved the man with more force than James would have thought he had in him, screamed, “Shut your mouth!” and James was on the boarding steps, scurrying up, Cato and Joshua and Sam right behind him.

He stepped through the gangway onto the deck, met the captain’s loathing with hatred of his own, looked around at the destruction.

Lines lay strewn about the deck, great tangles of rigging draping off the pinrails and lying in heaps in the scuppers. One of the small cannon amidships, aiming down into the hold. Smashed bits of grating, smashed bits of rail, smashed barrels, bottles, crates of cabin stores torn open, their contents scattered around.

The doors to the binnacle box were half torn off their hinges, hanging open, swaying with the rocking of the ship. There was a wide black scorched circle on the deck where someone had apparently built a fire, an inconceivable thing on a wooden ship.

Black patches on the deck, swirled into bizarre patterns, marking those places where people had thrashed and bled their lives away. Chains. Netting full of stone, bent to fathoms of rope, ready to carry the bodies, living or dead, to the ocean floor.

James’s hands were trembling. A film of sweat covered his body. He could smell its unhealthy odor, even over the stink of the slaver. His jaw ached from the pressure with which he clenched his teeth together.

James turned slowly to the slaver’s captain and the five white sailors who stood behind him. At the gangway stood Cato, Joshua and Sam, William, Good Boy, and Quash.

“What happened?”

One of the sailors replied, addressing his words to James. “We was took by pirates. They used us horrid, for days. Killed half our men. Took two dozen of our nig…Negroes, and before they left, set the rest loose. Stood off in their boats, watched us fighting to…to get them down below again.”

James breathed, loud, panting, trying to get control. He could see it before him, like a play, the desperate blacks pouring out of the hold, not knowing what to do because they did not understand enough to form a plan, just wanting to be free of the hold.

And then on deck meeting guns, cutlasses, cannon. The cannon blast down through the hatch, canister shot tearing men, women, children apart in the darkness, the dead and wounded left below. Too dangerous to open the hatches. Wounded on deck thrown overboard. Retribution taken, a lesson for those listening below, and then over the side.

The trembling had turned into shaking, King James’s arms and hands vibrating like a luffing sail. A keening sound formed in his throat. James realized that he had no control over himself, like a sleepwalker, some part of his mind was in control but he had no control over it, some dark part that he did not know was there.

He heard Sam saying, “James, James, get ahold of yourself, this here is for the Court of Admiralty…”

He met the captain’s eyes, saw no sorrow, no remorse, only malevolence there.

“Get off my ship, nigger.”

James stepped across the deck, moving on the captain. “Nigger?”

“I said get off my ship!” the captain shouted, and as James advanced he jerked the pistol from his belt, pulled back the lock with his palm.

James’s hand fell on the handle of his sheath knife and before he could think, the steel was clear of the sheath and he was advancing

into the barrel of the captain’s gun.

“Nigger?”

“Draw a blade on me? You’ll hang for this, you black bastard!”

They were a yard apart. Two men motivated by hatred alone, neither able to think beyond the moment.

The captain raised the gun higher, the round hole at James’s head. James took a great stride, grabbed the barrel, twisted it. The gun went off, the bullet tore through James’s shirt, thudded into the deck, and the knife shot forward and plunged hilt deep into the man’s chest.

Then, screams, shouts of rage. The white men behind their captain surged forward. James felt hands grab him, a fist strike the back of his head, but he could not take his eyes from the haughty captain’s face, the wide eyes, the blood erupting from his mouth.

A cutlass flashed over him and James gritted his teeth and waited for the deathblow but then his men were there, the crew of the Northumberland, surging into the slaver’s crew with fists and sheath knives. They were all fighting-his men, the blackbirder’s men-slavers and former slaves locked into it. A gun went off, steel clashed on steel, someone screamed. A great brawl was taking place around him and James knew he had to stop it.

“Enough! Enough!” James shouted, and the volume and authority of his voice made the fighting men step back, weapons lowered, glaring at one another but not moving.