James Nelson: The Blackbirder

It was silent, save for men gasping for breath or moaning in agony.

There was a dead man at the tip of King James’s knife. A white man, a ship’s captain. James had killed him.

And in this way he had ended his own life as well.

The battle had lasted no more than a minute.

James let the body of the captain slip from his knife. It stared up, wide-eyed, from the deck. It seemed surprised. James could not imagine why.

Aft, two of the slaver’s crew were dead, another cut badly across the shoulder. Armed though they were, those exhausted, half-crazed slavers had been no match for the Northumberland’s men.

The three living men of the blackbirder’s crew sat on the deck, hands up in surrender. One was weeping, sobbing, tears running down his stubbled cheeks. Around them, James’s men held them at bay with their own weapons.

They thought they were finally safe, James reflected. Thought they had come through it at last, reached the safe embrace of the Chesapeake, and then this. Death at the hands of black men.

James took a breath. The anger was gone, it had dissipated with that one cathartic thrust. But now he had to think, because everything that he had come to know and depend upon was over, for him, for his men, for every person aboard that tortured blackbirder.

“What the hell have we done? What the hell have we done? They’ll fucking hang us for this.” Retching. It was Sam, puking with abandon. He was smeared with blood, his coat and shirt torn in the melee.

Under it all, under the noise of the sobs and the retching and the shouting, was the sound from the hold; clanking, screaming, moaning.

And despite those many layers of noise whirling through his head, James could see the essential truth of Sam’s words.

They would fucking hang them for this.

The black men; himself, Cato, Joshua, the others-all would be lucky even to live that long. No jail would hold them until a trial. They would be dragged from their cells and beaten to death. A warning.

God, he had to think.

“James…” Cato now, the tone of that one word pleading.

“Get them people up from below. Break open them hatches, get them people on deck.”

It was something to do. Forward motion, the next step, and it gave James a moment to think while the others were occupied, allowed him to think without a dozen eyes boring into him, as if trying to peer through his skin and find an answer that they thought must be there.

“James…” It was Sam now, his eyes wild with panic. “I don’t blame you for what you done, don’t blame you, but this ain’t my fight, you see? I didn’t want no part of this…”

“Go. It ain’t your fight, so just go. Take them”-James nodded toward the three surviving members of the slaver’s crew-“take them aboard the sloop and go.”

“Take the sloop? But how…? What about you?”

“We ain’t going back. Not to Virginia. Nowhere in America.”

“You’re going to sail this blackbirder? She’s near a wreck, food and water’s probably gone…”

“It don’t matter. We gots no choice. Whatever condition she in, we gots to go.” He had not decided that so much as understood it. They could never go back, not if they wished to live to week’s end.

Lucy. Dear God, had she seen this coming? Some premonition? He had heard of women having such things. He had called her foolish. Now he might never see her again.

And then William was at his side too, tugging on his shirt, his dark eyes wide. “I don’t want no part of this neither. I ain’t gonna hang for this.”

“You got no choice, boy.”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with killing them people,” William protested, which might have been true. James had not seen the fight. “I don’t want no part of this.”

“It don’t matter,” James said. “They’ll hang you just for being here, and you a black man. Don’t you see that?”

“I ain’t staying.”

James looked at him for a long moment. The kindest thing he could do would be to chain William to the deck, make him come. But he had no reason to think that the fate of the men on the ship would be any better than what waited for William back home.

“All right. Go with Sam.” James turned from William and addressed the former deep-water sailor. “Tell Marlowe what happened. Tell him the truth. Gonna be a lot of stories told, but I want Marlowe to know the truth.” That was important.

Sam nodded and he and James looked at each other, neither man sure of what to say.

“God speed you, King James,” Sam said at last.

“And you.”

Then Sam turned to the white men at his feet and James turned his attention forward and both understood that that had been their last meeting on earth. James could think of no other words, not with the raging confusion, the terror, and the uncertainty in him.

He had not felt such things for twenty years, not since the last time he had walked the deck of a slaver, iron manacles on his wrists and ankles.

King James left Sam to his business and walked forward to where Joshua and Cato and the others were using belaying pins to knock out the wedges that were holding the tarpaulins over the main-hatch gratings. Cato’s hands were trembling and he fumbled the pin, dropped it to the deck, swore, snatched it up again.

This was his moment to think, but nothing would come, no solid ideas, only swirling impressions and overwhelming desperation, and he was drawn instead to whatever horror lay beneath the heavy canvas.

“Here,” Cato said, “grab hold there.” Joshua grabbed on to the larboard corner of the tarpaulin as Cato grabbed the starboard. From below the cloth the sounds from the hold were muffled but loud, a vast array of voices in tones of anger and fear and sorrow to the point of abandon. James recognized the cadences of African languages, but he could not make out any of the words.

Now and again the sound was punctuated by a wailing, or a screaming or what sounded like a loud entreaty to God. The people in the hold would have heard the anchor cable running out, would be able to sense that the ship was no longer under way. They would know something was about to happen, and their experience would tell them that any change meant some fresh misery.

Cato and Joshua looked at each other, apprehensive. But the thing had to be done.

“Go,” James called, and the two men walked forward, peeling the tarpaulin back off the hatch.

The stink rolled up over the deck and enveloped them, and James was staggered to realize that what they had smelled before had been but a watered-down taste of what the hold contained. It was more than just the smell of bodies and waste. It was festering wounds, rotting human flesh. Death and decay in that closed, hot, sweltering hold.

“Oh, dear God!” Quash exclaimed. Good Boy retched and vomited on the deck. James clapped his hand over his mouth, took shallow breaths, tried to keep himself from vomiting as well. Joshua and Cato dropped the tarpaulin, staggered away.

The cacophony from the hold rose in pitch. Pleading, wailing, and still James could understand no word of what they said. Slavers, he knew, purposely mixed people from distant tribes in their ships so that they would not be able to communicate, to organize and plan. What if none of these spoke Malinke? How would he talk with them? And did he himself remember enough Malinke? It had been more than two decades since he had used that tongue with any frequency.

Dark fingers reached up through the holes in the grating, like tiny arms reaching out, beckoning help. They had to get those people out, but now James’s men were too revolted and too terrified to approach that black hole.

They were saved the trouble. From below a voice cut across the wild jumble of sound, giving an order in some language foreign to James, and with an organized effort the fingers grabbed ahold of the grating and pushed it aside.