Pete Hamill - Forever

He explained what an indentured servant was (for Cormac had never heard the words), and how these hungry Irish people, listening to the siren call of America, signed on. They pledged five to seven years of their lives, without pay, without schools, five years of labor for English planters in America, in exchange for their passage. They would be free of heartbreaking Ireland and the terrible hunger. The English were, of course, happy to see them go, particularly the Presbyterians, who were gifted at making trouble. In America, they’d work in the earthly paradise, and when the passage was worked off, they’d be free to live their lives.

“But except for knowing they’ll someday be free, they’re no different from the poor, bloody Africans. They’re owned, lad. D’ye understand me? Other men own them. And in America, the men who own them, who have them under contract, those men sell them, just the way they sell the Africans. Although on this ship, the Africans are in even worse shape than the Irish.”

“What Africans?”

“Come.”

With the fiddle playing behind them, and the Irish joining in their sad, hopeful song about Tir-na-Nog, Mr. Partridge moved down still another ladder, with Cormac behind him, descending into the bottom level of the ship. He told Cormac to mind his head, since the space was cramped, only four feet of room. In the lantern light Cormac saw the grillwork of a jail and beyond the timbered grille, the glistening forms of men. Black as coal. Black as midnight. Eyes stared at him and at Mr. Partridge. Eyes yellow in the light. Eyes sullen. Eyes angry. Mr. Partridge raised the lantern, said a polite hello (to no reply), and told Cormac that there were thirteen men in this fetid place, with its smell of swamp (as Cormac remembered the rotting Irish corpses in the river that made Thunder change his course). And there was one woman, he added (citing the captain himself as his authority), a woman who claimed to be a princess. In the far corner of this small prison, there were lumpy shapes covered with rough blankets. Cormac thought: One of them must be the woman.

“It’s a dirty business,” Mr. Partridge said. “But it’s England’s favorite business because it’s so easy. They buy Africans for three pounds from the Arab traders and sell them in New York for fifty pounds. So you’re looking at, what? Seven hundred pounds’ worth of living, breathing merchandise, lad.”

The pieces of living merchandise looked at Cormac, breathing lightly but saying nothing, asking nothing, expressing nothing except some muted, wordless, seething anger. In his mind, Cormac saw the shop on the Belfast quays, the shop of the slave trading company, and the earl’s face, and wondered if these human beings could be his property.

“Let’s get some air, lad,” Mr. Partridge said in a desperate way, holding a handkerchief to his nose.

They retraced their steps to the main deck. A clean wind was blowing, filling the sails, and the swishing sound of the ship was louder as it cleaved through the Atlantic waters. But the clean wind couldn’t scour from Cormac’s mind the images of the Africans and the Irish, jammed on their separate levels below his feet. The words of his father’s letter rose in him: I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man. …

The captain’s name was James Thompson. Tall, with a gimpy right leg. Face fleshy, his long nose veined from weather or whiskey or both, his mouth held in a tight slash. He had kind eyes, brown and liquid. The captain found time to explain his charts and instruments to Cormac, and how the prevailing Atlantic winds blew from west to east. All ships bound for America in these cold months were forced to sail south into warmer waters, where their sails could take the winds at an angle. Even this route had its perils. On the ninth day out, when they were hit by a roaring, terrifying two-day gale, Captain Thompson was in full command, sharing the deck with his sailors. When they ran into the region of windless calm called the Doldrums, he wore a worried look and tried to be just in doling out the shrinking rations. As the Irish began to die, he was dignified as he presided over their burials in the ocean sea.

The old died first, and then some taut, frail women, and at least six infants. Cormac soon stopped counting. He nursed Mr. Partridge through the delirium of fever, and each day took his uneaten food and a jug of water to the Africans on the bottom deck. They never said thanks. They never spoke at all. On one of those furtive trips, while a fiddle played from the deck above his head, he saw at last in the light of his lantern the face of the African princess, who, he later learned, was named Tomora. She had gleaming ebony skin, black wiry hair, high cheekbones, full lips. She glanced at him with contempt and then vanished behind a blanket that hung from the low ceiling like a wall.

That night, another African stepped forward: tall, bare-waisted, with powerful shoulders and a hard body. Cormac pushed a loaf of bread through the grillwork that formed their jail. The African took it, his eyes wary.

Cormac pointed at himself and said his true name: Cormac . Then: Cor-mac . Then more slowly. Cor. Mac. The African gazed at him for a long moment and then shifted his eyes to the bread, then back to Cormac. His eyes glittered with lantern light as he passed the bread behind him. The woman said something else. The African scrutinized Cormac’s face and eyes. Then he nodded.

“Cor-mac,” he said.

The young white man smiled and nodded yes.

The African pointed at his own chest.

“Kon-go,” he said.

“Hello, Kon-go.”

“Hel-lo, Cor-mac,” the African said without smiling.

Cormac tossed him a small salute and went back to the ladder leading to the sky.

One night during the second smothering week of the calm, Cormac awoke to a long, deep scream. Mr. Partridge tumbled in the dark to the floor as Cormac jerked open the door. There was the minister, Andrew Clifford, bent to the side in agony, and beyond him in the cabin was his wife. She was hanging from a beam, a scarf knotted tightly around her broken neck. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. Clifford sobbed and lifted her at the thighs, as if to ease her out of the noose, sobbing, “God forgive me, God forgive me, oh my Martha. God forgive me.”

Mr. Blifil arrived, officious and annoyed, bringing a lantern, making marks in a book, and then, with Martha Clifford laid out upon a cot, her neck dark purple, the captain appeared in the cabin door. His face was drained, his eyes red from too many days struggling with the sea and the vanished wind. He gazed at Martha Clifford, shook his head sadly, whispered some condolence to her husband, and went back to commanding his immobilized ship.

Four hours later, in the first light of morning, Martha Clifford was sewn into a canvas shroud and buried at sea. At the edge of the small crowd, Mr. Clark whispered to Cormac about the minister’s wife. She and her husband had lost all four of their children during the famine in Armagh (or so the minister had told him). She was desolated by the loss, mute for weeks, and her husband believed that in America they could begin all over again, in a land blessed by God and free from famine, free from memory. She came with him reluctantly, wanting to remain in Ireland near the bodies of her children. Clifford forced her to leave. Each night on the Fury, in turbulent seas or prolonged calm, she called for her children, as if demanding the reunion of death. The captain, on his solitary midnight watches, heard her more clearly than Cormac or Mr. Partridge. She had chosen to hang herself while her husband was far forward, ministering to feverish sailors.