Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (28 page)

“Her job too.” Frank scratched the back of his neck.

“She wants me in the office tomorrow,” said Maggie.

“It’s pretty discouraging,” said Frank. He continued. “I guess I came down here for all the wrong reasons.”

“Your university sent you. You didn’t have any choice.”

“I had a choice but wasn’t thinking about choices at the time.”

“You had no way of knowing it would be like this. How could you have known that he would not keep the project open if you actually found something? Everyone thought there was nothing here. No one considered what to do if we actually found something.”

Frank shook his head. “With other jobs it was always assumed that the property owner and everyone else would be so excited that they would grant extensions, go out of their way to get more information, help us out. The projects are usually so weak in historic value that no one complains when we close up the sites. Your Confederate site excited people. The media made weak historical value into a political problem. We have a location far more important but we can’t get any excitement.”

“Jake thought that you were like him.”

Frank looked out into the darkness. “He even told me I was like him. I guess I used to think that was a compliment. He says that if I was a real scholar he would never have brought me down here. What bothers me is that he had that original impression of me.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Maggie.

“How do you stop a bulldozer?” asked the Pastor.

“You could make this work, Frank. When I was your student I thought you could accomplish anything. I haven’t lost that faith in you.”

He looked at Maggie. “Since I’ve been down here, I’ve thought a lot about those early teaching days, about who I was.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Like in the war, there’s a time to lock and load.”

The Pastor and Maggie looked at him.

“We’ve got to become winners,” said Frank.

Maggie turned on the floodlights and for a while the Pastor and Frank worked beside each other at Q. The skeletons were more exposed. Frank was working on the thigh area of the adult figure. The Pastor was scraping soil from the lower part of the leg of the child’s skeleton.

“Strange there’s nothing about them that shows why they were here. Usually there’s jewelry or some kind of possessions. These people had no possessions buried with them.”

“There’s the fact of the fire that burned the bones. Maybe that took away any of the possessions. Burned them up,” said the Pastor. “Hey, here’s something,” he said as he worked at the ankle. Frank moved over to where the Pastor was. He scraped at the bone while the Pastor watched.

“What is it?”

“Looks like rust,” said Frank, his face close to the soil.

The object took form among the bits of the mud and clay of its home. As Frank worked he followed trails of the artifact which led out from the initial point. The rust led in a brown path towards the leg of other skeleton. “It seems to be attached to the ankle area.”

Then Frank looked at the Pastor. “I know why there were no possessions.”

“What?” said Maggie.

“This is part of a leg iron. See, Pastor, this is where the hasp was attached. I think this is one of the old type padlocks. See the bag shape. That kind of lock shape means they are very old. They used these locks long before the padlocks that we have today.”

Frank stood and motioned to Maggie to come over. He looked at the Pastor. “Chains on a child. These poor people were slaves.”

“Children were very valuable in the slave trade,” said Maggie. “They had less disease than the adults so they were a better investment for the traders.”

Frank continued, “These chains indicate that the child here was burned to death with no chance of escaping.” Frank shifted his position squatting and ran his hands with care over the earth in front of him.

“If these two skeletons were slaves, I expect that there are a lot of slave skeletons in here, probably a lot more children too.”

The Pastor touched the aggregate also with a tender touch, softly with his fingers, carefully wiping back the trickle of ground water. “So this was a slave graveyard. The legend is true. “

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“I wish I hadn’t found this,” said the Pastor.

Maggie stood up. “This graveyard legend, Pastor. It could have been a story made up by the surviving local slaves, maybe the ones who were forced to bury the wreckage. The legend was a way to keep the story alive, a way that the white overseers could not suppress.”

“The murderers would not want to let anyone live who witnessed anything. Any witness would have to be very careful the rest of his or her life,” said the Pastor.

“It could have been an accident,” said Frank, as usual speaking as a scientist, trying to consider all sides of the issue. “We still have no reason to believe it was murder.”

Maggie said, her emotion showing in her tone, “An accident maybe but it was an accident where no one was saved. In those days if there was a shipboard catastrophe, lots of times they saved the Europeans, put them on the lifeboats and left the slaves on the ship. There are lots of stories of that kind of thing happening.”

“That giant and his associates in the other end of the ship were burned to death too,” mused Frank.

“More likely the slaves were killed because the others were killed,” said the Pastor. “Keep in mind they were considered the same as livestock. There may have been no thought about whether the slaves would die.”

“The slaves had great value,” said Frank.

“That just means the murder of the others was significant, something that had to be hidden or covered up by fire even with the great loss of the slave value,” continued the Pastor.

“This explains old Mr. Johnson’s story about Adam and Eve,” said Maggie, who was sitting on the ground. Her hands were around her knees. She stared at the leg iron.

“How’s that?” said the Pastor.

“Adam and Eve were old slave names. When the traders loaded the ships over in Africa they would name the first male and the first female brought on board as Adam and as Eve,” said Maggie.

“Maggie, you must have been interested in black history to know all this,” said the Pastor.

“No,” said Maggie. “I was actually studying European history. My mother told me of her heritage, of her family’s generations in very early England. In college I was doing research to write a paper on the English tribes.”

“How did you get into slavery?” said Frank.

“In the early days the Romans took the English tribal captives back to Rome as slaves. The story of slavery began to fascinate me. I changed the paper and I read about all the civilizations that practiced slavery. I read the diaries of the captains in the African slave trade, some of them dating to the Seventeenth Century. That’s how I found out about the Adam and Eve names. I just didn’t think of it when the Pastor told that story. That old preacher must have heard some earlier story about this place,” said Maggie.

“This wretched child here,” said the Pastor. He looked at the fragile yellowed bones and tenderly tried to wipe them clean of the muck. “Young, too young to know anything, maybe eight or nine years old. Terrified.”

“Let me tell you what I remember from the diary descriptions,” said Maggie. “Of course I can only guess at the ending, when the ship got up here in this creek.” Her eyes were closed as she slowly spoke.

“The children had to surrender with their families to some other African, perhaps a debt collector or a conquering warrior from an enemy tribe. Then they were separated from parents and marched with others in tropical woodlands for miles and miles. Their little legs would be exhausted when they would reach a gathering point, a riverbank, maybe something like this river here, fairly narrow, muddy, with long dugout canoes drawn up on the shoreline. Iron rings were put on the children’s ankles and they were loaded into these boats, pushed down into the bowels of the canoes until there were many packed inside. The canoes were guided out into the river by expert boatmen, and they were taken down river to another place. The children would cry and cry but there were no parents to hear them and after a while they would stop crying and begin to think about survival. One of the children would become a leader, the strongest child, and would whisper in the village language about plans of escape. The thought of escape would keep the children warm for a while in the chill.

“The iron bites into the flesh of their ankles and the pain becomes intense. They scream or moan, bodies shaking with cold and shock in the night. Their skin has no cover. They are stripped of even the simple loincloth they had worn, and all their body hair shaved so no one can tell their ages and so each can bring a higher price. The iron pulls constantly against their skin with each touch causing more pain.

“Another move and they reach the trading factory at the port on the Guinea coast and are put inside a large room that houses many other Africans of many different tribes. The darkness is overpowering except there is one small window where they take turns looking out. There they can see the beautiful white beach and the ocean and the low black ship with the white men working on its deck setting up a great canvas cover for when they will be loaded and set out on the deck of the ship in the hot sun. Again there are those who would escape this wretchedness and they listen to the various ideas and they hope and pray to probably Allah because many were Muslim or maybe a woodland god that they had been taught from their tribe. Each hopes that some of these new leaders will have the power to fight the white men who are called English.

“Then the time comes and each is led in chains outside to stand in the sun and be prepared for the sale. Each body is rubbed all over with palm oil so it will shine. Perhaps each is given brandy so he or she will smile with a drugged smile and indicate that he or she has a good temperament. The slave trader king who is offering the slaves to the English walks around with his own Africans and with the English themselves. These people probe each body for illness and weakness, with a total disregard for dignity, studying penises, vaginas and rectums for disease, mouths and gums for rot and strength. They haggle over a price for each slave, the price denoted in cowrie shells, these shells brought here from far way because the African slave traders prefer them for trade. These shells are carefully counted out and then a child becomes the property of the English. The same selling sequence happens with each of the others, the other boys and girls, the young men and women, the older men and women, each manacled into their human destiny. They know that those who are not sold are discarded in this process. There is no place, no food for them here on the coast, no one will return them to their village, and they are them taken away sometimes to be killed for sacrifice to the African slave trader’s gods.

“Then they are taken together to a spot on the beach near a great fire and there strong men hold each child while the shoulder is branded with the first letter of the ship’s name, a mark which the children do not understand but which they think means that they will be eaten sooner than the others. They fear that they will soon be eaten by the white men on the ship.

“They see and hear the great waves that crash on the beach. They watch as the African king’s men try to launch their small canoes through the breakers, watch as the cargoes of humans going out to the ship scream their way through the terrifying water and they see some slaves fall into the water and drown carried down by their chains. They are packed again into a small boat and they pray to that god they had not seen, they hope and they cling to each other, the grasp futile as all are slippery with the palm oil.

“They go through the waves and then are being propelled towards the great black ship. They see the fins circling the small canoes, the sharks who have feasted on others who capsized, and they shrink back into the small boat, knowing their naked black skin can be no protection against the sharp teeth of that shark.

“They are prodded by the men in the canoe to grasp the wooden steps on the side of the great black ship, the barnacles on the hull rising and sinking in the water beside the small canoe, their sharp edges threatening to tear skin to pieces, the children trying to climb with the edges slicing their bare feet. Then they are on the deck of the great ship, down behind the great walls of wood that hide the water, the great guns on both sides of them, the canvas stretched overhead protecting from the sun and the sailors standing around watching. They want their parents. They hear the word Maryland. The word strikes fear and they cannot control themselves and urinate on the deck. They are whipped by a sailor but in such a way that it hurts but does not leave a mark. They soon learn Maryland is where they are going, where, the children think, they will be eaten at some great sacrifice or feast.

“Some slaves began breaking free and jumping overboard. A teenage girl quickly and soundlessly cuts her foot off below her ankle on a sharp piece of deck hardware, so she can remove the chains and drag the remains of her bleeding body up the black wall of wood of the slave ship and with her last strength throw herself over the side into the water and into the mouths of the waiting sharks below.”

“They live on the ship for a few days as the other slaves were brought aboard. Then one morning the sailors climb into the great masts and huge white pieces of cloth are dropped down and soon fill with wind. The ship is underway, they see the clouds move above them but they do not see the vision of their homeland falling behind because they cannot see over the great walls of the ship. Then they are forced down wooden steps into the inside of the ship where they are placed in a small spot with others massed on all sides of them. Some are very sick and on all sides are other boys who were crying. There is only a smell of vomit and excrement, the stench of fear and disease, and the room is so dark that none can see. The movement of the ship makes them sick too.

“In time they are permitted on deck in groups to eat. The food is what like home but at first they are too sick and afraid to eat. After a few days they begin to eat. They are given a wooden spoon to eat with. While the children are eating the sailors try to clean the hovel below decks but they never get all the filth and it reeks of death. Each day more dead persons are thrown to the always waiting sharks off the stern of the ship, the sharks literally following the ship across the ocean from Africa.”