The Slave Dancer (15 page)

We made our way to the deck. It was nearly dark. Waves washed placidly across the ship. I could see the shore now, the narrow beach, the line of palms. I glanced at the boy. He was gazing intently at the shore, his mouth slightly open, a look of eagerness on his face. Did he think we had come to his home? I caught his arm and shook my head. The light left his face. I wondered if we were looking at Cuba.

Then I nearly jumped out of my skin. A wild choking laugh erupted from what was left of the aft quarters. I heard the distinct sound of a bottle smashed against wood. Cawthorne was not dead.

The laugh ended abruptly. There was only the soft gathering rush of water, the hush beneath the dying wind. The boy gestured toward the shore. We slid down the deck, bracing our feet against what was left of the main rail. A piece of the boom lay close. I touched the boy, and pointed at the length of wood. We worked away at it, disentangling it from the sail that was wound around it. I could not estimate how far we were from the shore. But I knew we'd drown if we stayed on the ship.

I heard another shout. Cawthorne lay against the mizzenmast, the angle of the ship such that he was nearly horizontal. I thought he had seen us, but no. His gaze passed over us without recognition. Perhaps he could see nothing. I looked back at the water. I could only swim like a dog. It was the way I'd learned. I didn't know if it would carry me—pawing—all that way. And I didn't know if the boy could swim. But what choice was there?

We flung the piece of boom into the water and slid in after it. I lost sight of the boy almost at once. My lungs took in water. I sank. A hand touched mine. I rose sputtering. He was there, his head bobbing a few feet away. We managed to take hold of the wood, and kicking our feet, we made for the shore.

I turned my head once. I saw, against the cloud streaming sky now streaked with an earthen glow, the Captain, his hand clawing the air. The ship was sinking slowly from view. For an instant, I felt a twinge in my ear as though Cawthorne's teeth had closed upon it once again. I wondered if, with all the brandy I was sure he'd taken, he'd know the difference between breathing air and water.

I don't know how we reached the shore which had looked so close yet ever receded as we swam toward it. The darkness came down all at once like a thick black cloth. I don't remember when we lost the boom, how often we reached toward each other and found only the water, or how many waves broke over us and lifted us to terrifying heights.

How long it took us, I'll never know. But even now I can feel the urgency of our struggle, the hope that delivered me from the depths and brought me up to air again and again as though most of my true life had taken place in that stretch of sea.

The Old Man

When we awoke, it must have been in the first light of morning. The tranquil sea was turning from gray to a mild blue as the sun's pale rays spread out over the water.

I breathed in the land smells, earth and trees and the sharp salty aroma of sea wrack.

But chickens! I suspected my own hunger had made me imagine I smelled them. I lay still, grateful for the thin warmth of the sun. Something ran across my ankle. It tickled, and I sat up and saw a crab no bigger than my thumb. The boy, still dressed in the woman's undergarment, lay a few feet away. He was sniffing the air.

“Chickens?” I wondered aloud. The boy said a word in his own language and smiled. We got up, both of us brushing off patches of sand that had dried on us. He started to pull off the garment when something caught his attention in the long defile of palms above the beach. I looked. Behind the palms was the thick dark green of what appeared to be impenetrable underbrush. There was no wind at all, only a great stillness.

Chickens! It was no imagining. Out from the trees, bobbing its head as it clucked came a large yellow hen.
People,
I thought. My knees began to tremble. That feathered lump meant farm and man, and I was afraid.

I stood poised for flight, waiting for the chickens owner to make his appearance, armed with pistol and whip—God knows what else! The chicken scratched the sand. I grabbed the boy's arm and pointed down the beach. But he continued to stare at the creature as it advanced in our direction. Suddenly he grabbed up a stone, then looked at me inquiringly. How I wanted to nod
yes!
It was such a plump chicken! But I shook my head vigorously and waved at the trees. He took my thought and dropped the stone, then he hitched up the skirt of the undergarment and we started off down the beach. We had nearly gained the point, when a voice called out, “Stop!”

But we kept right on going until we were on the small neck of land and could see to the other side. I saw with dismay that there was no beach, only a line of steep-faced rocks covered with hair-like ferns. We stopped dead. There was no place to go except into the water. Dreading what I would see, I turned. To my astonishment, an elderly black man stood watching us from near the place where we had slept, and where I could still make out the faint outlines of our bodies in the sand. Beside him was his harbinger, the yellow hen, her head cocked. She grabbed up something, and I guessed it was the crab which had so recently ascended my ankle.

I looked at the boy. His face was radiant. But the glow was gone almost instantly. He must have realized that although the old man's clothes were ragged, they were those of white men.

The old man began to come toward us with slow steps. We went to meet him. I could not think what to say, how to explain the circumstances which had brought us to this shore. I wished the boy and I had landed on one of those uninhabited islands Purvis had told me about—out of the reach of others—for I found a bottomless distrust in my heart for anything that walked on two legs. It was the old man who broke the silence.

“Where you going? Where you come from?” He looked at me quickly, then away. I observed how carefully he began to study the black boy. Then, when I hadn't answered, not being able to find words, he said, “Well, master?”

“No!” I croaked. “I'm not his master.”

The old man reached out and took the boy's arm and turned him around. Then he pulled the woman's garment off him. He touched some old scars on the boy's back.

“Our ship sank in the storm,” I said. “We swam to shore.”

The old man nodded and released the boy. “Where are the others?” he asked.

“There was the crew,” I said. “They drowned.” I looked out at the sea. There was nothing.

Everything marched at dead measure. The sun's heat had grown stronger, and I was suddenly aware of my thirst.

“We haven't eaten for a long time,” I said. “We've had no water, either, and we don't know where we are.”

“You in Mississippi,” said the old man, looking at the boy. “He don't say nothing. Why is that?”

“He speaks his own language,” I replied, wondering if we would, at least, get something to drink. There must be food and drink there in the forest. The old man had come from
some
place. “But he's not learned our language yet,” I added.

“Our language …” echoed the old man.

“My name is Jessie Bollier,” I said desperately. The old man seemed to be weighing us, deciding …

“What's his name?” he asked.

I touched the black boy's hand. He tore his gaze away from the old man. I pointed to myself. “Jessie,” I said. Then I pointed to him. “Jessie?” he questioned.

“What's your name?” I asked the old man. He looked out at the water. He would not find a trace of
The Moonlight.
During the night, it must have been carried off whatever had held it up and was now resting on the bottom. He had not answered my question. I turned again to the boy, pointed at myself and repeated my name. Then I touched his shoulder. This time he said clearly, “Ras!”

I walked away from him. “Ras!” I called. “Jessie,” he answered.

The old man made up his mind. “You come with me now,” he said. He walked up toward the palms, grabbing up the chicken without changing his pace. It squawked with rage. We followed. There was nothing else we could do. He might give us something to drink.

I would not have imagined there was anything like a path in the forest, but there was, just a slight indentation wide enough for a foot. The old man kept looking back at the boy. He took special care to see we were not whipped by the close growing branches, holding them until we had passed. He led us for perhaps a quarter of a mile, then halted for no apparent reason and dropped the hen to the ground. She ran off into a thicket, clucking indignantly.

“She go where she pleases,” said the old man. “I spared her so far.”

Then with both hands, he grabbed up a great thatch of branches and thrust it aside. To my surprise, a large clearing was revealed. In the center was a small hut and a few yards of spaded earth and to one side, a pig pen, where a sow nursed a number of piglets while a giant pig grunted and rolled in the mud. A few chickens scratched in the dirt. The old man led us to a large cask nearly full of water. He handed a dipper full to Ras, then held the boy's hand and pressed it and said softly, “Slow, slow …”

Ras finished and held out the dipper to me. At the first taste of the dank cool water I forgot all else and drank steadily until the old man shook me and drew me away from the cask. “That's enough,” he said.

He took us into his hut. The earth floor was hard and smooth. I saw a crude hearth with a few blackened pots and utensils grouped around it. A tree trunk served as a table. On the floor, there was a bed of straw and leaves.

I sank to the floor, resting my back against the wall. Ras remained standing, watching the old man set out food for us on the tree-trunk table.

On land at last, in a silence broken only by insects chirring, warmed by the damp breathless heat of the forest around us, resting on a surface that remained steady, about to assuage my hunger, I couldn't understand the heaviness that weighed me down, that made it so difficult to breathe. I wanted—and this made me wonder if I'd really lost my wits—to be dropped in the mud with the pig outside, to roll in the wet dirt, to bury myself in it. I wanted to cry.

How soon before the bodies of the crew would be washed up on the sand? Would I look once more at Ben Stout's face drying out in the sun? I felt again the violent heaving water through which Ras and I had struggled to the shore. How had I done it with my dog's pawing? Suddenly, I heard an inner voice crying out “Oh, swim!” as it had whenever I'd thought of my father sinking among the dead drowned trees in the Mississippi River. I wondered if it was that plea that had served me so well at last.

A few days later, when Ras and I and the old man were walking on the beach, we found a few things from
The Moonlight,
Ben Stout's waterlogged Bible, pieces of Ned Grime's bench and many odd pieces of wood which the old man gathered and piled up out of the reach of the tide. I found, drying out in the sun and buzzed over by small biting flies, a long piece of rope.

“You won't find nobody,” the old man said to me. “The sharks will crack their bones. They don't leave nothing.”

I was thinking of rope, how, leading up to the topmost sail, it had hummed with life, how, stretched and taut, it had guided or restrained the sails just as bridles and reins guide and restrain horses. I picked it up and waved away the cloud of insects. The rope smelled of decay.

I had not eaten much at our first meal, but I made up for that in the next few days. One night, the old man made a stew of okra and greens and ham. Ras and I ate until the food ran down our chins and we were covered with grease. He pointed at me and laughed. I drew my finger along his chin, showing him the ham fat that had collected on his cheeks. He laughed harder. It was still daylight. The birds were calling each other to sleep. The old man smiled—very slightly—and rose to light an oil lamp. I took the pot outside and scoured it with sand. Then Ras and I squatted near the hut. A huge beaked bird flew above us toward the dying light in the west. I heard from far off the great breathing of the sea, taken in, expelled. We sat there until dark when the bugs drove us inside.

Ras and I talked together, knowing we couldn't understand each other. Sometimes, pointing to a tree or a bird or some feature of his face, he would slowly pronounce a word. I would repeat it, then say it in English. In this fashion we learned a few words of each others languages. The old man had given us clothes, and though they didn't fit in a way that would have won my mothers admiration, we were at least dressed.

The old man was entirely dependent upon the little patch of ground he had planted and his few animals for the sustaining of his life. He was seldom idle. I wondered at some of the things he had in his hut, where they had come from. I knew by then he must be an escaped slave who had founded for himself this tiny place of liberty deep in the forest. Often I felt we were as remote from other people as we would have been on a deserted island.

At the end of the first week, the old man told me his name. A piglet had gotten out from under the fence. I chased it, crying “Old man! Old man!” He caught up with me in the thick undergrowth, swooped down on the piglet, saying at the same time, “You can call me Daniel.”

I could tell by looking at Ras that we were both gaining weight. I began to feel the return of my strength. We rose at dawn and went to sleep with the birds. Daniel cautioned us not to go too far from the hut and to be careful and watch out for snakes. We brought to the hut the wood he'd collected on the beach, and we fetched water to keep the cask full from a nearby stream. There were always chores to be done. But there were games and idle times. We hid from each other and sought each other out; we built a small shelter out of fallen branches; we chased the chickens until Daniel stopped us. It was a time without measure in which no thought of the future intruded, when the memory of the past was put aside for a while.