by Scott O'Dell
When I caught sight of Konje again, he was no longer in chains. He was dressed in a red shirt and a yellow cap. He was the leader of a gang of slaves who washed the filth from the decks where we lived.
The ship was called God's Adventure. One of her owners was Len Sorensen. I had known Master Sorensen for five years. He had come to our village many times trying to buy slaves. He had bought none from Konje's father or from Konje, yet he was always friendly and brought us presents.
Three days later, when he saw me among the crowd of slaves he had gathered along the coast, he was also friendly. He didn't send me back to the village, but he found me a hole that was clean, where I could lie down and stand up. In the rest of the ship, the decks were so close together you had to lie flat on your back.
More helpful than this, he calmed some of my fears. I didn't believe that the white people where we were going were cannibals, as most of the others believed. They would work us hard but would not eat us.
The island of St. John, which was to be our home, was owned by Denmark, Master Sorensen told me. He said that it was far across the ocean, near America. He told me many things. He told me, for instance, how I would be sold to a white planter, how I should act.
"The planter who buys you," he said, "will put you to work in his household or in the sugar-cane fields. In the fields, under the hot sun, slaves don't last long, perhaps a year. So show your white teeth, Raisha, smile a lot, and don't say anything unless you're asked."
At first we talked in my dialect, but after a while Master Sorensen spoke in Danish and I learned some of his language. This was very helpful when I got to the island of St. John.
4
God's Adventure—such a hopeful name for a savage ship—took six months and more to sail from Africa to the islands. We left the mouth of the river in the night. We sailed slowly north along the slave coast and stopped at every port.
Captain Sorensen gathered in two or three slaves in each port. He was very particular. Ashantis he wouldn't buy because they caused trouble, he said. The Senegals were intelligent. The Congos were tall and beautiful. The Mandigos were lazy. The Ibos made good house servants, he told me, and bought ten of them.
God's Adventure was crowded before we ever left the village of Accra. The ship had four decks, piled one on top of the other, so close, as I have said, that you could not stand up. The new slaves choked the ship. Then a plague broke out and three or four of us died every day.
Lenta and her children lived on the lowest of the four decks. I never saw her until the plague began and I heard that her son, Madi, was sick. I carried him aloft to my place on the first deck. It turned out that he didn't have the plague. He just couldn't eat the fuzzy green meat and weevily mush he was given and threw them up.
I shared with him the food Captain Sorensen saw that I was given every day. Soon, as we turned back along the slave coast and picked up more slaves, Madi got well. His body was a bundle of bones, but he moved about, ate, and kept the food down.
Soon after we turned back a storm struck us. The ship with all her big cargo was top-heavy. She rolled like a log. Her bare masts dipped into the sea. She creaked and groaned. Gray waves rose up and engulfed the top deck, sweeping men into the sea.
The storm left us afloat off the port of Accra. Here Captain Sorensen took on more slaves to replace those he had lost from poor food, the plague, and the storm, and sailed westward toward the islands with three hundred eighty-one slaves.
We had not sailed far when the ship began to leak where her bottom timbers met the sea. The crack was small in width but long. Water poured in fast and began to flood the lower deck. Captain Sorensen sent sailors down to fix the leak, but they failed. If anything, the sea poured in faster.
He knew about Madi, knew that the boy had fingers like sticks and sent him down with a rope around his waist to poke strips of oiled cotton into the crack. After Madi worked for a while the seawater came in more slowly.
They pulled him in, gave him a sip of rum, a bowl of corn and fresh meat, and sent him down again. His sticklike fingers worked cotton into the rest of the crack. The leak stopped.
It was dusk by now, and we were sailing along fast when they began to pull him in. One moment he was there, dangling with the rope around his waist, the next moment only half of him was there. Sharks had gotten the rest.
His death came close to bringing a revolt. We slaves talked of little else, until the sailors went around with whips, guards got out their muskets, and Captain Sorensen warned us that unless we quit talking he would give us water to drink but nothing to eat. He would also throw the leaders of any revolt into the sea.
The food got worse. The salted meat had green spots on it. The water in the mossy casks had things swimming around. And the ship stank. She was washed out every other day. Slaves were sent below to burn powder and kill the smells, but still the ship stank. Those in the two deepest decks began to die, three or four a day, and were thrown overboard. A school of gray sharks began to follow us.
Then everything changed. The food got better and there was more of it. One of the sailors told me that Master Sorensen was fattening us up.
"In less than two weeks," he said, "we will reach the islands. He wants everyone to look healthy."
I passed the news to the rest of the slaves, thinking that everyone would be happier, now that we were near the end of our journey. It had another effect. They had gotten used to their lives, bad as they were, and feared what would happen after they reached land.
All that Captain Sorensen had told me about the islands of St Thomas and St. John proved to be true. As we came into the harbor of St. Thomas and I saw the crowd in the streets, as many blacks as whites, gathered around the auction place, flags flying everywhere and bands playing, I remembered everything he had told me.
It seemed as if I had been there before. Even the slave pen with its rusty iron bars and swarms of black guards swinging whips I had seen many times.
Only when we were led onto a platform and I looked down into a ring of white faces sweating in the sun did I wonder if the other slaves were right after all. Perhaps these white men gazing up at me with their mouths half-open really were cannibals who ate people.
5
Captain Sorensen had decided to sell three of us together, Konje, Dondo, and me. Lenta looked grim and unhappy. She still grieved for her son, so she was kept to one side.
A man rapped his hammer on a stone. He was the auctioneer Captain Sorensen had told me about. "We have three prime slaves of the three hundred slaves God's Adventure brought to the island this day," he said. "Here is Konje, chief of the Barato tribe." He put a hand on Konje's shoulder. Konje flinched. "A great breeder of sons and daughters. A magnificent specimen."
Konje did look magnificent. They had covered him with palm oil. He was naked to the waist, and his muscles rippled in the broiling sun. He towered above the black guards standing against the wall and the man with the hammer.
The auctioneer said, pointing to me, "Raisha the daughter of a subchief. Comely, strong, mother of many strong, comely children. She also speaks the Danish language. And Dondo, trained as a slave in a chieftain's family, is the perfect household servant."
He wiped his brow and banged his hammer. He banged it again until the crowd was quiet.
"These three, the finest Africa has to offer, will be sold as one," he said. "And no bid under two thousand rigsdalers will be considered. What do I hear?"
The auctioneer heard silence, then whispers among the planters. A man who stood just below me said to a woman wearing a pink dress and a flower in her hair, "What do you think, Jenna?"
"I think it's a bargain at three thousand rigsdalers," she said. "The man's worth that much alone."
"He's a little overpowering," the man said. "It would take a strong hand to control him."
"You have a strong hand, Jost."
Someone shouted an offer of two thousand four hundred rigsdalers. The auctioneer repeated the offer and ga
ve the stone a blow.
"I like the girl, too," the woman said. "She has a nice smile."
It was the same smile I had learned on the ship, as if I had just received a gift I had always wanted. My face hurt from smiling and I felt like letting out a hair-raising scream. The deep blue eyes of Master Jost, blue as the sky, examined me from head to foot.
Offers were coming fast, a few rigsdalers at a time.
The woman said, "Don't be niggardly, Jost. We will be here all day. The sun is hot. Philippe Horn is over there writing on a piece of paper. He wants them badly. Get rid of him with an offer he cannot match."
Jost cleared his throat, cupped his hands, and shouted,"Three thousand rigsdalers."
The crowd fell silent. Men I took to be plantation owners, who stood down in front in big straw hats, looked at each other and shook their heads.
The auctioneer shouted, "Three thousand rigsdalers. Do I hear three thousand, one hundred?"
The silence grew. Master van Prok lifted his hat and put it on again. He seemed ready to make a higher bid.
"Three thousand," said the auctioneer, glancing down at the planters, calling each by name. "Gentlemen, what do I hear?"
He heard nothing. His hammer came down with a bang. "Sold, sold to Master van Prok of Hawks Nest for the sum of three thousand rigsdalers."
From the shadows a black man crept out and climbed the ladder to the platform where the three of us stood. He was tall but bent over by some misfortune, so that he shifted crablike from one side to the other as he moved along.
"Come," he said. "I will take you to the boat that will take you to Hawks Nest on the island of St. John. St. John is only four miles away. It will be a pleasant voyage on this sunny day."
He took us past the pen that held the rest of the slaves that God's Adventure had brought to St. Thomas that day. Midnight black though they were, they looked like ghosts and were ghostly silent. My heart went out to them.
"What is your name?" Konje asked.
"Nero," the man said.
"What work do you do at Hawks Nest?"
"I am the bomba, Bomba Nero. I oversee what goes on at Hawks Nest. You can also call me Sir Bomba."
He talked out of the side of his mouth. His arrogance and cold, darting glance made Konje clamp his jaws.
At a shack by the wharf, the bomba took Konje inside. Two blacks put manacles on him. I saw them take a red-hot iron out of the fire and stamp a number on Konje's back. He made not a sound. They stamped Dondo, too.
We waited on the wharf for Jost van Prok and his wife. They came with two boys, good for running errands, Master van Prok told Nero when the bomba gave them a surly glance.
"I have two servants," Jenna van Prok said. "You will be my third. You will like that, I am sure."
"Oh, yes," I said.
It was the task I had worked for from the day Captain Sorensen had told me about it, that it was much better than working in the fields, out in sun and storm. It was why I had learned to be docile, to say nothing unless asked, and to smile even though it hurt.
St. John is a beautiful island, just a few miles from St. Thomas, across pale blue water. At dusk our small boat came to Hawks Nest, the van Prok plantation, and moored in the shallows. From here we all walked ashore, except Jenna van Prok.
She was carried to the beach on Konje's broad shoulders. As he bent to set her down on the sand, Bomba Nero glanced at him. It was a searching glance, little more than a lifting of an eyelid, but in it was hatred.
I told Jenna van Prok that Lenta, my friend, was a good cook and would be very helpful at the house.
"I bid for her," she said, "but the Haugaard brothers outbid me. They have a plantation close to Mary Point. It is near so you'll see her again."
She looked at me from under the rim of her pink hat. "You have a pretty smile, like an angel from heaven," she said. "I'm going to call you Angelica. Do you like that?"
"Yes," I said, though I didn't like the name at all.
The van Proks changed all our names. The mistress called Konje "Apollo." Her husband called Dondo "Abraham." This was a custom, I learned. The planters wanted the slaves to forget they were born in Africa, that they were black Africans.
"Do you understand what I say?" Jenna van Prok asked. "The language I speak?"
"Yes, when you don't speak fast," I said.
6
Hawks Nest looked down upon the sea. It was neither small nor large among the plantations on the mountainous island of St. John, but half of its land was level, good for the growing of sugar cane.
The rest of the plantation was cut up by gullies, bushy ravines, and by rock-strewn peaks. Here Master van Prok had cleared the land and terraced it for the growing of cotton.
The van Prok house stood on a low cliff within sound of the sea. It was made of stone and timber and looked like a small fort.
The slave huts stood at a distance from the house beside a large pile of boulders, the men on one side, women on the other. In the middle of the boulders were privies. They were far enough from the house not to be unpleasant for the van Proks.
My hut, like all the others, had stone walls and a roof of palm leaves. One side was open and faced the sea. This was a help because sometimes in the night cool winds blew from that direction.
The first night I slept in my hut, I was told by the van Proks' slaves that for a year now, a terrible drought had settled upon the island. Great white clouds would come up at dawn, spread across the sky, and turn black, but not a drop of rain would fall.
This is exactly what happened on my first night. Dawn broke clear, with a small sea wind. The white clouds came up. The sun burned holes in them. They spread across the sky and turned black, but no rain fell. The clouds disappeared during the night. The heavens were on fire with stars.
Before I went to bed, Jenna van Prok had whispered to me, "My husband has told the bomba to put you to work in the fields tomorrow. This is his habit with all new slaves. He likes to test them. Don't despair. In a week I will have you working in the house."
A tutu horn blew just before dawn, a wild sound from a conch shell. Roosters crowed. The bomba came up the path, banging his ironwood club against everything in his way.
"Out!" he shouted. "This is not Sunday. It is a Wednesday in the month of April. You are not in Africa, dreaming about a breakfast of melons and roasted birds. You're on the plantation of Master van Prok, on the island of St. John in the Danish West Indies among the Virgin Islands. Out!"
We went to the side of a hill in a bushy ravine. There were fifteen of us, all but Konje, who was sent to work at the sugar mill. Before the drought, I was told, cotton grew in the ravine at this time of year and there would be pink flowers on the bushes. Now all was scorched and dry. With long knives we cut down the bushes and stirred up the ground.
In midmorning boys brought our breakfasts—a handful of dried finger-sized fish called poorjack and shriveled chickpeas, but nothing to drink. Already the sun beat down. It burned hotter than it ever did in Barato.
At noon we rested for a while. It was the time when the slaves went off to work in their little plots of land to raise vegetables for themselves. Now all they could do was to scratch at the scorched earth and pray on their knees for rain.
After the sun went down the bomba came and said that we hadn't done much that day, that we didn't deserve even the little fried fish his boys handed out to us.
After three days in the field I found that they ate better food at the van Proks'. Fearing that I would collapse from the work and the heat, Mistress Jenna had made her husband change his mind about testing me for a whole week.
She brought me into the house and I became her body servant, one of three, as she had said. With Amina, a slave she'd had for years, I attended her from dusk until midnight and ate my supper from what the van Proks left over.
We ate salt pork from Holland, salt mutton from New England, and bread baked in St. Thomas. Sometimes the bread had weevils in it, which I pic
ked out before Mistress Jenna was served.
The food was not good. Master van Prok complained about it. "They send us meat that the market has refused," he said. "Meat so tough it bends the teeth. And the salt! You have to drink a firkin of water to calm your thirst. And at this moment there's not that much water on the whole plantation."
For the slaves and the van Proks water to drink ran out after the second meal of the day, except for what was needed for the mules that turned the millstones that ground the cane for molasses and rum.
All three of Mistress Jenna's body servants were made to work in the distillery five hours each day. Master van Prok's three male servants hauled water up the hill for five hours, too. Among the three was Dondo. He had worked in the fields for days, until Mistress van Prok discovered that he was good at trimming hair. He then was brought into the household.
From the very beginning, Konje had hauled water up the hill from the sea. He could carry two times more water than any of the other slaves. More weight and much faster. He would put a cask on top of his head and go up the steep hill half running.
The bomba picked up Konje's new name, and when I was working in the distillery I heard him call out, "Apollo, you're a wonder. I, too, was a wonder, like you, but see what the hammer did."
Then he grinned and beat the ground with his club. He was punishing Konje, little by little, to get rid of his arrogance.
One of the slaves told me that the bomba had once been a giant of a man. But he had run away and when he was caught, instead of cutting off one of his legs, as was the law, they broke his bones with a hammer. Then they put them together wrong. Strangely, after that he loved the white people and hated the slaves.