“Don’t you talk back to me,” his father raised his voice but kept his tone even. “What is it with you today? Since when did you start questioning me?”
Jerome wanted to go on—to point out his father’s hypocrisy. After all, Jerome was so much stronger than the other boys. He loved playing football, but he couldn’t afford to let loose and actually injure someone. “Fine,” he said softly. This isn’t even what I wanted to talk about.”
Through the intercom, Jerome could hear tools clanging, a lock opening.
“Coach Dodge’s wife—” Jerome went on, “she’s a speech therapist. I was talking to him about Regina because she’s got him for math this year. Coach said she couldn’t even bring herself to say ‘Here’ or ‘Present’ when he called attendance. She just raised her hand and waited until he saw her.” Jerome paused and listened, but his father said nothing. “She’s not getting better. It’s been two years since she spoke even a word. She’s not talking at home or at school. Coach Dodge says his wife could meet with Regina—for free—to, you know, try to help her with her problem…”
“What?” his father snapped. The sound of tools stopped.
“Like I said,” said Jerome, “Coach Dodge’s wife might be able to help out. I mean, it’s been a long time since we tried anything new, and Gina’s not getting any better.” Jerome was surprised at how vocal he was being on this subject. Face to face, he could never bring himself to mention Regina’s problem. His father was intent on keeping the family hidden—no doctors, no attention. And Jerome understood why. He’d accepted long ago that if he was going to play football, he could play well enough to win, but not so well that scouts would start noticing. But he still wanted to get help for his sister, and the intercom somehow took away his fear of his father’s temper. “Coach says his wife has dealt with stuff like this before. It’s usually not a physical problem. It’s usually a mental thing—like insecurity.” He continued describing the potential therapy, mindful that his father had stopped speaking. He touched on how tough high school would be for Regina as a social outcast. Finally, after making his argument, he stared at the intercom and waited for his father to answer.
There was nothing.
“Pop?” he asked.
Silence.
Jerome dropped the brush into the pail and walked to the intercom. He spun the volume knob to the highest setting. An electronic hiss filled the stall. “Pop, you there?” he called out again.
In response, he heard only a short click and then silence again. Even the hiss was gone. His father had shut off the intercom.
Seven
The world is shaking. Swaying back and forth. Around me from all sides, I can hear men’s voices. Yet it is the water that has awakened me. It is on my feet and across my chest. It sprays the side of my face. My head throbs—but from the inside, not from a bruise. I know where I am, but I force my eyes open so that I can see the bars of my cage.
Water surrounds the ship, and yet my throat burns from the lack of it. We have traveled so far that I can no longer see my land, my Africa. The water is blue and cold and beautiful and rough, and my cage sits on the deck of the ship. Men walk by me as if I am not even here.
The roof of my cage is covered with some sort of cloth—a black curtain—to shield me from the sun, which still breaks through the bars on the sides. I have slept here for hours—perhaps days even—and my skin feels raw and burned. My face is scraped and coated with dried blood, as are my legs and arms and feet. It is as if I had been dragged across the sand and thrown to the floor of this cell on the deck of Van Owen’s ship. He has chosen to keep me alive—barely.
As I force myself up to a sitting position, wrenching the stiffness from my body, the visions return. I see a white horse striding across a bridge, her rider panic-stricken. I see Regina furious because she has never even met her oldest brother. I see Van Owen standing at the bars of my cage—this cage—but it is nighttime then, and he is crying because someone has died. The visions recede, chased away by a loud voice.
“The girl’s awake,” shouts a man in a tattered uniform. As he walks by my cage, his stench wafts in. The stench of rotted meat. His eyes go to my exposed breasts, and I throw my arms across my chest and pull my knees up to cover myself. That seems suddenly important. He spits on the floor of my cage, missing me by inches. I twist so that my back is to him. Through the bars on the aft side, the sight is the same. Water. Endless water. Nothing more. I long to drink.
“Yeah, she’s awake,” another man bellows as he trots over from astern and bends in to have a look at me. He manages a rotted, cracked tooth smile, holding up his hat to block the sun so he can get a better view. “What are you covering yourself up for? We’ve all seen everything already.”
“Get away from that cage, Harrow,” another man calls from behind me. He is on a platform above the main deck. He stands at a wheel, turning it slightly every now and then. He is young. He turns to an older man beside him and asks him to “take over.” Then he hops down from the platform and approaches my cage. I have not seen him before. He did not come ashore with the others. He is somehow different in spirit from the rest of them. I know just from looking.
He stares in at me, clutching the bars as if it is he who is imprisoned. His hands are blistered and worn, and he looks fatigued. For a moment, I forget where I am, and I pity the poor man. His eyes are sorrowful, and they meet only my eyes, not traveling down my body. He steps back for a moment, turns away, reaches into a barrel, and pulls out a cup with a long handle at the end of it.
“Water,” he says to me as he passes the cup through the bars. “You’ve been asleep for three days,” he mumbles softly, certain that I won’t understand him. “Drink it.” He motions with the cup as if I am a child who does not know what to do with it. He means no offense, though.
I reach out my hand and learn just how weak I am. When I take the cup, my arm shudders. I gulp the water in one swallow and slip the handle back through the bars. “Thank you,” I whisper back to him in a raspy voice. The man stares back at me dumbfounded. Without realizing it, I have spoken to him in English.
“What are you doing there, Roland?” another voice asks. I recognize the man’s shadow even before he is near, and I know his voice. My people’s conqueror. My father’s murderer. Hendrik Van Owen.
Roland takes the cup from me and tries to hide it behind his leg as he turns to face his captain. “Just checking on her, sir.”
Van Owen steps into view. He wears a baggy white shirt, white pants, and black boots. His long hair, tied in a ribbon when he was on my shores, is now loose, fluttering in the ocean wind like a spider web, covering one of his blue eyes. His skin is smooth, barely weathered by his days at sea. He is perhaps fifty years old, but he has the look of man who appeared old even when he was young. But I know that Van Owen will never truly be old. Because of me.
As he approaches the cage, his hands rest in his belt, one of them clutching his whip. “Roland,” he says in a mock gentle manner, “if I’d wanted you to check on the girl, I would have asked.”
“Aye, Captain,” says Roland, lowering his eyes to his shoes.
“Return to your post,” Van Owen orders as he scans him suspiciously. Before Roland can move away, Van Owen adds, “And give me that cup.” Roland hands him the cup and heads back toward the stairs and the wheel. Then Van Owen, still a few feet away, leans toward me, pressing his face against the bars so that his wild hair blows into my cage and his shadow blocks the sun. “So,” he intones softly to me, “you’ve decided to return to the land of the waking then, have you?”
I don’t want to give him the joy of seeing my anger, but my hands give me away, clenching into fists around my knees.
He looks out at the ocean, reveling in his belief that I don’t know where we are or where we’re going. But I do. First we’ll dock in Boston. He’ll cover my cage completely with the black curtain as his men lead the others—the ones stored below—past me, parading them like cattle. I
won’t see them, but I’ll hear their chains rattle as they pass. I’ll shout my mother’s name, wondering if she’s still alive and among them, wondering why there are some things still hidden from me when I seem to know so much of what is to come. “Mother,” I am calling weeks from now. “Mother?” She doesn’t answer.
“What are you daydreaming about, little witch?” Van Owen interrupts my vision.
I turn away from him and gaze off. Though we drift in a vast watery emptiness, in my mind I can see my final destination—his plantation in North Carolina. There, I will be forced to call him Master.
“You look strong enough, little witch,” he interrupts. “I was beginning to worry, but I think you’ll survive the trip after all.”
I know I will. I see years and years to come, so many of them filled with pain, both old and new, all of them haunted by the memory of my father’s death at his hand. He is pulling the trigger even now, for my visions are of the past as well as the future. The bullet strikes my father over and over, killing him again and again. I cannot stop it—the bullet or the vision.
Van Owen remains at my cage for quite a while, holding vigil, watching me as if I am an oddity. So I give him nothing to watch. I turn my back to him and stare out at the water. He doesn’t complain—not even under his breath. When I turn back much later, he has gone, probably returned below deck. A tall cup of water sits at the far end of my cage, though. Beside it is a clump of stale bread. I know that he has left them for me. So that is why he was so angry with Roland—Van Owen wanted to be the one to give me nourishment, to be my savior. I wish that I didn’t have to take anything from him, but I have no choice. I swallow the bread and wash it down with the water, trying not to remember that his hands touched them. Trying not to acknowledge that my life is in his hands. That I live only because he allows it.
I hide for several more hours in the shadow of the curtain, constantly shifting away from the sun, from side to side of my cell. My throat is constricted from the heat. I know that I will live through this trip, but that knowledge offers little comfort. I feel as if I am dying. Only days ago, I was a princess about to be married. Now I am a caged beast, forced to accept sustenance from my father’s murderer.
With the night, most of the men retire below, so no one is left gawking at me. I curl up in a corner of my cage, huddling for warmth from the cold night sea winds that taunt my wet body. I try to imagine I am back in Africa—or even working in the fields in North Carolina—anything to make me feel warm and unafraid and not so alone.
“Ho, there,” a man’s voice whispers suddenly. It’s Roland. Again he stands beside my cage and looks in on me with pity. Again his hand stretches in, offering me water. I drink it down and return the cup, and he fetches more. “I can’t bring you food. Someone might notice if I take anything from the galley. But since the captain’s asleep now, I can at least offer you water.”
I drink down the third cup and the fourth before I finally whisper back in English, “Thank you.”
“So I didn’t imagine it earlier,” he says. “You do speak English. How do you…? I don’t understand…”
“I don’t either.” My accent, I notice, is Southern, almost like Van Owen’s. I speak like a woman from North Carolina.
Roland thinks he has it figured out. “Did you escape from America and go back to Africa?”
“No. I’ve never left Africa. I…I just know your language.”
We both struggle for words, but I am stifled by fatigue and he by shame. Finally, he speaks again. “We’ve changed course, you know.” I stare back as I drink again, listening to him speak. “The Pinnacle—that’s the name of this ship—was supposed to land at Cuba. That’s the only possible safe destination for this kind of ship. But the captain’s taking us straight to America now. He says it’s because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes, he says that…”
Suddenly Roland drops to his knees on the floorboards beside my cage, his eyes bulging wide. He looks down at his chest, and we both see it at the same time—the sharp tip of a knife protruding from his ribcage. It slides back into the wound, the blade disappearing inside him before exiting his back, and he coughs while blood rushes from his chest.
“You should have obeyed my orders, Roland. That’s what a first mate does.” Van Owen is speaking slowly, purposefully, but with no emotion whatsoever. “When I was a first mate, I followed orders. Even when my captain beat me for no reason at all, even when he forced me to work for days at a time without rest. No matter what was asked of me, I obeyed my captain’s orders. Without question.”
Roland’s body is twitching. With one hand he grabs hold of one of the bars of my cage. With the other, he tries to cover the wound to slow the blood. I gape in horror, unable to help. He knows he is dying, but he tries to hold on to his last few breaths. Why did I not see this in my visions? Why is this moment new to me? What else is still hidden?
“This is your fault, witch,” Van Owen says softly. “You brought me up on deck. Every night, you call to me, drawing me up here just to look at you, don’t you?” His eyes are fixed on me, not even noticing the blood that drips from the knife, painting red dots on his bare foot. “What sort of spell is it you’re casting on me?”
Ignoring him, I crawl forward and touch Roland’s trembling fingers. He is dying because he tried to help me, and I don’t want him to die alone. Instantly, Roland grabs my hand, pulling me even closer to him. His eyes meet mine, which are wet with tears. He breathes in sharply, making a horrible gurgling sound as blood stains his teeth. He tries to speak but only sputters crimson.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him in a whisper, so that Van Owen cannot hear me speak in English. I look down at our hands touching, and, in a flash of a moment, I see Roland’s entire life. He grew up in Boston, the son of a banker. His father lost the family’s money in a foolish investment and then committed suicide by stepping in front of a carriage. Roland had been attending a university, but he had to quit after his father’s death so that he could learn a trade. His mother suffers from dysentery, yet she continues to work as a cook in a hotel. His sisters scrub floors in the homes of former family friends. Because he loved the sea, Roland found a way to make a living on it. Whenever possible, he worked on fishing boats or cargo ships, but the family was so delinquent in paying the father’s debts that Roland took this job with Van Owen, a former business partner of his father’s. He had known he would hate serving on a slaving ship. But he could not have known just what sort of man Van Owen is.
The influx of Roland’s memories stops abruptly. He slouches forward, his face sliding down the bars of the cage until his shoulder meets the floor and he can fall no farther. His grip on my hand loosens, and he dies without a sound, though the blood continues to flow from his wound and from his mouth.
“Bleed,” says Van Owen. “Yes, go on and bleed. What else can you do?”
I look up at him. He is dressed as he was earlier—all in white—but his shirt is loose. His eyes are sleepy, as if he woke suddenly and came up on deck because he imagined me calling to him.
“What a shame,” he goes on talking to Roland, “to see you like this now. I didn’t take you ashore in Africa because I knew you didn’t have the stomach for hunting, but I did think you’d be a good officer here on the ship—that you’d do as instructed.” His accent is thicker than mine—more deep Southern. The vowels are long and drawn out. He sounds like a learned gentleman from Kentucky. Consonants are swallowed up by the vowels. His drawl is harsh to the ear. “What story shall I tell your mother then, Roland? Perhaps that you were rocked overboard during a gale? Or maybe that one of these African warriors slit your throat and hurled you into the waves—even as you were trying to feed him. Yes, I like the sound of that one.”
I crawl back to a deep corner of the cage as Van Owen rambles on, but I can’t take my eyes off of Roland’s, which still stare back at me.
“When I was a first mate aboard the Antares,” V
an Owen continues while kneeling and placing a hand on Roland’s shoulder, “Captain Remy—Dayton Boyd Remy—had us moving gems through the Barbary Coast. Now those were dangerous trips, Roland.” He strokes the dead man’s hair as if petting a dog. “Waves thirty feet high. Storms for weeks on end without surcease. This—what we’re doing here—this is nothing. This is a holiday. We capture a few hundred barbarians, kill a few for sport. It doesn’t take much effort. Even if only a third of them survive the trip, we make a fortune. The Barbary, though, was full of cutthroat pirates—men for whom killing never needed a reason. The sort of men who make me look genteel by comparison. Such were the men who attacked our ship at nightfall, and it was my fault. The captain was asleep down below, so I was in charge. I had the conn. I was so tired, though—nodding off in the fog—that I didn’t even see the pirate ship that had ambled up right alongside ours, barely a stone’s throw away. Not until their plank came thundering down on our bridge, and their men started running across it, boarding our ship. I rang the bell, and our crew raced up to the deck, but the pirates were upon us in seconds. They knocked me down, dragged me back onto their ship, and threw me into a cage below deck. I could hear the fight even from there. Guns firing. Men screaming. Then, finally, the pirate ship pulled away with seven of us American-born men aboard. Were the rest of my compatriots all dead, I wondered? I assumed not. My new ship seemed to retreat in a hurry. Certainly, the pirates would have taken our ship if they could have, but I didn’t know then for sure. All I knew at that moment was that I was a captive of Barbary Corsairs. And I was frightened.” His gaze suddenly turns to me. “Probably almost as frightened as you are right now.”
The moonlight catches his face, and I notice the tears running down his cheek. I wonder if they are tears of self-pity for his days as a prisoner or if he weeps for Roland. Or for me.
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