The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

  ‘Madshaka and I was talking. Reckoned we got no business telling all them people what to do. Reckoned we’d vote on it, what we’s to do, where to go.’

  The four young men nodded thoughtfully but they did not look so sure. James imagined they would be happy to let one man – him – make the decisions for all. They would have been happy to be relieved of all responsibility in that regard.

  At length men from each of the tribes stood and came aft and sat cross-legged on the deck in a semicircle around the binnacle box. Madshaka and Kusi stepped up, flanked King James. Madshaka spoke.

  ‘Each of the clans, they send three men. The men talk for the tribe. Easier that way, not so many men.’

  James nodded. It was a sensible thing to do. Each individual tribe would be expected to hang on to the hierarchies that the pirates had shunned.

  ‘I … Kusi and me … have told them what we decide, that we all vote where we go, what we do.’

  ‘Good, good. We best talk on it then, and then we vote.’

  Madshaka and Kusi turned to the assembled men, began talking, fast, in the odd and incomprehensible languages of West Africa. James leaned against the binnacle box, arms folded. Hoped that he looked calm, in control. He was in fact quite uncomfortable. All this talk, and he understood not a word.

  Heads nodded, men spoke to one another, the translators moved on to the next group. Twenty minutes of this and they were done, and the deck was filled with the babble of discussion, debate. Madshaka and Kusi stepped back, flanking James once more.

  One man sitting near the mizzen fife rail leapt to his feet, held James’s eyes, spoke loud, passionately. In James’s ear, Kusi said, ‘He say you the captain, when we fighting, just like Madshaka say the pirates do.’

  James nodded. Kabu Malinke prince to slave to freeman to pirate. Royalty to outlaw.

  Kusi continued. ‘He say we must go back to home … he mean Africa … must take all the people back to their homes.’

  Madshaka translated the words for the others, switching from one tongue to another, and heads nodded and voices rose and one did not need to understand the words to catch the tones of agreement and assent. Africa. They would go back to Africa.

  James’s clan did not look so sure. ‘Africa?’ Good Boy said. ‘What we do in Africa?’ James imagined that Good Boy was, at that moment, as far from Virginia as he had ever been in his life.

  ‘I don’t know,’ James said, talking low. He did not want Madshaka and Kusi to overhear him, though he was not sure why. ‘We got to do it, for these people. Then, I don’t know what we do. We think of something.’

  The four men muttered agreement. It seemed more like resignation.

  More fast talk, translated arguments, hands waving, impassioned speech. Madshaka said, ‘They argue over where in Africa to go.’ He turned back to the group, called out something, the men were silent. He called out again, one language at a time, and the men of each tribe in turn responded. Voting, deciding. James felt entirely removed from this process, as if he were something less than a member of the group.

  At last Madshaka turned back to him. ‘We go to Kalabari. It is decided, we go there, and these people go home, upriver, overland.’

  Kalabari, in the heart of the Niger River Delta. Far from the slave factories of Whydah and Popo and Sierra Leone. There the people could use the great Niger River to carry them into the heart of their lands, and from thence over the savannahs to their homes. It was decided. James had not even understood the debate.

  ‘Very well …’

  Africa. The name whirled around in James’s head. Africa. He never thought he would see it again.

  A prince when stolen, what was he now? He did not even know if his city was still standing, if his people still existed. He had not seen either for twenty years. The Malinke might have been wiped out years before, for all he knew.

  Twenty years, and all that time he had fantasized about this moment, when he would return to Africa. And now that that dream was taking form and substance he did not know how he felt about it, did not know what if anything there was for him now in his motherland.

  ‘We gots to get the boat sailing,’ Madshaka urged him, gently.

  James nodded. ‘Yes, we do.’

  He would think about Africa later. Right now they had to get under way. For more reasons than the others knew.

  James knew, had realized it even as they were voting on their destination. It had dawned on him as he had wallowed in his regret at missing the chance to go privateering aboard the Elizabeth Galley.

  They would blame Marlowe for this, those people in power in Williamsburg. There would be no letter of marque, not for a man who had brought this terror on the colony of Virginia.

  There would be only one way for Marlowe to regain his precious place, and that would be to hunt the black killers down, to bring them back. He would not want to do it, would recoil from the thought, but in the end he would agree because he would have no choice. He would do it for Elizabeth.

  ‘Get them men together.’ James turned to the grumete. ‘Madshaka, get them in three groups, we’ll organize them by mast. Cato, Joshua, you each go with a group, show them how to do what I say. Madshaka, Kusi, you all translate what I say. If we going to live we got to start learning these people how to sail this ship.’

  They had to get the boat sailing, the half-rotten, festering, leaking tub. Because in their wake would come the Elizabeth Galley, new, fast, well armed, determined.

  CHAPTER 7

  Elizabeth knelt on the lawn at the edge of the flower beds, sunk her hands in the moist dirt. She could feel the dampness creeping through her skirt and wool stockings, but it felt cool and good, with the sun beating on her back and her wide straw hat.

  She picked up a spade and scooped the loose dirt out until she had a hole ten inches deep. Then she carefully, lovingly picked up the little rosebush and set its roots in the hole before pushing the dirt in around it.

  Playing at agriculture. Sometimes that bothered her. All over the tidewater people broke their backs working the soil, slaves and freemen alike, just to eke out a living or to make someone else rich. But she just played, like the noblewomen in France who found amusement in pretending to be simple country girls.

  But those were just minor concerns, because she loved to work in the gardens, loved to make Marlowe House a more beautiful place. More her own.

  She had lived there since coming to the New World with Joseph Tinling. But the house had not been her home, it had been merely a place to endure Master Tinling’s brutality. After his death she had sold it to Marlowe, then a newcomer to Virginia, had moved to town, happy to be shed of those echoing rooms and their horrible memories.

  But after she and Marlowe wed she had moved back, and now she was exorcising those demons of her former life, remaking the wretched Tinling House into the Marlowes’ ancestral home. New furnishings, new carpets, new portraits, fresh paint.

  The gardens were a big part of that, Elizabeth’s chief contribution, because unlike the furniture or the paintings, which were just items to be purchased, the garden was something that she could do herself, something pure and organic. Coaxing beauty and nourishment from the earth.

  It was midmorning but she had been at it since just after sunrise. She needed the garden’s cathartic influence, the release of tension that comes with physical labor.

  She had seen Thomas and Francis Bickerstaff off in the predawn hours. Before, she had been angry about his going off privateering, abandoning her. She was angry that Thomas had grown bored with the home she was trying to make.

  But that all changed the moment Sam blurted out his awful story.

  It was a very different departure from the one she had envisioned. There was none of the suppressed excitement, none of Thomas’s feigning disappointment in leaving when in fact he was aching to be under way, none of the footloose buccaneer that made Thomas so equally loved, hated, feared, and appreciated in the tidewater.

  Ra
ther, it had been a somber moment, and Thomas had been genuine in his desire not to go. But go he must, they both knew that.

  And Elizabeth, who was no fool, was not insensible to the fact that he was going after James more for her than for himself. Thomas could have told Nicholson to sod off, but for her sake he had told the governor ‘Yes, sir.’

  She worked her shovel in the dirt, spacing the plants three feet apart. In a few years they would be great thorny bushes, spilling over with brilliant small red flowers, like drops of fresh blood on mounds of green.

  And then a shadow fell over the turned earth and a man’s voice, loud and full of delight and surprise, said, ‘Lizzy? Could that be you?’

  Elizabeth wheeled around, gasped in surprise, squinted against the sun. The man was standing no more than five feet away, had approached over the grass so she could not hear him.

  She stood, slowly, and threw her spade down like throwing a knife. It stuck in the dirt and quivered. She wiped dirty hands on her apron, leaving arched brown streaks on the linen, folded her arms across her chest. ‘Dear God …’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no, Lizzy, none of that. Well, certainly, there are some women think I am a god, but not you, surely?’

  She held him in her harsh gaze, then at last she had to smile and shake her head. ‘Billy Bird. I had never thought to see your face again.’

  ‘Ah, like a bad penny,’ he said, swept off his cocked hat, a big plume trailing astern, bowed elegantly at the waist. He wore white silk stockings and white breeches bleached so bright that it hurt to look at them in the late-morning sun. Under a red coat with neat embroidery around the pockets and cuffs he wore a red waistcoat and a calico shirt. A buff leather shoulder strap ran diagonally across his chest, the silver buckle winking in the sun, a heavy sword hanging at his waist. He wore no wig, and his hair was long and clubbed, as the seamen wore it.

  ‘You look like a damned peacock, as usual, Billy.’

  ‘And you …’ He straightened, held out his hands. ‘Is this what has become of the beautiful Elizabeth Sampson, late of Plymouth and London? Working in the dirt like some pickaninny?’

  She did not know if she wanted to hug the man or stick a knife in his guts. She never did. She and Billy Bird went back many years. ‘My name is Elizabeth Marlowe now, Billy, and it gives me great pleasure to work in the garden of the home of which I am mistress.’

  ‘Ah, great pleasure! And you know there is no one who can give you great pleasure like old Billy Bird, my darling.’

  ‘Billy, lay one hand on me and I will cut your balls off and stuff them down your throat. You know me capable of it.’

  Bird chuckled at that. ‘Yes you are, yes you are. But how about a hug for an old friend?’ He held out his arms again, and after a second’s hesitation Elizabeth stepped into them and gave Billy Bird a hug. He held her to his chest, gently, affectionately. He smelled faintly of perfume and tobacco smoke and tar. They squeezed each other and then stepped back again.

  ‘It’s been … three years at least,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Rhode Island, mostly. Boston, New York. And off on the far-flung oceans of the world.’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have come here. Governor Nicholson has no love of pirates. He has hanged any number of them already.’

  ‘Pirates! Oh, Elizabeth, really! I am an honest merchant, and besides I have never committed anything that smacks of piracy against a Christian. That I know of.’

  ‘Indeed. I am sorry to say that you just missed meeting my husband, speaking of people you should not cross.’

  ‘Oh, have I really? I am sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Elizabeth. Bird’s timing would not be an accident. Everyone in Williamsburg and Jamestown knew that the Elizabeth Galley had sailed on the tide that morning.

  ‘Though in fact I believe I have met your husband … Thomas Marlowe? In Port Royal, some years back. But his name was not Thomas Marlowe then, and he was something less than an honest man of the soil …’

  ‘You are mistaken, I am sure. But whatever you think, I am certain you can keep it to yourself, just as you are certain that I’ll tell no tales about you.’

  ‘I am the soul of discretion, ma’am, you know that.’

  ‘The soul of discretion.’ But for all his loud-mouthed boasting, Elizabeth knew that Billy Bird could keep his mouth shut when he had to, and she trusted him. ‘What brings you to the tidewater? Are you staying?’

  ‘I have taken up lodgings at the King’s Arms. Just temporary, of course.’

  Just until Thomas returns, Elizabeth thought.

  ‘I’ve some small business here,’ Billy continued, ‘and my ship is down at Norfolk, fitting out. Ship, I say. She is a brig, in fact, just a little thing. Lost my last ship off Madagascar. I will tell you all the unhappy details, but first I think you should invite me in for a cup of chocolate.’

  ‘Do you?’ Elizabeth folded her arms, cocked her head, regarded Billy Bird. Plymouth, London, Williamsburg. Since she was fourteen years old she had known Billy, and he always seemed to pop up again, wherever she was. They had been friends, had enjoyed the occasional roll in bed. And here he was again.

  She could well imagine what he was hoping for now. He would be disappointed, but he would get over it. A cup of chocolate, however, was within her newfound moral boundaries.

  It was a still morning, little wind, and the insects were just starting in with their buzzing. Elizabeth was about to ask Billy in when she heard the horses, a long way off. She paused, lifted her head, and listened.

  There was more than one, not galloping but not walking either. The sound grew louder as the riders approached. She looked down the long, tree-lined road that ran up to Marlowe House.

  She couldn’t see anyone, so she knew they were still a ways up the rolling road that connected their plantation to Williamsburg in one direction and Jamestown in another.

  Men on horses, riding fast. That was never a good thing. All these men, racing around on their great animals, always off on some important duty, inflicting some misery or another on someone. Like a pack of wolves. Chasing down fugitive slaves, chasing down pirates, chasing down threats to their beloved property.

  ‘These would be friends of yours?’ Bird asked.

  ‘I doubt very much friends.’

  They listened for a moment more. The riders grew closer. ‘I say, Lizzy, I never care to be conspicuous when there are men, no doubt armed men, charging about the countryside on horses. So if you do not mind terribly, I shall just duck into your house, perhaps indulge my eye with your exquisite taste in furnishings. You always did know how to spend a man’s money.’

  ‘As ever, the soul of discretion.’

  Billy Bird gave another of his elaborate bows. ‘Your servant, ma’am.’ Then he straightened and trotted off toward the porch.

  ‘Caesar!’ Elizabeth called out, and then again, louder. ‘Caesar!’

  Behind her she heard the main door open, heard bare feet on the wide front porch.

  ‘Ma’am?’ said Caesar. He was a former field slave, now head of the household. Past fifty, a gentle, soft-spoken man. No great demands were made of him. Marlowe figured that he had earned his rest, his easy duty.

  He looked with only vague curiosity at Billy Bird, who brushed past him with a friendly nod and disappeared into the cool interior of Marlowe House.

  Elizabeth climbed up to the porch, scanned the road again from that higher vantage. She could see a cloud of dust, a mile or so away, kicked up by the approaching riders.

  ‘Do you hear those horses coming?’ she asked.

  ‘No, ma’am.’ Caesar’s hearing was not all one might wish.

  ‘About half a dozen, I should think.’

  ‘They gots to know Mr Marlowe ain’t here. What you think they want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ That was true, but she could guess. Marlowe’s free blacks were the topic du jour in Williamsburg. This visit would involve
them in some way. She did not think it would be for the black people’s benefit.

  ‘I don’t imagine that whoever is coming is going to do us any favors,’ Elizabeth said, and Caesar nodded. ‘Round up all the people in the house and hurry out back and tell everyone working in the fields to lose themselves. Do you think you can all hide yourselves until these people go?’

  Caesar nodded. ‘If they’s only six of them, and no dogs, we can hide so they don’t find us.’

  ‘Very well. Go.’

  With that, Caesar disappeared and Elizabeth stepped slowly down to the lawn. In the far distance, on that part of the rolling road visible from Marlowe House, she could see the riders, small, bobbing specks against the green fields. She only hoped she had heard them in time.

  They turned onto the road running up to Marlowe House, seemed to pick up their pace for that last charge down to the plantation. Halfway there, two hundred yards away, and Elizabeth could see the white coat and breeches of Frederick Dunmore at their head.

  And I thought I would be lonely with Thomas gone, she thought.

  Hurry, Caesar. Pray, hurry.

  They reined up in front of her, their great, sweating, panting beasts pawing and shaking heads, twisting around under their riders, as if anxious to be at it. Dunmore, foremost, in his white coat, filmed with dust, the locks of his long white periwig flung back over his shoulders, twisted and tangled like Medusa snake-hair. Sword, brace of pistols in his crossbelt, musket thrust through a loop in his saddle.

  Behind him, three more plantation owners, and behind them, deferential, Elizabeth recognized the overseers from those plantations. Professional slave handlers, men whose earnings were commensurate with their ability to enforce discipline, their measured brutality.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Dunmore, but I am afraid you have missed my husband,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Didn’t come to see your husband, ma’am. We come for your niggers.’

  ‘I’m sorry, you’ve what?’

  ‘We’ve come for your niggers. Threat to the tidewater. Too bad that innocent white men had to die before anyone would listen to me. We’ll hold them until the burgesses figure out what to do with them.’