The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

  Dunmore shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps you can tell me, sir, is Frederick well? He was always so … high-spirited. I hope he has found his way in the world, and not lost sight of Godliness.’

  Dunmore stared, scowled, said nothing.

  ‘I have feared for him, you know, all these years. So many times I took pen in hand to write, as if the Lord were telling me that Frederick was in need of what little guidance I could offer, but each time …’

  ‘Frederick makes his own peace with God.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear that. But how could he not, having such a pious upbringing. Might I inquire if it was business that drew him away from Boston? Has he gone to seek his fortune elsewhere, or perhaps to spread the true word?’

  ‘You did not ask where he has gone.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I would think your first question would have been to inquire as to his whereabouts, not why he has left.’

  ‘That was to be my second question, sir.’

  ‘Get out.’

  This simple statement took Billy aback. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Get out, sir. I do not know who you are, or what you are about, but I want you to leave. Now.’

  ‘Well …’ Billy flustered. ‘I have never … we are at the Ship and Compass, sir, if you wish to make apologies for this rudeness before my wife—’

  ‘Get out!’ Dunmore was on his feet, his chair flung to the floor with the violence of his standing. He pounded his fist on the desk. ‘Get out!’

  But Billy would not be flustered, not even in the face of such unfettered rage. ‘Come along, my dear, let us go. This is just the thing I was warning you about, with the Dunmore family—’

  ‘Get out!’ He pounded the desk again.

  Billy took Elizabeth by the arm and steered her out of the room and back down the hall, the way they had come. Billy held her back, despite her desire to break and run, forcing her to walk at a dignified, even leisurely pace. They stepped back into the church, past the wide-eyed Sally, down the aisle, and at last back into the bright midday sun of Boston, the crowded streets, the smell of the horses and brackish water, the close-packed houses and shops.

  ‘Well, he was not as receptive to our inquiries as I had hoped,’ said Billy, adjusting his sword until it hung at the desired angle.

  Elizabeth took a deep breath, closed her eyes. Wait Dunmore’s sudden violence had unnerved her, and now her shock was settling into despair. ‘Oh, Billy, whatever will we do now? God, what a fool I was, thinking we could just show up here and discover some shocking secret. What have I done?’

  ‘Lizzy, dear, I hope you never thought we would be simply handed what we want. Now at least we know there is something to learn. But it will take some ferreting, you know, and ferret we will.’

  As usual, Elizabeth found some comfort in Billy’s words, in the absolute assurance of his tone. ‘But how? What will we do?’

  ‘First we shall dine on the best that Boston has to offer. Cod fixed any way you like. And then we begin on the second part of the plan.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘I do not know at the moment, my dear, but by the time our cod dinner is done I have no doubt I will. I myself am a master at cooking cod, did you know that?’

  She looked at him, shook her head. This sounded like the setup of one of his idiotic jokes. She wondered whether she should encourage his sophomoric humor. ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘You didn’t? Well, you do know there is none can stuff a codpiece nice and full like me.’

  And despite herself, Elizabeth smiled.

  CHAPTER 24

  They were in among the shipping again, near enough to the coast of Africa that they could smell the land, even when it was not in sight.

  Every day they sighted so many vessels that soon they raised no comment among the joyful, relieved, and optimistic men and women aboard the former French merchantman. Long dugout canoes, carved from a single tree and rowed by big crews of skilled paddlers, dark spots on the horizon, but the largest of these would on occasion paddle out to them, sometimes close enough to exchange a few words.

  There were sailing vessels as well, the low-sided native craft with their great arching lateen sails, and brigs and snows and ships from Europe and America. On a few occasions those vessels passed to windward, and the revolting and frightening smell of a blackbirder rolled down on them.

  For a week their course had not changed, save to compensate for the baffling winds which during that time managed to come from every point of the compass. But most of the wind they could use, and the chip log spun out behind to show their progress as they closed at long last on their port of destination.

  Then one morning James stepped onto the quarterdeck to find the pilot and Madshaka in conference by the helm.

  He watched Madshaka’s broad back, and the pilot, cowering slightly, and hunched. He could not hear what they were saying.

  It was an hour past dawn and it was already hot, and the vessel, which had been motionless, was starting to catch some puffs and the slatting sails were starting to fill. The pilot said something to the helmsman, Madshaka gave orders for the yards to be trimmed around a bit.

  Madshaka was armed. He generally went around with only a long dagger on his belt, but now, pirate fashion, he carried a sword, dagger, and a brace of pistols, as if he were readying for a fight.

  The sky was pure, pure blue. On the puffs of air rode scents from the land, the nearby land, and James understood that he should be happy. Africa. Home. It was almost over.

  Then Madshaka turned to him, grinned his sardonic grin, said, ‘King James,’ and jerked his head in a gesture meant to summon him over.

  ‘The pilot, he say we make landfall, today,’ Madshaka said when James had stepped over to him. ‘I think, whatever you need to do to anchor, you better do it now.’

  James just stared. ‘You giving me an order, Madshaka? We not pretending anymore that I’m still captain?’

  ‘No, no. I just make a suggestion. Captain.’

  James nodded. Madshaka’s sarcasm was the real answer. But if cockbilling the anchor and preparing it for setting would get them one step closer to being done with the voyage, then James did not really care from whom the order came. He headed off forward, looking for Quash and Good Boy and Cato and Joshua. His men.

  It took most of the morning to prepare the anchor, the best bower having been lashed in place for so long, and the gear stowed away in parts of the ship never visited, and James working through the clouds in his mind to make sense of it all, and in the end it was done.

  A headland had appeared beyond the bow just as they were bending on the cable, low green hills rising out of the blue sea. The wide arms of land spread as they approached, and by the time the best bower was cockbilled and ready to let go, their entire northern horizon, from east to west, was shoreline. They had not seen so much land in many weeks. It seemed the oddest of sights.

  Cato put a hand on James’s shoulder, a bold gesture of familiarity, a transparent attempt to lift James from his mounting despair. ‘What think you, James? Kalabari!’

  James shook his head. ‘It is not.’

  Cato was silent and he looked uncertain as to how to respond. ‘It’s not?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The beaches, the trees … it don’t look right. Kalabari should not be to the north.’

  The two men watched the approaching shoreline in silence. Off the larboard bow they could see, emerging from the forest, a city of significant proportions, an African city of low buildings. It appeared as a stutter of white geometric patches against the green forest, a strip of white sand in front, crowds of shipping anchored in the exposed roads.

  James turned to Cato, tried to smile, but the result was not what he had hoped. ‘I’m wrong, I think. I’ve not been here before. I suppose this is Kalabari.’ But James was in no frame of mind for lying and he did not convince Cato.

  James left the young man at the cathead, made his way
aft. The ship crept toward the shore and the white squares resolved themselves into individual structures, houses with dark windows and roofs thatched with bere as if they were trying to blend in with their background. Against the press of the green hills he could see the tall, spindly palms, waving in the same breeze that was drawing them in.

  Along the line of the beach, the treacherous surf of the African coast flashed white. The surf through which only the skilled grumetes, like Madshaka and Kusi, could safely bring the big canoes, a skill that made them so invaluable to the white men there.

  ‘Madshaka, we best furl courses and topgallants,’

  James said. Madshaka shouted the orders forward and the men raced aloft and the sails came in. He did not acknowledge James, did not even look at him, as if James’s words had just been thoughts in his own head.

  As the voyage was ending, so was the pretense.

  They stood on under topsails until they were in among the ships, ships of every size, from two-man canoes to big English and Portuguese slavers, all scattered along several miles of shoreline.

  There was some kind of settlement on the shore, and boats going in and out of the surf and plying between ships, but they were a mile or more to the east of the big city they had seen. The people crowded the rail and stared, silent. They were here, and words did not seem adequate.

  The French pilot said to Madshaka, ‘Anchor there,’ and pointed, and this time Madshaka turned to James and glared, because what the pilot said was beyond Madshaka’s ability. James turned to the helmsman and pointed to the patch of water that the pilot had indicated and the helmsman nodded and pushed the tiller over.

  The ship turned up and up into the wind and the leeches of the square sails began to shiver and James said to Madshaka, ‘Tell them to clew up the fore and main topsails,’ and once again Madshaka stepped forward and gave the orders as if they had originated with him.

  The fore and main topsails came down on the run and the mizzen topsail came aback and the ship stopped on that spot of water.

  ‘Let go!’ James called forward. Cato waved his acknowledgment and let the ring stopper fly and the best bower plunged into the water with a great splash and the ship, that floating community of disparate tribes, was fast by her anchor to the shore of Africa.

  And then one of the men was coming aft, yelling something at Madshaka, waving his arms and pointing toward the shore. He stopped a foot from Madshaka, still yelling. His tone was accusatory.

  Madshaka stepped back, held his hands up, as if to ward off blows, and with a quick word he silenced the man. He turned to the Frenchman. ‘This fellow, he say this not Kalabari. Where you take us?’

  The Frenchman shook his head slowly, side to side, stammered, ‘Whydah … this is Whydah …’

  ‘Bastard!’ Madshaka’s arm moved like a great black snake, too fast for anyone to react, almost too fast to see. He jerked a pistol from his belt, brought it up, drew the hammer back with his big thumb and shot the pilot in the forehead from three feet away.

  It was too fast for the pilot to say anything, too fast for him to react at all. The blow from the .69-caliber ball knocked him off his feet and blew his skull and brain apart, showering the bulwark with gore, and he was dead even before he fell in a bloody swath across the deck.

  ‘Bastard!’ Madshaka shouted again, and he took a step forward and kicked the dead man hard, the smoking gun in his hand. He turned toward the stunned men and women and children who were looking aft at them and shouted something in one language then another and another, pointing at the shore and the dead man.

  When he was done he turned to King James. ‘This bastard,’ he pointed at the dead pilot, ‘he trick us. We tell him we go to Kalabari, he take us to Whydah. He have friends here, I wager.’ He waved the discharged gun at James. ‘You, you supposed to know this navigation, you supposed to watch him! How he do this?’

  James scowled, shook his head. God, would it stop? He had only taken cursory looks at the chart when the pilot had showed it to him. The track marked there had been one heading to Kalabari, but there was no way for James to know if the course the pilot had marked on the chart was the same as the course that the ship was actually sailing. And here was the result.

  Whydah. What would they do in Whydah, in the heart of what the white men called the Slave Coast?

  Now Madshaka was shouting at the people and pointing to James and the people were looking at James with hateful eyes and for once James understood completely what Madshaka was saying.

  He folded his arms, looked at the crowd facing him. He did not doubt they would fall on him, beat him to death, but he could not seem to move himself to care.

  But Madshaka stopped the tirade, paused, glanced over at the shore. He raced to the rail, leaned against it, seemed to be studying the buildings, the beach. There was something artificial in the performance, something contrived about his stance, his concentration, but James could not see on the faces of the others if anyone besides himself felt as much.

  Then Madshaka turned back to the people. He pointed toward the shore and he spoke again, but this time his voice was pleading and sad with just a hint of his former anger and James could not imagine what he was saying.

  He spoke for ten minutes and by then the other men were nodding in agreement and were themselves looking at the distant shore. Then Madshaka said something with a tone of finality and the men nodded again, their faces grim, and then they dispersed.

  Madshaka turned aft, and in doing so caught James’s eye. He stopped short and the two men stared at each other for a moment, then Madshaka said, ‘This where I was taken. Whydah, where I was put into slavery. I tell them I know where the factory is, just there, where they keep the slaves. I tell them we go ashore, free them all, take them away.

  ‘Tonight, we go ashore, free our brothers. You come too, King James? Or are you afraid?’ He let the question hang, grinned at James, and his expression was gloating and victorious, not that of a man selflessly risking his life to emancipate his brothers in chains.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come.’

  He thought of that old sailor’s rhyme. Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin …

  The warning was supposed to be for white men, he thought.

  CHAPTER 25

  Madshaka walked fore and aft, fore and aft, like a lion preparing to charge. He liked the feel of the still-warm deck planks under his hard, bare feet, liked the slap of the cutlass, the slap of the dirk, the thump of the pistols across his chest. He had to remember not to smile with delight at it all. This was a solemn moment. The people believed that. He had told them so.

  Before him, in uneven ranks, his army. The nucleus of his army. Sixty men. Well trained. Vicious. They had already followed him in enough attacks that he knew he could count on them. He had taught them how to be merciless, how to butcher any resistance, how to roll over any confrontation. They would do it again.

  Of the sixty men before him, seventeen were Kru, like himself. It was too bad they were not all Kru, did not all speak Kwa, did not all have that loyalty that came of an ancient bond of kinship. Then he would really have something.

  But they were not, and he had no use for the others, the Yoruba, the Ibo, the Bariba, the Aja, all the rest. He had no use for the English speakers, no use for the women. No use after that night’s work.

  ‘The factory, two miles from the shore,’ he told them. ‘I know the way. No sound until we there. The King of Whydah has army, he will fight us, because he is an evil man. We must not be discovered until we victorious.’

  He saw grim faces. The men nodded their understanding as he spoke.

  ‘It will be easy, if we surprise them. Not many men there. We overrun them, kill only who I say. I open the prison, we go in, help our brothers out, take the white men’s gold, and come back to the ship.’

  A noble cause and one that would further enrich them. He could see the effects his words were having, words he translated into the various languages of his army. English too,
for he had convinced King James and the other Virginians to go with them on their righteous crusade.

  King James. Madshaka could well imagine what a hell his life had been. Stolen from a noble family of the Kabu Malinke, forced to endure the Middle Passage, a slave for two decades. His bold, selfless act of saving all those aboard the blackbirder turning into such a nightmare. Madshaka knew that a man’s mind could endure only so much, and he knew that James must be near the breaking point.

  And after all that, King James’s life would end here, on the African shore, on that night, in the slave port of Whydah.

  Another man might have felt sorry for him. But then, another man might have found pity for those people stolen into slavery and forced on to the hellish voyage to the New World, especially after he himself had just been made to endure its living death.

  But Madshaka was not such a man, and he was proud of that fact. Every horror that he lived through made him stronger, every new circle of hell through which he passed made him more contemptuous of those who were broken by it. Some men were hunters and some the hunted.

  He looked up at the moon, saw that it was settling toward the horizon. It would remain long enough to get them through the surf and then it would set, leaving them to approach in darkness. Perfect. It was time to go.

  On his word the army, his army of pirates, dressed as they were in their plundered sailor garb, colorful swatches of cloth bound around heads and waists, climbed silently down the boarding cleats and into the longboat below.

  Madshaka felt Kusi’s loss for the first time since shoving him into the sea. It would have been good to have another grumete, another boatman who could have taken the gig through the surf, so the longboat would not be so crowded. But it was a small thing, and did not measure up to the convenience of having Kusi drowned.

  Madshaka came last. He took the last steps down the ship’s side and stepped into the stern sheets of the longboat. He unshipped the rudder, which was useless in the big surf, and took up a spare sweep, holding it at his side like a soldier holding a pike as he stood on the after thwart and called, ‘Give way!’