The Slave Dancer

by Paula Fox

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

  Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

  Winner of the Paris Review’s Hadada Award

  “The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

  “One of America’s most talented writers.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Consistently excellent.” —The New York Times

  “Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.” —School Library Journal

  “Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox’s brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

  “Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —The New Yorker

  “As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox’s prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn, New York magazine

  “Fox’s achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

  “Fox has little of Roth’s self-consciousness, less of Bellow’s self-importance, and none of Updike’s self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

  “There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by homage or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb, The Boston Review

  “Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel, BOMB

  The Slave Dancer

  Newbery Medal Winner

  “Spellbinding … will horrify as well as fascinate.” —School Library Journal, starred review

  “Movingly and realistically presents one of the most gruesome chapters of history.” —Booklist, starred review

  “Each of the sailors is sharply individualized, the inhuman treatment of the captives is conveyed straight to the nose and stomach rather than the bleeding heart, and the scenes in which Jessie is forced to play his fife to ‘dance the slaves’ for their morning exercise become a haunting, focusing image for the whole bizarre undertaking.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Moving, harrowing, and, unfortunately, entirely believable.” —Historical Novel Society

  “Brutal and brilliant.” —The Paris Review

  The Slave Dancer

  Paula Fox

  For Shauneille and Don Ryder

  and their daughters, Lorraine and Natalie

  Contents

  Introduction

  History

  The Errand

  The Moonlight

  The Shrouds

  The Bight of Benin

  Nicholas Spark Walks on Water

  The Spaniard

  Ben Stout’s Mistake

  The Old Man

  Home and After

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Many times a book is just that, a book. Occasionally a book is more. It can be a comforting diversion, a prod to some inner emotion, it can even become an old friend. Rarer yet, a book can be all of the aforementioned as well as something still more profound: It can be an act of courage.

  This is where the nearly half-century-old The Slave Dancer sits in my pantheon of great books. Paula Fox’s work displays the kind of gutsy, vital writing that assures it will be as fresh and relevant fifty years from now as it is today.

  When Ms. Fox decided she was going to write a story about slavery, she was faced with a whole raft of difficult choices. I know, because I’ve been through the very same struggle of choosing how to portray horrors that are nearly unimaginable.

  For years I wanted to write a novel about slavery from a slave’s perspective, but I delayed and delayed because I couldn’t find a way to do it. It proved impossible for me to comprehend what it was like to inhabit the mind of a person whose family had been enslaved for generations. How, I asked myself, could I even pretend to know what type of mental machinations and emotional death would go into having to think of yourself as nothing more than an animal? And worse yet, having to teach your children that if they want to survive, they too must accept the constant degradation and humiliation; that they must never forget they are not even close to being fully human. Nothing in any of my research, my life, or my imagination, would allow me to honestly make this leap. Slavery was a horror beyond my skills as an author.

  Paula Fox, always showing immense respect, overcomes this problem by having us view slavery through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Jessie Bollier, a poor white boy whose one skill, playing the flute, gets him shanghaied onto a slave ship to serve as a slave dancer.

  Even though this is a book for young people, Ms. Fox never writes down to them. Nor does she wallow in the obscene, traumatic turn Jessie’s life has taken. Our naïve narrator grows up very quickly and the reader’s revulsion at his predicament grows right along with him. Through Ms. Fox’s deft hand, Jessie’s descriptions reveal the abominations of the slave trade through the eyes of a boy’s limited understanding of a complex and difficult situation. Our older, more experienced eyes allow us to be appalled.

  An example of this is Ms. Fox’s revelation of the overpowering, all-encompassing stench produced when upwards of a hundred human beings are kept tightly packed below deck for months at a time. Slave ships, such as the Moonlight, were so rank and befouled after the middle passage that they could never be reused as anything other than a slave ship. When they had served their purpose they were either scuttled or taken out to sea and set afire.

  As counterintuitive as it may seem, another example of the courage of Paula Fox is her use of the “N” word.

  Though the word might not have been quite as controversial when the book was written in 1973, it was problematic enough. But who could have ever dreamed that fifty years later the word would become even more toxic?

  It’s difficult for me to describe the depths of my feelings toward this word. Its continued use shows a breathtaking and inexcusable depth of ignorance on the part of whoever utters it, regardless of their race. My feelings about it are rooted in my walks to school through segregated Flint, Michigan, where, as a junior high student, my siblings and I were liberally peppered with the slur.

  There is only one context in which this word is acceptable, and that is its historical context. It is ugly, it is grating, it jumps off the page at me, but, in keeping with the tone of this beautiful book, its use is real and accurate. There is no way around that.

  The Slave Dancer is not an easy book to read. It is unsettling, unnerving, and unapologetic in its blunt presentation of an incredibly difficult subject. My respect as an author is rooted in the fact that Ms. Fox neither panders nor pulls her punches nor allows the reader a chance to wiggle off the hook.

  The book remains both a major literary accomplishment and a major act of courage on the part of Paula Fox. I am proud to know I am in the same profession as she.

  Christo
pher Paul Curtis

  2016

  History

  Ship The Moonlight

  Officers Captain Cawthorne—the Master

  Nicholas Spark—the Mate

  Crew Jessie Bollier

  John Cooley

  Adolph Curry

  Louis Gardere

  Ned Grime

  Isaac Porter

  Clay Purvis

  Claudius Sharkey

  Seth Smith

  Benjamin Stout

  Sam Wick

  Cargo 98 slaves whose true names were remembered only by their families, except for the young boy, Ras

  Shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico, June 3, 1840

  Survivors 2

  The Errand

  In a hinged wooden box upon the top of which was carved a winged fish, my mother kept the tools of her trade. Sometimes I touched a sewing needle with my finger and reflected how such a small object, so nearly weightless, could keep our little family from the poorhouse and provide us with enough food to sustain life—although there were times when we were barely sustained.

  Our one room was on the first floor of a brick and timber house which must have seen better times. Even on sunny days I could press my hand against the wall and force the moisture which coated it to run to the floor in streams. The damp sometimes set my sister, Betty, to coughing which filled the room with barking noises like those made by quarreling animals. Then my mother would mention how fortunate we were to live in New Orleans where we did not suffer the cruel extremes of temperature that prevailed in the north. And when it rained for days on end, leaving behind when it ceased a green mold which clung to my boots, the walls and even the candlesticks, my mother thanked God that we were spared the terrible blizzards she remembered from her childhood in Massachusetts. As for the fog, she observed how it softened the clamor from the streets and alleyways and kept the drunken riverboat men away from our section of the Vieux Carré.

  I disliked the fog. It made me a prisoner. I imagined, sitting there on a bench in the shadows of the little room, that the smoky yellow stuff which billowed against our two windows was a kind of sweat thrown off by the Mississippi River as it coiled and twisted toward the sea.

  Except for the wooden sewing box, a sea chest which had belonged to my mother’s father, and her work table, we owned scarcely anything. One cupboard held the few scraps of our linen, the cooking pots and implements, candle ends and a bottle of burning liquid which my mother rubbed on Betty’s chest when she was feverish. There were two chamber pots on the floor, hidden by day in the shadow of the cupboard but clearly visible by candlelight, the white porcelain one chipped and discolored, the other decorated with a painting of an ugly orange flower which my mother said was a lily.

  There was one pretty object in the room, a basket of colored spools of thread which sat on the sill of the window facing Pirate’s Alley. By candlelight, the warmth of the colors made me think the thread would throw off a perfume like a garden of flowers.

  But these spools were not used for our clothes. They were for the silks and muslins and laces which my mother made into gowns for the rich ladies of New Orleans to wear to their balls and receptions, their weddings and the baptism of their infants, and sometimes to their funerals.

  One early evening toward the end of January, I walked slowly home inventing a story that might distract my mother from asking me why I was late and where I had been. I was relieved to find her so preoccupied there was no need to tell her anything. Even if I had blurted out the truth—that I had spent an hour wandering about the slave market at the corner of St. Louis and Chartres Streets, a place as strictly forbidden to me as Congo Square, where slaves were allowed to hold their festivities, I doubt she would have heard me. The whole room was covered with a great swathe of apricot colored brocade supported by chairs to keep it from touching the floor. Betty crouched in a corner, staring at the cloth as though in a daze, while my mother, her back against the wall, gripped an edge of the brocade in her two hands and shook her head from side to side, muttering to herself in words I could not make out.

  I had seen damask and gauze and velvet and silk across my mother’s knees or falling in cascades from her table, but never such a lavish piece as this, of such a radiant hue. Designs were embroidered upon it showing lords and ladies bowing, and prancing horses no larger than thimbles, their rear hooves buried in flowers, haloes of birds and butterflies circling their caparisoned heads.

  Without looking up, my mother said, “We need more candles,” in such a fretful and desperate voice, I knew she was pressed for time and had before her a piece of work that would keep her up many nights.

  I held out a few coins. I had earned them that afternoon playing my fife for the steamboat crews who came to gorge themselves on the fruit that was sold in the great market near the levee.

  She glanced at my hand. “Not enough,” she said. “Go and borrow some from Aunt Agatha. I must start work on this nightmare right away.”

  “It’s beautiful!” cried Betty.

  “This nightmare …” repeated my mother wearily.

  I hesitated. I hated to go to Aunt Agatha’s neat house on St. Ann Street. No matter how often I went, my Aunt would always direct my course like a pilot boat as soon as I opened the door. “Don’t walk there!” she would cry. “Take your huge feet off that carpet! Watch the chair—it’ll fall! Can’t you walk like a gentleman instead of some lout from the bayou?”

  To Betty and my mother, I called her a disagreeable and mean old maid. My mother replied that I was a surly boy and would grow up to become an uncharitable man. She was, after all, my mother said, my father’s only living relative, and her grief at his death had entirely changed her nature. “We’re his relatives,” I’d muttered. That was different, she’d said. Still, I had no other memory of Aunt Agatha except as a woman who especially disliked me.

  I had been four, and Betty a month from being born, when my father drowned in the Mississippi River. He had been working on a snagboat, helping to clear away the tree stumps and other hidden debris that had made the river so perilous for the passage of steamboats. The snagboat had been caught by a current, my father lost his footing, fell and sank before anyone could help him.

  In dreams, sometimes even when I was fully awake, a voice inside my head would cry, “Oh, swim!” as though by such an appeal I could make the river return my father to us. Once my mother had heard this involuntary cry escape my lips, “He was brave,” she had said. But I was not comforted. “He is dead,” I had said.

  My mother had reminded me then that there were souls whose fates were so terrible in comparison to ours, that we should consider ourselves among the fortunate of the earth. I knew she was thinking of the slaves who were sold daily so close to where we lived.

  “Jessie! Will you go now, this instant?”

  “I’ve a cramp in my leg,” Betty complained.

  “Well then, stand up, girl,” said my mother crossly.

  I went out onto the street wondering what she would have said if she’d known that this very day I’d seen six Africans offered up for sale as cane hands. They had been dressed as if they had been going to a ball, even to the white gloves they were all wearing. “These niggers are matchless!” the auctioneer had cried, at which instant I was picked up bodily by a man as hairy as a dray horse, thrown to the pavement and told to keep away from the slave market until I had something better in mind than nasty peeking.

  I knew the way so well, my feet took me to Aunt Agatha’s without help from my brain. She received me in her usual fashion, then gave me three candles.

  “Why doesn’t your mother use her oil lamps?” she asked accusingly.

  “They smoke,” I answered.

  “They wouldn’t if someone knew how to trim them properly.”

  “They don’t give enough light,” I said.

  “People shouldn’t work at night anyhow,” she said, then, catching sight of the fife which I always carried, she exclaimed, “What an und
ignified way to earn your keep! Playing that silly pipe! It’s time you were apprenticed and learned a trade. I doubt you’d benefit from schooling.”

  “My mother has taught me reading and numbers,” I answered as sharply as I dared.

  “But who is to teach you how to think?” she snapped back.

  I could think of no answer to that so I made for the door, remembering to sidestep a small carpet she prized. “Goodnight, Auntie,” I said, as though I were about to burst into laughter. I heard her snort as I closed the door.

  The night sky was clear. The air was faintly scented with the aroma of flowers which grew in such profusion inside the walled gardens that belonged to the rich families in our neighborhood. Often I had climbed those walls and peered through the black iron grillework into the great rooms of their houses or looked down into the gardens where, among the beds of flowers, a stone hut had been piled up to shelter the house slaves. Once I had seen a lady glide across a floor in a gown I was sure my mother had made, and on another evening I had been startled when, thinking myself unobserved, I had grown aware of a silent watcher, a black woman who stood leaning against the doorless entrance of such a hut. She had been utterly still; her arms hanging straight by her sides, her eyes fixed upon me as I half straddled the wall.

  I had been afraid she would suddenly decide to give the alarm, and I was angry she had seen me at all. “Star!” someone had called, and at that, the black woman had placed her hands on her hips and, without a glance in my direction, moved toward the house.

  I had never heard anyone called such a name before. When I told my mother about it, omitting the circumstances in which I’d heard it, she said, “Might as well call someone ‘shoe’. It’s not a human name.”

  For a while, I didn’t climb garden walls. But the memory of the woman standing there in the evening shadows stayed with me. I wondered why her master had called her Star, and what she had thought about her name and if she thought about it at all, and I often recalled how she’d walked so slowly and silently to the big house, her skirt hiding the movement of her feet so that she seemed to float across the ground.