The Slave Dancer

by Paula Fox

  “She go where she pleases,” said the old man. “I spared her so far.”

  Then with both hands, he grabbed up a great thatch of branches and thrust it aside. To my surprise, a large clearing was revealed. In the center was a small hut and a few yards of spaded earth and to one side, a pig pen, where a sow nursed a number of piglets while a giant pig grunted and rolled in the mud. A few chickens scratched in the dirt. The old man led us to a large cask nearly full of water. He handed a dipper full to Ras, then held the boy’s hand and pressed it and said softly, “Slow, slow …”

  Ras finished and held out the dipper to me. At the first taste of the dank cool water I forgot all else and drank steadily until the old man shook me and drew me away from the cask. “That’s enough,” he said.

  He took us into his hut. The earth floor was hard and smooth. I saw a crude hearth with a few blackened pots and utensils grouped around it. A tree trunk served as a table. On the floor, there was a bed of straw and leaves.

  I sank to the floor, resting my back against the wall. Ras remained standing, watching the old man set out food for us on the tree-trunk table.

  On land at last, in a silence broken only by insects chirring, warmed by the damp breathless heat of the forest around us, resting on a surface that remained steady, about to assuage my hunger, I couldn’t understand the heaviness that weighed me down, that made it so difficult to breathe. I wanted—and this made me wonder if I’d really lost my wits—to be dropped in the mud with the pig outside, to roll in the wet dirt, to bury myself in it. I wanted to cry.

  How soon before the bodies of the crew would be washed up on the sand? Would I look once more at Ben Stout’s face drying out in the sun? I felt again the violent heaving water through which Ras and I had struggled to the shore. How had I done it with my dog’s pawing? Suddenly, I heard an inner voice crying out “Oh, swim!” as it had whenever I’d thought of my father sinking among the dead drowned trees in the Mississippi River. I wondered if it was that plea that had served me so well at last.

  A few days later, when Ras and I and the old man were walking on the beach, we found a few things from The Moonlight, Ben Stout’s waterlogged Bible, pieces of Ned Grime’s bench and many odd pieces of wood which the old man gathered and piled up out of the reach of the tide. I found, drying out in the sun and buzzed over by small biting flies, a long piece of rope.

  “You won’t find nobody,” the old man said to me. “The sharks will crack their bones. They don’t leave nothing.”

  I was thinking of rope, how, leading up to the topmost sail, it had hummed with life, how, stretched and taut, it had guided or restrained the sails just as bridles and reins guide and restrain horses. I picked it up and waved away the cloud of insects. The rope smelled of decay.

  I had not eaten much at our first meal, but I made up for that in the next few days. One night, the old man made a stew of okra and greens and ham. Ras and I ate until the food ran down our chins and we were covered with grease. He pointed at me and laughed. I drew my finger along his chin, showing him the ham fat that had collected on his cheeks. He laughed harder. It was still daylight. The birds were calling each other to sleep. The old man smiled—very slightly—and rose to light an oil lamp. I took the pot outside and scoured it with sand. Then Ras and I squatted near the hut. A huge beaked bird flew above us toward the dying light in the west. I heard from far off the great breathing of the sea, taken in, expelled. We sat there until dark when the bugs drove us inside.

  Ras and I talked together, knowing we couldn’t understand each other. Sometimes, pointing to a tree or a bird or some feature of his face, he would slowly pronounce a word. I would repeat it, then say it in English. In this fashion we learned a few words of each others languages. The old man had given us clothes, and though they didn’t fit in a way that would have won my mothers admiration, we were at least dressed.

  The old man was entirely dependent upon the little patch of ground he had planted and his few animals for the sustaining of his life. He was seldom idle. I wondered at some of the things he had in his hut, where they had come from. I knew by then he must be an escaped slave who had founded for himself this tiny place of liberty deep in the forest. Often I felt we were as remote from other people as we would have been on a deserted island.

  At the end of the first week, the old man told me his name. A piglet had gotten out from under the fence. I chased it, crying “Old man! Old man!” He caught up with me in the thick undergrowth, swooped down on the piglet, saying at the same time, “You can call me Daniel.”

  I could tell by looking at Ras that we were both gaining weight. I began to feel the return of my strength. We rose at dawn and went to sleep with the birds. Daniel cautioned us not to go too far from the hut and to be careful and watch out for snakes. We brought to the hut the wood he’d collected on the beach, and we fetched water to keep the cask full from a nearby stream. There were always chores to be done. But there were games and idle times. We hid from each other and sought each other out; we built a small shelter out of fallen branches; we chased the chickens until Daniel stopped us. It was a time without measure in which no thought of the future intruded, when the memory of the past was put aside for a while.

  One evening, Daniel rested his hand on Ras’s head. The boy looked up at him questioningly. Daniel patted him gently. Watching them both from the doorway, I shivered.

  The very next night, I learned what was to happen to Ras.

  After we’d cleaned up the pots from dinner and Daniel had lit the lamp, I heard a footstep. The sow grunted. Daniel went outside. He spoke at some length to someone. Then he came back and said, “You be quiet, Jessie. I want you to sit outside. Here. Take this and wrap it around you against the bugs.” He handed me a dusty cloak. I shook it out. A smell of mildew rose from its creases. “Don’t look so scared, boy,” said Daniel. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

  Standing at the edge of the clearing were two black men. They watched me go to the pig pen and sit down against the fence, then they entered the hut. For a long time I strained to make sense out of the murmur of voices inside. I felt pitiful and alone, then the pig came and lay down behind me on the other side of the fence and grunted softly. I grunted back. It was better than talking to myself. I must have dozed for a while. I heard Daniel speaking from the doorway, “Come back now, Jessie.”

  When I entered the hut, I saw the two men had gone. Ras was squatting on the floor, his fingers tracing some design on it.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “We’re going to get him out of here,” he said. “We got a way of taking him north, far from this place. One of those men speaks his language. Look at him! See how he’s thinking?”

  Ras was looking at me now but I might as well have been invisible. He didn’t see me at all.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Daniel said as he sat on the straw bed. He was rubbing his ankle. Beneath his fingers, I caught a glimpse of an old scar.

  “And me?” I asked.

  “You got to go home to your family,” he said. “You rested up now. It’ll take you a few days walking.”

  “When is Ras—”

  “He’s going tomorrow soon as it gets dark. They coming for him.”

  Daniel got up suddenly and walked to where Ras was sitting. He took the boy’s hand in his own.

  “You be all right,” he said over and over again in a kind of lullaby.

  On our last morning together, Ras and I went down to the beach. We found, resting amid the sea wrack at the high water line, a curved piece of the ship’s bow.

  Ras was quiet, given to long silent staring pauses when he stopped whatever he was doing and went off into a private vision of his own. We stayed close to each other all that day.

  Daniel made us a pudding of yams for supper. Ras had little appetite, but the old man kept heaping food on his plate with a pleading look on his face. I saw Ras try; he knew he had to eat.

  At dark, one
of the two men came back. Daniel had made a packet of food which he gave to Ras. He had dressed in clothes the man had brought him and they fitted him well. I wondered to whom the clothes belonged, and where he was. Ras looked taller—almost unknown. He and the young man who’d come to fetch him spoke infrequently. Whatever would happen to him now, Ras was resolved, tight with intention. I could tell it by the way he determinedly stuck his narrow feet into black boots, the way he took the food from Daniel’s hands, the way his glance rested constantly on the doorway. Daniel bent over him. I saw Ras’s arms slide around his back, his hands resting on the old man’s shoulders. Then he came to me.

  “Jessie?” he said.

  I nodded, uneasy under the expressionless stare of the young man.

  “Nose,” said Ras as he touched my nose.

  I smiled then. He placed a finger against my front teeth.

  “Teef,” he said.

  “Teeth,” I corrected.

  Ras laughed and shook his head. “Teef,” he said again, and then, gravely, “Jessie.”

  He was gone in an instant. Daniel and I were alone.

  I felt such a hollowness then, and the awakening of the memory, asleep these last weeks, of the voyage of The Moonlight. My mouth went dry. I sat on the floor and hid my head in my arms.

  “Come here,” said Daniel.

  I looked up. He was sitting on his straw bed. I got up and went to him.

  “Now, sit down, Jessie. And tell me the whole story of that ship.”

  I told him, leaving out nothing I could remember, from the moment when Purvis and Sharkey had wrapped me in that canvas to the moment when Ras and I had slid into the water from the sinking ship.

  When I had finished, the old man said, “That’s the way it was,” as though everything I had described was only what he already had known.

  I wanted to ask him if he too had come in that same way to this country, but something held me back. I asked him nothing.

  “That boy, he be safe soon,” said Daniel. “Now you go to sleep. You need your rest. You got to start before light. Listen, boy!” He stopped speaking and looked at my face intently. The lamp was low, and now the hut was like a clearing in the forest lit only by the last burning twig of a campfire. The shadows deepened the sockets of his eyes. He seemed very old.

  “If you tell your people about Daniel,” he said, “Daniel will be taken back to the place he run away from. Are you going to tell them?”

  “No, no!” I cried. I yearned to show him my resolve as though it were a thing like a shoe or a hoe that I could put in his hand.

  “All right,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not.

  He woke me before the birds began their twittering. I dressed in the dark in the clothes he had given me. But I had no boots. He said, “You wrap your feet in these rags. They make it easier for you to get through the woods.”

  I bound my feet with the strips of cloth he handed me.

  “Now listen sharp. I’m going to tell you how you get home.”

  Slowly, often stopping to make me repeat what he had said, he drew a chart of words that would lead me home to New Orleans.

  I looked out into the woods. It was utterly dark.

  “Here,” said Daniel, as he handed me a packet. “Something to eat,” he said. I heard a grunt from the pig pen, a few squeals from the piglets, a drowsy cluck from a hen.

  “Thank you, Daniel,” I said.

  “I hope you have a safe journey,” he said.

  I wanted him to touch my head as he had Ras’s. But his arms remained unmoving at his sides. I looked into his face. He didn’t smile. The distance between us lengthened even as I stood there, listening to his breathing, aware of a powerful emotion, gratitude mixed with disappointment. I thought of Purvis.

  “Go on, now,” he said.

  I stepped out of the hut. Daniel had saved my life. I couldn’t expect more than that.

  Home and After

  I was frightened in the woods, in the dark. The path was no more than a tracing on the thick underbrush. With my bound feet, I often had to stop and feel around with my fingers until I found it again. In my wake, birds woke with sharp cries and complaints. The dawn’s light was still too weak to penetrate the forest, although when I looked straight up, I could see the paling of the sky.

  I was caught between the urge to move as rapidly as I could and to stay right where I was until daylight. What I dreaded, what turned my forehead damp with sweat, was a vision of snakes beneath the brush, snakes like strings of wet brown beads, or thick like the weathered gray hafts of axes, or brilliantly colored like precious stones.

  Then I came to Daniel’s first marker, a small clearing near a trickle of stream where someone had recently built a fire. The smell of the ashes had been revivified by the morning dew. I was comforted as though I’d met someone whom Daniel and I knew.

  When the sun had risen to its zenith, I came to a rutted road where farm wagons had left their wheel tracks. The forest had thinned to a few sparse clumps of trees, and I saw the sea glittering a quarter of a mile away. Once, as I was crossing a scraggy meadow, I startled a small flock of brown birds which rose like an arch beneath which I glimpsed a great white sail on the sea. I wondered what sort of ship she was—and what she carried in her holds.

  In the late afternoon, I passed through a marsh where I was surrounded by loops and circles of still water on the surface of which floated patches of flowers, and where long-legged birds gazed down at their reflections with grave looks. I was the only human being abroad. The sky seemed immense.

  That night, I ate a portion of the food Daniel had prepared for me, and made myself as comfortable as I could in an abandoned wagon, its shaft aimed at the sky. I felt like a fool, but before climbing under it I had tossed stones at it to frighten away the snakes I was sure were nesting there.

  Daniel’s markers drew me through the second day—one was a curious pile of stones on each one of which was painted a human figure; another was a tiny gray cabin far off at the edge of a field. There was nothing to shelter me that night. I simply lay down on the ground. Before daylight, I was awakened by the soft close chittering of some little field animal which ran right across my chest.

  On the third morning, I woke to mist and heat. The wagon ruts had disappeared. Instead, at regular intervals as though they’d been embroidered, were the distinct shapes of horses’ hooves. On my left, the fields ran down to the sea where they ended at low sand hills. On my right were woods but these were tamed woods, more like a vast park. A low stone wall ran along the side of the dirt road. I followed along it until I came to the place where two tall columns marked the beginning of another road which ran straight as a plumb line to the steps of a great plantation house. A small lizard the color of blood ran up one of the columns, then stopped and played dead.

  Splendid flowers bloomed along that road. The wide porch of the house was empty. Not a leaf moved in the windless air. Then, all at once, a man on a black horse rode into view. He halted. The horse pawed the ground then flung up its head. At that, as though summoned by the horse, three black men ran to the rider and helped him dismount. They dashed before him up the steps to open the doors while a fourth man led away the horse.

  I forgot I was in full view—as they were. I saw the doors close behind the rider. The windows reflected nothing. There was no sign of life. The lizard ran down the column. I felt frozen, choked, as I had that first time on The Moonlight when I’d been summoned by Captain Cawthorne to dance the slaves. Then I heard a dog bark from far away, and I bounded down the road like a rabbit that has regained control of its limbs.

  Later, the sky turned the color of soot. The rain began, slowly, hesitatingly, until the sky opened up and the water fell in sheets. I sheltered beneath a hedge, soaked through, watching the road turn to mud. I knew I could not be far from home now. To my dismay, I felt I could go no further. The water blinded me. It roared in my ears. I was filled with an apprehension that had no reasonabl
e shape in my mind. It spread around me like a dark sea. I did not think my legs would move when I wished them to. Suddenly, moved by an obscure impulse, I held my breath. Somewhere, someone had once told me that there were people who could choke off their lives by an act of will. I toppled sideways and lay exposed to the rain. But I was breathing. I couldn’t not breathe.

  At twilight, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. From every blade of grass, from every leaf, hung glittering drops. My spirits revived. I tore off the rags from around my feet and continued down the road, mud oozing between my toes. I was hungry now but hunger didn’t surprise me as it might have once. I slept that night in a fishing boat upturned on a narrow beach bordering an inlet. The last morning of my journey, I was awakened to bright sunlight by small buzzing flies.

  By late afternoon, I was walking down Chartres Street toward Jackson Square. I looked like a muddy scarecrow but I didn’t attract much attention, only a warning look from a lady sliding along beneath her parasol, and a vague smile from a riverboat captain who, having long since begun his day’s drinking, allowed everything strange to amuse him.

  I opened the door to our room as I had done in my imagination a hundred times. I took my first step inside. I heard a shriek, a cry. Betty and my mother and I stood silently for a moment, then we ran toward each other with such force I felt the little house shake in all its boards and bricks.

  We talked through half the night. I learned of their frantic search which had followed my disappearance, how even that very day my mother had questioned venders in the market as she had done every day since I’d been gone. My mother often wept, not only because I, whom she’d thought dead, had been returned to her, but at the story of The Moonlight. When I described how the slaves had been tossed into the shark-filled waters of Cuba, she covered her face with her hands and cried, “I can’t hear it! I can’t bear it!”