The Abduction of Smith and Smith

by Rashad Harrison

  “And you think going up will help it?” asked Jupiter.

  “Been dormant too long. Need to walk out some of the ache.”

  “There’s room for you to walk in here, you know. Just walk in circles.”

  “Goddamn it, I didn’t escape one prison just to be held in another.”

  “This ain’t exactly the same thing. We’re going home now,” said Jupiter.

  “My leg hurts. I need some fresh air,” said Archer.

  “You just want to go up there because you were told not to go up there and you don’t like being told what to do.”

  “If that’s true for me, then it’s true for my leg too. I’m saying stay down here, and it’s saying, no, go up top.”

  “Archer, don’t start any trouble.”

  Archer went on deck. He watched the moonlight dance on the water. A man was on watch duty, scanning the dark with his spyglass. Archer thought about Elizabeth and the boy. Did they miss him? What did they think of him when he didn’t show up for the boy? Did they think he was dead? That he had abandoned him?

  Archer heard crying. He thought it was a trick of the ocean, an auditory hallucination. Maybe that sailor was a more sensitive fellow than he seemed. No. He heard it again. It wasn’t coming from the ocean, it wasn’t coming from the sailor, but it was coming from the ship. Somewhere down below.

  Archer looked over his shoulder at the sailor. The sailor returned the look and went back to his spyglass. Archer dashed belowdeck. He went down the steps to a double set of doors. They were locked. He pressed his ear against them and heard the crying. He looked up and to the left of the doors: a set of keys on a ring, like a guard might leave outside of a prison cell. He tried each key; there were five of them. None worked, except the last one.

  He open the door, slowly, as it was heavy—maybe fortified with steel. It was pitch-black inside, but he heard the crying. He went back out for the lantern that hung outside the door. He shined its light inside the dark room and for the source of the crying: a little girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, dressed in rags, sobbing. Archer moved the light. Behind her sat dozens of other women, girls, in stoic silence.

  63

  Archer backed away, closed the door, and put the keys and lantern back in their place. The sailor on watch met him as he came up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just stretching my legs, getting fresh air,” answered Archer.

  “No. You don’t go down there. You stay where I can see you. If you go down there, then you’ll go out there,” he said, pointing to the dark sea.

  “I understand,” said Archer. “It won’t happen again.” Archer smiled and patted the sailor on his shoulder. It was all stone.

  Archer headed back to the cabin.

  “Jupiter, you won’t believe what’s down below this ship.”

  Jupiter looked at him. “What now?”

  “They’ve got a hull full of women down there. Ragged and scared.”

  Jupiter sat up. He wanted it to be a lie. He was so close to reuniting with Sonya and the boy—closer than he had been in Yerby’s cave or Wu Ping’s compound. Of course he had to do something; he knew it as soon as Archer said it. How could he be delivered to his family on a slave ship?

  Archer became impatient with Jupiter’s silence. “Say something. We’ve got to do something to help them,” said Archer. “We can’t just sit back and watch their freedom be taken away from them.”

  Jupiter laughed. “Boy, this is one hell of a time to develop a conscience. While you sat around on a plantation for most of your life and watched the humanity be snatched away from every slave around you. Now you go down below for a few minutes and come back up as some sort of abolitionist, some type of hero. You see a room full of teary-eyed maidens and all of a sudden you’re some knight in shining armor. How many china dolls did you try to rescue up there in Chinatown? Maybe those girls back in ’Frisco weren’t pretty enough. Those girls down below, are they real pretty? Is that it, Archer?”

  Archer lunged at Jupiter and cocked his fist. Jupiter didn’t react. He just smiled at Archer.

  “There it is, Master Archer,” said Jupiter. “Teach me a lesson about freedom.”

  Archer released him and dropped his fist. He lay on his mat and closed his eyes.

  64

  Jupiter was bothered by his conversation with Archer. His anger with Archer soon passed, so it wasn’t that. The man wanted to do something to help those girls, and he was right. That’s what bothered Jupiter the most. He had to see for himself. It was not that he didn’t believe Archer, but there was an unidentifiable force that was pushing him, propelling him to see with his own eyes. To make matters worse, while everyone slept Jupiter thought he could hear a little girl cry over the sound of the waves.

  • • •

  “I need you men to work,” Barrett told them.

  “I thought he wanted us out of sight,” said Archer.

  “That was then, but some of the men have grown resentful that you get to rest while they work. They wanted to throw you overboard, but I talked them out of it when I told them that you have sea experience.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure to thank them for their hospitality.”

  “Jupiter,” said Barrett. “Hold watch tonight.”

  Jupiter nodded.

  “You should go down there and see for yourself, tonight,” Archer said to him.

  Jupiter didn’t answer.

  • • •

  That night, Jupiter took the keys and opened the door. He saw them. He had never been on a slave ship, but he had heard about its horrors from descriptive abolitionists and older slaves who themselves remembered or knew someone who remembered the voyage over.

  The girls were corralled like cattle; some of them were downright skeletal.

  One of them became very animated and spoke in Chinese.

  “Calm down. Quiet,” Jupiter whispered to her. “I can’t understand you. They’ll hear you.”

  “She’s asking if you are a slave,” the little girl said.

  “You speak English?”

  “Yes. I learned from English missionaries.”

  The woman spoke to the little girl in Chinese.

  “She wants you to tell the captain to give us more food,” she told Jupiter. “We are starving.”

  The woman spoke to the little girl again, clutching her chest. The little girl looked down. “Tell him,” the woman managed to say.

  The little girl looked up at Jupiter. “We need more food. Do they want us to look like skeletons when we reach shore? What men will want us then?”

  “How did this happen to all of you?” Jupiter asked the little girl.

  “We want to be reunited with our families. Our husbands, our brothers, and fathers. They all went to America for work. We are supposed to be making the voyage to see them, but we don’t have the money to pay. So we will have to settle our debts in other ways when we reach shore.”

  Jupiter placed his hand on the girl’s shoulder. Her eyes grew large, and he felt a hand on his own shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t be down here.” Barrett hooked his arm forcefully under Jupiter’s and led him up the steps. “Forget what you saw, Jupiter. They will be with their families again. Yes, they will have to work off the cost of their voyage in a brothel on their backs, but they will be paid more than they ever made on the mainland. And they will have access to the opportunities that the West can provide, more than they ever did back home. So it is either know their fate, which is to live the life of a peasant—or to have one that is open and limitless. They can be anything they want to be in your land. That is the choice that they have made. It is a sacrifice, but it is a worthy one.”

  “But how can they look their husbands or fathers in the eye,” asked Jupiter, “after all this?”

  “What, are you becomi
ng sentimental? Why? Because they are women?” Barrett laughed. “How many men have you put in this same situation?”

  “Never like this,” answered Jupiter.

  “No, worse than this,” Barrett said. “These women chose to be on this ship.”

  “Not all; some were forced,” said Jupiter. “I can tell.”

  Barrett was quiet. He looked back at the door and then at Jupiter. He shook his head. “It’s a sorry sight, isn’t it, son?”

  “If you know that then why are you doing it?”

  “Did you think stepping out of that dragon’s den would be easy? It was a requirement of our freedom. Those women were on this ship a month before I took the helm.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jupiter.

  “It’s one of the businesses Ten Dragons specializes in. Cheap labor. Prostitution.”

  “Slavery.”

  “Sadly, that describes about a third of all human interaction. The international ports are starting to frown on this sort of thing. Especially the U.S. They needed a navigator with a special knack for evasion.”

  “So we just arrive and turn them over to whorehouses?”

  “No. I am taking what remains of the weapons to Cuba.”

  “So that was the plan?” asked Jupiter. “That is not how you explained it to us. You want to sell weapons to the oppressed to help them to be strong for their own sake. But if they don’t want that help, the help you’re willing to offer, then you have no problem offering your services to tyrants.”

  Barrett smiled. “Yes, Jupiter, it’s true, I wanted redemption, but somehow it evaded me. It’s not a straight path, it’s curved and winding. When redemption eluded me, I seized opportunity. It is not wrong or right, it just . . . is.”

  “And what about those girls?”

  “They will be set free,” said Barrett.

  “I don’t like the tone of your freedom.”

  Barrett smiled. “I know this bothers you. I too am looking for redemption. You have convinced me, Jupiter, and I am grateful. Do not worry, this is not a step backward to profiting off the flesh of others. I am not a slaver. I can’t participate in the oppression of those women.”

  “You confuse me.”

  “Some years back, before the war, the American government had a plan to relocate its Negroes. Some of them went to Haiti, others went to an island in the Caribbean called Île-à-Vache. It was pitched to them as a paradise, a pearl in the Caribbean.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Most people haven’t. It’s a plop of shit. A group took the first Negro settlers there, and it was nothing like they promised. The weather, the lack of food, they starved and suffered. Most of them died.”

  “Why was this place chosen? Who brought it to their attention?”

  “I was hired by a consortium that wanted to rid America of its Negroes. I am cursed. I see that now. But I can still undo it. I can’t return to the Caribbean as a slaver. Those girls will be set free long before we reach land.”

  Barrett ushered him on deck. Jupiter had wished Archer was lying, and now he wished Barrett was telling the truth. He closed his eyes and felt the wind. For the sailor, the sea is freedom. Despite her often oppressive and mercurial moments, if you endure her moods and learn her patterns, she will offer you the world. For a man of the sea, the only alternative type of freedom was death. Jupiter looked back at that door. He knew what kind of freedom Barrett had in mind. Jupiter was about to participate in his second mutiny.

  65

  Somewhere in the Pacific

  Raymond—that was the name of the man that Jupiter had once crimped. He’d shown him the girls, and the mutiny happened hours thereafter. Barrett gave no resistance, but he swore to withhold any assistance navigating. Whatever came of this, the men were to obtain it on their own.

  Jupiter knew it was the right thing to do, but something about the crusade may have been corrupted considering Jupiter had failed to tell Raymond that it was he who shanghaied him so long ago.

  • • •

  They tried to ease the clouds from their brains, hoping their memories would coalesce as they navigated under the starry skies. They thought that between the two of them, they would have gained enough information to survive their journey. But a ship is neither a deck of cards, nor is it a toy in a bottle. It is a way of life, a philosophy. A symbol. It sails through the rivers of the blood more so than the seas of the mind. They did not watch the sea for shifts in her mood—temperamental and mercurial she can be—they were too busy watching Barrett, bound aboard a ship once again under his command.

  They were hit by a squall, and then a storm that sent them off course, at least the course Jupiter and Archer thought they were ­following.

  • • •

  Barrett stayed silent through the whole ordeal. Archer and Jupiter, though their confidence waned each day, never asked him for help. Sunburned and parched, they were low on fresh water, low on food. Though he was nearby, Jupiter was no longer at the helm, he was genuflecting before it, begging for its cooperation. The sea’s decisive and ancient currents set their course, and the ship went along agreeably.

  Jupiter looked out on the ocean. He had made sacrifices to the wrong god—the memory goddess, Mnemosyne—not Neptune or Poseidon. No land in sight, only water on the horizon. He no longer saw it as a route to Sonya and his son. Despite how vast it was, he only saw it as one enormous place to die.

  He felt the Colonel’s hand over his. The weight of it stung his cracked skin. “It’s over now,” he said to Jupiter. “You can let go.” He looked at him, his white hair ignited by a halo of sunlight. He couldn’t see his face. “It’s all right, you can let go. I’ll take it from here.”

  Jupiter let go of the wheel and fell into his arms. He looked over the Colonel’s shoulder—Barrett’s shoulder—and saw the young Chinese girl crying with a knife in her hand, and the cut ropes that once held him.

  • • •

  Archer, delirious, protective, misunderstood the embrace. He lunged at Barrett with his last bit of strength. The Captain pulled out his blade and stabbed Archer in the stomach. As Archer held his stomach, Barrett kicked him over into the boat.

  He turned to Jupiter. “I’m sorry, but you have to join him.”

  Jupiter obeyed.

  The ropes were untied and the boat was dropped in the sea.

  66

  San Francisco

  Her new partnership with Mr. Clinkscales—such an odd name—was paying handsomely. As a shipper and gunrunner, a woman of intrigue, she resented that Miss Ellen would have the audacity to summon her to the old woman’s Octavia Street mansion—stranger still that Maggie came when called.

  Maggie was greeted by the desiccated old butler and led into the opulent yet neglected and dusty interior. She sat across from the old colored woman. “You’re looking well, Miss Ellen,” said Maggie.

  “Oh, don’t lie to me, child, I look as old as I ever did. But you, child, you’re looking quite regal. You’re practically glowing.”

  “I’m doing fine, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be so modest, child. Nothing pleases Miss Ellen more than to see one of her children living a good life. That’s all I ever wanted for my girls. And you are definitely living the good life . . . I hear things.” The old woman smiled.

  “I never could have done it without you, Miss Ellen. Thank you for everything.” Maggie reached across the table. “May I take your hand, Miss Ellen?”

  Miss Ellen looked at Maggie and pulled away. “I’m sorry, dear, my arthritis is agitated. The slightest touch causes me pain.”

  Maggie withdrew her hand. “Well, I suppose I don’t need to ask why you have brought me here.”

  “Why I brought you here? You brought yourself here. I’m old, but I’m certain of that. I’m so tired of you ungrateful little wenches pretend
ing I’m some puppet master pulling your strings. All I’ve ever done is to recognize your potential, and to help you live up to that potential. I never forced a decision on any of you. Especially you, ­Maggie.”

  “I know, Miss Ellen, and I am forever in your debt.”

  “Forever in my debt? Yet you treat me as if I’m the one who owes you something. When you was a teenage girl on her back, legs spread for money, didn’t I teach you how to spot the right kind of man? The big fish. When you set your sights on Mr. O’Connell, didn’t I teach you how to get your hook in him and reel him in?”

  “You did. But he still left me with nothing.”

  “He left you a name, child. I gave you the money for your business because of what that name could do for us. Now, here it is, twenty years later, and you forgot our agreement. You act as if that’s all this is about. Did I ever ask you for anything? When you’ve needed me, I always opened that door for you. Yet you’ve turned your back on me so many times. Do you ever come to see Miss Ellen, just to see how she’s doing? No. You come in here with a railroad scheme. You say it will earn me more than what you owe times ten. But that’s not how it turned out, is it?”

  “A lot of people lost money, Miss Ellen, all the investors did—including me.”

  The old woman laughed; phlegm rattled in her chest as she covered her mouth. “But you seem to be doing just fine now.”

  “Miss Ellen, that is my shipping line. I built that business up by myself.”

  “Is that really true, child? Think hard about the history I just laid out before you.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for a partnership, I already have one.”

  “I know all about your partner. But I’ve been your partner from the beginning, and I am tired of being silent. Maybe I am a bad mother. Maybe I didn’t teach you girls the way I should have. We are supposed to help each other. Women supposed to help women. We are stronger when we stick together. As soon as we trust a man at the expense of our sisters and mothers, we lose. There is no you without me. O’Connell, the old place in the Barbary, Dalmore and this shipping company, all of that was put into motion by your association with me. Because of my love for you. You’re still young. You’ve got a lot of life ahead of you. I’m an old woman. I don’t have much time left on this earth—but until that day comes, while I’m here I want what’s mine. I’m sure the Irish would like to know what really happened to Mr. Hutchins. And I’m sure the Chinese would like to know who set them up. I hear Mr. Lin lost a grandson to Hutchins’s men. I’m not saying they would pay you a visit, but it must be worth something to them.”