James pushed his way through his gawking men to the bulwark that bumped against the high-sided blackbirder. A white face with equal measures of soot black and filth brown looked down at him, a man standing at the slave ship’s gangway. Clothes torn, hair wild, streaks of blood on his filthy shirt. Pistol in his belt. The face of a man who could not recall his last rest. But more defiant for it.
James stopped, looked up. The man looked down. Then the man said, “Where is the captain of this sloop?”
“I am the captain.”
They held each other, stare for stare. James could see the narrowing eyes, could hear the debate in the man’s head.
A nigger? A nigger coming to our aid?
“Cast off,” the white man said. “Leave our ship. It is no concern of yours.”
Nigger.
And then another man was there, just as haggard, but with the defiance beaten out of him, and the other man said, “For the love of God, Captain, let them aboard if they can be of some help.”
The captain turned, shoved the man with more force than James would have thought he had in him, screamed, “Shut your mouth!” and James was on the boarding steps, scurrying up, Cato and Joshua and Sam right behind him.
He stepped through the gangway onto the deck, met the captain’s loathing with hatred of his own, looked around at the destruction.
Lines lay strewn about the deck, great tangles of rigging draping off the pinrails and lying in heaps in the scuppers. One of the small cannon amidships, aiming down into the hold. Smashed bits of grating, smashed bits of rail, smashed barrels, bottles, crates of cabin stores torn open, their contents scattered around.
The doors to the binnacle box were half torn off their hinges, hanging open, swaying with the rocking of the ship. There was a wide black scorched circle on the deck where someone had apparently built a fire, an inconceivable thing on a wooden ship.
Black patches on the deck, swirled into bizarre patterns, marking those places where people had thrashed and bled their lives away. Chains. Netting full of stone, bent to fathoms of rope, ready to carry the bodies, living or dead, to the ocean floor.
James’s hands were trembling. A film of sweat covered his body. He could smell its unhealthy odor, even over the stink of the slaver. His jaw ached from the pressure with which he clenched his teeth together.
James turned slowly to the slaver’s captain and the five white sailors who stood behind him. At the gangway stood Cato, Joshua and Sam, William, Good Boy, and Quash.
“What happened?”
One of the sailors replied, addressing his words to James. “We was took by pirates. They used us horrid, for days. Killed half our men. Took two dozen of our nig…Negroes, and before they left, set the rest loose. Stood off in their boats, watched us fighting to…to get them down below again.”
James breathed, loud, panting, trying to get control. He could see it before him, like a play, the desperate blacks pouring out of the hold, not knowing what to do because they did not understand enough to form a plan, just wanting to be free of the hold.
And then on deck meeting guns, cutlasses, cannon. The cannon blast down through the hatch, canister shot tearing men, women, children apart in the darkness, the dead and wounded left below. Too dangerous to open the hatches. Wounded on deck thrown overboard. Retribution taken, a lesson for those listening below, and then over the side.
The trembling had turned into shaking, King James’s arms and hands vibrating like a luffing sail. A keening sound formed in his throat. James realized that he had no control over himself, like a sleepwalker, some part of his mind was in control but he had no control over it, some dark part that he did not know was there.
He heard Sam saying, “James, James, get ahold of yourself, this here is for the Court of Admiralty…”
He met the captain’s eyes, saw no sorrow, no remorse, only malevolence there.
“Get off my ship, nigger.”
James stepped across the deck, moving on the captain. “Nigger?”
“I said get off my ship!” the captain shouted, and as James advanced he jerked the pistol from his belt, pulled back the lock with his palm.
James’s hand fell on the handle of his sheath knife and before he could think, the steel was clear of the sheath and he was advancing
into the barrel of the captain’s gun.
“Nigger?”
“Draw a blade on me? You’ll hang for this, you black bastard!”
They were a yard apart. Two men motivated by hatred alone, neither able to think beyond the moment.
The captain raised the gun higher, the round hole at James’s head. James took a great stride, grabbed the barrel, twisted it. The gun went off, the bullet tore through James’s shirt, thudded into the deck, and the knife shot forward and plunged hilt deep into the man’s chest.
Then, screams, shouts of rage. The white men behind their captain surged forward. James felt hands grab him, a fist strike the back of his head, but he could not take his eyes from the haughty captain’s face, the wide eyes, the blood erupting from his mouth.
A cutlass flashed over him and James gritted his teeth and waited for the deathblow but then his men were there, the crew of the Northumberland, surging into the slaver’s crew with fists and sheath knives. They were all fighting-his men, the blackbirder’s men-slavers and former slaves locked into it. A gun went off, steel clashed on steel, someone screamed. A great brawl was taking place around him and James knew he had to stop it.
“Enough! Enough!” James shouted, and the volume and authority of his voice made the fighting men step back, weapons lowered, glaring at one another but not moving.
It was silent, save for men gasping for breath or moaning in agony.
There was a dead man at the tip of King James’s knife. A white man, a ship’s captain. James had killed him.
And in this way he had ended his own life as well.
Chapter 4
The battle had lasted no more than a minute.
James let the body of the captain slip from his knife. It stared up, wide-eyed, from the deck. It seemed surprised. James could not imagine why.
Aft, two of the slaver’s crew were dead, another cut badly across the shoulder. Armed though they were, those exhausted, half-crazed slavers had been no match for the Northumberland’s men.
The three living men of the blackbirder’s crew sat on the deck, hands up in surrender. One was weeping, sobbing, tears running down his stubbled cheeks. Around them, James’s men held them at bay with their own weapons.
They thought they were finally safe, James reflected. Thought they had come through it at last, reached the safe embrace of the Chesapeake, and then this. Death at the hands of black men.
James took a breath. The anger was gone, it had dissipated with that one cathartic thrust. But now he had to think, because everything that he had come to know and depend upon was over, for him, for his men, for every person aboard that tortured blackbirder.
“What the hell have we done? What the hell have we done? They’ll fucking hang us for this.” Retching. It was Sam, puking with abandon. He was smeared with blood, his coat and shirt torn in the melee.
Under it all, under the noise of the sobs and the retching and the shouting, was the sound from the hold; clanking, screaming, moaning.
And despite those many layers of noise whirling through his head, James could see the essential truth of Sam’s words.
They would fucking hang them for this.
The black men; himself, Cato, Joshua, the others-all would be lucky even to live that long. No jail would hold them until a trial. They would be dragged from their cells and beaten to death. A warning.
God, he had to think.
“James…” Cato now, the tone of that one word pleading.
“Get them people up from below. Break open them hatches, get them people on deck.”
It was something to do. Forward motion, the next step, and it gave James a moment to think while the others were occupied, allowed him to think without a dozen eyes boring into him, as if trying to peer through his skin and find an answer that they thought must be there.