I was sixteen when they captured me. No, not whites. Not my own people, either, but other black men, who swept down upon us. They took me and some of my friends. They set fire to my village, and I don’t know who lived or died that day. Those of us they kept were put in chains and marched to the coast and sold to the white men with ships. I didn’t know the name of my country then — it was just home. I know now that the world calls it Angola.

The blacks who sold us got a pittance for us compared to what we were worth at this end of the journey. They sold us for silver, for guns, for rum, for beads, and even for pots and pans. While they negotiated with the ships, they locked us up in big cages on the shore called barracoons. People were jammed up together, pushed against each other’s stink, but it was heaven compared with what awaited us. There were people from all over, and half of ’em spoke languages I didn’t know. Almost everybody was naked. The slavers preferred us that way. We were nothing but beasts to them, and you don’t put clothes on a mule, do you? We were there not even a full day before we were purchased and dragged up on a ship.

The captain, he barked at us like a hyena. None among us knew his language, but we understood him well enough, since failing to do so meant you got beat with a rope end till you figured it out. People wonder why we didn’t do anything, why we didn’t fight. After all, there were hundreds of us and hardly anything at all of them. But they had us terrified. We didn’t know where we were. We were hungry and exhausted. I think we all believed that if we were just good and quiet, we wouldn’t be harmed. If we’d known the truth... There were some ships where the slaves mutinied, but not many.

Crewmen came along and pulled some of us out of the crowd and stood us in a line. There was a redheaded fellow who, if anybody was too slow to move, lashed them across the face, and he was smirking all the time and shouting at us. He liked for us to be too slow.

The tall ones like me, we were all lined up together. Then the middle heights and the shortest. Men and women were separated, too.

Then they drove us down into the belly of that ship. They’d fixed it up special for their cargo. Made three tiers of what could be called pigeon holes, but what were more like coffins stacked on top of each other. You climbed in at the foot and dragged yourself up inside it, trying not to lie on the chains that shackled you there, ’cause you were going to lie on them for a long time if you did. The bottom tier was the biggest, which is to say, the longest, for the tallest of us. The first man in line, he didn’t want to go in, and that red-headed bastard beat him unconscious with the rope. The man had to be picked up and shoved into his hole. He became the first to die on the voyage, but not the last. The rest of us saw how it was, and most crawled into their coffins willingly. We had no more than fifteen inches across in those holes. There was hardly room above to lie on your side. If you could turn over. Take you half an hour to turn over in that space, and you had to hunch your shoulders and wriggle like a tadpole. You’d end up with splinters in the meat of your arm, and if you weren’t careful you could strangle in your chains.
It stank like no pigstye you’ve ever known, too. But we were property, and worth a good deal, and they didn’t want us getting sick. They could lose thousands of dollars if some fever swept through their cargo, so they hosed us down regularly.

I had big wrists then, too big for the shackles they supplied, so that the skin was rubbed raw on me in no time. To either side there were uprights, supporting the second and third tiers, which was all that kept us from being squished. During the day enough light got in that we could see the fear in one another’s eyes. They wanted us to see that. They wanted us to pass our fear around. I guess you boys who fought in the ‘Great War,’ you had it bad in the trenches, with mud and mustard gas and all. But you haven’t been anywhere as near hell as I have. You never lived three weeks in a coffin narrower than your shoulders. If the person on the upper tier above you got scared and pissed himself, it dripped down on you and there was nothing you could do about it till they next hosed you off with sea water, and then a soup of human waste from above came raining down between the boards.

They stuffed in a man beside me who had been beaten all over. His eye was swelled up, and his head was bloody, crusted. The flies were at him, but he was smiling, like he felt nothing at all, and even over the stench of that place I smelled him, smelled the booze on him, for he was drunker than a man can get. I think they could have beaten him to death and he wouldn’t have noticed for a week....

***

The second night aboard, the thing happened that changed my life. That beat-up drunk beside me, he made this quiet sound, like a gas jet. It wouldn’t have wakened me, but I was lying on my back and barely asleep. I was looking at the boards above my nose, so close that my breath came back on me. I turned my head to see, but it was black as a coal mine.

I heard a slithery sound, like a big snake twisting, and more hissing. The chain rattled just the tiniest bit. My hair started creeping up on my head. Bristling like a dog. After a time there was only the absence of sound. I knew that hole beside me was empty and that man had gotten free somehow.

I couldn’t see as far as my feet even. Couldn’t turn my head to know where he’d gone or what he purposed to do. There was no escape from that place for anyone.

An hour maybe went by like that before he came back. There wasn’t a sound until he was slithering into that hole again. I stared so hard into that dark that it burned, but all I could make out was a general shape, twisted up like something made of molasses. Then of a sudden two eyes glistened there, looking right back at me, and a voice said, "Best git ta sleep now, friend." Then he gave this big sigh and his eyes closed into the darkness. He fell asleep, which was more than I did the rest of the night.

Next day they hauled us out for our dance on the deck, and I had a good look at him in the light. All his contusions were gone like they never had been, and he looked like he’d eaten about forty bowls of gruel, instead of the one. The crew hardly paid us any mind. Something had happened but I couldn’t tell what because I couldn’t understand what they said. That strange fella was kind of tilting his head as if listening, and damn me if he wasn’t smiling to himself like he knew a big secret. He noticed me looking and gave me a wink and talked to me, as a Gullah would say, all sweetmout. "They lost that red-head lasher," he said. "He just up and disappeared last night and nobody kin find him." I asked myself how he knew their language. Right then I almost guessed the truth about him. But I kept my own counsel on it, as he’d only have to slide over a foot or two in the night to silence me for good.

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All graphics and text © 2003 Gregory Frost

from Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, from Warner Aspect.

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