“Sit.” Her voice goes sharp and she aims her knife at me.
The same knife I buried to the hilt in weak, barnacled patches of a Spanish warship, sending her and her crew to the bottom of the sea.
To Mother Carey’s table.
I flip over one of the shells covering a platter. It’s heaped with severed fingers and slabs of flesh and the odd swimming length of bowel.
I struggle backward, but it’s a maddening swish of water and my arms churn, trying to push away, trying to get clear. Mother Carey grins with her pointy cat-teeth as she lifts a goggle-eyed, limp-swaying Spanish sailor from his seat and cleaves his arm from his torso while he burbles Mamita.
“You will sit,” Mother Carey says as she slits the sailor from neck to navel, “and you will stay. It would be a pity if you didn’t enjoy the fine feast you’ve provided me.”
Spanish sailors with empty, slack faces are taking seats one after the other in chairs that hold them fast as Mother Carey prepares a feast of the dead for herself and Davy Jones.
“You wouldn’t leave me, would you? Sit down, Jocasta. Sit down and be with your mother.”
Mama’s voice keeps coming out of Mother Carey’s mouth as she stands at the head of her table and pulls helpless Spaniards out of chairs much like the vacant one before me. As she cleaves the poor bastards bone from bone and piles their guts on abalone dishes.
I learned to stop asking about Mama. Pop said it was easier that way. That we love people when they’re here, but when they go, they’re gone.
Pop. Who never once thought to leave me behind, whatever the cost.
I don’t sit down. I kick my feet. I start to rise.
Water moves around me and over me and through me, through my hair and my skin, and flutters the scraps of linen that still cling to me. I wing out my arms and glide.
I am growing lighter.
The wind changes shades. The sunlight changes color.
Most of us huddle up close in the sand. But five of us, we feel it. We know what to do.
I become light. I catch the updraft, sway over the waves. The nests on the dunes are distant but safe for now. Out we go, and out.
A storm builds to the north. A storm my mother is stirring, for she and her man grow hungry once more.
Sails beyond the barrier island, rigged for pursuit. When the sky is this color we are drawn to ships, to those who are as we once were.
I angle my wings, slide along the ship’s waterline, pluck up some tiny-shelled creatures to crunch. Dabble my toes against the water, then glide up on a wick of wind.
I am up and into the rigging, toward a brown man with graying hair who sits all alone on the foremast yard, swinging his legs while the wind catches his jacket.
Soon they will go. Capstan chanty, anchor up, ship in sight, beat to quarters. He will be among them. He will grip his blade, swing over harsh water. He is still waiting for his prize. He waits for her even as he curses her.
Around the edge of the sail. Up, and toward him.
The water sings and beckons. The wind wants to nudge me toward the dunes and my nest, and soon enough I will return there, but right now I need to be on this yard with this man. I need to see him.
I need him to look north so he’ll stay on this side of the water and not below, where my mother would put his bones on her table.
He holds out a hand and I cannot help but take wing. Too sudden for the shell of me, too much, even though the soul of me would curl up in his pocket, feel the warm beat of his heart one last time.
I make a pass through the rigging, then sweep down to the waterline. I arc over the quarterdeck, where dark clouds are beginning to mount.
I hover there until he sees.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are sometimes called the Golden Age of Piracy, although if you were trying to live through it, you probably called it something less rosy. The New World at that time was dynamic and its culture in flux, and issues of freedom, order, and loyalty were anything but settled.
The Mother Carey legend is part of a vast body of nautical lore. Her name is a corruption of mater cara (Latin for dear mother), which was one way early Spanish and Portuguese explorers referred to the Virgin Mary. Folk music fans will recognize elements of “The Sweet Trinity” (Child Ballad 286), but the bones of the story developed as a result of my discovery that about 25 percent of sailors on pirate or privateer vessels during the Golden Age of Piracy were people of color. We know of several notable female pirates, and considering that we know the most about pirates who were caught and tried, there’s a strong possibility someone like Joe existed without being known to history.