As I listened to the rhythmic calling, the names became for me a chantey, a sea song, and the ship began to rock with the movement of names round the despicable place. And I realized that at least some of these women knew how to do this. They were no strangers to captivities and bars. The deck rolled and I knew we had left the bay and made for open sea.
They might take us to Kingston. Houses all along the beach had been beset by thieves, far back as I could remember. Indeed, Pa had fought off others, but these he could not prevail against. A striking pain went through me as if I had been stabbed from my shoulders to my knees in one thrust, with the thought that we might not be headed to Kingston but to some faraway island.
I heard Patience call out, “Allan Talbot? August Talbot?” The names echoed from lips down the way. Now it seemed I could make out the length of the place, having grown used to the dark, and the ship turned east so that sun came in through small openings and a single porthole. Patience shouted again, more loudly, “Allan Talbot? August Talbot?”
I held my breath. At last, two raps. “They’re alive!” I said, pushing my hands against my face. “Pa!” I shouted. I turned to Patience. “Call for Ma. Your voice is louder than mine.”
“She is not here, Resolute.”
“She escaped, then!”
Patience sighed but answered not. “Do not make me say it, sister.”
Crushing our petticoats to the side, we nestled together and managed to make seats for ourselves as the whole lot of weary women sank to the floor.
The ship rocked with the comfort of a hammock. Weariness took me. Sounds around me, the heat, the stench, nothing could keep me awake.
Patience later told me that the day and the night had passed before I awoke. A man in a dirty turban came with a great tub of cold gruel that he slopped into a trough in each cell. It seemed we were supposed to lap it up like dogs. “Sir? Oh, sir,” I called. “A spoon, sir, if you please?” No one seemed to hear me. Some women fought over it, scooping the stuff with their hands into their mouths. I did not get any. Within a few minutes those who had eaten the most began to be sick. I did my best to resist, but with people packed so tightly, I became ill with the rest of them.
The next two days or more were lost to me as I groveled there in the bowels of that ship. The wretchedness cannot be described, so dire became our misery. After two days three women had died and later, upon reflection, I think perhaps our heathen captors either had mercy or began to worry that their cash bounty on our heads might disappear if they did not feed us. They brought in crockery jars of rum and tow sacks full of hardtack. That day they also brought two of the men from above, both prisoners but neither of whom we knew, and showed them how to work the pumps. While the captives pumped, our deck flooded with several inches of freezing seawater, complete with small fish and octopuses and other creatures I could not name. They opened drains and let the spilth run off, then flooded us twice again.
We were sopping and sick, and I, nearly out of my mind with torment. Why would Ma not answer me when I called? Had she escaped and stayed on the plantation? Had she run to the kitchen to hide and there escaped the fire? In anguish, I knelt beside Patey and cried against the iron bars, a deep and terrible sort of sobbing that made me feel helpless as a babe. I could not stop. I cried myself to sleep. I roused when a dark brown hand came through the bars and shook me. The man offered more rum and hardtack. I took the tack from his dirty hands and clutched it close to my chest, drank the fiery rum in one swallow, and passed the cup back to him. I took a small nibble of the hardtack and tucked it into my cheek, putting the rest into a fold in my bodice for later. Not even a plate! Ma and Pa would hear about this roughness, I promised myself.
I dreamed, then, of games of hide-and-seek with Allsy, dashing through the herb garden by the kitchen, filling our noses with the smells of trampled oregano and mint. I proffered my cheek to her for a kiss then pulled it back, and when she laughed I kissed her cheek, instead. We danced jigs on a plank set up for a bench. I gave her my lavender chemise for Hogmanay Day, and since she had just learned to weave basketwork, she gave to me a small, patterned basket. Before she put it in my hands, she said, “Look-a dis, Missy,” and interwove our fingers, light and dark. She pointed to the leaves of the weaving, light and dark, as patterned as checked cloth. “Oh, la,” I said, “it is you and I!”
I opened my eyes and smiled, for these were not dreams but memories. “Allsy, I miss you,” I said in the darkness.