Sold
It was midnight when we were hurried off the ship into the port town, and taken to a sort of high-walled enclosure, like cattle. We were washed by the white men there, and given palm oil to rub into our skin. We were, in truth, looking better than we had been for months. Hrudo had dysentery by that time, so a sailor cut a short length of cord and rammed it into place to prevent the constant flow of diarrhoea. This, needless to say, resulted in Hrudo having severe bowel pains, but the white sailors did not seem to be at all bothered. Guhli was dragged to one side and his hair was dyed black with some strange pigment, the like of which I had not seen before. We slept ill that night. My dreams were troubled, and I was weak in my very spirit. The next morning, every man, woman and child was herded into a largish pen, with a wall made of stone around it, and then just left there. A shiver raced right down the length of my spine – what was to become of us?
It was then that we found out, in the most frightening way possible. The gates of the enclosure creaked slowly open, and then, suddenly, a small bunch of British men rushed in at us. These were not sailors, or overseers; these were rich, wealthy men, the landed gentry of the British Caribbean. Panic. Panic was the overwhelming thing one felt, running, trying to get away. I saw, to my everlasting revulsion, Guhli, bleeding and battered, crumpled against a wall. The stampede had broken his back, and I knelt down to him to hear his final words… “Africa” he breathed, and settled into unconsciousness, joining the souls of his ancestors, at peace at last. I was grabbed, and pulled brutally towards a man I recognised as the ship’s trader, who was paid for me, after which I was dragged to a cart. In the cart I saw a huddle of six people, all slaves like myself. There I saw Nurmale, who gave me a sort of questioning look, whereupon I related to her my count of the mutiny detailed above. She wept freely, and I cannot claim to have mad any attempt to stop her, but instead I wept with her, remembering and weeping at the memory. Then one last slave was dragged towards the cart. It was the girl I had seen beaten so long ago I Africa. So long ago… She was thin, pale and wan, but otherwise still the same as I remembered her. Nurmale and I helped her up onto the cart, whereupon one of the white man’s servants came and bound us, hand and foot, so that it was a most uncomfortable journey to…where?
New Name, New World…
I stood in line with the other slaves, and we were marched towards the master of the plantation who had captured us in the scramble earlier. A clerk of some sort sat next to him. The master pointed at the first man and said, “His name will be Joseph Palter”.
He then pointed at the second in line, a woman, and pronounced that she was to be named Margaret Smith. Each of us, I understood, was to be given new names. Then, I saw, each of us was to be branded with a hot iron, or owner’s initials burned into our shoulders. A final man then barked at the slave (who was still weeping with the pain of he branding iron) “What is your name?”
The man replied “Lophuri” and for this was pulled aside and cruelly whipped. The rest of the slaves said the name they had been given without question. At last the master’s eye fell on me. “You” he said, with all the authority of an Emperor, “Shall be James Green”.
James Green felt the hot iron scorch, burn and sear through his shoulder, then recited his name and stepped into line. Nurmale was to be renamed Martha Cunningham, and our young companion Elizabeth Wandwood. I will never forget her face as she stepped towards the man with the heated iron; she was afraid, scared, and wide-eyed with apprehension; her piercing shrieks as the hot metal bit deep into her flesh, her pained and grimacing face reciting a name that was not her own, all these are engraved for posterity on my memory, and I know I will never forget. It is unlikely I will ever forgive, either.
…New Life
That night was the first in the small village that we were to call home. The huts were small, with only the barest minimum of possessions and furniture. Nurmale (or Martha as she was now known) began quickly to organise our group into the huts, exercising a matriarch like power over us. It became apparent that we were to be separated from the rest of the slaves by means of a barrier between the two encampments. We were, it seemed, to be the only ones in this part of the encampment until the masters could get more; there had been a slave outbreak recently, so we were not obliged to make our own huts. Nurmale was, after our ordeals, not an overly large woman, but she was heavily built and capable as any of the men. Elizabeth (I never learned her African name) was a wispily built, thin and willowy girl, with a cascading mass of sleek black hair and quick, subtle eyes that darted and danced. Jack, Thomas and Albert were men of slightly more than my own age, heavily and powerfully built, with shaven heads that gleamed in the sun. Albert had had his leg crippled by his rough treatment at the slave scramble, and on occasion this prevented him from walking until he could rest it. Two young women, Victoria and Beatrice, who slightly older than them, but by no more than a year, were of a stocky nature, and were also capable workers, as was proved in a short amount of time. It was the next day that we were first introduced to our work; we were taken to a large building of new construction, and roughly pushed inside. What we saw there was a vast mass of machinery and huge vats, empty at the moment, but waiting to be filled.
Firstly, large canes of sugar were hauled up from the plantations where, on the way to this mechanical monstrosity, we had seen many other slaves working in the beating sun, silent and afraid, unable to stop for fear that they would be caught by one of the overseers who prowled round, whips in hand – the dread of any slave. Then the sugar was boiled in the massive vats that we were to tend. When the sugar was boiled it turned into a spitting, hissing inferno, with boiling, sticky droplets flying out in all directions. Jack, Thomas and I had to ladle this mixture from the vats into the huge cooling trays, where the mixture slowly cooled into molasses. Nurmale, Elizabeth and Albert tended the vats, and one other too: a Creole who had been sent to join us. Of course, there was also the overseer, ever present, waiting for a chance to cause any of us undue pain.
At one point, thee Creole tripped Beatrice (who had been loading the sugarcane in), and she fell to the ground. He carried on as if nothing had happened, and was accosted by Nurmale for such. But he said, “I am a Creole, not one of your foul African tribesmen”
I was shocked at this. Here was a slave, an African, who looked down on his own people! What madness was his? However, as I soon found out, it was only common for the Creoles, those slaves born in the Caribbean, to look down upon their African kindred.
After work had finished (at about ten O’clock) we went back to our own huts. Then, suddenly, the Creole who had been so impolite to us earlier proceeded to drag Elizabeth towards the Creole huts. She implored him to stop, and I told him in no uncertain terms that I would not just sit by and watch this, but he refused to listen. I lashed out at him, and we began to fight bitterly; he had a raging madness in his eyes. At length a Creole who had been promoted to overseer came over, and, having a sever bias towards his kinsman, decided that I should receive forty lashes with his whip. I would like to say that I bore the lashes with a good grace, but I cannot; the sheer unfairness of it all was so alien to me, I wept like a child, no, like a baby, a baby who has just discovered that his fantasies of a perfect life are never to become real.
Death
The next morning Elizabeth, trembling, managed to make her way back to our huts. She embraced me as a baby to its mother, scared of going out into the wide world. I dressed the wounds she had received (for the Creole had not been gentle with her), and we resolved at length that we should say no more of it, in case the master, naturally favouring the Creoles, decided to force Elizabeth to stay in their camp permanently, or punish myself further for standing up for her.
We returned to the boiling house for another long, hard day of labour; the Creole (whose name, I think, was David Simon) scowled at me fiercely as we walked through the door to take up our stations. We had a different overseer from the previous day; this one was, if anything, a harsher and crueller man than the last. He carried, no a whip, but a large pole, this being his preferred method of hitting us. Albert, who was a short time late due to his leg, was set to work in irons for he remainder of the day. He took this with a better grace than many slaves I have seen, but still he was clearly pained by the weight of the irons, which were exceedingly heavy.
The foreman sneered at he pain on our faces as we began the arduous task of ladling the boiling mixture into the cooling trays, and was quick to smack us with the pole if we ever laid down our ladles to glance at our arms, speckled with tiny burn marks form the spitting, hissing sugar. It was a deep at, and as the cane kept coming in there was always more work.It was at shortly after midday that the foreman announced that he would be leaving the room for five minutes or so, but that we had better keep working hard. As soon as he had left, however, David Simon, the Creole, leapt from the vat rim that he and I were on to the (precariously thin) walkway where Elizabeth and Victoria stood above a large boiling tray. Victoria gave a start, and ran back o he end of the tray.
“Well?” Goaded the Creole. “Are you going to come and protect her? Are you? Or are you not that brave really?”
It was a dilemma, and one I could not solve. I stood; ladle in hand, unsure of myself. Elizabeth struggled hard, but to little avail. Then everything seemed to happen at once. Elizabeth pulled free, and then the door burst open…
“Stop that, you!” roared the overseer. David’s head flicked round, just in time to see the butt of the rod slam into his stomach. On the thin walkway, it was just too much… he tilted, staggered, gasped, reached out…
And fell into the vast, bubbling mass hat seethed below. His harrowing cries echoed through the building as his skin was boiled off and superheated sugar seeped into his exposed flesh. Elizabeth, wide-eyed, slowly descended from the perilous walkway. We would not be using that vat until it ad been properly drained. For myself, I kept my composure, but inside felt sick to my very soul at the events I had seen unfold, that I, in fact, ad been part of.
“What’s the matter with you? Get on wi’ it!” I received a sharp smack across the back of my calves with the rod. I kept working – there was nothing else I could do.
An End, and a Beginning
Deeply shaken, we returned to our huts. After a troubled sleep and dreams of screaming, heat and steam, I woke to find it was Sunday, our day of rest. I wandered over to where Nurmale and the other slaves stood, shaking their heads. They were watching the punishment of a slave from the neighbouring plantation who had attempted to run away. Or, rather, what had been his punishment. He was now beyond punishment forever. He, as far as I could make out, had been fixed into a collar, of a sort, I was told, which was often used in the Caribbean for punishment. It consisted of a solid iron collar with a series of outward facing spikes preventing the wearer from lying down, so that if they attempted to the collar, pushing into their throat, would strangle them. I took a single look at the face of the poor, dead, man, then went away and was sick. Beneath a crisscross of interlacing scars and lash cuts was clearly visible the face of Hrudo. Elizabeth, Nurmale and myself returned to the huts, where we had been told that a new slave was grievously ill. I had a quite reasonable skill in herbs and medicine, which I hoped to teach Elizabeth, and Nurmale was to come if needed to recite any rituals required, as she had become, as I have said, our matriarch of sorts. I walked into the hut, and knelt down. Dying in front of me was my old teacher. He looked up at me with sad eyes, and whispered the same word I had heard so many others say, and although I was not sure in myself about anything anymore, I listened, as I had so long ago, to his final breath; “Africa.”
With him died my past; I face a troubled future. I have friends though, and people I can rely on. I will continue this life, and suffer, and endure, so that perhaps when white man has grown up, he will see that he is not alone in having feelings, thoughts, and then, maybe, he will stop preventing others having those precious thoughts and feelings, stop draining their souls into a dark pit of despair.
But, should you read this, heed my words; there is a path of bones along the ocean floor from here to Africa. Merhli. Ohlaga. The mutineers. Guhli. David Simon. Hrudo. My teacher. Names on a piece of paper. But there are faces behind those names, faces that watch, and wait, waiting, someday, to be free…