A Slave's Tale

[Jubal]

I wrote this story a while (read a couple of years) back for a piece of History homework. It's not amazing, but it's kinda interesting I hope. It's set in the 1700s at the time of the slave trade.

.............................................

[big]The Diary Of Plurod Odawe[/big]

Capture
Africa. Africa. A name – how foolish the Europeans are, to believe that such a vast, diverse area, so rich, so beautiful, so magnificent, so alive, could be summed up in just a single, short word! I tell you, and heed my words, that there is no word that could describe Africa, no book, no song, no poem, no, not even if it were written on a sheet of paper that covered the world, it could not describe my homeland. This was the world I had hoped to spend my life in – a world where men worked hard, and saw the rewards, and were satisfied. But it seems this is not to be. I was walking down to a farm not far from my hut that fateful morning, for the Farmer’s son was sick, and my wise tutor in herbs and medicine was busy with other matters. The trees provided cool shade and stopped the sun beating down onto my back, and as I sauntered down the track I listened to the raucous cries of the many creatures of the forest, and watched the clouds float carelessly overhead. I had just reached the farm gate, when I heard a great noise behind me, a banging, cracking explosion, and I spun around…
         Only to find I was looking into the face of an Ngrol hunter, from the neighbouring tribe. He carried a weapon which I had seen only occasionally before, what was it? That was it, a gun. A fire-stick that killed people as easily as a sharp knife kills a defenceless tree frog. I yelped and turned to run, when I saw a faint plume of smoke beginning to rise from the thatched roofs of the huts. I slowly turned back to the hunter, ho was looking at me almost wolfishly, his eyes narrowing as he thought of his reward for my capture. “Walk” he rasped. “And don’t try to run”.
His gun was trained directly onto my chest – in fear for my life, I gave up and allowed his fellows, who had just arrived from capturing the farmer and his family, to tie my hands and lead me up a track that led, surprisingly, away from their village. In fact, I realised, it led to the sea.
         My head was awash with questions, but in my fear I voiced none of them, just kept walking on, and on, and on, until at length we reached a bay or inlet, where a large ship of a type I had not seen before, only heard about was moored. It was, in fact, a mighty wooden vessel of the sort that the English, Spanish, French or Dutch might have used to transport spices, goods or food to and from their colonies – but it was not goods that this ship was to carry. Its cargo was people, and there were multitudes assembled in line there, each person tense and trembling, desperate for some kind of certainty in a life that had been thrown into turmoil and darkness. A few hunters, similar to the ones who had captured me, were striding up and down the lines of people with whips, striking anyone who talked, or faltered, or in an way seemed to be doing anything other than standing still and in line. A girl in the next line of no more than my own age, maybe a year or so younger, faltered and was cruelly beaten until red welts showed up across her back. She cried out, and was kicked brutally until, shaking, she stood up once more. I cried out indignantly at her treatment, and received maybe forty lashes with a hunter’s whip for my pains. She briefly glanced at the blood that seeped from my back then closed her eyes tight, trying in vain to rid herself of the memory. The farmer, whose name was Ohlaga, and his wife, Nurmale, exchanged glances, two kindred spirits in an uncertain world.
         After this, we were all herded onto the ship, like cattle to the slaughter, and the men and women were separated. Nurmale gave a slow, sad look of farewell to Ohlaga before disappearing, along with many others, into the darkness of the hold. Ohlaga called out to her, but quickly felt the hard lash of a white sailor cut deep into the flesh of his back. His teeth visibly clenched together, he went ahead of me into the black nightmares that awaited us below. My first glance into the hold was one of apprehension, followed by a feeling of simple, blind fear. This hold was barely higher than my shoulders, and I had to bend down and squeeze myself in to the pathetically small space I was allowed by the press of other people and the very limited movement allowed by the heavy manacles that we were held with. I shut my eyes - there seemed to be nothing else I could do.

Despair
I have few memories of the first week or two on the ship, other than meeting my fellow sufferers. There was Ohlaga - embittered by the loss of his farm, he rarely spoke, and when he did, it was almost never in words, just in harsh, painful, rasping gutturals - though many of the slaves’ captures had broken their bodies, Ohlaga’s had broken his mind. Ohlaga was a man of about forty, still very able-bodied and strong, with a shaven head and piercing dark eyes that you could see the fear and madness reflected in. Hrudo was chained on the other side of me; his story was that of betrayal, his own clan chief had sold him to the white men. He was not five years older than myself, a young man with a world that had, like a lamp falling to the floor, been shattered and extinguished. His wife and child had been taken too, and his father had been killed, leaving him a desperate man. Finally, Guhli, an old fisherman who had had some experience of white men, was chained up facing me. He was old, and had no hair and few teeth, and was crippled in the leg because of what he had faced at the hands of the enemy tribe who had sold him.
         I say there is little else I can remember, and this is the truth, for there, in the hold, away from the light of day, away from the certainty of firm soil, away even from hope itself, there was nothing but a void into which all thoughts, memories and feelings drained slowly away, save that of despair, which was manifest. This was the test of souls, and few in number were those who could truly say they passed it.
         We were fed, after a fashion; a sort of slop, of the kind animals might be fed on, was half poured, half spooned onto our platters in quantities that would not have fed a child of three. The slop was mostly, I think, rice, with yams and possibly beans mashed into it. On occasion, we were also given dry and tasteless biscuits or small portions of meat to eat (or rather, attempt to eat, for there were few of us whop had the strength to eat properly, starved as we were). We were allowed to drink just twice a day, no more than a single half-pint ant any time. Those who refused to eat were tied to the wall and had food forced down their throat. Merhli, may his soul be at peace, was a farmer chained up near to myself - he lasted just nine days before he began to have uncontrollable diarrhoea and bowel pains – he died in torment two days later, the first of many who would fall to the scourge that was dysentery. Scurvy, too, became quickly apparent – when it as mealtime I saw several people’s skin beginning to discolour, and was afraid that the disease might spread from person to person so that in time there would be none of us left.
         All this while we were still unsure to where we were headed – Guhli informed me that the sailors were English, but other than that we had no knowledge of who our captors were. By his time many of us felt that we could b afraid of nothing any more. We were resigned to our fates in this hold, which now smelt foully of human excrement, and all we could think of was the futility, the hopelessness, the sheer, rancorous, foul, fearful despair.

Disease and Dissent
I fell ill in the third week of our voyage. By that time I was weak from lack of food, and I was frequently violently sick upon the decks. By the time the white men noticed me, I was so weak I could not stand or even eat normally. I was taken away from those of my fellow prisoners who were still well, and left, unchained, on the deck of the ship. They did not consider me a threat, and indeed I was not one, being too weak to stand, I merely lay, a mewling scrap of a man, on the harsh wooden boards; the sun and rain beat down on me in equal measure, but away from the cramped conditions below deck my health, by luck more than anything else, slowly began to improve.
         It was one day when my health was beginning to improve noticeably (but when I was still unable to do much other than walk a few feeble steps a day and eat) when I heard a most frightening crash from below decks. And then another.  A British sailor stuck his head out of the trapdoor and called out, before he was seemingly dragged back into the hold. I watched in terror as the British sailors readied their muskets, and watched…
         The slaves came rushing out of the hold. “No! No!” I screamed, but they slammed open the hatch and charged as one, led by… Ohlaga. Like a crazed lion he raged, hurling grown men with his bare hands and smashing their faces. About half of the slaves followed behind him, yelling and whooping with the clamour of the fight. But it was then that my yelled warnings became apparent. The sailors on the rigging and in the bows fired into the massed ranks of the slaves. About twelve died in the first volley; maybe a few more in the next. Ohlaga was still fighting though, and this compelled my fellow slaves to keep fighting, charging en masse towards the gunners at the helm of the ship. But then a bullet struck Ohlaga in the chest, then another. Then another. He kept charging as he died. Charging on... and on... grabbing a young British sailor… on, on, and over the side of the ship, taking the young man down with him in a dead man’s grip. Now, though, the slaves had no one to rally behind. Starved and weak from underfeeding, they began to lose the fight until, in the end, the last ten men surrendered and were thrown overboard.
         Land was at last sighted a week after the mutiny. Dreading the future, each and every slave on board knew only one thing; though the voyage of death was over, our trials may have only just begun…

[Jubal]

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…