下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
T HIS IS THE STORY Old Ren told:
It is two hundred years ago, almost exactly: summer 1775, and we are in the Bight of Benin, on the west coast of Africa. We are standing on the shore—or near enough, in the brush right before the sand begins. We will call this tale “What Old Man Caesar Found There.” Because to understand what came after, we have to start at the beginning, with what he found and how he found it.
This was the day he found his children, his twins.
He was gathering wood, Old Caesar was, on the shore. And he glanced up at the sea, as people do who live near water, just to check on it now and then. And when he glanced up, he saw them: two children, a boy and a girl, neck deep in the water, faces toward shore. As he watched, these two—just entering the lanky years between toddlerhood and puberty—walked up from the water. They were holding hands. They were naked. The waves did not jar them, nor did they shiver in the breeze. They moved upright as pillars and almost as slow. They were walking from the water, as if they’d been born there.
Old Caesar, the man who would become their uncle, watched them from the trees. He watched, slack-jawed, as they waded shallower and shallower. No Guinea boat in sight; no slave ship on the horizon. But he knew somehow, immediately, what they were. What they meant. Caesar hadn’t known there were any more people like him. He let fall his bundle of sticks and stared until the children reached the wet sand, where they both dropped, slow as leaves, to their knees. Their fingers still entwined, these two little pilgrims. Couldn’t be more than six or seven, and no family left in this world. None free, anyway. Of that you could be sure.
Their faces thin and hungry. And they’d be half dead from their long walk.
Old Caesar decided the way he always decided things: quick and sharp. He strode out of the trees to them, took their free hands, pulled them to standing, and brought them home. He fed them and clothed them. They became his adopted children, and he called the girl (who would become Venus) Water-Drinker, and the boy he called Swimmer—to allude to their gifts without giving them away. The gifts were kept secret, as most strong gifts probably should be.
• • •
“M ORE,” SAID C AESAR , leaning forward. Kinchen listened grudgingly. Both girls had heard this story before.
• • •
T HEY WERE LIKE NEWBORNS , these two. Swimmer and Water-Drinker, boy and girl, brother and sister. They didn’t talk, not for the whole first week. They didn’t do anything of their own volition. Old Caesar fed them by hand, cut the meat small for them and mashed the pumpkin like they were babies. The boy slept whenever he wasn’t eating. The girl stared. At the walls, at the floor, at her new uncle Caesar’s chin or hands or feet (but never his eyes), her face vacant and unfocused.
Old Caesar thought maybe they were addled. Maybe they’d always been addled (though clearly with gifts), or maybe their dip in the ocean had unfixed some crucial gears in their heads. When he’d worked on the slavers—before he’d stolen himself back, before he’d taken his own long walk to freedom—he’d once seen a broken sextant scatter itself on the deck, and he imagined the children’s heads filled with little brass screws and fittings, and he not skilled enough to repair.
But after a week of eating and sleeping and staring, the children began to look around. The boy picked up his own spoon, and the girl scratched her nose, and the old man figured that was a good start. By the end of the month, they took care of their necessary business in the woods on their own, and they started helping to draw water and prepare dinner. The boy went with Caesar to gather wood.
Then the two children started to talk. They didn’t speak Caesar’s language, nor he theirs, so their attempts to communicate were halting, mostly overblown gestures.
Caesar decided to teach them his language, which would be useful here on the coast. (Their talk being unfamiliar to him, he guessed they’d lived far inland before they were kidnapped.) He’d also teach them English, the language of trade and of power on these shores. He began that evening, at supper, with the names of foods.
Within a year they were fluent in his language and as fluent as he (which is to say, pretty good) in English. But whatever life they had before they came to him was lost—as if it had never happened. They had no memory of the slaver that must have taken them or where they had lived before the slaver. They had no memory of the ocean or how they appeared in the surf that day. They only knew that they were twins and they were special and they were loved by this man, their uncle, who had always taken care of them and always, always would.
• • •
“W HAT IS YOUR POINT?” said Kinchen. “We know this story already, and it’s getting late.”
“Patience. These details are important to understanding what is to come.” Old Ren paused in a long moment of silence while Kinchen glared and Caesar sat perfectly still with her face squished up, as if trying not to wiggle were a painful experience for her.
“All right,” said Ren. “I’ll skip ahead to 1778. Three years later. The twins are living with their uncle Caesar in the Bight of Benin in the west of Africa, and they are learning to swim.” He cleared his throat.
• • •
W ATER- D RINKE R—THE GIRL who would become Venus—sputtered and squinted as her head resurfaced. Uncle Caesar thought that she and her twin brother should learn to swim (especially given her brother’s name, Swimmer), but despite three years of Uncle’s periodic tutoring from shore, neither of them had yet acquired the skill.
Water-Drinker (that is, Venus) disliked the lessons, as they made her uncle cross, but she loved her uncle so she kept trying. Still—
“Hopeless, isn’t it?” said Swimmer, spitting out a mouthful of water as he climbed on the sandbar next to her. His rare fountain of words showed his disdain for swimming lessons.
Uncle Caesar yelled from shore, “Back to the deep water, and paddle!”
They sighed and stepped off the sandbar again, flailed— and sank like stones. This time they walked back up together, and when their heads were above water, their uncle waved in resignation. “Come on in.”
At supper he shook his head, but his voice was kind. “We’ll try again in a few months. Meanwhile, don’t let anyone see you in the water. Your walking” (he gestured to Venus) “and your talking” (he gestured to Swimmer) “and how you twins share these gifts with each other—this is powerful magic—”
Swimmer grunted. “We know. Keep a secret.”
Water-Drinker (that is, Venus-to-be) was tired of this conversation—and tired of trying to swim. She said, “Who would see us, anyway? And who would we tell?” Her brother glared at her to stop her talking, but she didn’t stop. “Why must we live so far from everyone?”
Uncle put down his dish and cleared his throat. “You have me and your brother. Isn’t that enough?”
She hung her head. Of course. Of course they were enough—they loved her.
Then he said, in a softer voice, “Is there something that’s missing for you? Maybe you’d like to see another girl sometime? Talk with another girl?”
Venus nodded, still looking down at her calabash. She was something close to eleven years old now; another girl would be nice. But what she wanted wasn’t only another girl . She wanted people . She wanted to belong to a people. Not just a family, as good as that was. Something even larger.
“What else is wrong?” the uncle asked. Across the table she could see the concern in his deep brown eyes. “Tell me.”
“It’s just—I don’t—” But she couldn’t tell him exactly what she wanted. It would hurt his feelings, to know that he wasn’t enough, and not simply because he was a man. So she asked a question instead. “Why do we study languages if we aren’t ever going to live among other people?”
Uncle Caesar looked astonished, as if he were expecting a different question, and the boy stopped chewing to stare at her. The uncle said, “We speak my own language because it is mine, and you are my children.”
She nodded, and so did her brother.
“And we learn English because the Englishmen are the traders who visit the coast. It’s important to know how to speak to them.”
“Reading and writing?” said the boy. (He struggled with writing.)
“Reading and writing, too. If you can speak and read and write in English, you will be able to keep from getting caught; or, if caught, you can free yourselves. Now why don’t you open the book and study?” He grinned at their faces and took the dishes out to clean.
The children owned one book, an ancient primer, which Uncle Caesar had acquired on one of his trading trips. He kept watch for another book when he went trading, but so far he hadn’t found any. Thus the children knew “Through Adam’s fall / Sinned we all” as if it were engraved on their own hearts. But that wasn’t enough, not nearly. So the uncle, a good writer with a strong, clear hand, had penciled a story for them in English in the margins of the book. It was the story of how he’d found them. They often studied the tale.
Water-Drinker (Venus) didn’t like the story much, and Swimmer liked it even less. He thought it made him sound weak and babyish, and when he was asked to read the tale aloud, he’d often feign a sore throat. Water-Drinker read aloud when asked, but she disliked what she read. The story didn’t make sense. Not knowing the facts, Old Caesar had embroidered. How had she and her brother saved themselves, exactly? What had they done to end up walking in the surf? What had happened to the slave ship, if there really was one? Why couldn’t they remember the water, and the time before the water? The story leaked like a sieve.
Sometimes she would wake up at night with a jerk, recalling a piece of a dream. It was always the same dream. She was walking slowly, raising little clouds of sand with her feet, and the air was so thick and cool, it felt like a real living thing, like it was pressing on her, kissing her everywhere. Light drifted down from above, and everything around was green and deep. In her dream, she never had to draw a breath.