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O LD R EN’S STORY , continued:
Now it’s a few years later. The twins are about fourteen years old, adults in how they work but still children in how they daydream. Swimmer is tall—he has all the height in the family—and deep voiced, someone one would instinctively listen to, though he rarely speaks. Venus, still lean and small, now has a woman’s curves under her loose clothing. She wears her hair short and often dips her head, as if in doubt, before she talks. When she has a truly important idea, however, she lifts her chin high just like her uncle Caesar—and then her brother and uncle listen closely.
It’s 1781. Mid-November and getting chilly, and the two no-longer-children and their uncle are on a slave ship. The Zong . They are somewhere between São Tomé Island, Africa, and the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, trapped in the hold of the boat as it takes the Middle Passage. They are enslaved.
None of the three had ever learned to swim—and none ever knew how to free themselves from chains—and now they are caught. Bound in iron. And afloat on a rancid bit of wood in the middle of the ocean.
At first, Water-Drinker, the girl who was immediately renamed Venus, comforted herself with the knowledge that they’d all been captured and traded onto the ship together; that way she and her uncle and her brother, though enslaved, would at least live and work together, and have a home together as before. And someday they’d escape.
That comfort did not last. She understood the slavers’ English—low-class as it was, spat out by the albino-skinned, hairy-faced sailors—and she quickly deduced that if she and her brother and her uncle survived the trip, they’d be sold separately. No respect for family ties.
She also discovered that she was the wrong age and sex to expect to be left alone for long. She could hear the sailors’ comments, and even though her ears were innocent, she soon learned the meaning of the words. The slave ship was a new kind of primer.
She formed a quick, sharp plan: to play ill. No one would want to mess with a sick girl, she reasoned, one who could infect you. Her decision was powerful: immediately she began to run a fever.
Most of the nausea she felt wasn’t acting, either. The hold of the slave ship was packed with bodies and even more packed with noxious fumes. Incarcerated in the main space, the men (including Swimmer) lay fettered to one another, left leg to their neighbor’s right leg, left arm to their neighbor’s right arm, like children in a handholding game. They each occupied tighter space than a man in a coffin, and to turn or scratch involved negotiations with the neighbors. No one sat upright, for the ceiling sloped too low and more men were bunked above.
The women and children huddled in a small room, just as crowded and smelly as the men but with slightly more freedom of movement—and more liberty for the sailors to take them off on their own, if they desired. They stuck together as if fettered. The necessary tub, where they relieved themselves, spilled repeatedly—and stank even when it wasn’t sloshing on the floor. The women and children were taken on deck only infrequently, and then they were forced to dance in the harsh sunlight or, worse, to witness someone being punished for refusing to eat or for acting rebellious. Venus saw a man—not her brother or uncle—lowered slowly into the water from a rope, as punishment for what crime she never heard. The sharks ate his legs before his chest was wet. His screams stayed in her ears for many days. There was no escape.
Not that she was afraid of the sharks. They circled the boat continuously, eating trash and the odd dead (or live) body that was heaved overboard. But she knew herself and her gifts, and the sharks didn’t scare her much. No, it was the white-skinned men and their whips and guns and ropes and manacles; it was their iron and their love for blood. That was what scared her. She’d never before thought that she wasn’t a person, but now she knew: to them, she wasn’t anyone.
Her uncle had told her that she and her brother must have been aboard a slave ship when they were little, before he found them coming out of the sea—a slave ship that sank, maybe, and they with their luck and their gifts had walked and survived. She didn’t remember. But now, on this ship, she felt as if certain moments were familiar, as if she’d had this nightmare before and even though she couldn’t recall it, it might come back to her waking memory at any moment. As if it were just barely out of reach.
And she didn’t want to have it back.
• • •
W HEN THE PRISONERS on the men’s side started to get sick ( actually sick, not pretending like Venus was), the slavers worried. Then one of the white men died, and then another, followed by several African men. Soon the women were coming down ill, too, and a few of them died. The captain—until this voyage, a ship’s surgeon—and his friend Mr. Stubbs walked through the hold and scrutinized the ailing who lay in the women’s cabin (including Venus, still faking).
“More than one kind of contagion here,” said the captain. “Some have the bloody flux, some gaol fever, and this one”—he pointed at Venus—“this one is where it all started. I don’t even know what she has.”
They stood in front of her, the two white men, and peered through the stench as if she were a specimen. They didn’t know she understood English, and she wasn’t about to enlighten them. When Stubbs prodded her with his foot, she coughed and groaned obligingly.
“Number Eighty-Six,” said the captain. He coughed, too.
“I remember her,” said Stubbs. (She remembered him as well, with his groping hands and bad breath. She hacked again, and let the snot dribble out her nose.) “Venus. We all thought she was a pretty one till she took sick. That’s why the name.”
“I don’t know how you can tell ’em apart. All their faces look the same to me.” Swaying, the captain considered Venus. “Not much of a looker now.” His face glistened with a thick sheen of sweat.
Venus propped herself to almost sitting and threw up in the necessary tub stationed next to her. She had nothing in her stomach, so she heaved up drool.
Stubbs pulled a grimace. “Animals.” He turned to his companion. “I have an idea for this disaster. You’ve already lost seven. You don’t want to lose the whole lot.”
“It’s a financial tragedy,” the captain agreed. “Once these diseases start, we can’t stop them spreading—not without quarantining the sick property, and that’s impossible to do on a ship this size.” He spat. “What a way for my first captaining to end.”
The men turned to walk out of the women’s cabin. “I know a good bit about the law,” Mr. Stubbs said. “Deaths from sickness aren’t insured. But other losses are. Come have a drink and hear my idea. There may be a way to save this voyage.”
They strolled out, trailing eddies of putrid air behind them.
• • •
T HEY WERE on their way to the West Indies to be sold as slaves—but only provided they survived the Middle Passage. Venus paid attention to how time slid past, because things were bad all around her and she needed to think what to do and when. By the eightieth day, the captain staggered with fever, and seven crew and sixty slaves had died. Gaol fever, bloody flux, despair. Their bodies cracked open from beatings and malnutrition, and distempers slipped in and racked them quickly. When they expired, the crew were thrown overboard tied with weights to pull them to the bottom. The dead slaves were heaved without weights, whereat they served as shark food.
The ship stank like rotting meat.
There was more room in the slave quarters, but no one moved easier.
Her brother and uncle, she heard through passing of messages, were alive and still healthy. She sent intelligence to them: Act sick. Uncle Caesar complied and began to cough. Her brother refused. He would not pretend anything for the white men, not even when she told him to trust her, that she had the seed of a seed of a plan.
Then the captain—or the people acting for him in his illness—put a scheme in motion, a strategy to save his employers’ investment even though the property were lost. A plot to collect the insurance money. A ghastly design.
• • •
V ENUS W AS not the only captive woman who understood English, but two of the five others were dead, and the last three were too sick to comprehend anything when the captain and Mr. Stubbs came in and discussed throwing them overboard. She shifted her head to hear them and cracked her eyes open in the gloom.
The captain’s clothes were drenched in sweat; yet as he swayed in the sweltering women’s deck, he shivered.
Mr. Stubbs said, “We’ve overshot the land. We’re short on water. A lot more will die. Your bosses can’t collect on property that expires of disease or thirst. They can, however, collect on property that falls overboard.”
The captain swore, frustration etched in the lines on his flushed face. “This mess’ll be the death of me. To be ruined by a single voyage gone wrong—they’ll never trust me to captain a ship again. I ain’t going to let that happen.” He pitched more than the ship’s rocking required. “It’s a bad business.”
“But a lucrative one,” said Stubbs. “If you play your cards right. Why, when I last captained a slaver—this was over twenty years ago now . . .”
They walked away. Venus crawled to the side of the room that overhung part of the men’s quarters below. She knocked her message into the floor with her bare knuckles and her heels, carefully. It was time. Eventually her uncle’s reply message echoed back to her, with added information. He was ready. Her brother still refused.
Venus crawled back to the women. She did, in fact, feel a touch of real illness, a little wobbly. Too much darkness and bad smells and anxiety. The water would wash that away. She sat and thought of her brother, and she tried not to vomit. People had to make their own choices. She would choose to save herself and as many others as she could. She only hoped it would work; she’d never in her memory tried such a trick before.