The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox Page B

late walks through the old quarter at home, I had dared the chance of hell fire by glancing through the windows of certain houses where I had seen women undressing, and undressed. I can only say that I didn’t linger at those windows. Sometimes, after my peeking, I had been ashamed. Other times, I had rolled on the ground with laughter. Why I was chagrined in one instance and hilarious in another, I don’t know.
    But what I felt now, now that I could gaze without restraint at the helpless and revealed forms of these slaves, was a mortification beyond any I had ever imagined.
    At the increasingly harsh shouts of Ben Stout, some of the black men had risen, swaying, to their feet. Then others stood. But several remained squatting. Stout began to lay about him with the cat-o’-nine, slapping the deck, flicking its fangs toward the feet of those who had not responded to his cries with even a twitch. At last, he whipped them to their feet. The women had risen at the first word, clutching the small children to their breasts.
    â€œBollweevil!” called the Captain.
    Ned suddenly lit up his pipe.
    I blew. A broken squeak came out of my fife.
    â€œTie him to the topmost crosstrees!” screamed Cawthorne. Stout, smiling, started toward me. I blew again. This time I managed a thin note, then some semblance of a tune.
    The cat-o’-nine slapped the deck. Spark clapped his hands without a trace of rhythm. The Captain waved his arms about as though he’d been attacked by a horde of flies. A black man drooped toward the deck until Spark brought his heel down on his thin bare foot.
    I played on against the wind, the movement of the ship and my own self-disgust, and finally the slaves began to lift their feet, the chains attached to the shackles around their ankles forming an iron dirge, below the trills of my tune. The women, being unshackled, moved more freely, but they continued to hold the children close. From no more than a barely audible moan or two, their voices began to gain strength until the song they were singing, or the words they were chanting, or the story they were telling overwhelmed the small sound of my playing.
    All at once, as abrupt as the fall of an axe, it came to a stop. Ben Stout snatched the fife from my hands. The slaves grew silent. The dust they had raised slowly settled around them.
    That morning, I danced three groups of slaves. In the last, I saw the boy who I thought had looked at me when I cried out at Stout’s heaving the child overboard. He wouldn’t stand up. Spark dealt him a mighty blow with the tarred rope which left its tooth on the boy’s back, a red channel in the tight brown flesh. He stood then, moving his feet as though they didn’t belong to him.
    It was to perform this service every other morning that I had been kidnapped and carried across the ocean.
    I dreaded the coming of daylight. I listened without interest to rumors—that two of the slaves had fever, that the ship we had seen to windward was an American cruiser in pursuit of The Moonlight, that Spark had suddenly taken to drink, that Stout was the Captain’s spy among us, that a black child had the pox.
    In the harbor of São Tomé, in the sickly haze of a morning when I’d been relieved of all my duties save that of emptying the latrine buckets, I wondered if I dared leap overboard and take my chances on reaching the shore. But what would I find there? Other men who might use me worse than I was being used? Or a captain who tortured his own crew? God knows, I had heard of such things!
    Now the slaves were fighting among themselves. The immediate cause was the latrine buckets. Many of them could not reach them quickly enough across the bodies of the others, for there was not a spare inch of space. Most of them had what Purvis called the bloody flux, an agonizing affliction of their bowels that not only doubled them up with cramps but made the buckets entirely inadequate.
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