My Name Is Not Angelica (8 page)

The governor curled his lips.

"And the Lord," Preacher Gronnewold said, "will punish you."

The governor gave him a cold look. "And you will be punished with the iron if you do not cease your chatter."

He turned to the executioner. "You have much to do," he said, "so set about it."

The man took the tongs from the fire. They were a glowing white. He didn't need to spit on them. He began with Dondo's naked feet. There was a faint crackling sound and wisps of smoke rose up. Dondo's legs strained against the ropes that bound him but he did not open his eyes or cry out.

The executioner got ready to clasp his ankles between the pincers. With a shout of "Enough!" Isaak Gronnewold lunged forward and grasped his arms. The man pushed him aside, then knocked him down with a single blow. Soldiers picked him up and carried him to the house, where Mistress Jenna opened the door and let them in.

With one brief glance the executioner measured the size of Dondo's chest. He opened the pincers to fit the size he had measured. With a grunt, he clamped them shut, one tong on each side of Don
do's bare chest. Then he opened the pincers, put them back in the fire, and stood with his arms crossed.

Now there was the odor of roasted flesh on the wind. Excited talk came from the row of plantation owners. Their bombas giggled. Bomba Nero clapped his hands. The governor and Master van Prok exchanged smiles. Mistress Jenna left the window. Our slaves turned their backs, their tongues stiff in their mouths, stiff as mine.

Governor Gardelin spoke to his executioner, who still stood with his arms crossed. "Since we have just begun, let us move along," he said.

The man got out his flogging whip and snapped it a couple of times, first at a flying gull.

"No," the governor said. "The rack before the whip suits us better."

The man gave the rack a glance, turned one of its many wheels, and said, "I am ready, governor, when you are."

"Ready," said Governor Gardelin.

Soldiers untied Dondo. To the governor's surprise, but not to mine, Dondo moaned once and collapsed in the ropes that bound him.

"Wake him," said the governor.

The executioner picked up a handy bucket of seawater and threw it over Dondo's body. The salt and the water did nothing. The governor asked for a second bucket.

Dondo's eyes were closed from the beginning. I believe that his ears were closed, too. He had not heard the talk and the laughter and the crackling fire. He had heard only the big drum at Mary Point. He was not with us anymore. He was back among the green hills of Africa.

Mistress Jenna was trying to put medicine down Isaak Gronnewold's throat when I rushed into the house to tell him that Dondo was dead. She had him on the porch where there was some wind from the sea for him to breathe. His face was pale and swollen but his eyes showed fire.

He got to his feet at the news of Dondo's death and staggered outside.

I started to follow him. Mistress Jenna called me back.

"Are your things together?" she said. "The governor is leaving this afternoon."

"Yes," I said, telling her the truth. In my hut under the mat I had the gunpowder I had taken from Dondo, and the net to catch pot fish. I needed a small sack of muscovado, a bush knife, not too large, and tinder, tinder especially, for a fire. There were other things I could use, a pan to cook in and salt, but there was no way I could get either one.

"Do not stop to hear the preacher and Governor
Gardelin argue," she said. "Get your things together and come back. Do not tarry."

And the two men were arguing. They stood face to face at the sugar mill, the governor stiff as a poker and Preacher Gronnewold flailing the air with his bony arms. Master van Prok was listening to them. Nero was talking to the executioner, who was explaining how the straps and wheels worked on the rack that pulled people apart.

I slipped past them without being seen. The mill was deserted. It hadn't made sugar since August, and it was now November. There were four pieces of tinder, one for each of the big kettles. I took the smallest, hid it in my hair, and left.

Nero and the executioner were still talking. I went to the cave where the soldiers had laid Dondo and said goodbye to him. Then I walked past the two men. When I was out of sight I ran.

Our slaves were back in the fields. I picked up a bush knife in one of the huts. It had a broken handle and a dull edge, but it was the only small knife I could find. I took the necklace, all the things I had hidden, wrapped them in a goatskin sack and my sleeping mat, balanced the mat on my head, and started for Whistling Cay.

There were two trails, one the white people used and the secret trail that Konje used. I knew where the secret trail started, but it wound back and forth and doubled back on itself, from what he had told me. I could get hopelessly lost.

I took the trail the white people used and went fast, stopping only to listen for donkey hoofs on the stony ground. At Cinnamon Bay I heard voices. It was three slaves carrying casks of seawater up from the shore. I hid in the bushes until they were gone.

At Maho Bay I came upon two white boys playing with a dog. They paused to glance at me and one of them asked whose slave I was. I didn't answer him. The other boy said that I looked like a runaway. Then both of them ran toward a house sitting up on a hill among some trees.

I went faster now and didn't stop until I reached Francis Bay. There I left the trail and followed the shore until I came to a place close to Whistling Cay where the sea was shallow. I waded out to my shoulders, then I had to swim for a short way. I didn't worry about the gunpowder and muscovado. They were wrapped tight in the goatskin sack.

The water was as clear as the air. I could see bottom and hundreds of bright little fish. A school of stingrays—at least twenty of them, with their gray-green eyes that stuck up on small stalks—swam along beside me. Like guides, as if they knew where I was going.

There was no beach where I landed. I had to scramble up one coral ridge after another to reach a level place. From here I could see the cliff at Mary Point rising straight up from the shore.

At the top of the cliff, which was the color of
fresh blood, was a grove of palm trees. In their midst were huts, thatched with palm leaves. People moved about among the trees.

This was the camp of the runaways. This was the camp that Konje ruled. I imagined I saw him. And toward dusk as a big fire started and people began to sing, I imagined that I heard his booming voice rise up above all the other voices, up and up to the stars.

Night was coming fast. Higher up lay another ridge of coral. Between it and where I stood was a small valley. You could throw a stone from one side to the other. Trees were growing there that would give me shelter from the hot land wind that had begun to blow.

In the darkness, I made my way through clumps of cactus to the bottom and spread my mat among the trees. The big drum at Mary Point had started to talk, but the rattling leaves and the shrieks that came from the caves drowned out all of the words.

The wind died during the night. The sun rose in a cloudless sky. I was amazed to find that I was surrounded by fruit trees. Long ago, it seemed, when heavy rains fell, water had collected in the meadow and made soil where birdborne seeds could grow.

I jumped to my feet and looked about at my little kingdom. I counted two coconut trees with
clusters of nuts hanging from them, a banana tree with a bunch of green, finger-length bananas, and a breadfruit tree bearing six shriveled fruit. There was enough fruit to last for a month.

Against the far side of the valley, on a flat place in the coral, I found African writings, symbols of the Aminas tribe. My idea about the fruit trees being planted by nature could be wrong. Runaway slaves might have lived here years ago and planted them.

Water I had worried about. I could gather wood to build a fire to boil seawater, but I had nothing to collect the steam and let it form into water I could drink.

I needn't have worried. Organ cactus and Turk's head cactus grew everywhere on the slopes around the meadow. After the spines were cut off or burned off and the cactus split open, there was water hidden away in the pulp. You would chew it and the water would seep out. Although it tasted like cooked feathers, still it quenched your thirst.

A thought took my breath away. As I looked around at the fruit trees and the cactus, I saw that I would have enough to live on for weeks. With the fish I caught there would be more than enough.

I could not go to Mary Point, or so Konje had told me over and over, because they suffered from lack of food. If I lived on fruit and cactus and dried the fish I caught and saved it, I could go to Mary
Point. I would have enough food for myself, and for someone else. I would not be a burden on the camp.

That morning I set the fish trap in a pool where the tide flowed in and out and baited it with a sea cucumber. Before noon I had more than a hundred small fish in the trap. They were the length of a finger and if you held one up to the light you could see clear through it. For a meal you had to cook three dozen of them, but they were as good as anything that came from the sea.

I spread the pot fish out on a ledge to dry and covered them with strips of cactus to keep the gulls away, as we did at Hawks Nest. Then I set the trap again, this time in a different place, at the mouth of a cave.

I went into the cave, thinking that it might be a good place to hide if anyone came looking for me.

The opening was narrow for a short distance, then it spread out into a wide room, round in shape, with straight walls. The roof was round also and barely high enough to walk under. In the center of the roof a jagged hole let in a little of the sun so that the room was streaked with moving shadows.

I heard faint sounds, like someone sighing. It was air going through the hole over my head. When the wind blew hard, the sighs could become the deafening shrieks I had heard before.

Beyond this room a passage led on, perhaps into
other rooms. The sun went down while I stood there. I did not stay any longer; but it was a good place to hide if anyone came.

Drums were talking when I got back to the meadow, the big drum at Mary Point, a drum at Maho, and one at Cinnamon Bay.

The big drum still spoke about Dondo's death. But it also spoke something new. In six quick beats and three pauses and six quick beats again, using the name I was known by, it said that I had fled from Hawks Nest and had come to Mary Point.

The big drum lied to encourage other slaves to flee, yet Konje knew that I had fled, that I was hiding somewhere near Mary Point. This made my heart beat fast.

I ate half a breadfruit for supper and thought about eating a few of the fish. At dawn the trap was bulging with twice as many fish as I had taken before. The sun had not found its way through the hole in the roof. But I built a fire there anyway, for fear a fire in the meadow would be seen, and finally ate six of the fish I was saving.

I set the trap again in the same place and carried the fish to the meadow to dry in the sun. The fish I had set out the day before were gone. The gulls had not taken them. I found the tracks of an animal, a strange animal, for there were claw marks in the dust and marks that only something with a long tail could have made.

The loss upset me. It took two days to build a
platform in one of the trees, as high off the ground as I could reach.

The giant lizard with a tail as long as my arm that had taken the fish, that sat watching me from a high ledge during the day, could not climb a tree. The gulls got some of the horde, but still it grew, with more than a hundred fish caught every day at the mouth of the whistling cave.

I didn't keep count of the days. But I guessed from the number of fish I had stored and the news from the big drum that more than a month had passed and it was early December.

The drum urged the slaves to flee the plantations. It talked about the day they would revolt and kill their masters. The day had not been chosen, but it was coming. It was near, the drum said.

In the morning I packed the gunpowder and wrapped the fish in leaves and in the netting I had caught them with, then in my sleeping mat. There were thousands, but they weren't heavy. A dried pot fish is as light as a feather.

The sun was up when I finished. If I started out I could be seen from any of the plantations on Francis Bay. I waited until the next morning, and at dawn, when the first fires burned on the cliff at Mary Point, I got to the beach.

I left the beach before I came to the plantation where I had met the two boys. I saw one of them again but we didn't speak. After a short walk I overtook an old woman carrying a stack of wood
on her head. I would have hidden if she had not seen me first.

She greeted me with suspicion. "Where you traveling to?" she asked.

"It's so hot I forget where I am going," I said carefully.

We were near the grove of red-barked turpentine trees Konje had told me about, that marked the trail into Mary Point.

"You got the frightened look," the old woman said. "You're going to the runaway place."

I said nothing.

"Listen, my child. Take my word. Stay away from that place. They're starving. Eating rats and such. Soon they'll be eating each other. When the soldiers come, and they're coming soon, I hear, they'll find you and take you back to the plantation. You know what happens at the plantation."

She drew a finger swiftly across her throat and left me. I couldn't move until she was long out of sight.

From the turpentine trees I walked out into a cactus jungle higher than my head. The ground was strewn with spiny clumps. I heard faint voices and someone chopping brush. It was not far to the runaway camp, but there was no sign of a trail.

I balanced the load on my head, pulled my dress tight around me, and took a few steps. They were cautious steps, but cactus spines pierced my feet and I had to stop. There was no way I could get at them unless I returned to where I started.