Thirty-Three. The Brig
Chapter Thirty-Three
The Brig
They went down the river to Norfolk on a steamboat on the second of December and were nine days in a yard there while Reddick finished making up his lot.
The yard was smaller than Davis’s and worse kept and had a shed along one side and a pump, and there were people coming into it all that week in ones and twos from four counties, and by the eleventh there were thirty-one of them.
Nelson looked for the woman Alice on the first day and on the second and did not find her, and by the third day he understood that she had been sold in Richmond to somebody else on some other afternoon in some other room, and he did not learn to whom, and he had ridden five miles in a wagon beside her.
—
On the morning of the eleventh they were taken out of the yard four at a time and stood in a line along the wall of the shed, and there were two white men at a table with a ledger and an inkstand and a folding rule.
It went quickly. It took about a minute and a half a person.
They asked him his name and he said, “Nelson,” and the man wrote it.
They asked him whose he was and he said, “Mr. Reddick,” and the man did not write that; he had it already, at the top of the page, and he only nodded.
They asked him his age and he said nineteen.
Then the other man came round the table with the folding rule and stood him against the shed wall and put the rule up flat along him and said a number over his shoulder, and the first man wrote that too.
Five feet eleven and a half.
Nelson had never known that. Nobody had ever measured him in his life. He had known he was tall the way you know it — by doorways and by other men — and he stood there against the boards of a shed in Norfolk and was told a number about his own body by a stranger who was not telling him.
Then the man at the table looked up and said a word, and Nelson did not follow it, and the man said it again with his pen moving. “Black. That’s black.” And wrote it.
And that was the whole of it, and he was told to go and stand by the pump.
—
The brig was called the Ann Eliza and she lay at a wharf with two other vessels and had a mixed cargo in her — barrels and crates and something in bales — and thirty-one people went into her on the afternoon of the eleventh of December, down a ladder into a space under the deck aft of the cargo about forty feet long.
Before that, on the wharf, there was a business Nelson watched and did not understand.
The captain came down from the after part of the vessel with the same ledger from the shed, and a man from the customs house came along the wharf with a case under his arm, and the two of them stood there for a quarter of an hour going over the paper.
The customs man had a list. The captain had a list. They read them against one another out loud, and the names came off that wharf in the winter air one after another, thirty-one of them, and each time the customs man made a mark.
Nelson heard his own name said by a man he had never seen, in a city he had never been in, off a piece of paper, and did not answer it because he had not been asked to.
Then the captain took his hat off and swore an oath.
He swore it with his hand up and he said it fast, the way a man says a thing he says forty times a year, and what he swore was that the persons named in that paper had not been brought into the United States after the first day of January in the year eighteen hundred and eight, and that under the laws of the state they were held to service.
Nelson understood about a third of it.
He understood eighteen hundred and eight, and he had no idea in the world why a man on a wharf in Norfolk was swearing to God about a year fifty-one years gone, and he stood there in a line with thirty other people and it went past him entirely.
The customs man signed the paper twice and gave one of them back and put the other in his case, and went away up the wharf with it.
—
Twenty-six days.
The hold was forty feet long and about twelve wide where it was widest and you could stand up in the middle of it and not at the sides.
There was a grating over part of the hatch and boards over the rest, and the light came down in one long bar that moved across the floor in the day and was not there at night, because after dark the hatch was barred over and that was that until morning.
They were let up on deck in fine weather in the daytime, in two lots, an hour each, and not at all in bad.
They were fed twice: at about ten in the morning and at about five in the afternoon. It was fried cornmeal cake and a piece of bacon, and there was water in a cask that was fresh for the first six days and not after.
There were thirty-one of them and no room for thirty-one to lie down without touching, and it was December, and after the first three nights nobody minded about the touching.
—
It went bad off Hatteras on the fourth day and stayed bad for three days.
That is a place where two waters come together and it is known for it, and what it did to the Ann Eliza was pick her up and put her down for seventy hours.
The hatch was barred the whole time. There was no light in there at all except what came through the grating, which was grey and then black and then grey.
Everybody was sick. There is nothing to say about that except that thirty-one people were sick in a space forty feet by twelve with the boards over the hatch for three days, and that they were not able to get to the buckets, and that when the weather broke and the hatch came off and two of the crew came down there with a hose and a broom, the men who came down were not cruel about it and were not kind either and did the job like men mucking a stall.
Nelson lay against the curve of the hull for most of it with his arm over a boy of about twelve who had come out of Southampton County and who cried for the first day and did not for the other two.
He kept the thimble in his hand during that. He could not keep it in his mouth.
—
Then they came round below Florida and into the Gulf and it went warm, and for six days it was almost nothing at all.
It was warm, and they were let up on deck an hour a day, and the sea went blue in a way he had no word for and would not have believed, and there were fish that came up out of it and went along beside the vessel for a while and went down.
And in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to him he stood at a rail in the sun with his hands on the wood and looked at water going past, and there were four or five minutes in there when he was not unhappy.
He did not tell anybody that. There was nobody to tell.
—
A woman called Mourning had a child of four with her.
They had come aboard together out of Nottoway County and they had been sold together, which was not a kindness and was the law: a child of that age could not lawfully be sold there apart from his mother, and so a trader who wants to move a young woman moves the child with her, and it was discussed.
The child took a fever on the nineteenth day.
There was nothing whatever to be done and everybody knew that too, and what happened instead was that for three days a hold full of strangers arranged itself around one sick child — people moved so the coolest part of the floor was hers, and a man gave up his coat, and there was an argument about water that Mourning won, and a woman from Amelia who had had six of her own sat with her half of every night.
The child lived. She was still hot when they came up the river and she was crying, which was the best sound in that hold in twenty-six days.
Nelson did not do very much of any of it. He got water twice. He mostly watched.
He watched a hold full of people who had nothing, and no reason, and who would all be in six different places inside a fortnight, take three days of trouble over a child none of them had ever seen before the eleventh of December, and he sat with his back against the hull and thought about his mother putting Junie between them for ten weeks like a plank across a hole.
—
They came up to New Orleans on the sixth of January.
They were kept below while she was warped in, and there was a very long time of noise overhead and nothing to see, and then the hatch came off in daylight and they were brought up in two lots and stood along the deck in the sun in the clothes they had been wearing for twenty-six days.
There was a man on the wharf with a case under his arm.
He came aboard, and the captain brought out the paper, and the two of them stood at the after part of the deck and went through it exactly as it had been gone through in Norfolk, and this time it was done out loud with the people standing there, because nobody could be put off that vessel until the paper and the deck agreed.
The man read out the names.
He read them off in the order they had been written down in a yard in Norfolk twenty-six days before, and as each one was read the person said here, or sir, or put a hand up, or was pushed forward by somebody who understood faster.
He read Nelson.
And Nelson said, “Here.”
That was the first time in his life that his name had been read off a piece of paper by a stranger and an answer required of him, and it took about a second, and the man went on to the next one without looking up.
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