My Name Is Not Angelica (3 page)

He wiped his brow and banged his hammer. He banged it again until the crowd was quiet.

"These three, the finest Africa has to offer, will be sold as one," he said. "And no bid under two thousand rigsdalers will be considered. What do I hear?"

The auctioneer heard silence, then whispers among the planters. A man who stood just below me said to a woman wearing a pink dress and a flower in her hair, "What do you think, Jenna?"

"I think it's a bargain at three thousand rigsdalers," she said. "The man's worth that much alone."

"He's a little overpowering," the man said. "It would take a strong hand to control him."

"You have a strong hand, Jost."

Someone shouted an offer of two thousand four hundred rigsdalers. The auctioneer repeated the offer and gave the stone a blow.

"I like the girl, too," the woman said. "She has a nice smile."

It was the same smile I had learned on the ship, as if I had just received a gift I had always wanted. My face hurt from smiling and I felt like letting out a hair-raising scream. The deep blue eyes of Master Jost, blue as the sky, examined me from head to foot.

Offers were coming fast, a few rigsdalers at a time.

The woman said, "Don't be niggardly, Jost. We will be here all day. The sun is hot. Philippe Horn is over there writing on a piece of paper. He wants them badly. Get rid of him with an offer he cannot match."

Jost cleared his throat, cupped his hands, and shouted,"Three thousand rigsdalers."

The crowd fell silent. Men I took to be plantation owners, who stood down in front in big straw hats, looked at each other and shook their heads.

The auctioneer shouted, "Three thousand rigsdalers. Do I hear three thousand, one hundred?"

The silence grew. Master van Prok lifted his hat and put it on again. He seemed ready to make a higher bid.

"Three thousand," said the auctioneer, glancing down at the planters, calling each by name. "Gentlemen, what do I hear?"

He heard nothing. His hammer came down with a bang. "Sold, sold to Master van Prok of Hawks Nest for the sum of three thousand rigsdalers."

From the shadows a black man crept out and climbed the ladder to the platform where the three of us stood. He was tall but bent over by some misfortune, so that he shifted crablike from one side to the other as he moved along.

"Come," he said. "I will take you to the boat that
will take you to Hawks Nest on the island of St. John. St. John is only four miles away. It will be a pleasant voyage on this sunny day."

He took us past the pen that held the rest of the slaves that
God's Adventure
had brought to St. Thomas that day. Midnight black though they were, they looked like ghosts and were ghostly silent. My heart went out to them.

"What is your name?" Konje asked.

"Nero," the man said.

"What work do you do at Hawks Nest?"

"I am the bomba, Bomba Nero. I oversee what goes on at Hawks Nest. You can also call me Sir Bomba."

He talked out of the side of his mouth. His arrogance and cold, darting glance made Konje clamp his jaws.

At a shack by the wharf, the bomba took Konje inside. Two blacks put manacles on him. I saw them take a red-hot iron out of the fire and stamp a number on Konje's back. He made not a sound. They stamped Dondo, too.

We waited on the wharf for Jost van Prok and his wife. They came with two boys, good for running errands, Master van Prok told Nero when the bomba gave them a surly glance.

"I have two servants," Jenna van Prok said. "You will be my third. You will like that, I am sure."

"Oh, yes," I said.

It was the task I had worked for from the day Captain Sorensen had told me about it, that it was much better than working in the fields, out in sun and storm. It was why I had learned to be docile, to say nothing unless asked, and to smile even though it hurt.

St. John is a beautiful island, just a few miles from St. Thomas, across pale blue water. At dusk our small boat came to Hawks Nest, the van Prok plantation, and moored in the shallows. From here we all walked ashore, except Jenna van Prok.

She was carried to the beach on Konje's broad shoulders. As he bent to set her down on the sand, Bomba Nero glanced at him. It was a searching glance, little more than a lifting of an eyelid, but in it was hatred.

I told Jenna van Prok that Lenta, my friend, was a good cook and would be very helpful at the house.

"I bid for her," she said, "but the Haugaard brothers outbid me. They have a plantation close to Mary Point. It is near so you'll see her again."

She looked at me from under the rim of her pink hat. "You have a pretty smile, like an angel from heaven," she said. "I'm going to call you Angelica. Do you like that?"

"Yes," I said, though I didn't like the name at all.

The van Proks changed all our names. The mistress called Konje "Apollo." Her husband called
Dondo "Abraham." This was a custom, I learned. The planters wanted the slaves to forget they were born in Africa, that they were black Africans.

"Do you understand what I say?" Jenna van Prok asked. "The language I speak?"

"Yes, when you don't speak fast," I said.

Hawks Nest looked down upon the sea. It was neither small nor large among the plantations on the mountainous island of St. John, but half of its land was level, good for the growing of sugar cane.

The rest of the plantation was cut up by gullies, bushy ravines, and by rock-strewn peaks. Here Master van Prok had cleared the land and terraced it for the growing of cotton.

The van Prok house stood on a low cliff within sound of the sea. It was made of stone and timber and looked like a small fort.

The slave huts stood at a distance from the house beside a large pile of boulders, the men on one side, women on the other. In the middle of the boulders were privies. They were far enough from the house not to be unpleasant for the van Proks.

My hut, like all the others, had stone walls and a roof of palm leaves. One side was open and faced the sea. This was a help because sometimes in the night cool winds blew from that direction.

The first night I slept in my hut, I was told by the van Proks' slaves that for a year now, a terrible drought had settled upon the island. Great white clouds would come up at dawn, spread across the sky, and turn black, but not a drop of rain would fall.

This is exactly what happened on my first night. Dawn broke clear, with a small sea wind. The white clouds came up. The sun burned holes in them. They spread across the sky and turned black, but no rain fell. The clouds disappeared during the night. The heavens were on fire with stars.

Before I went to bed, Jenna van Prok had whispered to me, "My husband has told the bomba to put you to work in the fields tomorrow. This is his habit with all new slaves. He likes to test them. Don't despair. In a week I will have you working in the house."

A tutu horn blew just before dawn, a wild sound from a conch shell. Roosters crowed. The bomba came up the path, banging his ironwood club against everything in his way.

"Out!" he shouted. "This is not Sunday. It is a Wednesday in the month of April. You are not in Africa, dreaming about a breakfast of melons and roasted birds. You're on the plantation of Master van Prok, on the island of St. John in the Danish West Indies among the Virgin Islands. Out!"

We went to the side of a hill in a bushy ravine. There were fifteen of us, all but Konje, who was
sent to work at the sugar mill. Before the drought, I was told, cotton grew in the ravine at this time of year and there would be pink flowers on the bushes. Now all was scorched and dry. With long knives we cut down the bushes and stirred up the ground.

In midmorning boys brought our breakfasts—a handful of dried finger-sized fish called poorjack and shriveled chickpeas, but nothing to drink. Already the sun beat down. It burned hotter than it ever did in Barato.

At noon we rested for a while. It was the time when the slaves went off to work in their little plots of land to raise vegetables for themselves. Now all they could do was to scratch at the scorched earth and pray on their knees for rain.

After the sun went down the bomba came and said that we hadn't done much that day, that we didn't deserve even the little fried fish his boys handed out to us.

After three days in the field I found that they ate better food at the van Proks'. Fearing that I would collapse from the work and the heat, Mistress Jenna had made her husband change his mind about testing me for a whole week.

She brought me into the house and I became her body servant, one of three, as she had said. With Amina, a slave she'd had for years, I attended her from dusk until midnight and ate my supper from what the van Proks left over.

We ate salt pork from Holland, salt mutton from
New England, and bread baked in St. Thomas. Sometimes the bread had weevils in it, which I picked out before Mistress Jenna was served.

The food was not good. Master van Prok complained about it. "They send us meat that the market has refused," he said. "Meat so tough it bends the teeth. And the salt! You have to drink a firkin of water to calm your thirst. And at this moment there's not that much water on the whole plantation."

For the slaves and the van Proks water to drink ran out after the second meal of the day, except for what was needed for the mules that turned the millstones that ground the cane for molasses and rum.

All three of Mistress Jenna's body servants were made to work in the distillery five hours each day. Master van Prok's three male servants hauled water up the hill for five hours, too. Among the three was Dondo. He had worked in the fields for days, until Mistress van Prok discovered that he was good at trimming hair. He then was brought into the household.

From the very beginning, Konje had hauled water up the hill from the sea. He could carry two times more water than any of the other slaves. More weight and much faster. He would put a cask on top of his head and go up the steep hill half running.

The bomba picked up Konje's new name, and
when I was working in the distillery I heard him call out, "Apollo, you're a wonder. I, too, was a wonder, like you, but see what the hammer did."

Then he grinned and beat the ground with his club. He was punishing Konje, little by little, to get rid of his arrogance.

One of the slaves told me that the bomba had once been a giant of a man. But he had run away and when he was caught, instead of cutting off one of his legs, as was the law, they broke his bones with a hammer. Then they put them together wrong. Strangely, after that he loved the white people and hated the slaves.

Konje knew what the bomba was trying to do, but when I told him that he was killing himself, he only clenched his hands.

Late one afternoon, when the distillery had been running on sugar cane stored months before, and Konje had hauled more seawater than ever, a ship sailed into Hawks Nest Bay. A cannon went off, horns sounded, and a flag ran up the mast.

The cannon shot roused Jost van Prok, who lay in his hammock asleep. I had just gone to work with his wife's hair, making the three little curls she wore on her forehead.

Master van Prok bounded to his feet and ran to the window that looked down on the bay.

"Spaniards," he shouted in his bull-like voice. "Devil's spawn. Robbers from Puerto Rico. What will they want for their water this time? Last year it was two rigsdalers a tubful. Twice that this time, you can be sure!"

Mistress Jenna skipped to the window. "What good fortune!" she cried. "No matter the cost. Now
we can have a garden. Now we can fatten a few sheep and eat fresh meat instead of that salt stuff from Holland."

She was beside herself. The whole plantation was excited, for now every slave could plant a small garden. Everyone was excited except Jost van Prok, who had to pay.

The Spaniards sold the water at three rigsdalers a tubful. A tubful was what a slave could carry on his head. The tubs were all the same size. A small man could carry a tub a third full. A strong man a tub two-thirds full of water.

This was how Konje became the most important slave on Hawks Nest plantation. He could carry a full tub on his head, up the long hill path to the storehouse, without spilling a drop.

The Spanish captain was not pleased with Konje. And when Master van Prok cut the number of carriers to four, to Konje and three others, the captain threatened to sail away unless he was paid double the number of rigsdalers.

Master van Prok paid, muttering under his breath, "Thieves. Spanish cutthroats." But the water had brought the plantation to life. The storehouse rang with laughter. Slaves sang. They came down from the fields and worked.

Many of the rain barrels in the storehouse had dried out and fallen apart. They had to be put together again. Our two carpenters worked all day
and by torchlight. Dozens of barrels still had water in them, but, full of wriggling eggs and young mosquitoes, they had to be cleaned out.

The bomba went around banging his ironwood club, with a smile for everyone except Konje.

It was dusk. Konje had been working since dawn. He came into the yard while I was bringing Mistress Jenna's supper from the cookhouse. His feet dragged and water spilled over the side of the barrel.

After he had emptied the barrel and come out of the storehouse, I made him sit down. I offered him a piece of Mistress Jenna's salt mutton. He refused it but took a drink from her cup of rum, then spat it out.

The bomba had been watching us from the shadows. He came limping across the yard and looked down at Konje sprawled on the ground.

"You are not to drink Mistress Jenna's rum," he said. "You are not to touch the cup she uses. Do you understand?"

Konje did not answer. It was an insult not to answer, but the bomba let it go when he saw Konje get to his feet.

We waited until he was in the house, probably telling the van Proks all that had happened.

"I have noticed the distillery is at work," Konje said. "There's fire under all the pots. One of the pots is full of muscovado."

Muscovado was the coarse yellow sugar left in the first pot as the sugar cane started down the line.