Sapphire's Grave

She was a fierce woman—the kind they did not bother. No, the captain said, raising one hand to stop the advance of several of his crewmen. This one is hostile. She may be violent. The crewmen stopped short, and backed away from her silent, smoldering ferocity. She was black—blue-black, as the crewmen described her—with several stripes carved into each of her glossy cheeks, and wary, narrowed eyes. She did not scream or cry in anguish as did the other women. She had been trekked to the coast from inland, where it was said that the women did not cry, for internment until the ship set sail. Silent and resigned, her angry, level stare had warned of a latent wrath, barely held in check, dreadful as hellfire. The captain was intrigued by her kind. He would have her for himself.

Long after dark they came to retrieve her from the bowels of the lumbering vessel. She was not asleep, but staring expectantly at the opening to the hold. She had seen the captain’s lechery, and had known that they would come. She was prepared to do what was needed.

The captain’s quarters were illuminated by a strange glow from a covered receptacle. As her eyes adjusted to the eerie light, she sensed him moving behind her, smelled his alien stench as he came slowly, cautiously toward her. She turned to face him. He was shirtless, with strange, gossamer hairs on his chest that made her skin crawl and her lip curl. He raised a hand as if to fend off an attack. She did not move. Slowly, he lowered his hand. Her eyes followed it to his crotch as he began to speak, softly, in his alien tongue, his eyes moving across her bare breasts, the plane of her belly, the curve where her waist met her hips. Inwardly, she crouched as she waited, marking his steps, measuring the distance between him and herself. For a moment, she was distracted by his phallus, now exposed, pink and erect and defenseless.

She had steeled herself to face the unknown, watchful and alert for opportunities to escape. She had suffered, patiently, indignities not inflicted upon an ox, things that she must never mention. But she would not suffer the further insult of bestiality with this creature against her will. She would destroy him, and be destroyed.

He quickened his measured pace, suddenly, and she sprang upon him, her ankles locking around his body, her fingernails digging into his back as she sank her teeth into the flesh surrounding his jugular. He cried out in pain and surprise, beating at her back in a futile, pathetic defense. He bellowed again, but she held her grip, willing him dead, he and all of his kind who had come uninvited from some unknown hellish place to destroy her and hers.

Men poured into the room, some shouting in horror and shock, others too frightened or stunned to move when they saw the blue-black woman and their captain, locked in a macabre embrace, his hoarse cries dying as she held his neck in her jaws, his blood dripping from her chin.

It took several men several minutes to detach her, their captain’s agony worsening each time they pulled at the woman, who tightened her death grip, digging into his shoulders yet more deeply, with each tug at her waist or legs or arms, and each blow to her back.

But when she was finally yanked away from him, she did not fight, only stood quivering with rage, not looking at her captors or struggling against the shackles with which they bound her.

Had they killed her, she would have won. The captain understood this. He pondered this blue-black woman quaking, he felt, with vengeance and an awe-inspiring and mystic power, as the crewmen tended his near-fatal wound. It had been her intention to kill, and then to be killed. He would see that she lived, in a misery that she could not yet imagine.

He gave the crew an unconventional order: This devil-witch was not to return to the hold. She would be bound, hand, torso, and foot, to the deck, to be sold not in Charleston but in Santo Domingo. He knew of a trader there who would see that she got her due.

But a violent tornado prevailed against the great ship, gathering so suddenly and with such might that it took the crew, resting on deck as the human chattel lay secure in the hold, by surprise. The winds seemed to blow in all directions. The ship rocked dangerously as violent waves engulfed the deck and overtook the crew.

Their bodies were washed ashore days later at the Cape Verde Islands, to the alarm and delight of other crews who waited shipless on the shore. Replacement hands were hastily dispatched to rescue the floundering ship, which lay a day’s journey, it was guessed, from the islands.

At first the blue-black woman shackled to the deck went unnoticed, lying quietly and still, sunbaked, desiccated, and barely alive as the excited new crew examined the ship’s exterior. When they finally boarded the vessel and found her bound hand, torso, and foot, they speculated as to the reason for her cruel isolation, and the extreme measures that had been taken to bind her to the deck, measures ironically responsible for her survival. She was nursed to health and, exhibiting no signs of aggression, returned to the hold. She would fetch a good price in Charleston.

And indeed at Charleston she brought a handsome sum at auction, touted as a breeder and field servant, her corded arms and strong back, her slender fingers fit for cotton-picking. No mention was made of a violent temperament or rebellious spirit. No one knew that she possessed a power that had brought the wrath of God upon a great vessel.

Had they known that she was pregnant, she would have brought an even greater price. But they could not have known. Her pregnancy was barely apparent even at the time of delivery in a rice field in Charleston, some ninety days after sale. Her child, it was said, would not—could not—survive. The tiny girl child, nearly embryonic in appearance, could barely muster a cry when they drew her, a silent and reluctant arrival, into the new world, an ocean away from the place of her conception.

But survive she did, to grow strong and slender as a reed, blue-black and smoldering with the promise of hellfire in her narrowed eyes. People were frightened by the woman and her child. By the time she was five years old, the girl had become obstinate and sullen toward her masters; and so she was sold away to St. John’s Parish. She would never see her mother again.

She came to be called Sapphire for her blue skin and flaming, fearsome beauty, alien and frightful and exciting a terrible awe in all who saw her, drawn in spite of themselves.

At fifteen she received word of her mother for the first time in a decade; her mother—dark shadow of a memory who had instilled in Sapphire a sense of oneness with a God whose nature she could not recall. Her mother, Sapphire was told, had succumbed to a fire of her own setting in Charleston. That part of Sapphire that believed this relinquished its faith in her mother’s God. Her mother had been the only person who had ever loved Sapphire, and even in separation, that love had sustained her—until now.

She was courted, briefly, by a young man from Cuba called Neptuno, a boxer traveling with his master in the local prizefighting circuit. He was killed during a match in Stono. Sapphire bore his child several weeks later, a premature infant, brown-skinned and green-eyed, whose hair would grow long and straight as sugarcane. Her violent and early arrival caught the attention of the local veterinarian, a young man of Greek descent and gentle disposition. He had been visiting with the livestock when he heard Sapphire’s tortured screams. His compassion drew Sapphire to him. Her glowing black skin and feisty spirit drew him to her. Their affair lasted nearly a year and yielded another girl, this one pale and amber-eyed and, by Sapphire’s calculation, nearly six weeks early.

Sapphire shared a cabin for a time with a field hand recently imported from across the sea. She was given to him to distract him from the memory of his homeland, to assimilate him and make him feel at home. But after giving birth to their daughter, a dark girl who brought to Sapphire the clarity of her own mother’s face, Sapphire was taken from him one night upon the whim of the Master’s son, who shared her with his friends at a party given on the occasion of his impending marriage.

Rejected thereafter by her former husband, Sapphire moved to a cabin of her own with her three daughters. She began to receive visits—first a succession of white strangers, usually teenagers from nearby plantations who accosted her in the fields or en route to her cabin at dusk, their hands groping and awkward. Then, overseers and their friends, supposing that she enjoyed, rather than merely endured, their lewd attentions. Eventually, slave men began to take liberties with her, accusing her of disloyalty and asserting their right to exploit as white men had. And she began to give in to them in a desperate attempt to salvage some approval from the enslaved community in which she was forced to live; and when this effort failed, she gave in to them because she had nothing to lose.

When she discovered that she was pregnant, and horribly alone, Sapphire gathered all the faith that she could recover, and God sent her an angel of benevolence.

Concerned about the rising rate of infant mortality among the slave population, and the consequent loss of wealth, a neighboring planter had purchased a midwife—an African woman trained in the handling of difficult deliveries, and hired out to neighboring plantations. Sarah was her name.

Sapphire, with her history of premature deliveries, was a suitable candidate for Sarah’s care. Such care involved a diet of fish and beans, onions and dandelion leaves, and a regimen of herbal concoctions. It stopped short of relief from backbreaking labor in the rice paddies. Sapphire and Sarah developed a comfortable friendship. Some said that they even looked like sisters. Sarah felt this kinship in her heart; but Sapphire could not truly trust in the kindness of others. Sarah understood this, and maintained a comfortable distance.

But there was trouble: Sapphire had become coddled, the overseer reported, and was refusing to work. She complained of fatigue, headaches, and swelling of the extremities. The Master of the great house nodded his agreement. On two occasions, he had nearly taken a whip to her himself. He had feared that the care of a midwife might spoil the gal. By the time Sapphire’s child was born—another girl, small, but sound—he had decided to fix Sapphire. He would make an example of her that the others would not wish to follow.

And something in Sapphire would die, imperceptibly but certainly. The luxury of human weakness would die for Sapphire. She would be imbued with a hardness and tenacity born of hardship that exceeded the limits of human tolerance. Without understanding the import of his deeds, the enslaver would create the beginning of a legend.

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