The Call of Zulina (20 page)

At long last Ikem lifted his face and slowly gazed around him. First at Oyo and Safya and Hola, but all three quickly averted their eyes. Next he focused on Antonio, then on Cabeto, then on Sunba. He stared at each in turn, but not one could hold his piercing gaze for long. Next, Ikem locked Tungo in his stare, and for a long while, Tungo glared right back. But in the end, even Tungo's defiance wavered, and he, too, lowered his eyes. As for Gamka, he didn’t even try to meet the old man's challenge.

When he looks my way, I’ll stare down at the floor
, Grace determined.
I won’t look into his eyes.

But that's not how it happened. Ikem's eyes grabbed Grace in spite of her resolve and forced her into his resolute gaze. Try as she might, she could not pull her eyes away from his. When Ikem finally released her, his head dropped to his chest. He placed one hand on Udobi and the other on Kwate and continued to grieve in silence.

Thinking it an intrusion for anyone to watch Ikem in his deep grief, Grace got up and positioned herself directly in front of him so that her flowing skirt blocked him from view. Then she said to the others, “Tungo told us that if we left quietly in the night, there would be no peace for us. He is right. I know Lingongo, and she will never allow us to leave here and live in peace. But Cabeto is also right. We are too few to fight against the armed slavers.”

The strength and authority in Grace's voice hushed even Ikem's lament.

But she was not yet finished. Her eyes flashed and her voice roiled with passion as she exclaimed, “If we ever again hope to walk free, we must have more people willing to fight beside us. That leaves us with only one choice …”

Thrusting her wounded fist high into the air, Grace proclaimed, “We must take Zulina!”

B
raced against the billowing wind, Pieter DeGroot stood alone on the hillside behind Zulina fortress and gazed down at the dozen ships anchored in the harbor below. Azure sea stretched out so far before him that it seemed to become one with the heavens. With rhythmic predictability, foamy whitecaps whipped up far out in the distance and swept onto the deep-red sands of the shore below before they washed back out again. Along the shoreline, coconut palm trees bent and stooped in wild dances. Only back here, shaded by the high fortress walls, where his face caught a fresh wind, could Pieter find a bit of relief from the oppressive African heat. How he longed for the foggy coasts of Europe where a sailor actually needed to pull a knit cap down over his ears and tug his coat collar up around his neck to keep out the chill of the sea air.

Even more, he longed for the lush green veldts of his boyhood. Pieter closed his eyes and conjured up a picture of those fields that had seemed to stretch out so endlessly when he was a boy—fields framed by the high dikes he used to know so well. Oh, to see them again in the winter, frozen over into solid ice! How many happy hours he and his brothers and sisters had spent skating across those frozen ponds!

Pieter opened his eyes to the reality of ships anchored at Zulina. He kicked at the loose rocks strewn around his feet until he cleared away a spot of dirt, and then he sank down and settled himself on the hillside. He found it more and more difficult to remember those long-ago days—more and more painful. So much had happened since he was a boy in the Dutch countryside. It was not just that things had changed; he himself had changed.

A piercing wail echoed from inside the fortress and jerked Pieter out of his reverie. He turned around to face the stone wall, grimaced, and looked away. All he could think about was that other horrible shriek. It, too, had come from inside. It had assaulted him as he hung back behind the others in the passageway. Lingongo was just outside the dungeon door, ready to push it open, but when that unearthly scream pierced through the walls, it paralyzed all of them with horror and dread.

“’Tis the cry o’ the devil ’imsef, it is!” Joseph had gasped, and not one person doubted that he was right.

Pieter ran the back of his hand over his sunburned face. The memories tumbled over and over and chafed his mind until it was worn raw. With the tail of his shirt, he wiped the dust from his weary eyes.

Suddenly, something caught Pieter's eye. He jerked upright and leaned forward for a better view. Down below, a lone figure moved toward the notorious door of no return. Over the years, more African captives than anyone could tally had been driven in shackles and chains from the main floor of the fortress, through a dank and narrow passageway, and out through that very door to longboats waiting to take them over to the slave ships anchored in the harbor. Once captives passed through that door, they were gone forever. Some were resigned to their fate, crying perhaps, maybe even moaning. Many fought and struggled, but they were quickly whipped into submission. A few resisted so ferociously that they were finally beaten unconscious and dragged to the longboats.

But now, no longboats waited, and the slave ships at anchor stood empty and unmanned. The steady gale seemed to push that lone figure forward. Palm trees whipped wildly on both sides as blue ocean lapped white and foamy in front. What could it mean?

Pieter shaded his eyes and squinted hard at the unknown person. African? Yes, almost certainly. Surely a man. But who? What was he doing out there all alone and unguarded?

The man disappeared into the passageway, and then he quickly reappeared at the small window on one side of the door.

Pieter cringed. At that very spot he had loaded his slaves onboard
Dem Tulp.
On that day an African trustee stood guard in that self-same window. The longboat was almost full when the guards forced one last slave through the door—a huge young man—a Mandingo in extra shackles. Pieter had sighed with relief when he saw him prodded toward the longboat. That Mandingo was his prize purchase. Just the sight of him filled Pieter with pride and caused his imagination to swim with visions of riches. Then, suddenly, the Mandingo hurled himself over the side.

“Man overboard!” Pieter had yelled. “Haul him out!”

Instead, to Pieter's shock and horror, the trustee took careful aim and fired. The musket ball struck the Mandingo in the shoulder. He reeled and splashed about, bellowing like a wounded water buffalo. Before Pieter could gather his wits, a second trustee in the opposite window also fired. His shot blew a gaping hole in the Mandingo's chest. The Mandingo pitched forward and sank into the sea like an iron bar.

Without so much as a backward glance, the sailors pushed the rest of the terrified captives into the longboat. When it was full, the sailors climbed in, dipped the oars into the bloody water, and rowed out to
Dem Tulp
as if nothing had happened. It was at that moment that Pieter vowed he would never again sail a slave ship. No profit, however fabulous, was worth it.

“Now, then, Dutchman! Ye be keepin’ yersef outta the admiral's way too?”

Pieter forced his attention away from the shadowy figure at the window and shaded his eyes. Captain Cummings puffed down the stone steps toward him.

“Blamin’ me, ’e is,” Cummings complained. “Now, ’ow's it me fault when ’e's the one wot grabbed the musket, I asks ye? Ye knows wot ’appened. Ye saw it all wi’ yer own eyes!”

The whole awful scene flashed back: Lingongo unbolted the dungeon door, and Joseph and Cummings pressed right up behind her, panting like a couple of yard dogs. Then they heard that unearthly shriek that turned their blood to ice. Yes, Joseph had grabbed Cummings's gun, but immediately, Lingongo snatched it from her husband. Not one other person had moved. Joseph's hands shook and sweat dripped down his face, soaking the collar of his shirt. He didn’t want to let go of that gun. But then, he never could hold his own against Lingongo.

“So wot if we witnessed ’er makin’ a fool of ’im?” Cummings said. “Ain’t the first time we seen it, an’ won’t be the last time, neither. Standin’ up to her weren’t goin’ to change that none.”

At first, Joseph had refused to back down. But so had Lingongo. Pieter thought she would blow a hole clear through him; she was that furious. Old Joseph must have been thinking the same thing because—although under his breath he bid all powers in heaven and earth to plunge her straight below—he finally gave in and let her have her way.

The roar of the musket blast ricocheting in that narrow stone passageway had knocked Pieter to his knees. Cummings and the others scattered like rats on a blazing ship. They let go with more cursing than Pieter had heard in any tavern in any port city of the world. Even Joseph rushed to put as much distance as he could between himself and his wife. Only Pieter hadn’t moved. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. It was that he couldn’t. His legs had gone completely numb and useless.

Cummings shook his head in puzzlement and lamented, “I ain’t like ye, DeGroot. Me, I don’t mind killin’ slaves. I figures they's lots more where we got those ones from. But turnin’ guns on our own kind? On the admiral's own daughter? Now that, I says, is a sin. Yes, sir, fer sure it is a sin!”

Pieter shot Cummings a look of undisguised disgust.

“I will stay, and I will be free!” Grace had yelled back in answer to her mother's ultimatum. How that had caused Lingongo's face to twist in murderous rage. Although it took every bit of effort she could muster, she had composed herself enough to call back to her daughter, “Then you will hang from the gates of Zulina!”

But that wasn’t all. As Lingongo pushed her way down the corridor, only Pieter, still hunched back in the shadows, heard her final vow: “No food and no water will go into that dungeon! We will wait until they are close to death from hunger and thirst. Then we will go in with guns and knives and slaughter every one of them!”

“An’ the tustees … ,” Cummings continued. “Where is they now, I asks ye? Where is they?” “I don’t know.”

Pieter got up and picked his way across the rocks, back toward the fortress. But when he glanced back over his shoulder, he again caught sight of the figure at the window below. He stepped as far to the edge of the embankment as he possibly could. Yes, now he could see. It was an African dressed as a white man. A trustee, then. But which one? He stretched forward to get an even better view.

Badu! It was Badu, one of the trustees with whom he had shared a pot of porridge the day before that poor, desperate mother and daughter had tried to escape. One of the two trustees who had shot them dead.

Badu climbed onto the window ledge and stood in the exact spot where the trustee with the gun had waited as Pieter loaded
Dem Tulp
. And then, as Pieter watched in horror, Badu let go and dropped into the sea.

With the tide rolling in, strong waves smashed against the foot of the door of no return. But Badu did not reappear. There was nowhere to swim, nowhere to go. Badu had joined the ancestors.

“It's not right!” Pieter exclaimed out loud. “It just is not right! The Africans should have a fighting chance. We even give an animal in the jungle that much!”

T
he rhythm of African working songs that sailed on the wind and drifted through the windows of the London house washed a flood of melancholy over Mama Muco. Joseph Winslow's slaves were busy in the nearby cassava fields. Muco stretched herself out the window to watch them beat the rhythm with their hoes and digging sticks as they chopped at the hard ground.

In a strange way, it comforted her to hear those old chants. She still remembered them from her childhood, even after so many years. Despite the ache in her heart, Muco lost herself in the beat and picked up the music:

“Yama o yama do deo, Yama o yama do deo … dede dshamalomba,”
Muco intoned in her husky voice as she rubbed oil deep into the carved crevices of the mahogany chairs that were pushed up around the dining table.
“Yama o yama do—”

Without warning, Muco abruptly hushed and cocked her head. The workers had stopped singing. She hefted herself up from the floor and hurried to the window to gaze out at the fields. The workers were still there, all right, but they no longer chopped and dug. Now they were staring in the direction of the stone wall, over toward the accursed fortress, whose name Muco had vowed never to utter again.

With a gasp, Muco dropped her polishing rag and ran for the door. “Oh, Lord, Lord,” she prayed, “let it be my Grace come home!”

But it wasn’t Grace. Muco was halfway across the dusty courtyard when she met Joseph Winslow rushing toward her. The moment she saw his flushed face and heard his ragged breathing she knew something was terribly wrong.