Free The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox

muzzle at a spot not far from the two officers.
    I heard the cold dead clang of metal striking wood.
    I heard one piercing scream. My teeth began to chatter.
    Then a very small brown face rose above the rail as though it had flown up from the sea. It continued to rise slowly until its brown bare chest was visible. Then I saw dark hands around its waist. The hands lifted, the little naked girl’s legs flew out, and I saw the head of the young man who had been carrying her.
    For a second, she sat on the deck, looking all around her, her eyes huge with amazement, then she crawled and jumped toward the rail but was forced back by the forward propulsion of the man who tottered over the rail, unable, it seemed, to bring his body any further. The child hugged the young man’s neck frantically and buried her face in his hair. At that moment, Nicholas Spark bent his thin length and gripped the man’s back as though he were gathering up cloth, and yanked him altogether over, the chains around his ankles striking the deck with a violent clanging.
    The clanging never ceased as one after another of the captives struggled over the rail and were dropped or dragged onto the deck. How long did it all take? I’ll never know. None of us moved.
    Later, after the thud of bodies and the rise and fall of the sobs of the children had stopped, a group of nearly naked individuals sat hunched up beneath the tarpaulin we had rigged up. The Captain was aft, speaking in low tones to the cabociero who, this time, was accompanied by a tall black man carrying a whip. Spark stood close to the blacks, his pistol in his hand.
    Although many were silent now, some continued to lament. I prayed they would stop for I had not drawn a true breath since the child’s face had appeared at the railing, and I wondered, gasping, when I would again.
    â€œPurvis!” cried Spark suddenly. “Get to that one!”
    Sparks pistol pointed at a man who squatted by himself, somewhat apart from the others. His knees were tight against his chest; his head lolled in a strange way. Purvis ran to him, lifted him up, yanked him back and forth, punched his arms and threw him about so violently I was sure they would topple overboard.
    The other blacks, except for the little girl who had been the first over the rail, turned away from the sight. But she ran crying toward the young man.
    â€œGrab her, Stout!” called Spark. Stout stepped forward and took the child by her hair, shoving her back among the others. He came back to where we were standing, smiling vaguely and rubbing his hand against his shirt.
    â€œGet a measure of rum, Jessie!” Purvis shouted to me.
    I fetched it from the galley and ran to Purvis who by now had backed the young man up against the rail.
    â€œPour it in his mouth,” Purvis said.
    â€œHis mouth is shut,” I said in a whisper.
    â€œOpen it!”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œHere,” said Stout, suddenly appearing next to us. He took the cup from my hands, lifted it, then shoved it forcefully against the man’s clenched lips, grinding it back and forth like a shovel teasing hard earth, until trickles of blood dripped down the brown skin and onto Stout’s fingers. I was aware the other blacks had all grown silent. The only sound was the muttering of the Captain aft, and the crunch of cup against teeth until the spilling moonlight revealed rum and blood mixed upon the deck.
    When, that night, I lay awake in my hammock, I saw again and again my arm reaching up to the young man’s dazed face, the rum dripping over the rim of the cup because of the trembling of my hand. I heard, hardly muffled by the timbers which separated me from them, the blacks groaning and crying out in the hold, and the world I had once imagined to be so grand, so full of chance and delight, seemed no larger and no sweeter than this ship. Before my tightly closed eyelids floated the face of the child who had, after that one glance at