My Name Is Not Angelica Read Free

night when no one was looking, to my death.
    When I caught sight of Konje again, he was no longer in chains. He was dressed in a red shirt and a yellow cap. He was the leader of a gang of slaves who washed the filth from the decks where we lived.
    The ship was called
God's Adventure.
One of her owners was Len Sorensen. I had known Master Sorensen for five years. He had come to our village many times trying to buy slaves. He had bought none from Konje's father or from Konje, yet he was always friendly and brought us presents.
    Three days later, when he saw me among the crowd of slaves he had gathered along the coast, he was also friendly. He didn't send me back to the village, but he found me a hole that was clean, where I could lie down and stand up. In the restof the ship, the decks were so close together you had to lie flat on your back.
    More helpful than this, he calmed some of my fears. I didn't believe that the white people where we were going were cannibals, as most of the others believed. They would work us hard but would not eat us.
    The island of St. John, which was to be our home, was owned by Denmark, Master Sorensen told me. He said that it was far across the ocean, near America. He told me many things. He told me, for instance, how I would be sold to a white planter, how I should act.
    "The planter who buys you," he said, "will put you to work in his household or in the sugar-cane fields. In the fields, under the hot sun, slaves don't last long, perhaps a year. So show your white teeth, Raisha, smile a lot, and don't say anything unless you're asked."
    At first we talked in my dialect, but after a while Master Sorensen spoke in Danish and I learned some of his language. This was very helpful when I got to the island of St. John.

4

    God's Adventure
—such a hopeful name for a savage ship—took six months and more to sail from Africa to the islands. We left the mouth of the river in the night. We sailed slowly north along the slave coast and stopped at every port.
    Captain Sorensen gathered in two or three slaves in each port. He was very particular. Ashantis he wouldn't buy because they caused trouble, he said. The Senegals were intelligent. The Congos were tall and beautiful. The Mandigos were lazy. The Ibos made good house servants, he told me, and bought ten of them.
    God's Adventure
was crowded before we ever left the village of Accra. The ship had four decks, piled one on top of the other, so close, as I have said, that you could not stand up. The new slaves choked the ship. Then a plague broke out and three or four of us died every day.
    Lenta and her children lived on the lowest of the four decks. I never saw her until the plaguebegan and I heard that her son, Madi, was sick. I carried him aloft to my place on the first deck. It turned out that he didn't have the plague. He just couldn't eat the fuzzy green meat and weevily mush he was given and threw them up.
    I shared with him the food Captain Sorensen saw that I was given every day. Soon, as we turned back along the slave coast and picked up more slaves, Madi got well. His body was a bundle of bones, but he moved about, ate, and kept the food down.
    Soon after we turned back a storm struck us. The ship with all her big cargo was top-heavy. She rolled like a log. Her bare masts dipped into the sea. She creaked and groaned. Gray waves rose up and engulfed the top deck, sweeping men into the sea.
    The storm left us afloat off the port of Accra. Here Captain Sorensen took on more slaves to replace those he had lost from poor food, the plague, and the storm, and sailed westward toward the islands with three hundred eighty-one slaves.
    We had not sailed far when the ship began to leak where her bottom timbers met the sea. The crack was small in width but long. Water poured in fast and began to flood the lower deck. Captain Sorensen sent sailors down to fix the leak, but they failed. If anything, the sea poured in faster.
    He knew about Madi, knew