“Put hate and fear in name-string,” he said to them. “Peaceful and happy be all that stay behind. I keep you safe till the right day.” Or that was what he told Denmark that he said. Few of the arriving slaves spoke any English, so he had to explain it to them in some African language. Or maybe he was able to convey it all to them in knot language. Denmark wouldn’t know—Gullah Joe wouldn’t teach him what the knotwork meant or how it worked. “You read and write White man talk,” Gullah Joe said. “That be enough secret for one man.” Denmark only knew that somehow these people knew how to tie bits of this and that with scraps of string and cloth and thread and somehow it would contain their name, plus a sign for fear and a sign for hate. Even though he couldn’t understand it, the knotted name-strings made Denmark proud, for it proved that Black people knew how to read and write back in Africa, only it wasn’t marks on paper, it was knots in string.

Besides gathering the names of the newly arrived slaves, Denmark helped collect the names of the slaves already in Camelot. Word spread among the Blacks—Denmark only had to pass along a garden fence with an open basket, and Black hands would reach out and drop name-strings into the basket. “Thank you,” they said. “Thank you.”

“Not me,” he would answer. “Don’t thank me. I ain’t nobody.”

Came a day not long ago when they had all the slaves’ names, and Gullah Joe sang all night. “My people happy now,” he said. “My people got they happy.”

“They’re still slaves,” Denmark pointed out.

“All they hate in there,” said Gullah Joe, pointing at the bulging net.

“All their hope, too,” said Denmark. “They got no hope now either.”

“I no take they hope,” said Gullah Joe. “White man take they hope!”

“They all stupid like my woman,” said Denmark.

“No, no,” said Gullah Joe. “They smart. They wise.”

“Well, nobody knows it but you.”

Gullah Joe only grinned and tapped his head. Apparently it was enough for Joe to know the truth.

There was one person who wasn’t happy, though. Oh, Denmark was glad enough to have a purpose in his life, to have Black people look at him with gratitude instead of loathing. But that wasn’t the same as being happy. His woman was still before him every day, lurching through her housework, mumbling words he could barely understand. Gullah Joe saw that his people weren’t unhappy anymore. But Denmark saw that the happiest people were the Whites. He heard them talking.

“You see how docile they are?”

“Slavery is the natural state of the Black man.”

“They don’t wish to rise above their present condition.”

“They are content.”

“The only place where Blacks are angry is where they are permitted to live without a master.”

“The Black man cannot be happy without discipline.”

And so on, throughout the city. White people came to Camelot from all over the world, and what they saw was contented slaves. It persuaded them that slavery must not be such a bad thing after all. Denmark hated this. But Gullah Joe seemed not to care.