I smiled and waved back as I broke the first waves with my feet. Then I dove, and all I could hear was the ocean’s singing, the bubbles and waves as they rose up and blended with my breaths. With every kick and stroke I felt a little stronger. By the time I reached the wherry, I’d shed some of my sadness and felt halfway to being me again.

I grabbed the gunwale to pull myself in.

Sewel’s hand came down on my wrist. “Molasses would’ve got here first, Francisca.”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t let go. I knew better than to meet his bleary eyes, so I kicked in place and stared at the red feather on his new round-brim hat. The very day Mama went in the ground, Sewel had sailed for Nassau, returning only that morning. While I’d poured my tears into her pillow, he’d gone hat shopping.

At last he let me go. I climbed aboard and checked that my shirt covered me in the right places, though there wasn’t much to cover. Then I squeezed the water from my braids.

Sewel turned to speak to Mr. Baines, making his voice loud enough so Moses Wiggins could hear as well. Moses and Mercy were runaways and Sewel never spoke to them direct. “Tide’s an iron hook today. Best we run past Memory Rock, then veer north.”

With that, the men got to raising the sails and setting a course, except Moses, who had no sail and had to row his way out there.

Soon as we got underway, Sewel unstoppered a bottle of rum and leaned back, resting his arm on the tiller. I could see the silvery letter M branded on the brawn of his thumb. It was Mercy who told me what that letter stood for—manslayer—but I knew what it meant long before I learned the word for it.

I turned fore and trailed my fingers through the water. With the waves rippling and my dark braid hanging over my shoulder, I could almost imagine it was Mama’s face staring back at me instead of mine. Fathoms below, an angelfish spooked and disappeared into a bed of whip seaweed. Over on the Baines boat, the boys starting singing songs about Captain Teach and the good days of pirating gone by, when earning your daily bread was as easy as taking it from someone else, while Sewel and Mr. Baines called back and forth about the war with the rebellious American colonies.

Wrecking was how we earned our daily bread. We helped ships that had run up on sandbars or reefs as they cruised through the Bahama Channel—sandbars and reefs we knew better than anyone. If the ship couldn’t be kedged back to deep water, we hauled away the cargo for a share. In rarer times, when the ship was a total loss and sank, we dove for its sunken spoils, sometimes uncovering them for years after the wreck itself.

I dove for sunken spoils. Sewel never did the diving because of his missing toes, he claimed, which made no sense to me. Fish swam, didn’t they?