The evening and the morning were the fiftieth day.

* * *

Their food still made us nauseated, but more of us ate it. They beat us anyway, just as before, but we learned to ignore the pain. The ship’s rocking still bruised our already-bruised flesh, but we moaned less now. The shrieks and cries of women and men being entered without permission still chilled our blood, but we saved our breath for another day. When their medicine man made his rounds to see if their diseases had consumed us, we stared at him, leaving him more frightened than ever. When they took us above deck for dancing, we moved without provocation. They thought they’d won. They believed they’d finally achieved our submission. They were wrong.

Truth was, we were more dangerous than before. People determined to survive are willing to sacrifice anything to achieve that end. Captors sensed a shift in our energy and became watchful. They were wise to do so. Instead of once or twice a day, they now visited our quarters hourly, seeking the nature and purpose of our newfound poise. They poked us with the butts of their rifles, but we responded like dead men. A few studied our faces, but met only solid resolve to destroy them one day. They concluded that, just as before, we must be planning an uprising. So they determined to dissuade us.

The next day, immediately after dancing, we were instructed to remain on deck. Crewmen had their guns drawn and pointed at us from every direction. Unable to understand their tongue, we studied their gestures and discerned that our suspicions had been right—they suspected us of planning another mutiny. They grabbed one of our sisters—no one knew her name—and bound her with thick ropes. They lifted her, screaming the while, with the mast of the sail, and slowly lowered her body into the water. When they lifted her again, her lower half was gone. Some monster of the sea had taken it. Shreds of ragged flesh dangled from her bloody midsection. Within seconds, she was dead. Most of us turned away. It was a sight unfit for human eyes. A few tried to comprehend what kind of people these captors were, but there was no comprehension.

They lowered the rest of her into the water and let the monsters complete their feasting. We closed our eyes and trembled. Our prayer was that she entered the next world whole. Then they took an African lad, a boy of no more than ten rains, and doused him with oil. We told him, with our eyes, of a magical world where he was going, a place where there’d be no more suffering. He nodded and smiled. Then a crewman set him ablaze. For a moment, he ran in circles, shrieking words in his own tongue as the fire consumed him. Then he collapsed to the floor of the deck. Most of us cried aloud and covered our eyes. A few beheld the boy’s demise in its entirety. They saw his spirit ascend into the cloudless blue sky as his flesh turned black beneath the flames. Someone said his name was Toundi, which means “Our abounding joy.”