Et cetera : Letters from Lost River Cave: Chapter 1 -- The Storm

Editor's Note: As the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War approaches in less than one year, we will begin sharing some chapters from a a novel in progress entitled "Letters from Lost River Cave." The book tells the story of two friends in Western Kentucky, where the Trail of Tears winding west intersected the Underground Railroad heading north, and captures the struggle over slavery in the minds of those who lived along the wide and not-so-well defined line between North and South.

Jack stood on the deck of the ship, lost in thought, pondering the contrast between the beauty above him and the horror that lingered at his feet.

It was midnight in the Caribbean. Early fall. 1701.

He had never planned to join the crew of that slave ship. But men in debt in those days had few choices. Although he hated slavery, he had hoped that this experience may someday help him help those desperate souls he had seen and heard – and smelled – chained in the lower deck of the Henrietta Marie as it traveled from central Africa to the West Indies

Perhaps, he hoped, the narratives which he planned to write, sharing the horror he had witnessed over the past several weeks, would allow him to help break forever the fetters now resting, empty and out of sight, below deck.

The slaves – 142 men and woman from the western coast of central Africa – had been sold on one of the islands of the New World. In their place, now, were barrels of cocoa, along with chests full of gold and silver, and bags of vegetables and spices.

The horrible stench from the former payload lingered, mingling with the normally-pleasant aroma of the cocoa and spices. The odor was so potent, so penetrating, that for the rest of his years, the smell of the spices he loved would remind him of this journey.

Yet, high above him, and all around, glistened the glory of nature at sea. The reflection of the nearly-full moon turned the rippling of the waves into a million tiny beacons, allowing him to see and hear the gentle lullaby of the water as it rocked the ship eastward, toward its British harbor.

The contrast, however, alarmed him. How, he thought, could something so flawlessly beautiful look down on the horrible ugliness of mankind’s refusal to be a brother’s keeper? How could the whiteness of the stars which as the Psalmist said “declare the Glory of God,” remain silent witnesses to the groans and dying of the mankind below?

He looked down, and instinctively stepped away from the stain saw on the weathered wood beneath his feet. The crew member assigned to remove the dead bodies from the living mass below had, just days earlier, at that very spot, performed his task then leaned far over, retching, as is to purge both body and soul of the most lethal malevolence.

JT too leaned over, in a vain attempt to remove his nose from the odor that surrounded the ship.

He closed his eyes and for just a moment felt that he was back on land, safe, in his bed, and silently prayed that God would forgive him for the cruelty he had become part of perpetuating.

A sudden clap of thunder quickly brought his mind back to the deck. The moon was hidden now, lost behind an ominous blackness that oozed across the sky. Lighting seemed to pierce the waves, as though some celestial cannon – the hand of God, perhaps – were aiming arrows of fire at the ship The sea writhed as if trying to escape the teeth and claws of a lion. The ship tilted back and forth like the kites Jack remembered holding aloft from the hills near his house.

In an instant, the entire crew was on deck, lowering the sails, fastening every loose object and tossing below deck the daily supplies. The man in the crow’s nest screamed as a violent wave tried to catapult him into the darkness.

Everything turned into a rain-spotted blur as Jack attempted to follow the captain’s orders. The deck became impossibly slick as the waves crashed over the boat. Gravity tugged at him from both ways so quickly that he sensed it was pushing him forward and astern at once.

In the midst of the chaos, Jack had time for one slow, rational thought: In the rain, the stench disappeared; he wondered what kind of storm it would take to remove slavery from his society.

The storm again reclaimed his mind as the boat, echoing the human cries of the previous weeks, groaned under the strengthening vice, squeezed between the wind and the sea.

Jack ran for the hatch, hoping to find sanctuary from the wind and rain. Then a sudden twist of the wind tilted the vessel, and with nothing but slimy water between his boots and the wood, he half-slid and half dived backwards into the rail. His left leg collapsed against the barrier as the sailor felt himself being sucked into the briny blackness. He tightly closed his eyes, bracing for the sting of the water’s impact against his face as he reached up, desperately hoping to find the rail.

When he opened his eyes, he was back in his bed.

Kentucky. 1849.

At first, Jack – Jackson Tecumseh Kensington – was relieved to realize that the only moisture clinging to his clothing was his own perspiration.

But then a question formed in his mind: How could a dream about a place he had never been – and a boat that disappeared a century and a half earlier – be so clear, so specific, so full of the horrors and odors he had only read about in those fiery abolitionist pamphlets?

The question then led to a thought that was even more terrifying than the dream itself: What if the dream was not about him? What if the dream was about his country, about slavery?

For the past few years, the abolitionists had been propagating their Doomsday Gospel, warning that the judgment of God was about to rain down on every society that still held men in chains of slavery.

Just a few days earlier, he had read Longfellow’s Warning, the one in which the poet saw slavery, like the Biblical Samson, shaking the pillars of this country, and causing the ruin that Samson brought to the Philistines.

Among the books on his table was William E. Channing’s “Slavery,” which Longfellow praised in another of his poems about what Jack’s slave-owning neighbors liked to call “our peculiar institution.”

Jack was still trying to sort it all out.

He had listened to the abolitionists, agreeing with the view that slavery was wrong – even before that dream.

But despite his growing unease about slavery’s threats to his nation’s future, Jack still observed that instead of judgment at the hand of Providence, the new nation seemed instead to be under its protection.

The death of Adams and Jefferson during the Jubilee – the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – indeed seemed to be a heavenly “amen” pronounced on the prayer of a nation that debated slavery at length before guarding it in the Constitution.

And, After all, the first slave ship arrived on the East Coast a year before the Pilgrims. And God’s judgment had not yet fallen, even after more than 200 years of slavery in the colonies and then the states – and hundreds of years of it in the Old World.

And among many areas of the country, slave owners were allowing slaves to buy their freedom, and learning the economic importance of treating their chattel well.

Jack, like some others of his time, had hoped that slavery would just go away because new inventions and new attitudes would usher in a new reality.

But it didn’t.

The ranting of the abolitionists and the burden of the tariffs imposed by politicians of the northern states only strengthened the determination of slave owner and southern leaders.

Slavery, Jack came to realize, would not go away on its own.

Nor, he knew, could America survive unscathed without setting the captives free.

Not every American, in 1849, thought that deeply about slavery. But even at age 11, Jack knew that America would soon be asking the same questions and pondering the same warnings that filled the pages on his shelf.

The adults of Jack’s day, even as they looked back on the observation of the Jubilee, and remembered the national sentiment of diving protection, also remembered the intense unease they had felt on several other occasions. The New Madrid earthquake had rattled the West, making the Mississippi River flow backwards in 1812. Then the Year of No Summer had driven thousands from New England in 1816. Five years after that, an immense storm – hurricane was just becoming part of the vocabulary then – rattled the country from the Capital through New England and all the way to New York City.

Two years after that, on Nov. 18, 1833, the stars fell. A historically huge meteor shower filled the skies on several continents, and made many Americans wonder what the heavens were declaring.

Each of these events had countless Americans looking upward, and inward, asking themselves – and God – why?

Many of them were starting to come to the conclusion that all of these events were signs – warnings that a much more severe judgment was coming – if slavery remained.

But Jack didn’t need to see any signs to know that something severe was soon to come. His dream spoke to his soul, confirming what his eyes had seen and his heart had known: Slavery was about to turn America upside down.