My Name Is Not Angelica Read Online Free PDF Page A

floor and sat bolt upright. He was a stout man, as thick through as he was wide, with long arms and knotty fists. He stared through the doorway into the night with his cold blue eyes. His whip lay coiled beneath the hammock.
    "The runaways are making a good time of it," Mistress Jenna said. "But once their food disappears, they'll come running back."
    "
Ours
will disappear first," Master van Prok said. "They steal from the storehouse. They steal from the fields. And our slaves give them food on the sly."
    "You worry so about the runaways," his wife said. "Why is it that you and our neighbors don't arm yourselves and wipe them out?"
    "Because it would take ten times the number we could muster," Jost van Prok said. "The runaways would never stand and fight. They'd slink off somewhere and we would never find them again. These new slaves, the bussals, are different from the slaves who were born in the islands. If we did capture these new ones, they would up and kill themselves. To die by his own hand means to a bussal that his spirit returns to Africa and lives once more in the bodies of a nobleman. Or so I am told."
    "How silly," Mistress Jenna said.

    "The only way to control the runaways is by stricter laws. We've been far too gentle with them," Jost van Prok said.
    Dondo stood beside the hammock, waving a fan. At the words, "too gentle," the fan hung still in the stifling air.
    Master van Prok pointed a finger at Dondo. "What do the drums say?" he asked.
    "I do not understand the drums," Dondo answered.
    "Angelica," Master van Prok said, pointing the finger at me, "you've been here for months. You have heard the drums talk. What do they say?"
    I knew the drum talk. I knew what the drums were saying. The runaways planned a revolt against all of the white plantations on the island of St. John. They were getting ready, storing guns and knives and food. It would take months. It would be November before they were ready to revolt.
    "What do the drums say?" the master asked again, still pointing his finger at me.
    "I do not know about the drums, sir."
    "You should know, especially about the big one at Mary Point. The man you think about night and day, Apollo, the one you are thinking about now, while you stand there looking so innocent. He is the one who tells the big drum what to say."
    Mistress Jenna stopped sipping the air I stirred up with my palm leaf fan. "Forget about the drums," she said to her husband. "Why not askGovernor Gardelin to bring his army and have a wonderful parade? A parade will impress the new slaves and the old slaves, too."
    "An army? The governor doesn't have an army," her husband replied.
    The cat was after the house gecko, stalking the shiny lizard along the shelf that ran around the room. I was told to put the cat outside. By the time I caught him, my tasks were nearly done for the day.
    I helped Mistress Jenna get into her nightdress and brought her a cup of Kill Devil rum. Kill Devil came out of the coils first, raw and strong enough to kill the devil himself. Before the drums began to talk so much, she drank Kjeltum, the rum that came out last and was much milder.
    She drank the Kill Devil from a small cup with cupids painted around the rim. She drank two of these cups of rum. Then she looked around in her closet and found a dress she hadn't worn for a long time. She told me to put it on. The dress was far too large, but I put it on over my cotton shift.
    Master van Prok raised up from his hammock and said that I was prettier in my shift, without the dress. This did not please Mistress Jenna.

9

    I would not see Konje tonight. Since dusk as I waited on Mistress Jenna I had said this to myself. I said it to myself as I walked up the path to my hut. I had seen him four nights ago.
    It was a dangerous walk from the camp at Mary Point, through steep ravines and rock-strewn gullies, four long miles back and forth, at night. It could be weeks before he came again. It was better to know this than to look for