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call you 'young boss'?"
    "Just habit, a leftover from slave days. He said he called most white men 'bahss' instead of 'mister,' without even thinking..."I knew he didn't really feel they were his bosses. It was just his West Indian way of speaking. "After we became friends I asked him to call me Phillip."
    I could hear his "Phill-eep" even now.
    I talked with Henrik until he said he had to go home for dinner.
    ***
    That night I again found it hard to sleep. My mind kept turning back to those first few hours when I'd re-covered consciousness and found myself on the raft.
    What I remembered most about that morning was Timothy's refusal to give me more than three small swallows of water. I'd hated him for it at the time.
    A while later, I had a nightmare. A schooner that Timothy had once sailed on, the
Hettie Redd,
had been caught in a "tempis," a hurricane, off Antigua, and was breaking up. Timothy's feet were wedged in the rigging and he was drowning.
    I woke up with my heart drumming. We'd talked about the
Hettie Redd
and a green-eyed girl named Jennifer Rankin.
    I'd had dreams of Timothy while alone on the cay. Now I was having them at home.

8. Being a Slave
    OCTOBER 1884 —In the night quiet of Back o' All, from his floor mat Timothy asked Tante Hannah why the
bukras
had left him. The
Amager
had been a stone in his belly all day. He had a broken heart, his disappointment so big he was drowning in it.
    He hadn't known what to do with himself since early morning. For a while he'd walked in circles in Upper John and Dunko, staying away from Back o' All and the waterfront so no one would say, "Thot yuh gone to sea, boy."
    About noon he'd returned home, silent and brooding, then had gone with Tante Hannah to deliver ironed wash to the estate on Frenchman Bay Road. They'd caught a ride part of the way on a friend's donkey cart, not returning until time for supper at twilight.
    But he hadn't mentioned the
Amager
until this moment, well after the evening meal, more than twelve hours after the ship had stood out to sea. Tante Hannah wisely hadn't brought it up either.
    She sighed. "Can't say exactly why."
    A gullie settled on the roof with a
cha-cha-chi
sound, its claws scratching the palm fronds.
    Staring at the ceiling—annoyed that the gullie was up there, breaking into his thoughts—he asked if they'd left him because he was black. All day, he'd thought that must be the reason, the only reason.
    "Mebbe." He heard another troubled sigh that went back to the Gulf of Guinea, the Slave Coast of Africa. "Sum o' dat but moh deeper. Way bock it goes."
    She'd talked very little about her own past with him. Slave days. He'd guessed they were a painful subject with her, one she preferred to forget.
    The fronds in the roof rattled. The gullie was walking around. Stupid bird.
    Timothy guessed that slave ships had looked something like the
Amager
—beautiful above the main deck, but filled with horror and death below.
    He waited patiently.
    She was silent a long time, then for the next hour and more she talked about being a slave.
    The slave ships had sailed for Africa out of America and England, out of France and Holland and Denmark; out of Portugal, out of Spain and Italy. Money was to be made in the New World, selling bodies.
    The ships sailed with pots and pans and tools and guns, bolts of gaily colored cloth, cheap jewelry, and bottles of perfume. All of these were to trade to African chieftains for live black bodies. The ships first made land on the Grain Coast or the Gold Coast or the Ivory Coast—the Slave Coasts.
    Timothy listened, thinking about trading pots and pans for human bodies.
    The first hundred arrived in St. Thomas in 1673, almost two hundred years before Timothy was born. The king of Aquambon, located on the Gold Coast, had sold them to the Danes. For a while, St. Thomas was the chief slave port of the New World, Tante Hannah said.
    The gullie scratched.
    Tante Hannah's papa and mama, of the Ashanti