Alex and Eliza: A Love Story(7)
“If this were purely a military matter,” he said when Alex had finished, “you and I would be advocating the same position. But, alas, there are military matters and there are political matters, and when the latter taints the former, the waters grow muddy. I am afraid General Schuyler must fall on his sword, if not for the sake of the army, then for the sake of his country.”
Alex had traveled north to Albany with a heavy heart. The entire time he was arguing General Gates into submission, the pending confrontation with General Schuyler loomed in his mind. He had not yet met the New York patrician, but had heard only sterling descriptions of his character and his family—both his ancestors, whose pedigree was impeccable, and his descendants, which is to say, his children. His daughters were reputed to be each more beautiful and charming than the last. Perhaps one of them would look past his lack of pedigree and bring him the name and connections that had been denied him at birth by his feckless father. But it seemed unlikely, to say the least, that he would be wooing any of the daughters of a man whose head he was about to serve up on a platter.
Look on the bright side, he kept telling himself. Maybe this will be another hurricane . . .
THE HURRICANE OF 1772 had no name, but if it had, it would have been one of the Furies, those Greek goddesses whose only desire was destruction.
Alex also didn’t have a name.
He called himself Hamilton, but he could have just as easily called himself Faucette, his mother’s maiden name, or Lavien, the name of her first husband, because she’d never married his father. She never married his father because she was already married to another man, whom she had left before Alex’s birth and refused to talk about, just as she refused to speak about Alex’s father after he abandoned the family when Alex was nine.
That man, James Hamilton, was the fourth son of a Scottish laird who claimed that he’d given up the family manse—Kerelaw Castle was its grand name—to make his fortune in the New World. No one knew if his story was true, but his attempts to make money were well known throughout the wealthy Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Croix, as were as his absolute failures to do so. Indeed, the only thing James Hamilton was good at was disappearing. Just as he’d deserted his family in Scotland, he similarly left his children and their mother on St. Croix. Though Alex wrote to his father regularly and occasionally heard back from him, he never saw him again, and after his mother died, when Alex was eleven, he found himself truly alone in the world. He and his older brother had no relatives to take them in. James was fostered to one family, and Alex was sent to another. It wasn’t an adoption. It was servitude. Alex had to earn his keep by working in the family’s shipping office, but even that was tenuous. When Alex’s foster family decided to leave St. Croix, they left him behind to fend for himself. He was barely in his teens.
His intelligence had already made itself known in the small island community, however, and he continued to clerk at the docks. On the one hand, it was dull work: counting inventory and keeping track of changing commodities’ prices and calculating net profits and losses. On the other hand, it was fascinating. The great wooden ships, each as big as a plantation house, docked in the harbor with crews from all over the globe. West Africa . . . Lisbon . . . the Canary Islands . . . London . . . New York . . . New Orleans . . . Savannah. The sailors told stories of the wide world that made Alex realize how tiny and isolated St. Croix was and gave him his first yearning to see beyond it.
The stories were captivating, but their cargo was rather less appealing, for the great majority of the ships that docked in St. Croix were loaded with a single cargo:
Slaves.
By law, the freighters were required to “off-load” that portion of their cargo that hadn’t survived the long passage over the Atlantic before they docked in the harbor, which is to say, the shippers were supposed to throw the bodies of any kidnapped Africans who had died in the holds into the ocean before the ships sailed into St. Croix. But there were always one or two dead in the gaunt parade of people who were marched or, often, carried off the great, dark, foul-smelling ships. Those who had survived the harrowing three-month journey chained to a splintery, rat-and lice-infested berth had muscles so atrophied that they could barely stand, their flesh pocked with sores.
It was their eyes that haunted Alex most, because even though they didn’t speak his language and he didn’t speak theirs, he could still read the knowledge of their cruel and unjust fate written there. Each tick he checked in the category of “live cargo” filled him with shame, because each one represented the length and breadth of a human life. A few hundred pounds that would change hands in the slave market, a few years of life in the cane fields before their abused body finally gave out from exhaustion.
St. Croix was part of the enormously rich Antilles, an archipelago of islands, whose plantations shipped endless amounts of sugar to satisfy Europe’s sweet tooth, and consumed endless amounts of enslaved workers to grow and process the cane. Such was the demand for sugar that the small handful of islands, whose total area was smaller than that of New York or Massachusetts or Virginia, generated a hundred times more wealth than all the northern colonies combined. But all that wealth was generated at the cost of untold thousands of lives, each of which had had its total worth recorded in a single black check cursorily made by a white hand.
So, five years ago, when a hurricane had loomed out of the Atlantic like a great dark wall, its storm-force winds pushing twenty-and thirty-foot waves before it like a child’s hand splashing drops across a pond, there was a part of Alex that hoped the storm would sweep away the entire island and cleanse it of its terrible deeds. Buildings collapsed like playing-card houses, hundred-year-old trees were blown away like dandelion fluff, and the ten-foot-tall cane stalks disappeared beneath floods that swept in with the ferocity of a pouncing lion. When the winds and floods retreated, carnage as far as the eye could see was left behind.