A Crack in the Sea

by H. M. Bouwman

  “A statue?” Venus already knew much from her earlier visits to the Islands, but the statue she had never seen. “Where? What’s its significance?”

  The governors glanced at each other—significantly, it seemed. The darker woman said, “It was once a man—a real man. After he did some terrible things here . . . he turned to stone.”

  The other woman added, “That’s the power of the land here. And the gift of some of the people who understand the land—to make things like this happen.”

  Venus nodded. “I see.”

  “You know about power like this? Power to do things—magical?”

  “I’ve heard of it.” But she didn’t volunteer her own gift, which was her secret to keep. “What did he do that was so bad?”

  “Terrible things,” said the first governor, shaking her head. “Betrayal and murder and lying.”

  “And oatmeal poisoning,” added the second, her pale face suddenly intense.

  The first governor rolled her eyes and muttered to Venus, “Don’t ask.” She paused, thinking. “Though to be turned to stone: also terrible.”

  The second governor said, “He deserved what he got. And since turning back would take a drastic change of heart, he’ll be a statue forever. Biscuit?” She held up a plate.

  The first wrinkled her brow but didn’t say anything. Venus took a cookie.

  After tea, the governors brought Venus to a place near the docks, to a round dais, on which stood the statue, pitted and scarred with age and weather.

  “We need to get it out of the elements,” said the first governor.

  “But no one wants to take it,” continued the other. “Too much responsibility.”

  “Nice statue, though,” the first said. “Been altered over the years; whenever it needed repair the artisan tweaked it a bit. The sneer is gone.” She turned to the other governor. “Remember that sneer?”

  The statue was made of soft gypsum, almost translucent, much weather-damaged. The woman who’d kept it in repair over the years—and slowly eased the face’s scorn into a smile—was now dead, and there was no one else capable of such detailed stonework.

  Even dented and dinged, it was the most beautiful sculpture Venus had ever seen. Not that the subject of the carving was himself handsome, for he was not. A white man with hawkish features like the slavers’, he was everything Venus found ugly; and he was craggy and pitted, badly aged. But he was so real, and his face so full of joy, and his hands open in front of him—tossing bread to songbirds, maybe.

  Venus understood what the governors were asking without asking. She didn’t know why they wanted her for this job, but she knew why she agreed: it would be quiet and peaceful work, and a statue would be just the right person to keep her company.

  After a few weeks of walking all over the outskirts of town, Venus adopted a puppy and built a cabin. She chose a spot outside town and near a big bay, a location close enough to walk in for supplies and trading, but far enough away to be deliberately lonely. The cabin faced a large cave, dry and high-ceilinged. The governors moved the statue into the cave and named her its caretaker.

  Venus was content. With her knitting she had work enough to support herself; and with the dog and the statue, she had the companionship she wanted: a snuggler, and a listener who never talked back. Eventually she abandoned the house, left it to fall into disrepair, and moved into the cave with the statue. During the long winter nights she dug into the recesses of her memory, and she told her two quiet friends her own story as well as stories about the others she’d traveled with: her brother, Swimmer, her uncle Caesar, the scarred woman, the man who’d been eaten by the shark, the slaver captain, the leering Mr. Stubbs—everyone she could ever remember meeting.

  And she remembered. In the quiet of the cave she finally let everything lost come back to her. As the memories trickled into her conscious mind, she told the statue and the dog about the first slave ship, the one before Old Caesar, and about being stolen from her parents. She told about her parents—how her mother had welcomed the sun every morning, how her father had hugged her every night, how much they had loved her. Every part of her life had a story. And Venus wanted the stone man—white like the slavers—to understand. She wanted him to be sorry for what his people had done, even though she knew stone couldn’t apologize, and anyway, his own offense had been something quite different. Still, it helped to talk, and the dog at least listened, her sad eyes blinking.

  The little dog grew old on these tales; and so, after a time, did Venus. The stone man of course did not age, growth not being in the nature of statuary. Venus could have sworn in the dim light of the cave that his face acquired wrinkles as time went on. And laid over the joy, a look of tenderness. But surely that was merely the grime collecting from her cooking fire.

  Shortly after moving into the cave, she discovered an old acquaintance in the nearby bay: the Kraken, the one who’d met her people at the tiny island after they crossed over, the creature who had first convinced her that they had entered a new world. The one who’d been looking for his wife. She sat on the beach and gazed at him whenever he emerged. Once in a while he wiggled a tentacle as if he were waving. She waved back.

  Years passed. When she was very, very old—when she was ancient and had outlived all her kith and kin except the statue and the Kraken—she awoke one morning and felt her life ebbing out of her. She was dying; and she knew it. It occurred to her that she might take a walk, use her gift one last time. She rose and removed her shawl; she wouldn’t need it. She patted the statue and thought fondly, Good-bye and good luck. And for good measure and just in case he needed it: I forgive you, Renard. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I forgive you. And because she could not help herself: Come back someday and do some good in the world. Make amends. Ren. She ended with her nickname for him, and a last pat on his forehead. Then she paused outside and cleared the twigs off the dog’s grave.

  The way to the beach was difficult. She was so old, and so far down the path to death. It took hours to make her feet move as she wished. She leaned on a cane and rested every few steps. But eventually she left the land behind her. She dropped the walking stick in the tide and stepped out to sea. As she walked deeper, she moved easier. The water felt astonishingly warm, and the sea ahead of her was green and infused with light. The sand swirled slow maelstroms around her ankles.

  She walked toward the Kraken, who did not hide from her. In all my travels, I never found your wife, she thought, willing him to understand despite her deficiencies with the language. I’m so sorry.

  He blinked his brilliant eye, as if to tell her everything would turn out all right in the end.

  AFTERWORD

  SOME YEARS AGO—never mind how long precisely—I began writing a book that would eventually contain sea monsters. But the sea monsters weren’t yet in the book. I was still looking for them.

  They turned out to be Kraken, and they showed up, the first time, when I ran out of things to say and didn’t know where the story was headed. What should Kinchen and Pip and Caesar do? My notes at this point say, “Add in some Kraken??”

  The truth is, like many authors, I don’t know where I’m going, exactly, when I draft a book. I make many wrong turns before I find my way. I navigate by stars that are constantly shifting. But from the start, the story was about Kinchen and Pip and Caesar, and a giant raft, and islands. (Thanh came a little later, and I was so happy to see him!)

  From the start, I knew the book would also, somehow, be about the Zong, a ship I’d read about while teaching college literature courses. I had no idea yet what the connection was between the Zong and Raftworld, but I trusted that something would emerge as I wrote and rewrote. And sure enough, there, suddenly, fully formed, stood Venus. She was walking out of the water, holding her brother’s hand. And Old Caesar was standing on the shore, dropping his kindling in surprise.

  Let’s talk about
the Zong. I’m guessing you already know something about the other real events this novel is built on—the Vietnam War, Amelia Earhart’s last flight—but the Zong is a story that is relatively unknown today. And it is, at heart, where A Crack in the Sea really began.

  The Zong was a real slave ship. Originally a Dutch vessel, it was bought by a group of businessmen operating out of the giant slaving port of Liverpool, England, in 1781. On the west coast of Africa its newly appointed captain, Luke Collingwood, loaded the ship with 459 Africans and headed toward Jamaica, where the plan was to sell these people, make a lot of money, and return to Liverpool to start the process over again.

  But during the voyage, several very important things threw off those plans. First, both crew and enslaved Africans became sick; soon, people were dying. Second, the crew was plagued with problems: the captain himself was sick, the first mate was temporarily placed in the brig, and passenger Robert Stubbs was likely stirring up trouble. Third, the boat overshot its destination—maybe because the captain was sick or the first mate was in the brig—and sailed far past Jamaica, adding about a month to their travel time. Because of this navigation mishap, the Zong also may have run short of food and water.

  It’s not clear exactly who gave the order to throw people overboard to their deaths—the captain died only a few days after reaching Jamaica, so he never told his story; the crew and sole passenger told different versions of what happened; and no one asked the surviving Africans what they thought. It is clear, however, that someone gave the order, on November 29, 1781, to throw fifty-four ailing women and children overboard to drown.2 Then on the first of December, the crew threw overboard forty-two men, chained together. Shortly after that, they threw over twenty-eight more—and that same day, another ten jumped to their deaths, for a total of 133 deaths (one man climbed back on board).3

  Then what happened? When the Zong returned to her home port, her owners in Liverpool tried to collect insurance money for the dead Africans—just as if they’d lost barrels of sugar or crates of fancy lace or any other merchandise.

  The insurance company didn’t want to pay, and the case went to court. English antislavery activists—abolitionists—heard the story, and they showed up at court, arguing that the Africans had been murdered. But in the eyes of the law, slaves were not people—so they couldn’t be murdered. The case against the Zong’s owners failed, because as the court noted, throwing slaves overboard was, in legal terms, “the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.” The owners had the legal right to do what they did.

  Some British people were horrified. The Zong case is considered a turning point in antislavery history because it received so much publicity and because white people in Great Britain began to consider the deep evils of slavery. It would be almost another quarter of a century before slavery would end in England (and far longer before it would end in America); but the Zong pushed people in that direction.

  And the Zong is the heart and soul of my book. This is not to say that Thanh isn’t important—he is, hugely important—and so are Kinchen and Caesar and all the others. But for me, the story first became alive with Venus—with my feeling that she had to escape, somehow, from this terrible historical fact, this thing from which, in real life, there was no escape.

  Here, then, is one of the key differences between a fantasy novel and real history, something I wrestled with the whole time I was writing this book: in the second world of my novel, some of the people from the Zong manage to survive and make a new life for themselves. But in real life, after months at sea in horrendous conditions, 133 people from the Zong were really thrown overboard, and they really drowned. They died. They all died. There is no changing that fact, no matter what a novelist might wish.

  And when we widen our lens to see the whole ocean, the facts are incomprehensibly grim. Reliable estimates suggest that the number of people enslaved in Africa and brought to the Americas by way of the Middle Passage stands at somewhere around 12.5 million (though some estimates range much higher). Most of these people did not escape—there was no friendly portal waiting to take them to another world.

  The boat journey from Vietnam to surrounding countries in the 1970s and ’80s was also terrifying—and many people did not survive. Entire boats disappeared. No friendly sea monster showed up to blow people through a doorway.

  So why did I write the story as I did? Because I believe that stories can show us many things, including how bad things can get; and sometimes, stories can show us how things could be better than they are right now.

  The Zong slave ship—and slavery in Britain and America—are history. They are officially over. But that doesn’t mean racism has disappeared. And slavery still exists in other places in our world. Meanwhile, people the world over are forced to leave their homes by war and by persecution and by natural disaster; and sometimes they arrive at a new home only to find that they are unwelcome.

  In light of all this pain, what can a fantasy novel offer? It can ask us to consider alternatives and possibilities. What if we lived in a world where people didn’t die in chains, where people didn’t drown trying to escape from war and persecution, where somehow love, like magical water, surrounded us whenever most needed and held us all up? What if we lived in a world where kraken weren’t terrifying monsters—but simply people we do not yet know? A world where we could be bigger than we are, and where we could always offer a home to the stranger and the dispossessed? Where every new unrecognized face could one day become the face of a friend?

  The truth is, we do live in a world where these things are possible. We simply have to choose to make them happen. And sometimes, I think—I hope—a book can help us see that, and have courage, and take action.

  SPECIAL THANKS

  A DEEP, deep thanks to the following astute readers: Swati Avasthi, Valerie Geary, Lynne Jonelle, Gabriel Kellman, Rafael Kellman, Todd Lawrence, Megan Wagner Lloyd, Anja Löder, Xuan Thi Nguyen, Parker Peeveyhouse, Tran Thi Minh Phuoc, Anne Ursu, Stephanie Watson, and John Yopp. And of course Tricia Lawrence, my wise, endlessly energetic, and always-encouraging superagent. Hugs to you! Thanks to EMLA more generally for being an agency defined by its deep care for its authors. And thank you, Dennis, for always answering questions so patiently.

  Thanks to Anne Klejment, Xuan Thi Nguyen, Thanh Pham, Yen Van Pham, Tran Thi Minh Phuoc, and Sang Tran, for generous and kind help on understanding details about Vietnam, and especially thanks to Yen Van Pham for helping me understand what one’s country really is; and Xuan Thi Nguyen and Tran Thi Minh Phuoc for expert cultural and historical advice. All mistakes are, as always, my own.

  Thanks to Kathy Coskran of the Malmo Artist Colony for hospitality and peace, year after year. Thanks to Therese Walsh and Writer Unboxed for sending me to the first WU UnConference and welcoming me to your community. Thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board (and its Legacy Grant) for financial support while I drafted this novel. Thanks to The Loft Literary Center for so many years of nurturing, and in particular to Jerod Santek, formerly of The Loft, for being exactly who he is: kind and wise.

  Thanks to the University of St. Thomas for awarding teaching release time and a sabbatical during which I was able to draft and revise. Thanks also to so many UST students who’ve written and struggled alongside me—especially those English 326ers who giggled with me at my bad outlines into which I inserted sea monsters whenever I ran aground: you know who you are.

  An enormous hug and thank-you to my brilliant, thoughtful, and kind editor, Stacey Barney, who has the best phone laugh ever. And thank you to Kate Meltzer, Cecilia Yung, Annie Ericsson, and everyone at Putnam.

  Yuko Shimizu, the art is amazing. Thank you.

  Hugs to Swati for talking me through it all and to Anne for insisting everything would turn out okay in the end.

  Finally: thanks, as always, to my beloved children for driving with me to crazy and carting me back home with a story. Let’s do it
again.

  A Brief List of Further Reading for Kids and Adults

  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845. An amazing narrative by one of America’s best writers, about

  his escape from slavery, both physical and psychological.

  Tom Feelings, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo, 1995.

  Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, 1985.

  Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again, 2011.

  Thanhha Lai, Listen, Slowly, 2015.

  Tran Thi Minh Phuoc, Vietnamese Children’s Favorite Stories, 2015.

  Further (Adult) Reading Recommendations

  For More on the Middle Passage and the Zong Slave Ship:

  Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narative of the Life, 1789. Equiano’s narrative of his enslavement and redemption, including a possible firsthand account of the Middle Passage.

  Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, 2007.

  James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law & the End of Slavery, 2011.

  For More on Escaping Vietnam After the Fall of South Vietnam, and Life in the Mekong Delta:

  Mary Terrell Cargill and Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s anthology,

  Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape

  and Survival, 2000.

  Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s memoir, South Wind Changing, 1994.

  Nguyen Ngoc Tu, Floating Lives, 2014 (English translation). An evocative short story collection set in the Mekong Delta.

  1 Pronounced “Tahn.”