The Sacred Twenty Eight: The Noble and Most Ancient Houses of Shafiq and Shacklebolt (3/?)
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
- The Tempest, William Shakespeare.
The Shacklebolts remember the first time they came, whispers of a different kind of white man, who stole people in the dark of night and marched them far away, never to be seen again. Whispers became rumours, then open discussion and firearms were distributed through neighbouring nations for wars to be waged and slaves to be captured and sold across the sea. Then they came for them, swift and sudden, bearing guns and killing those who dared fight them, bursting their hearts out of their chests. Stolen. They were stolen from their homeland and marched to the coast, where they loaded them on ships as they would cattle. Tiny holes, unfit for humans, which they were expected to stay in without complaint until journey’s end, not even when the dysentery struck, and their legs ran with both shit and blood. Shackled and bolted in, worse than animals, for even their cattle had been free to roam, but they were not free.
Obeah, they called the form of magic their people came to practice in the New World. The art of inflicting pain upon their colonizers and oppressors by magical means. It had no name when they first did it. All they knew was that they must hurt these people to see if they felt, if they bled - if they were indeed human, for how could humans so hurt other humans?
They were at sea when the storm struck. A great hurricane that threatened to tear the ship apart at the seams. The sailors called on their God, a man they called Jesus and Jesus did not answer. And the sailors worried that their ship would be destroyed, if they did not find a way to make Jesus listen to them
First they cast the sick ones overboard and hoped it would lighten the load. It did not. Again, they cried to their God, but their God deafened himself to their cries.
Good, the first of the Shacklebolts thought, and smiled.
Then they saw them smiling and asked them why, when death was imminent, they found it in themselves to smile. They dragged them from their cells and flogged them, but still the first of the Shacklebolts smiled. These white men could whip them and rip the skin from their backs, they could hurt them and break them, but tonight they would sink and they would die.
They cast that first Shacklebolt overboard - for insolence, said the captain, for fear they knew - into the stormy waves below. Fools. As though a little bit of water could kill those with magic in their veins. He lived and some few days later was rescued by a pirate ship on the lookout for trade ships to plunder. The pirates took him on board and made him one of their own and soon he learnt the ways of their trade. With them he sailed the Caribbean coast and learnt how different slavery was in this brave new world.
They had slavery too. Slaves were spoils of war - not stolen or bartered goods. Some treated their slaves terribly. Some were as part of the families they worked for. All had this in common: a child born to a slave was automatically a free man. Free to join the tribe and take part in all its activities as a full citizen. Here they placed shackles on the arms and feet of babes in arms.
So he kept his shackles and changed his name.
And when the time came, he stole a ship for his own and found himself a crew of likeminded men. Men who had shackles and bolts they remembered. Men who knew what cruelty white men could show to those who were not like them. Men who were still human. Together they patrolled the Atlantic slave trade route for nearly thirty years, seizing ships as they could and setting slaves free.
Yet when the ships finally landed in England in 1812 and his son (now captain, after his father’s death) set foot for the first time on English soil, it was the name of William Wilberforce which lingered on people’s lips. William Wilberforce had stopped the slave trade. William Wilberforce was the one who had campaigned tirelessly, bringing his Slave Trade Act again and again to Parliament. William Wilberforce was the one who stayed true through the French Wars. William Wilberforce was the one who united the people of England to pressure Parliament into bringing down this evil institution.
William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce. That was the name he heard whispered everywhere in England.
Not once did he hear stories of the Slave Rebellions of Jamaica, or the numerous island uprisings. Not once did he hear tales told of slaves who had seized power and forced the French to retreat and give them freedom in Haiti. Seldom did he hear people tell the story of Olaudah Equiano and his part in telling people how they treated the slaves aboard slave ships. Not once did he hear them thank the privateers and pirates who sacked ship after ship, all bearing slaves to the New World under the neutral flag, setting so many hundreds free.
Instead he heard them call for pirates to be hanged for being thieving rogues and it made him ill to think of it.
When he first met the magical folk of England and he told them his tale, they welcomed him with open arms. Anyone who fought the muggle government was their friend, they said and then, without bothering to listen to his tale, they told him their story of oppression of how they were once burnt at the stake because magic ran through their veins. They were all brothers in their suffering, they said, these muggles were all alike in their disdain for human life and dignity.
No you do not understand, he said, and tried to tell them his story, but they were far more interested in telling their own stories and their own tales and ignored him when he spoke. Slavery was not their problem. They did not own slaves, the muggles did. Wizards did not do that sort of thing. Wizards were far above such petty moral concerns. Wizards did not get their hands dirty by dealing in muggle affairs. And if he was to fit in with them, he had best not meddle with the muggles either, lest he accidentally expose their world to those barbarians.
Nevermind that they owned House Elves, he thought to himself. Nevermind that they refused to give the Goblins wands then complained when the Goblins fought against them. Nevermind that they thought of centaurs as horses, when they were wise, far wiser than any of the wizards he had met. Nevermind that they looked down upon those who did not use wand magic, but used the old magics of their homelands - magic which long predated the Latin-Greek-pidgin spells they used. But he did not speak these thoughts aloud, because he knew what would follow was a long list of excuses and arguments about how he did not understand - he was new here, things were done differently here, it was for their own good, look at them they couldn’t even speak in grammatically correct sentences, this magic was more efficient, theirs was not dark magic and necromancy (they did not raise the dead and bid them walk like the Shacklebolts could) and so on and so forth.
They were exactly like the non-magical folk they thought themselves so different from, priding themselves on their superiority because of what? Blood? Magic in their veins? They would not last one day on a pirate ship, where each man was responsible for his own keep and only the meritorious made it to the top.
He would not let his children become indolent and self-absorbed like these wizards and witches. He would not let them forget how it was they had come to live in England. He would not let them forget their history. Let the others call them by English names - Robert, Walter, Julian, Naomie - but they would keep their old names and call each other by those names where no one else could hear them, where only those of their blood would know what it meant to be a Shacklebolt.
They would have two names and that was right, he thought. They were at once two people. A people ripped from their homeland and a people with an old heritage, far older than any of these families who so preened and swaggered around London. They would learn what it meant to be part of a people and yet not part of a people - to be able to stand aside and be critical and always fight on the side of those who were oppressed.
But most importantly, to never forget their people.
[Pic sources: Slave shackles, Screencaps from POTC, Privateers boarding a ship, Pirate shirt William Rast, Screencap from Tula: The Revolt]
