‘the world is my oyster; baby, come touch
margarita ‘rita’ black was born in 1689 in the center of the pirates’ heaven. tortuga. in the most notorious brothel of the caribbean. one-eyed jack’s. her mother was the establishment’s most beautiful and desirable woman, known as belle de jour, who died giving birth to rita. her father, benjamin black, the brothel’s owner and a pimp, kept his surname for rita not out of sentiment but convenience. he treated her as if she was his property and he never considered her fully human.
young, she cleaned, cooked and ran errands. as she aged and her mother’s beauty surfaced unmistakably in her face and her body began showing signs of womanhood, he forced her into the world of one-eyed jack’s filth and body selling.
she hated every single thing about the life she had to live, the life she didn’t choose, with her whole heart and soul, so she attempted escape several times. all times benjamin caught her. punishments escalated from confinement to beatings to public humiliation. the last attempt was her most prepared and she still failed after which was punished most violently, so she stopped trying, started waiting and falling into depths of escapism: daydreaming of a better life, of freedom and taught herself academically: mathematics, history, literature. she learned to read from a bible. she learned navigation, trade routes, EITC politics and piracy strategy. she stole books from customers. she developed a near-aristocratic english accent while simultaneously learning french and italian to fluency from international clients.
it was 1708. she was just eighteen when another client was assigned to rita, who was known in that place as ‘black pearl.’ his name was jack sparrow, he was a year younger than her, he was there right after his confrontation with armando salazar. she performed the usual character: warm, inviting and vacant. jack was observant enough to crack it within minutes and instead of pressing the advantage he simply talked to her, with genuine curiosity, asking questions no customer had ever asked. she was suspicious at first and then, gradually, wasn’t. he came back repeatedly, always paying and never touching. when he learned about her dream of freedom, her interest in piracy and academics, her escape attempts, what followed them and how her father treated her. by that time he was already very much smitten with her and decided to help.
he organized a raid on the brothel one night with his crew, framed as a practical venture, claiming benjamin owed him money. that night benjamin black was murdered by one of the crew members and one-eyed jack’s was set on fire by jack himself, while he was able to pull rita out of the chaos and bring her aboard his ship, the barnacle, over the crew’s significant objections, because of an urban myth that says that women on board a ship equals a bad luck. objections she later resolved by simply being more competent than everyone around her. she corrected navigation, predicted weather and cited maritime law at precisely the right moments until the crew accepted her on practical grounds. at the same time jack taught her the physical side of sailing she hadn’t learned from books. she surpassed him at nearly everything within some time, so he made her his first mate. they became genuinely formidable together, almost inseparable, complimenting each other in every single aspect. birds of a feather. and they madly, obsessively and intensely fell in love with each other as they shared captain’s cabin as captain and his first mate.
then, two years later, in 1710, jack had to leave piracy to join the east india trading company. he told rita it was temporary and begged her to wait for him. he made her captain of the barnacle and left.
over the next seven years she literally built an entire empire out of that ship. she expanded the barnacle into the great barnacle, hunted the caribbean’s most valuable targets, left no survivors in ship engagements, while actually being the one who least participated in battle directly and raided EITC vessels with a precision that made other captains suspect inside information. they were right. jack had been sending it through intermediaries the entire time. by 1716 rita had become a pirate queen, one of the nine pirate lords, the subject of tales, the most dead or alive wanted and notorious lady pirate of all time. a myth. a legend. a name used to frighten men and royal families.
then jack returned to piracy in 1716 after betraying the EITC and stealing their most valuable vessels, the wicked wench and found rita in one of the tortuga’s taverns. the reunion wasn’t anything similar to what two of them separately imagined their reunion would be. everything collapsed into a fight. he asked her to sail with him again as first mate and she declined. she was already more glorious than jack ever was, is or ever will be. he knows it. she told him it was stupid to think she’d agree, that he couldn’t disappear for more than half a decade and return expecting things to be as they were, even though she still loved him and knew he loved her as well, even though never ever he said her these cherished three words ‘i love you’. she was right. he did. more than he ever loved himself. but it didn’t prevent the fight. a fight in which no one really wanted to win or intended to hurt the other. both drew swords. she was better, had always been better and had spent six years becoming a legend while he played merchant sailor. she was winning when a moment of his clumsiness mixed with desperation led to a terrible accident: his blade went between her ribs deep enough to kill. she died in his arms in a private room above the tavern where they fought. she pressed her piece of eight, a moroccan bead with a worn siamese coin she wore around her neck, into his palm, named him her pirate lord successor and then she was gone.
he held her body for hours. he cried and screamed like a wounded animal, completely covered in her blood, his tears, snot and drool. he whispered apologies, begged her to return to him, repeated ‘i love you. i love you. i love you…’ as if she could hear any of it. probably the fact that she didn’t, actually made it easier for him to say these words, the words he never had the courage to say before. he covered each and every millimeter of her face, hands and palms with kisses in between this verbal waterfall. what was happening was reminiscent of ilya repin’s painting ivan the terrible and his son ivan, only if the painting depicted the lower social class and two lovers who, in the end, never fell out of love during years of separation and had been waiting for each other only to have such a meeting. at some point he realized he had to do something. he wrapped her in a cloak, quietly carried her out into the tortugian street, put her in a small boat and rowed to the swamp and the hut of tia dalma, a woman he had first met at seventeen who existed at the edge of what was conventionally possible. he arrived carrying rita’s body. tia dalma was not surprised. she took rita’s body inside and sent jack to wait on the steps. hours passed. when she came out she told him the sea had taken rita and nothing more could be done. he asked what he owed to tia. she told nothing right now, but eventually, when time comes, he’ll have to pay for it. with what he’ll have to figure out himself. he left without seeing rita’s body again.
he returned to his stolen ship and renamed it the black pearl in honour of the love of his life. a love he killed. that reinvention made him being able to fill his mouth with her name. over and over. black pearl. black pearl. black pearl. he braided her piece of eight into his hair and never removed it. he began drinking seriously and consistently from that point. he became the figure the world came to know: eccentric, unpredictable, brilliant in ways that were hard to distinguish from recklessness. he pursued women and kept none of them and told everyone his only love was the sea. and it could’ve been truth if the name of the sea was margarita black, a woman who haunted him in every wave, every current, every endless horizon that promised escape and delivered only the same emptiness he was trying so desperately to outrun.
what he did not know was that tia dalma had lied. she had brought rita back from death entirely, leaving her in a body frozen permanently at the age of 27, at the age when she died. she’s forever young and beautiful and now, after tia’s touch, almost intoxicatingly so. more radiant, dangerously radiant, than she had ever been before. she was still entirely human, but immortal: unable to feel physical pain, able to heal any injury almost instantly and practically incapable of aging. the world believed rita dead and executed. the british navy stopped hunting her. her legend only grew in her absence.
she spent some time in tia dalma’s hut learning the parameters of what had been done to her and then left. for the next eleven years she existed under false identities: sometimes she was marigrace ‘grace’ grindelwald, others marlene horne, then marie samuels, margaret ‘marnie’ edgar, mary taylor, martha hailborn and so on. she moved through ports where no one knew her face. she recovered from physical and emotional trauma in peace, daydreamed, returned to escapism and started reading even more extensively, studying philosophy and art and listening to the rumors: the black pearl was sailing. jack sparrow had made a deal with davy jones. jack sparrow this. black pearl that. she noted that he had named the ship for her and did not know what to do with that fact.
in 1728, while wandering the streets of port royal, she wasn't as neat as usual and was noticed, which was pretty obvious for a girl with her appearance. it's surprising she was able to remain invisible all the less past eleven years, because it's genuinely hard for someone like her to go unnoticed. and a merchant grabbed her wrist in the market and gave her a filthy propositions. this was a big mistake. the encounter went badly for him. he was wounded. mostly in his ego. he told a story afterward to everyone he met on his way and by the nightfall everyone was talking about her, accusing her of witchcraft only because she wasn’t frightened of men, had declined his proposal and was alarmingly beautiful and strong. she was found, arrested and scheduled to be burned at the end of the week. she let them put her in irons because fighting would only have confirmed what they believed and plus she wanted to rest.
the neighboring cell to hers was full of dirty and nasty pirates who spent two days making filthy noise at her and getting nothing back. on the third day one of them recognized her face. the cell went quiet and stayed that way. and on that same third day they brought jack sparrow in. jack sparrow who is now 38 and physically shows it, while rita is still 27 (or at least that is how she looks). now it seems like he’s the older one. much older one. canon events of the curse of the black pearl begin from this moment.
