Slave Auction

Maisie and Felix looked at each other.

“Now what are we supposed to do?” Felix said.

“I have no idea,” Maisie said. She could not believe what had just happened to them. Alexander Hamilton had walked away, leaving them alone on the island of Saint Croix in 1772.

“Maybe he’s not the one we’re here to meet,” Felix offered.

Maisie considered this possibility. If it wasn’t him, then who was it? And how were they supposed to find that person?

“Let’s look at the coin,” Felix said. “Maybe there’s a clue on it.”

Maisie dug into the pocket of her jeans, where she’d tucked the shard and the coin for safety as soon as she’d landed in the water.

“It’s just a silver dollar,” she said, holding it out in her palm.

Felix took it from her, surprised by how heavy it felt. It was actually beautiful. One side had a picture of a woman with flowing hair and the word LIBERTY on it. The other side had a graceful bald eagle surrounded by a wreath of leaves. The words HUNDRED CENTS ONE DOLLAR OR UNIT were printed on the edge of it.

“1794,” Felix said, studying it.

“So?” Maisie said, frustrated. “Big deal.”

Felix sighed. “Do you think Alexander Hamilton had anything to do with money?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Maisie said. “Anyway, that coin is a US coin, and we’re here in the Caribbean. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“But it’s dated twenty-two years from now. Anything could happen in twenty-two years,” Felix said.

“I feel like he’s the person we’re supposed to give it to,” Maisie said. “If we wander too far from him, he might not be able to find us.”

“Maybe we should just find a place to wait and see what happens,” Felix said, relieved. He wasn’t eager to venture into the island without knowing anything about it.

He looked at the crowded wharf and across the street where the town’s businesses stood, and then finally up the hills at the plantations. None of it seemed very appealing to him.

“The beach?” Maisie offered.

“Okay,” Felix said. He wasn’t thrilled at the idea of spending the night there, either. But what choice did they have?

They walked back along the wharf. Maisie liked looking out at the ships and knowing which one was a schooner and which was a bark. The schooners were the biggest and probably the ones that went across the ocean, to Holland and England and . . . “Wait a minute!” Maisie said, grabbing her brother’s arm. “Maybe one of those schooners is sailing to New York.”

“Oh no,” Felix said. “I’m not getting on a ship and sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.”

“But we wanted to get back to New York, right? Somehow things got mixed up and we landed here, but that’s our way back,” she said, pointing at the biggest ship of all. “Right there.”

Before Felix could protest more, Maisie ran down the dock and stopped a sailor there.

“Do any of these ships sail to New York?” she asked him.

The tall, blond man didn’t even pause as he answered. “You just missed one. Next one’s in two days.”

Excited, Maisie ran back to Felix, who stood at the end of the dock waiting for her.

“I heard him,” Felix said. The last thing he wanted was to get on one of these ships. They didn’t have any navigation system except the stars. And weren’t there pirates out there? And storms? Maybe even hurricanes?

“So we just need to find a place to spend the next couple of days, and then we are headed to New York. Who needs Alexander Hamilton, anyway?”

“That doesn’t make sense, Maisie,” Felix insisted. “I thought we needed him. If he’s supposed to have the coin, we won’t be able to get home unless we give it to him.”

“Fine,” she said. “When we see him, we’ll give him the dumb coin, and then we’ll get on that ship to New York.”

“And then how do we get back to the present? To Mom?”

Maisie didn’t answer him. Instead, she began to walk purposefully toward the beach. Felix followed her. He had one thought in his mind: How could he figure out a way back before his sister made him get on that ship?

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Maisie had watched enough reality television to know they needed to build a shelter of some kind and try to find some food and water. Knowing that they would be headed for New York in a couple of days made the idea of sleeping on the beach almost fun.

“What an adventure, huh?” she said to Felix, who looked about as miserable as she’d ever seen him. “Stop sulking,” she told him. “It’s warm and dry, and we always wanted Mom and Dad to take us on a cruise or something, didn’t we? So here we are, on a Caribbean island.”

“We have no food, no bed, and no money,” Felix said, counting off on his fingers as he spoke.

“We have the coin,” Maisie reminded him.

“Right. Somebody’s going to take a coin that doesn’t even go into circulation for over twenty years.”

“Come on,” Maisie said, elbowing him playfully. “This is probably the only Caribbean vacation we’ll ever get.”

“This is not a vacation!” Felix said.

But Maisie had run ahead of him, onto the sugar-white sand and straight into the turquoise water.

He had no choice but to dive in after her. For now, anyway, they were stuck here until he figured out a way home. He took off his glasses and held them tightly in his hand.

The water was even warmer than before. Felix dived down and opened his eyes. Schools of colorful fish swam around him. Here, bright yellow and white striped ones. Over there, electric-blue ones. In the distance, he could make out a coral reef stretching toward him.

Slowly, he made his way to the surface, watching the air bubbles rise with him. He came up right beside his sister, who was treading water and squinting into the distance.

“Look,” she said.

Felix squinted, too, in the direction where Maisie was looking. There, on the horizon, he could just make out the silhouettes of dolphins leaping into the air. Beneath the water, Maisie’s hand found his and held it, squeezing tight.

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On television shows, the contestants found twigs and things to build shelters. They caught fish with their hands and made fire by rubbing two stones together. Maisie and Felix were not so clever. They could find only palm trees and coconuts and lots of seashells.

“I guess we’ll just have to sleep out in the open,” Maisie said, trying to still sound optimistic.

After swimming for a long time, they had dried off on the beach, then set off to find all the things they would need to get them through the next couple of days. But now the sky was turning red and violet, and they sat leaning against one of the fallen palm trees, preparing for a night without any food or shelter.

“Do you think there are wild animals out here?” Felix whispered.

Maisie had no idea. But she said, “No, not on the beach.”

He picked up a coconut.

“If we could get this open, we’d have something to eat.”

Actually, Felix hated coconut. He didn’t like macaroons or Almond Joys or the coconut shrimp his father used to make. But he was hungry enough to eat almost anything. It seemed like a million years since he’d eaten that fried fish, and his stomach was grumbling loudly again now.

“Pound it against the tree trunk,” Maisie suggested.

Felix lifted the coconut and slammed it down as hard as he could against the tree.

Nothing.

He tried again, but the hard shell didn’t even crack a little.

“Let me try,” Maisie said.

She didn’t have any luck, either.

Felix put his hands over hers, and the two of them used all the force they could muster to crash that coconut down. This time it got away from them and skittered onto the sand.

“Hopeless.” Felix groaned.

“You don’t even like coconut,” Maisie said, which made them both laugh.

Dusk had fallen, and a light buzzing filled the air.

“What the—” Maisie began, but the sharp sting of a mosquito on her neck cut her short.

“Mosquitoes!” Felix said, jumping up and swatting his legs.

A small, angry cloud of mosquitoes descended on them, stinging their arms and legs and necks.

Felix slapped at them, but it was no use. When he blinked, he felt mosquitoes on his eyelids.

“Aaaaaarrrrggghhh!” he screamed.

“Run!” Maisie said, batting her arms as if she could knock the mosquitoes out of the air.

The two of them took off, fast, down the beach and back toward the lights of Christiansted.

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Standing in front of the locked door of Beekman and Cruger, Maisie and Felix tried to figure out how they could find Alexander Hamilton again. King’s Street had emptied out now, the horses and carriages long gone. Candles flickered in some windows in the houses up the street adjacent to it, but even as they stood wondering what to do, the lights that had led them back here were slowly extinguished. Felix was thinking about the mosquito bites that ringed his ankles and climbed up his calves. Wasn’t Saint Croix in the tropics? And didn’t the mosquitoes in the tropics carry diseases like malaria or yellow fever or worse? Maybe even the plague?

Despite himself, he whined, “What if we get yellow fever?”

“Yellow fever!” Maisie said. “Let’s concentrate on our real problems. Like having nowhere to sleep on this dark, creepy island.”

Felix swallowed hard. Did he have a sore throat? Was that a sign of some deadly tropical disease?

“I think I have a sore throat,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” Maisie said. She caught sight of a man leaving the building next door to Beekman and Cruger, locking the door, and walking slowly up King’s Street.

“Excuse me,” she said, stepping into his path, “do you know where the Hamiltons live?”

The man took a step back into the remaining lamplight, so as to better see Maisie.

“Are you sure you mean the Hamiltons?” he asked her.

Maisie nodded. “Alexander’s family,” she said, in case Hamilton was the most common name on Saint Croix.

The man shook his head. “There is no Hamilton family,” he said. He had a big, bushy mustache and a very round, red face. “The boy lives with the Stevenses. His friend Neddy’s parents.”

The man turned to continue on his way, but Maisie said, “Why does he live with them instead of his own family?”

Stopping, the man sighed and shook his head. “The father, that would be James Hamilton, left for Saint Kitts years ago and hasn’t been seen around here since. Even when Rachel died, he didn’t come back.”

“Rachel?” Maisie asked him.

Felix rolled his eyes. Why did she need to know every single detail about Alexander Hamilton? All they really needed was to find the Stevenses’ house.

But, of course, the man was droning on. “Alexander’s mother. Rachel. She died in ’68, poor thing. Both she and the boy, Alexander, got yellow fever.”

Felix gasped. His hands went up to his throat. It did hurt, he decided.

“Yellow fever?” he managed to say. “It’s here? On this island?”

“It comes every year,” the man said, nodding. “She called Doctor Heering,” he continued, “and he did his best. They say the chicken broth the nurse gave her seemed to help for a bit, but three days later she died. The boy survived. But they took everything from him and his brother, everything except her books. He’s a smart one, that Alexander. And loves to read.”

For a moment, the man grew quiet.

“Yellow fever comes every year?” Felix managed to croak.

The man nodded again.

“Can’t you control the mosquitoes?”

At this, the man laughed. “Mosquitoes? What would they have to do with yellow fever?”

Of course, Felix realized, scratching at his mosquito-bitten knees. They hadn’t figured out yet that mosquitoes carried yellow fever.

The man began to walk away again, then turned back to the children.

“The Stevenses’ house,” he said. “Up the street here.”

Without being asked, Maisie and Felix followed him.

The sidewalks were made of inlaid tiles, and the houses—the colors of sherbet—had overhanging balconies with flowers hanging from them in long trellises. The air smelled sweet, and once again, Maisie started to relax.

“What are the symptoms of yellow fever?” Felix whispered to his sister.

But it was the man who answered. “Well,” he said, “there’s the fever itself. And the vomiting. But it doesn’t come until winter. Seems to start right around Christmas every year.”

Relieved, Felix said, “Why didn’t you say so?”

The man didn’t answer him. Instead, he pointed to a raspberry house. “The Stevenses’ home,” he said.

The house appeared to be dark, as if everyone in it had gone to sleep.

“That light burning back there,” the man said, “that would be Alexander. Probably studying.”

Maisie saw it now, the one light in the room farthest from the street.

The man tipped his hat at Maisie and Felix. “Good night then,” he said, and continued up the street.

“We can’t wake them up,” Felix said, hoping his sister would, in fact, do just that. The thought of a bed and some food and water made him almost brave enough to do it himself.

“No,” Maisie agreed. “But there’s a barn back there. We could sleep in there.” She elbowed her brother playfully. “Like at the Bartons!”

“Who would have thought that time traveling always dropped you in a barn?” Felix laughed.

He thought a minute, then he said, “You could throw pebbles up at Alexander’s window,” Felix suggested. They did that in the movies sometimes, and he always had wanted to try it himself.

“I’m not going to do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He might get mad at me,” Maisie said.

“Who cares if he’s mad at you!” Felix said. His sister never cared about things like that.

“I care!” she said. “And I’m sleeping in that barn. If you want to throw pebbles at his window, be my guest.”

She walked purposefully toward the barn. Felix could tell there was no changing her mind, so he walked right behind her.

The barn smelled awful, though not as bad as the wharf had. It was small, with a couple of horses in a stable and a goat in the main part. If they were going to sleep here, they would have to share the space with that goat.

“At least the hay is soft,” Felix said, trying to be optimistic.

Maisie looked at the goat. The goat eyed her warily.

“Just great,” she muttered.

Maisie and Felix curled up in opposite corners, and even though the hay was scratchy, the barn was smelly, and the goat was curious, they fell asleep immediately.

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Felix woke up the next morning with a goat staring right in his face. He’d never been this close to a goat, except for at the petting zoo in Central Park. The goat is actually kind of cute, Felix thought. But when he went to pet it, the goat opened his mouth and attempted to chomp on Felix’s hand.

“Maisie,” Felix said, “wake up or we might be this goat’s breakfast.”

Maisie groaned. “Don’t even say the word breakfast unless you have some.”

“I wish,” Felix said. “Maybe your boyfriend can get us something to eat.”

In a flash, Maisie was standing over him, eyes on fire, nostrils flaring. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said.

“Okay, okay,” Felix said, getting to his feet.

As soon as he stood up, the goat butted him, knocking him back to the ground.

“Ouch!” Felix said, rubbing his back.

Maisie pulled him up and hurried him away before the goat repeated its attack. Outside, the sun was already hot, the air still.

“Go and knock on the door,” Maisie said, nudging Felix toward the house. “Ask for Alexander.”

“I’m not doing that!”

“I just saved you from a ferocious goat,” Maisie said. “Now it’s your turn.”

Felix stared at the door, trying to summon his courage.

Before he even came close to approaching it, the door flew open and a woman stepped out. She was wearing a long dress and apron, and she carried a rug in one hand and a stick in the other. Felix watched as the woman began to beat the rug, hard, sending little puffs of dirt into the air.

Maisie shoved him forward.

“Hey,” he said.

The woman stopped beating the rug and turned sharply in their direction.

“Where in the world have you two come from?” she said.

“We’ve been at sea,” Maisie told her.

“You poor things! In what country did you find those terrible clothes?”

Maisie looked down at her jeans and fleece vest. “The colonies,” she answered.

The woman tsked.

“We’re looking for Alexander,” Maisie said. “Hamilton?”

“He’s already down at Beekman and Cruger,” the woman said. “There’s an auction today, and he had to get ready.”

Felix had gone to an auction once with their mother. Some rich person had died and all of her belongings were up for sale. Fancy clocks and ornate silverware, china and ugly paintings, carpets and jewelry. The auctioneer had talked very quickly, so quickly that every time he spoke, Felix had giggled.

“Can kids go to the auction, too?” Felix asked the woman.

“Most everyone does,” the woman said.

She rolled the rug up and stuck it under her arm. But instead of going back inside, she stared at Maisie and Felix a bit longer.

“Would you children like some breakfast?” she asked finally.

“Yes!” Maisie said.

“Please!” Felix added.

“Come inside then,” she said.

Without hesitating, Maisie and Felix did just that.

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After eating eggs and fried bread and bananas, Maisie and Felix made their way back to King’s Street and Beekman and Cruger.

“I wonder if there’s pirate booty for auction,” Felix said.

“Doubloons!” Maisie said.

“Rubies!”

“Swords!”

Excited, they entered the building with the number 56-57 on it. Just like the day before, the large main room was empty. But from outside behind the store, they heard shouting and cheering. At the door that led out there, all they could see was a thick sea of people.

“It’s already so crowded,” Maisie said. “They must have really great stuff.”

As soon as they stepped out into the yard, they paused, confused.

More than two hundred black men huddled there. Their ribs jutted out from hunger, and their bodies had oozing lesions everywhere. Some men had dried blood on their backs or cheeks. Some had swollen eyes or lips. Burn marks from ropes circled their ankles and wrists.

“What the heck?” Maisie whispered.

A group of white men stood among them, rubbing their skin with oil until it shone in the hot sun.

Once the black men had their skin oiled, they took up hot irons and curled one another’s hair, braiding it with ropes.

“A good lot,” a man standing in front of Maisie and Felix said.

They recognized him from last night. He’d taken them to the Stevenses’ house.

“Prime slaves, they are,” he added.

“Slaves!” Maisie blurted. “You mean they’re auctioning men?”

The people around her laughed.

“Men? Hardly,” someone scoffed.

“These slaves have come from the Gold Coast and won’t even go for thirty pounds,” someone else said.

“A good mule costs more than one of these,” the man said, sending everyone into laughter again.

“You can’t have slaves!” Maisie shouted. “It’s immoral! These are human beings, you know, you can’t—”

A strong hand clapped over her mouth from behind, silencing her. Another hand gripped her arm and dragged her, kicking, out of the yard and into the store.

Once inside, she was released. She spun around and found Alexander Hamilton standing there.

“Are you a slave trader?” she demanded.

“My boss Cruger is,” he said.

“But you must stop it. Did you see how sick those men are? How hungry?”

Alexander set his violet-blue eyes on her, his face solemn.

“Don’t you think I know that?” he said quietly. “I live here. I see how these poor men have to live and the work they have to do, while the rich men sit in their fancy houses on their mahogany chairs, eating French cheeses and drinking French wine. But Nicholas Cruger is my employer. And I need this job.”

Maisie remembered what the man had told them last night. Alexander was an orphan, alone in the world.

“Still,” she said.

“Saint Croix is a neutral Danish port,” he continued. “Cargo can move through here without fussing with British laws, which tax everything that passes through there.”

“Cargo?” Maisie said. “They’re human beings. They have mothers and fathers and . . .” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that your mother died.”

“What of it?” he asked angrily. “Do you believe that being an orphan dictates my life? That I’ll be sitting here on that stool forever?”

“I just meant—”

“You just need to mind your own business,” he said. “And keep your mouth shut with all your opinions about how things should work here.”

With that, he stormed off.