Ship of Souls

“See?”
    “Take off your clothes, nigger,” snarls one of the soldiers. “Make him strip, Captain!”
    “Yes!” the others shout as a chorus, swarming around me like a mob. “Strip, strip, strip!”
    This time the captain makes no effort to rein his men in. I realize I have no choice but to obey and so start unbuttoning my shirt. I turn away to hide the glow in my chest, but to my relief, the light has dimmed completely. My cheeks burn, though, when I look up and see a teenage boy among the soldiers. He holds a hand over his stomach and looks away, ashamed.
    When I am down to my underwear, the rowdy soldiers quiet down.
    “Where is it then?”
    “He’s hiding it—off with your pants, boy!” A rusty—and, luckily, dull—bayonet tip swipes at the waistband of my underwear.
    “Hey!” I cry, pressing myself back into the crumbly dirt wall.
    “That’s enough, Edwards. It’s clear he’s not hiding anything between his legs.” The captain gets a round of laughter at that. He stares at me for a long while and then pronounces, “It must be inside the boy.”
    “Then what are we waiting for?” cries Edwards. “Cut him open!”
    “No!” yells the captain, extending his arm to hold back the eager mob. “You kill the boy, and you kill the life source within him.”
    I nod quickly, finally understanding what Nuru meant when she called me her “host.” The captain tosses my clothes back to me, and I quickly dress myself.
    “You’re more precious to us than gold, boy. What you got inside, it gives us life. See?” He steps closer to me and suddenly his bony arm grows flesh! In a matter of seconds, I see the captain as he once was. Blue eyes fill the empty sockets, and sandy hair sprouts from his no longer bare skull. He makes a fist and pounds it against his chest. “Having you here with us makes me feel like a man again!”
    “But…you’re dead.”
    “Ah, yes,” he says with a fake regret. Then the captain’s frown turns into a fiendish grin. “Dead—but not gone! We have learned to make the most of our…unfortunate condition.”
    “But why…” I falter and then decide not to ask.
    “Yes?”
    “Spit it out, boy!” snaps Edwards. “We ain’t got all the time in the world to stand here jawin’ with you.”
    I think about asking just what else they have to do, being dead, but decide against it. “Well, why don’t you want to return with the other souls? Why stay here…like this?”
    The captain only sneers at me. “So you know about the ship, hey? Do you know it’ll be packed full of niggers? The fools want to go back to Africa! Now why would civilized men like us want to set sail with a ship full of stinking slaves?”
    “I’d rather live in a hole in the ground than set foot on those savage shores,” says an older soldier.
    “It ain’t our home, see?” another explains. “And how do we know what they got in store for us? Maybe they want to turn the tables and make us—free white men—into their slaves!”
    The captain nods solemnly. “For all we know, your ship may be no better than a British prison hulk—floating death, that’s what they call them. I’ll keep my feet on solid ground, thank you very much!”
    I never imagined ghosts could be racist. I want to ask if they’ve ever heard of Crispus Attucks or any of the other black men who died fighting in the Revolutionary War. Even though my mother taught me that it’s pointless to debate a bigot, I try to reason with the nether beings. “Don’t you want to know what peace feels like? The war is over—”
    “No it ain’t! Not for us. It’ll never be over for us,” Edwards grumbles bitterly.
    “We was ready to surrender but them Hessians—they just kept firing and when they got close enough…” The old soldier drags his finger across his throat.
    A younger man picks up the tale. “No mercy did they show our poor boys—no mercy at all. But what can you expect from a pack of foreign mercenaries? They stormed up the hill with their pockets full of blood money.”
    Finally the teenage boy speaks up. “True—but we held our ground! We didn’t turn and run like the rest of those yellow-bellied cowards. We held our ground.”
    “And we hold it still,” says the captain. “Our blood is in this soil.” He leans in so close that I can count his blond eyelashes. “We’re not going anywhere.” To his men he yells, “Restrain the prisoner!”
    Nuru was right—the nether beings cannot touch me, but