His mother lay bleeding on the bed, her eyes wide with uncomprehending horror. The long knife had started in her womb, and jerked upward with a vicious pull. The man, fully clothed, stood watching her die. He turned toward the frozen child, the bloodied knife poised, ready to strike again. But the young man was not his mother. With the instinctive ferocity re-taught him by the streets and quays of London, he stiffened his arm and fired. The murderer fell at his feet. At the age of ten, he had killed his first man. He did not wait for the Law to decide his fate: he had seen too much of its handiwork. And he had no intention of slowly starving like the other orphans of the gutter. Instead he crept down to the docks, and stowed away on the most imposing ship he could find, dreaming, in his way, of a life of adventure at sea. And when the vessel was well out in the Channel, he left his hiding place and snuck into the captain's cabin, late at night as he paced the deck. Once inside he worked his fingers to the bone, scrubbing, polishing, and straightening the room. The strategy worked. When the captain entered and saw what he was doing, he beat him half to death, then ordered him chained in the hold. But after three days he released him and set him to work, performing tasks of the lowliest kind, with no other pay than a meager share of salt pork and hard biscuit, and the constant threat of being thrown over the side. But to a boy who had never known or expected kindness, it was enough. He never thought to complain or answer back, except to the cruder sailors, who thought to use him as a girl. These soon learned that the knife he carried was no idle threat, and that the boy could not be cowed. They left him be. Even the iron-willed captain had come to respect him. After a time he made him his cabin boy, going so far as to teach him the rudiments of sailing and navigation. He never showed affection, most probably did not feel it. But he became nonetheless the closest thing to a father that he would ever know. The vessel was a slave ship, and it gave him his first confirmation of life's inherent cruelty. For the strange dark men they transported were no less strong, subtle, or determined than themselves. And yet for no greater crime than being primitive, and unable to defend themselves against the weapons and treacheries of Europe, they were sold into a bondage from which there was no escape, ending only in death. He never thought to question whether this was right or wrong. And if this captain and this ship did not carry their human cargo to the colonies, some other would have, and perhaps not as safely or as well. So at the beginning of each westward passage, he learned but a single word of the tribe's native tongue. And when he went down into the hold to bring them their gruel, when one of them would catch his eye and make pleading gestures, bewildered at his lot, he used it: "Accept." There was no other way to survive.