Birth of a Dark Nation (21 page)

"She didn't say a word to the rest of her
sons," Eşusanya said. "I wonder what makes you so special."

I scowled.

"He's the youngest," Aborişade said. "The
youngest is always the favorite."

"It isn't like that at all," I said. "I don't
know why she chose to speak to me."

"Where do you think we're going?" Eşusanya
said.

"Eko," Ogundiya said.

"Who told you that?" Eşusanya asked.

"No one told me. I heard my uncle talking. We
will settle in Eko."

"Well that's not bad at all," Aborişade said.
"We learned about Eko. It is diverse."

"It's right on the water," I said.

"They say you can't see the other side of the
great river, there's so much water," Eşusanya said.

"Is there another side?" I asked.

The four of us fell silent, staring at the
stars.

~

The next morning we rose and we walked some
more. Our leaders assured us that we would be reaching our
destination soon.

Each of us carried something we would need.
Seeds. Water. Spices. Weapons. Textiles. Tools. We were starting a
new life with new people, whoever they would be. We would be useful
to them.

I surmised that the iron casks were filled
with gold and gems we'd amassed from our various conquests through
time. We'd certainly need to trade some things as we reached other
villages.

Night fell again and we were exhausted. The
older ones pitched tents, and the younger ones slept outside on
pallets.

I woke up suddenly from a deep sleep. I
looked to my right and saw Eşusanya on top of Ogundiya, embracing
him. Men loving each other among our tribe was nothing new, but I
hadn't realized those two had a relationship. I stared for a
moment, then turned over in an attempt to get back to sleep.

Almost immediately, I heard an immense
clopping noise, like a herd of antelope coming right for us. We sat
up and our elders began coming out of the tents. The noise got
louder and louder. Soon, we were all on our feet, facing in the
direction of the roar of the stampede, and waiting for the threat
to show itself. We hadn't eaten in a while, and surely whatever
this animal was would make a great late night feast.

"Wait…listen…" Aborişade said. We stood
still.

"The noise is coming from behind us,"
Eşusanya said. I immediately stood back-to-back with him, assuming
a stance we'd learned long ago in manhood training.

"They're coming!" Aborişade said over the
deafening roar. There was no time to strategize. Only time to
react.

Dust rose into the sky, obscuring the bright
moon and stars, even in the darkness. The roar reached a crescendo
and then stopped.

"Sweet Olódùmarè, protect us," I
whispered.

In an instant, we were attacked on all sides
by a force moving too fast for us to see.

"What kind of beast are you?" Aborişade
yelled into the fracas of moving bodies pushing, shoving, and
slicing at us.

A blade sliced at my arm and I yelped, more
from surprise than from pain. I looked down and saw the flesh wound
already healing itself.

"Just swing!" Ogundiya shouted.

We swung our fists into the air and every
third swing landed on something. It slowed the white blurs around
us down ever so slightly. I decided that, rather than punch, I
would grab.

I had a handful of hair in my hand, still
attached to the head of one of the monsters trying to attack us. It
was soft and long.

"Lasciami andare, bastardo nero!"
The
monster growled at me in his foreign tongue and slowed down enough
to reveal himself to me.

He looked human, on the surface. He had eyes,
ears, a nose, a mouth, and fangs, just like us. But he was
different. His eyes were a light brown, such as I'd only seen in
the amber beads of the women in my tribe. His features were sharp,
angular and angry. His nose came to a point. His brow was strong
and low. And his skin…his skin was a ghostly white.

I bared my fangs and he lunged at me with
both hands outstretched toward my neck. I deflected his arms and
grabbed him by the waist with both hands. I could see he wore a
plain white shirt with buttons, black pants, and black boots. I
picked his light frame up, hoisted him over my head, and hurled him
to the ground. I kicked him in the lower back in an attempt to stun
him.

He merely laughed and hopped back up on both
feet again.

"Si presenterà alla mia volontà!"

"I don't know what you said, but I know that
you're going to be my meal," I responded.

My own body must have looked like a brown
blur as I attacked the man. My lips met the vein in his neck and I
bit him as hard as he could. He tried to fight me off, but I was
too strong for him. My fangs sank into him and his hot blood soon
filled my mouth.

It tasted like nothing I'd ever had before. I
didn't like it.

I spat his vinegary blood to the ground and
tossed him aside. All around me, similar fights were unfolding. And
the terrorists just kept coming. Before I got a chance to pull one
of them off Eşusanya, two more had overpowered me and taken me to
the ground. I tried to fight them off, but before I knew it, they
had placed heavy iron shackles on my feet. I tried to reach down to
take them off, but each of the men twisted my arms behind my back
and bound me with more shackles. The harder I fought, the more they
laughed. Finally, one grabbed a stone from the ground and bashed it
against my skull, knocking me out cold.

The voices swirled around me for the next few
minutes, a mixture of the foreign language of our attackers and the
shouts, growls, and hisses of my own people. People walked over me.
I heard our elders shouting at us to remain calm.

I felt someone being thrown to the ground
behind me.

"Aragbaye," he said. It was Aborişade and he
was breathless. "Wake up."

"What's happening?"

"They drink blood just like we do."

"What?"

"They're soldiers of some kind. They're on a
mission."

"Haruna," I said. "Haruna sent us to our
deaths. This was the plan all along."

"I think so, too. Wait; quiet."

The ghostly men ran long chains through the
loops in our shackles.

"We're slaves. Aborişade, they're taking our
freedom!"

"We will never be slaves and we will never be
their food. We will get out of this."

From where we were lying, I could see the
monsters rummaging through our belongings. One opened up an iron
cask and held up several jewels to the moonlight. A second pawed
over one of our scrolls.

"
Rimetterlo. Gli schiavi e i loro beni
sono un pacchetto,
" a third man said. The first man hissed at
the third. For his insolence, he was punched in the nose by the
third.

"
Ho detto rimetterlo."

The remaining man slowly loaded our things
back on a cart. As soon as the man turned around, I saw him sneak
one of our scrolls under his shirt, leaving three others
behind.

"That bastard took one of our scrolls," I
whispered.

"We will get it back. We will get out of
this."

Before we knew it, we were being slapped on
the arms and chest and forced to stand upright. We had been chained
to each other in one huge coffle. I looked to my left and to my
right and saw the dead bodies of several men I'd known, mostly
elders. Ogundiya, the elder, was chained several rows over from me.
He nodded in acknowledgement when I saw him. Babarinde was not far
behind him.

The pale-faced men seemed to have a leader
barking orders at them. He pointed in one direction, then pointed
toward the sky. Soon, the men started cracking their whips, and we
began marching across the countryside.

As we marched, they sang a song in beat with
our footsteps.

.

A bi bo,

goccia di limone,

goccia d'arancia,

o che mal di pancia!

Punto rosso, punto blu,

esci fuori proprio tu!

.

Every time one of them said "
tu
" they
would crack the whip and try to hit one of us in the face with its
tip. They were successful more often than not. But in spite of this
humiliation, our wounds healed almost instantaneously.

We would never have dared marching at night.
It's not as though we were afraid of anything in particular, but
there was no reason to risk being caught by surprise if we didn't
have to be, whether by springing traps set by other tribes, or by
waking a sleeping den of animals.

These men had no such concerns. We marched
with haste through unfamiliar territory. We could handle it. We
were Razadi. Our stamina was legendary.

They knew we were different. They callously
and arrogantly pushed us along, laughing and taunting all the way.
But who were they and why did they want us? What would happen to
us?

Within time, we were actually
running—shackles and all—through the savannah to get to wherever it
was we were going.

Before we knew it, we were in a compound
overlooking the sea. There were about a dozen short, squat,
windowless buildings that had been erected out of lumber. Each had
a single door with a complex system of locks on the front. I
presumed that's where we'd be housed.

The men who had kidnapped us anchored us to
the ground. They worked furiously, as though working on a deadline.
They finally secured the last stake in the ground.

"
Affrettatevi
!" their leader shouted,
pointing to the sea as the sun began to rise. The men scattered and
entered their quarters while we lay shackled to the ground.

The sun's first rays reached our skin as the
last bolt locked the doors of the men's quarters from the inside.
Aborişade rested his head on my back and fell asleep, exhausted
from the journey. I, too, was tired, but my mind was too busy to
rest.

There were other settlements closer to the
shore, but we were too far to see who they were or what they were
all about. We needed to get away from here and get anywhere else. I
felt I'd rather die than be a slave.

My mind wandered off to sleep, even as the
sun heated the air around us. We thrived in the sun. We'd be
energized as we slept.

~

I wasn't sure how much time had passed by the
time I woke up, but the majority of our men were awake, alert, and
ready to fight. Babarinde and Ogundiya the elder kept admonishing
us to keep our wits about us, and to not do anything that would
endanger the whole.

Even as the different white men down by the
shore walked up to our encampment, our elders told us to be calm,
to always take the path which would lead to the fewest number of
lives lost. The men, more tanned than the ones who captured us,
walked with long sticks of wood and metal, heavier on one side than
the other.

The white men came to us and spoke to each
other in a language I was only later able to translate. And so much
time passed before I learned their language that much of what they
said remains lost to time. But I can tell you what they did.

The talked to each other for a long time.
They couldn't decide how to proceed. The word I remember being
repeated was "dangerous."

They began unpinning a section of our group
from the stakes we'd been chained to, and my brothers immediately
rose up against them. Twelve of them broke loose from the chains
and began fighting the white men down. These men were weaker than
the ones who had captured us. One fell backward immediately with
the force of a single punch. My brothers descended upon him and
drank as much as they could.

One of the men with a stick aimed it at my
drinking brother and pulled what I know now was the trigger. He was
killed instantly. That's how I found out what a gun was.

My brothers who were freed were shocked to
see one of their own dead and on the ground, but they rushed the
men with the guns anyway. One by one, my fellow Razadi were felled
by these men's bullets. Blood spattered across the grass.

The leader spoke. I don't remember all that
he said, but I remember him saying something about not being afraid
to kill all of us if need be.

Through whips and muskets we were subdued.
There was no more fighting back if we wanted to live to see another
day. Mama Abeo hadn't sent us out in the world only to be murdered
by strangers. We were charged to be the seeds of our culture. And
we were determined to do that, wherever we ended up.

We were forced to march over the dozen
corpses of our fallen, not giving them proper Razadi funeral rites.
I remember each of their names to this day and I hope their spirits
torture the people responsible for their massacre.

We were divided into two groups of no
particular order or importance to our slavers. My group, including
Babarinde, Aborişade, Eşusanya, and Ogundiya the younger, were
marched onto the beach and forced onto a ship called
La
Coeur
. The shackles and chains were built for the ship. I lay
down on hard wooden planks next to Aborişade and pondered whether I
would have a future.

The rest of our people, about half, boarded a
ship called
La Tête
. Ogundiya the elder and most of Mama
Abeo's other sons ended up on that ship.

The iron casks of jewels, the seeds, and two
of the remaining three scrolls came with us on board our ship.
La Tête
took the textiles, the weapons and tools, and the
third scroll.

It wasn't long before the ships set sail from
what we later learned was the city of Eko, a place that we thought
was a hub of commerce and culture for our region of Africa, but
which turned out to be nothing more than a slave trading port.

We had been tricked into slavery by the Oyo
as one last "fuck you" to our people. We thought we performed a
noble act by leaving, mostly willingly, to make our fortunes
elsewhere, never suspecting that we would be marching to our own
executions. Even now, I wonder what life would have been like in
our village had we never left, if another compromise had been
worked out where we'd all stay together, insulated from the evils
outside our own people, always safe within each other's arms,
ostensibly able to live forever, even if another child was never
born among us.