Blonde Roots (4 page)

I would have to walk with the slow confidence of one allowed out at night. If a neighbor saw me, the alarm would be raised. Freedom was within my grasp but my kneecaps were being tapped by a sledgehammer. I struggled to stay upright. It would be so easy to slip back inside the compound.

Madama Blessing would be outraged at my escape, and having witnessed her response to imaginary crimes, I dreaded to think how she’d behave if her anger could stand up in court, accuse me of the crimes of Ungratefulness and Dishonesty, and prove my guilt beyond Reasonable Doubt by presenting the Evidence (Caught Escaping) to a jury of her peers, all of whom were, like her, Ambossan slave owners.

As for Bwana, unlike his wife, he didn’t waste his emotions, such as they were, on his slaves. He took disciplinary action when required with all the passion of a hardheaded businessman for whom slaves fell into either the profit or loss column. Take my children, for example. Bwana had no need for any more four-legged gurglers crawling around his compound who didn’t carry his DNA in their genes, so it made sound business sense to enter them under the profit column.

As far as I could tell, the only flame that set him alight was when he howled out at night from some woman’s bed with such unbridled ferocity that we in the slaves’ quarters felt our spines run cold.

Yet Bwana and his family were the known, and here was I venturing into the dangerous unknown. I had become so much more than your nonachieving, low-flying slave. I had been elevated to the position of Bwana’s personal secretary because I was articulate and bright (but not too clever, or so they thought).

The terms of my engagement stipulated that it was a job for life, that my hours should run from Monday to Sunday, 12 a.m. to 11:55 p.m. daily, although I needed to be available to do overtime when required. I would receive an annual wage of nothing with an added bonus of nothing for good behavior but to expect forfeits in the form of beatings for any insolence, tardiness or absences.

Luckily, I was only knocked about a bit in the early days as part of my in-service training when my work report read: Attendance 100%. Punctuality 100%. Motivation 10%.
Could work harder and prone to distraction, i.e., daydreaming.
After that I met all my performance targets. I was also expected to look presentable at all times and I learned how to affect a pleasant smile devoid of any personal satisfaction. Our “contentment” must never exceed theirs.

It was pretty standard for a domestic slave, and I have to say Bwana had no cause for complaint with me.

I was the perfect house wigger.

I PEERED DOWN THE AVENUE,
hidden behind an enormous breadfruit tree full of bulbous green fruit that was about to fall right down on my soft human head and splatter my brains about.

My heart rattled like dried peas in a gourd.

Another carriage clattered past with a laughing couple inside, its wheels and hooves kicking sand up into my face. I caught sight of the woman; it was that coquette Madama Subria.

I had watched her with tears pouring over my heart as she had observed Frank being tied up to a tree and whipped. She had been blinking, rapidly. At first I thought she was sorry for him; then it dawned on me that she was brimming with tears for herself. I read these people so well. It’s very easy when you’re invisible.

I could see how the Ambossans had hardened their hearts to our humanity. They convinced themselves that we do not feel as they do, so that they do not have to feel anything for us. It’s very convenient and lucrative for them.

Madama Subria, I realized, had lost the hope of someone special to keep her entertained when she was bored. Mr. Subria must have forced her to attend the whipping. These Ambossan women were usually much too “fainthearted” for that. He had a prestigious position as a senior executive with Baringso Bank pic.

Tall, funereal, he stood next to his attractive little wife with an uncharacteristic smile playing on his lips.

The carriage passed and I darted out of the alley.

Once I reached Edgwa District, I felt safer. I walked underneath its famous entrance: two elephant-shaped tusks, which met in the middle as a grand arch, sixty magnificent feet high.

Edgwa, after the genteel refinement of Mayfah, was an assault on my senses, buzzing with crowds and booming with the bone-rattling thud of Aphro-beats from the music booths. It was famous for its bazaar, which ran all day, all night, and for several miles down the litter-strewn thoroughfare of m’ Aiduru Valley, another rich enclave of chiefs and their sprawling compounds. The valley had a canal running through it that the residents used for an elite form of energy-efficient transport: slave-powered dug-out canoes. In this way they avoided the crowds and the red laterite soil of the market, which sprayed dust onto their clothes when dry and sank their feet into its mucky gunk when wet.

I feigned a mild interest in the stalls as I passed, to appear as if I was out running an errand for my master, my head held high, basket on top, hands dangling. Yet to walk too upright and proud was deemed a sign of uppityness. It was a fine balance to tread: inner dignity versus survival instincts. I needn’t have worried because the only thing on the traders’ minds was whether you were likely to buy, and if so how much they could unreasonably charge, at which point you were expected to haggle, to endure a battle of wits and willpower.

I passed overripe melons on stalls, their heads cleaved open, putridly sweet, cerise juice oozing out. They lolled like the heads of runaways who hadn’t made it, black seed eyes staring spookily up at me.

I passed a gunsmith at work, an anvil placed between legs spread out on the ground.

Salesmen from the Cotton Marketing Board sold baskets of raw white cotton so seductive I resisted the urge to plunge my hands into the thick foamy softness.

I looked up just as a street seller thrust a fistful of four squirming, dying rats into my face. In his other hand were sachets of rat poison.

A tall, wiry young man was speed-walking toward me, balancing on his head a plank of wood some four feet long. I ducked under just in time.

Puffed-up matrons, walking off their feasts before resuming festivities later, pushed past me, their haughty faces marked with chalk and camwood, their thighs rubbing together like smacking lips.

Spiced chicken roasting on a spit almost made me faint with hunger as my revved-up adrenaline had by now burned up every ounce of carbohydrate from my last meal.

There were pyramids of red coffee beans, bowls of pink grapefruits, bolts of multicolored waxed cloth, decorated bed-boards, carved tip-stools.

Hard green bananas, still on the stem, looked like bunches of upturned fingers.

Desert salt looked like cakes of packed mud.

Many of the market traders were immigrants from North Aphrika and the Lands of the Arabian Sands, some of whom had been instrumental in the slave trade—the Business. They came to Slavery HQ with the most impressive CVs detailing their brilliant horsemanship and exemplary skills at raiding villages and kidnapping Europane women and children into slavery. Some had been pirates, enslaving those Europane fishermen or seamen unlucky enough to be sailing the high seas at the wrong time. Unfortunately these Arabian immigrants soon found that their well-honed skills were pretty redundant in the UK, where the task of slavery was somewhat more
managerial.

Among the crowds were also the regular impoverished masses of the city, the Ambossan working classes who found work when they could and wore scraps of material so flimsy they came apart as easily as spiders’ webs. Such poverty had surprised me when I first arrived. Poor blaks in Great Ambossa? But it was true.

I was even more astonished to discover that in earlier times Ambossans themselves had been sent to labor in the sugarcane fields on the islands, alongside us whytes. Some were indentured servants; others had been kidnapped as slaves.

The Europane was considered better suited to the job in hand, though.

Weren’ t we the lucky ones?

The Ambossan poor wandered the streets on feast days, had little reason to celebrate and needed no excuse to escape from their cardboard shacks in the shantytowns of Harlesdene in the north, Poplarare in the east, Pe Khama in the south or Goatsherd Bush in the west.

Their gamine children were bug-eyed with chiseled cheekbones, slack lips, sunken chests, bony hips and spindly heron’s legs.

They wouldn’t bother me. Indeed it was a little-known fact that some of the Ambossan working class were active in the Resistance, united with us in the fight against the ruling class.

Yet others were less sympathetic, shouting out “Wigger, go home! You’re taking our jobs!” from the other side of the road, even pelting us with rocks.

THE THOROUGHFARE WAS LITTERED
with discarded pecan-nut shells, coconut kernels, bacon rind, tobacco butts, mongoose and antelope droppings, used condoms made of pig gut and the rest of the ordinary debris of city life.

I tried to walk quickly without appearing to. I had twenty minutes left to get to Paddinto Station, and it was going well until I came upon five or six whyte men with raggedy beards and scabrous chests. As they were playing dominoes underneath a baobab tree at night, they were obviously free men, and I could see that they had the feral awareness of most free whytes, alert to their surroundings, ready to slip out of view down a passage or get lost in a crowd to avoid confrontation or danger. As I suspected they would, they all looked up. (Whytes always clocked one another when out and about. It was a minority-awareness thing.) I tried hard not to panic, but the parameters of my life were suddenly changing. I was in no-man’ s-land: I was escaping slavery and walking toward freedom, but I had not yet arrived. Of one thing I was now sure: when I left my master’s compound, I had lost his protection, which meant I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen the men, as usual. For those of us who were still enslaved, the small communities of free ones were either objects of pity (many were desperate scavengers) or envy.

This surprised me too when I had first arrived in Great Ambossa. That those slaves who were freed, for one reason or another, could remain in the country, although many Ambossans lobbied to get them kicked out.

The free whytes were mainly consigned to living in squalor in communal tents in tumbledown ghettos on the outskirts of the large cities, derisively referred to by the rich Ambossans as the “Vanilla Suburbs,” quite distinct from the far superior coco-palmed avenues of their own “Chocolate Cities.”

WE HEARD THAT IN THE BURBS
you could buy the traditional costume of many nations such as sporrans, knickerbockers, leather jerkins, peasant skirts, metal helmets with horns, chain-mail tunics, boleros, trailing gowns with fur collars, bodices that reduced your waist to eighteen inches and bustles that expanded your hips to a hefty size eighty.

In the Burbs there were hooch and grog dens, madrigal boy bands, recorder recitals and even civil rights protest singers. And there were also tambourine-bashing, tongue-speaking underground temples that syncretized Christianity with Voodoo.

There were also whyte hairdressers who sold thin-toothed combs for our unmanageable, flyaway fine hair. In the Burbs you rarely saw a free whyte with natural hair. They wore the perms, twists and braids of Ambossan women, although Aphros were most in demand. The hairdressers used kinky Aphrikan hair on the Burbite women, who had their own fine hair chopped off and these bushy pieces sewn onto them so that the effect was (un)naturally Aphrikan. It took up to ten hours and when the blonde, red, brown or straight roots came through it looked just plain tacky, apparently.

Our men used to joke that if you ran your fingers through a whyte woman’s hair, chance was it would come off in your hands. You’d see clumps of kinky hair littering the streets like black sheep’s wool.

In the Burbs, tanning was all the rage too, and you could get a nose-flattening job done quite cheaply, we heard, although I always thought that flat, fat nostrils on whyte faces looked ridiculous. The very thought of a mallet smashing down on my nose was just too scary for words.

Most important, the Burbs sold exotic Europane food unobtainable elsewhere. You could get Brussels sprouts, cucumber, lettuce, peas, tapioca pudding, lemonade, processed white bread, even cabbage.

My mouth used to water at the very thought of all that lovely plain food without any horrid peppers and spices.

The Burbs were out of bounds to the likes of me, of course, but I used to dream of wandering around the legendary Brixtane in the south of the city or To Ten Ha Ma in the east, which had been originally settled by Chinese seamen.

Some of these free whytes earned a paltry living as porters or watermen down at the docks, while the women took in laundry, or more often were hawkers—of all kinds of wares.

To the Ambossans the Vanilla Suburbs were generally a no-go area except for the feared sheriffs who trawled the dunes most days looking for runaways. Naturally it was the last destination for an escaping slave. More recently I’d heard that the more adventurous Aphrikan holidaymakers from the mainland of the continent had taken to visiting the Burbs on tourist trips to Great Ambossa. From the safety of their carriages and with an escort of Masai or Zulu warriors, they would gawk at the ghetto natives with anthropological fascination.

The free whytes all stuck together in a city where sheriffs roamed the thoroughfares and stopped and searched young males under the dreaded SUS Laws—which meant detainment on suspicion of being either runaways or common or garden-variety criminals. Naturally, having a whyte skin was all the evidence the sheriffs needed to accost a young man and strip-search him. Most carriage drivers were always being stopped and searched by the sheriffs when they were out on the road without passengers, especially those owned by the wealthy who indulged in custom-made fittings such as gold-plated spokes.

Adding to the danger were the opportunistic press gangs who roamed the backstreets and would happily tear up a Freedom Certificate and cart a hapless free man or woman off to a waiting slave ship at the docks of West Japan Quays on the Isle of Wild Dogs.