Blonde Roots (6 page)

I longed to possess the confident thrust of a person with the freedom to pursue her own course of action.

My guide’s body language was that of someone battling a storm. His shoulders were set in a permanent hunch. His forehead was ready to head-butt any opponents. Doubtless he came from one of the slums. No way had he been born with a silver spoon feeding his mouth, yet he had chosen compassion over resentment.

I liked him. Of course I did.

I could always tell whether Bwana or Madama Blessing were in a good mood or, more likely, ready to crack the proverbial whip, and I was usually prepared when they did. It is the skill of a great slave to predict the master’s moods and needs before he himself knows what they are. I relied on knowledge of Bwana’ s daily schedule (forewarned is forearmed), eavesdropping—which is the advantage of those who blend into the decor until called upon to carry out an errand—and I was expert at reading his facial expressions, body language and intonation. Peripheral vision was also essential, as well as an ability, after so many years, to sense his deeper yearnings.

When Bwana ambled into his den after a dinner of, say, egusi stew, pounded yam, cow leg and a flagon of palm wine, burping and flatulent, reeking of musk oil, chewing a kola nut and aiming its juice into a spittoon, or stopping to piss into a chamber pot that a slave boy held in the right position for him, I usually knew whether to pour him rum-on-the-rocks, a banana daiquiri or a piña colada, or whether to leave him alone or order in some takeaway sex from one of the high-class agencies like Ladies of the Night, recruited from one of the poorer Aphrikan countries like the Congo or Malawi.

As intimately as I knew him, he barely registered me. My job was to make sure his office was run efficiently.

The Ambossans were generally a proud, stalwart people. A commonly held joke was that the Gambians knocked on a door, the Ghanaians pushed it open, but what did the Ambossans do? Why, they just kicked the door down, man!

Bwana was indeed a true Ambossan chief. He had the moist, spongy lips of a man used to having them gratified, a broad porous nose that puckered when irked and oozed perspiration when enraged, the intractable shoulders of a muscle man and an expansive girth that gave him the gravitas of an aging military dictator.

The rich Ambossan male was often whippet-thin when young but built up an armor of fat as he aged. A big man was supposed to take up a lot of physical space too. This one also walked with the unhurried sway of someone whose authority was without question. A slight gesture of a hand, a raised eyebrow or a stern look sent his minions scurrying. Needless to say, women adored him. The wives of friends and acquaintances who came to visit dissolved into girly titters when he turned his charms on to each one in turn. The number of surreptitious, passionate glances—I could not begin to count.

Naturally, Bwana was foremost in my mind as we burrowed underneath the city of soil and sand. When he discovered my escape, his nostrils would emit flames so hot his lips would melt.

I turned my attention to the posters on the tunnel walls: stained, crinkled, slumping in their cracked glass cases like people with humped backs, sloppy bellies and weak knees. They were advertising dramas of yore: the classic
Guess Who’s
Not
Coming to Dinner, To Sir with Hate, Little Whyte Sambo, Esq.,
and the famous tragedies
The Tragic Mulatto, The Tragic Qua
droon and
The Tragic Octoroon.
One poster made me do a double take. It was for
The Whyte and Blak Minstrel Show.

The Ambossans still flocked in their thousands to see it at the Palladia Arena during the rainy season. It featured Am‘ bossan performers as whvte-face minstrels, faces smeared with chalk, lips thinned down to a red slit. They sang out of tune in reedy voices, their upper lips stiff as they danced with idiotic, jerky movements while attempting the hop, skip and jump of Morris dancing. They wore clogs on their feet, bells on their ankles, waved hankies in the air and rubbed their bottoms up against each other. All the while singing music hall songs about being lazy, lying, conniving, cowardly, ignorant, sexually repressed buffoons.

Bwana and his huge extended family went to the Palladia every year. They took up the entire stalls and returned singing the minstrel songs very loudly, thinking they were being so damned funny. It was a kind of madness, because the performing caricatures they mimicked bore no relation to the whytes in their service. Still, credit where it’s due, it was the only time they tried to entertain the staff.

Suddenly my guide did a sharp right, jolting me back. He led me down a short set of stairs that opened on to tunnels on either side.

One dusty sign on the wall read BAKALO LINE—Southbound via Baka Street, Marbone, Ox Fordah Crossroads, Embankere, Wata Lo, Londolo Bridge, Kanada Wadi.

The other sign read BAKALO LINE—Northbound via Pharoah’s Plains, m’ Aiduru Valley, Kenshala Dunes, Harlesdene, Kentouni, Harro Wa.

We did a right turn onto a platform with rail tracks, and standing before us was my gift from the Resistance-a one-carriage train. Another man was sitting in the driver’ seat in a little cabin at the front. Perhaps Tuareg, he wore an indigo turban, which was wrapped around his mouth and jaw, hiding most of his face. Only his eyes and nose peeked out, deep creases running down either side.

He nodded, once, clearly a man of few gestures and, as I discovered, even fewer words.

This was it, then, one of the famous Tube trains that had shunted back and forth for an age underneath the city. It was a wreck-no windows, no doors, no seats.

We had not spoken for the entire journey.

My guide gripped my shoulders, and I surprised myself by wanting to cry. He was risking his life for me.

Captured Resistance members were tortured, but I sensed this man would never spill the beans. If caught, his fate was inevitable.

“Take care, Doris,” he said. (This time it came out as “Duoro-sisi.”)

“The driver will take you to Doklanda. My task is done but I pray that you will reach your homeland. When you do, you must send word to the Co-op. I want to hear you are safe.”

His gaze held mine. This really was it.

“Do not drop your guard until you reach home safely.”

He clasped my shivering hands in his warm, stubby ones.

“Trust only those who earn it.”

Before I could reply he had vanished from whence we came. Now I couldn’t disappear back into the labyrinth of tunnels and return to Mayfah even if fear got the better of me, and it had been tugging my arm like a child.

The driver stared ahead and started the engine. I walked into the shell of a carriage, found a spot in the middle of the floor where I could hold on to a metal pole.

The Tube started to move with the quiet stealth of a cobra.

I had visions of hundreds of angry Ambossan men descending into the tunnels in loincloths, torchlights searching, the cracking of muskets, bloodhounds braying.

Bwana was a major mover and shaker in this city. News of my escape would spread like bush fire. He’d suffer public humiliation if I wasn’t captured. Slave and master alike would gloat. As his PA, I wasn’t your common or garden-variety house wigger. I’d be the talking point around every communal eating bowl in the city. I was probably at that very minute going down in recent history.

To the Ambossans we “scrawny blondes” all looked alike. It would be in my favor for once.

We were moving deep into the bowels of the earth, slowly. No one above would detect a tremor or sound. I leaned against the rusty pole. I needed to conserve my energy. During my lengthy sojourn at Bwana’s, life had become so predictable my senses had gone into a coma. Now the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, my ears were pinned back, my spine arched.

Hours passed. I had no way of telling other than that my stomach pangs felt like the sharp kicks of an unborn child and a heaviness swept down from my crown to my toes like molten lead. But every time my head flopped over and my eyes closed, I jolted myself upright again. Adrenaline had got me thus far. My guide had told me to trust no one.

As the train crawled through the black underground tunnel, its chugging rhythms began to lull.

I slid down to the floor and curled my body around the pole.

Maybe I would wake up back in Mayfah as if this night had never happened.

I HAD LIVED WITH FEAR ever since the man from the Border Lands had grabbed me when I was playing hide-and-seek in the potato fields behind our cottage with my sisters.

Madge. Sharon. Alice.

Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.

Slave or dead? Slave or dead? Dead or slave?

Not knowing their fate put my sleep on the torture rack for years.

ALICE WAS THE YOUNGEST and prettiest-COming two years after me, that wasn’ t funny. She didn’ t say a word until she was seven, which made her just so adorable, as did her spider eyelashes and blonde ringlets. (She was the only one of us to inherit Pa’ curls.) He once told her at dinner that she was such a pretty little thing she need never open her mouth to speak. Unfortunately she didn’t take his advice. During her mute years she learned how to get what she wanted through a branch of sign language known as lash-fluttering.

When we were alone I’d mimic her: grunt like an imbecile, roll my eyes into the back of my head, throw myself onto the floor and dribble. She’d fling her surprisingly mighty little monkey-self onto me, sink her teeth into whichever part of my anatomy was within easy reach, then screech her head off for everyone to hear. Guess who always got it in the neck, and “should have known better,” even though I had her teeth marks as evidence?

Because we were closest in age, we were supposed to pair up, but even when she could speak, I refused to. I played with my dolls alone, except when the older two let me partake of their friendship.

Sharon was two years above me and was thick as thieves with Madge. You couldn’t split them up or wedge yourself in between, no matter how hard you tried: backstabbing, sucking up to one and not the other, planting stolen objects, innuendo.

Sharon was like a mini-Mam, thinner than the rest of us, although we were all thin enough to snap in two at the waist like gingerbread men. We all had dark blue eyes, but Sharon insisted hers were
azure.
She imitated Mam’s elegant movements perfectly in the hope that people would comment (which they did), her arms dancing midair even when she was doing something as down-to-earth as picking apples off a tree in Percy’s orchard or combing her hair.

Sharon hated what she called menial tasks, which was a pity because her fingernails got as crusty and jagged as mine when we had to help Pa in the fields or dig ditches up to our waists, and as raw as mine what with scrubbing the laundry on the big stone down by the stream, and bleaching the linen with a mixture of lye and stinking human urine that had been collected in a tub specially for the purpose.

In the summer Sharon wore a garland of buttercups as a crown on her head and in winter, snowdrops. It was the princess look, apparently. One time she changed her name to Sabine but had to drop it when we refused to take it up. I guess Princess Sabine had a better ring to it than Princess Sharon. She expected her prince to arrive one day on a white stallion and star in her very own once-upon-a-time.

She was often to be found standing in the doorway looking out for him.

“Shall I pack your bags?” I’d say in passing, and then, once out of reach, I’d sing,

Like the nearest she’d get to royalty would be as maid-of all-work to Percy.

Our Madge looked out for all of us, even Pa. One time at table, after he’d thrown up in the parlor after another of his “just the one pint” Friday nights out with “the lads,” she told him sharply, “You and I are going to have words-in private.”

Such talk from a child to an adult was unheard of, as it was from a woman to a man. I couldn’ t believe her cheek and neither could he because he just nodded meekly. That was the day we realized she’d soon be an adult, a formidable one at that. As firstborn, Madge had no competition for four years, which should have turned her into a monster when baby Sharon came along, but she worshipped her little sister.

She was known for the twinkle in her eyes, which never dulled even when she was exhausted from shearing sheep, or when I told her she’d likely end up an old spinster spending her days at a spinning wheel if she didn’ t go to the summer fayre on the estate and find herself a young fellow. Mam and Pa said they couldn’t afford a dowry, but the truth was they’d never let her go.

I tried to get Madge’s twinkle into my own eyes, spending hours practicing in front of the looking glass, but it worked only if I slapped my cheek so hard it made me cry.

No one had to tell Madge she’d have to take over running the house if Mam passed on. She never looked wistfully at the horizon or wore garlands in her hair, but spoke of “duty” and “responsibility” and being part of “God’s greater plan.”

When I ranked them on a scale of one to ten for perfection, Madge was a nine and a half. I gave myself an eight. Sharon was a four and Alice got a one and three-quarters.

Now, Mam was tall for a woman but she’d had the pox as a kid, which explained why she was often “a bit under the weather.” Her skin was pale and clung softly to her like the crepe de chine Mrs. Katharine Holme, the seamstress at Duddingley, made into gowns for the ladies “up there.” Mam wafted around slowly so that her movements flowed into each other with no beginning and no end-like a dance. I’d try to imitate her too, but my movements always ended abruptly.