Temple of My Familiar (9 page)

“They fed us a little millet gruel, which we dipped with our hands from a long wooden trough outside the pen twice a day. We could see the sky for the ten minutes it took us to eat. In the early morning, before daybreak, we were let out to move our bowels. Constipation was always my problem; fear and anxiety kept me locked tight. But cases of dysentery were frequent, and many people while waiting—for what, we didn’t know—sickened and died. Later I was to realize that the men who bought us to sell had already calculated how many of us were liable to die and had therefore captured more of us than they were likely to need.

“After a week in the stockade, my mother fell sick. There was no room for any of us to lie down comfortably, but one of the Motherworshipers forced a little extra space by the wall, toward which my mother could turn her head for air, and when the pains wracked her, she could kneel. She was sick with vomiting and dysentery, those sicknesses it is least possible to hide. Her deeper sickness was over her shame at being filthy and exposed to strangers, in the embarrassed and helpless presence of her children. There never was a more fastidious or modest woman than my mother. She bathed at least once a day, and her cloths were spotless. I remember how sweet the oil always smelled in her hair! She could not accept so much filth on and about her person.

“On the seventh day she willed herself to die. The white men sent in a couple of brutes to drag her out by her heels—one of them held a rag to his nose as they dragged her—and place her body on a cart and carry it away. I envied her. I pitied myself. I did not know how to ask the strangers or even my sisters and brother to kill me.

“So I am very bitter about my old home, and who can claim I do not have a right to be?

“This is no hearsay. I was there.

“You do not believe I was there? I pity you.

“There was a period during the sixties when I passed myself off as a griot. I pretended I’d traveled to Africa and learned the stories of the diaspora straight from the old storytellers and record keepers there. I didn’t have to go anywhere. I remembered quite enough of the story to tell, thank you. There was a little white woman professor who came to one of my lectures about the crossing of the Atlantic in a slave ship. She was one of those Afrophiles who was so protective of Africa that she claimed Idi Amin was framed. She got up and said, ‘I wish you’d try not to say “I remember thus and so” about your African experiences. It is claiming more than you could possibly know, and besides that, it is confusing.’ Well, I apologized for doing that. It just slipped out. I did remember everything I was talking about, though, but I knew the professional way to present my experience was as if it had merely been told to me. Some people don’t understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things on paper. The professor went on to say she couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like on the slave ship. The crowdedness, the dirt, the absolute dependency on madmen to steer the ship, the absence of representation and control.

“Does this make you laugh? No?

“But anyway, there I was, in that lifetime, watching everybody’s hair being cut off. A few days before we left the coast they made us kneel in the sand outside the fort and proceeded to cut great clumps of our hair out, and then to shave our heads. As you know, Africans have an abundance of hair, and there were some with locks they’d had since childhood that fell nearly to their knees. These were brutally cut off, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then came the shaving of the heads and, for the men, of whiskers with a dry, and no doubt dull, razor. The black men who did this, at the bidding of their white masters, went through the severed locks carefully. Hidden in this hair were all manner of precious small items, tokens of home: gold beads, silver pins, bits of gris-gris. In my brother’s and sisters’ hair and in my own the silver coins were discovered. These items were pocketed by the brutes who held us, and they grunted in satisfaction upon discovering each one. You sometimes see these same faces on the streets of our larger cities; these are the young men selling the dope, or terrorizing the young ones while they take the little money that was pinned in the smaller children’s pockets for them to buy lunch. They haven’t left us, those faces; they are never hard to find.

“It was while the haircutting was going on that I was surprised to see a fairly large compound, consisting of many small huts, a short distance from the fort. During the three hours it took to cut our hair, douse us with a foul-smelling liquid, and flush out our mouths with vinegar—a protection against scurvy—I had time to notice it was inhabited by variously colored women of all ages, many yellow or light brown and some almost white; the area in front of the huts was filled with similarly variegated children. This was an amazing sight to me, who’d never seen people of such different shades, and I was too young to recognize the establishment for what it was, and obviously had been for generations, the fort’s brothel. I was to learn this later from one of the fair-skinned young women, who was sold onto our boat along with her young son. Her white master, recognizing himself as fat, swinish, and disagreeable to the nose and touch, had finally convinced himself of the much avoided truth that no one as lovely as this woman could possibly love him, even if she was his slave. In his cups one night he’d gambled her and his son away in a game of cards, which he assumed he was teaching his African flunkies to play.

“After the chopping down of our hair—we had worn it, some of us, in a style that made one think of trees—we were branded with pieces of hot iron shaped into configurations dreamed up by those who had, in America, purchased us sight unseen. I was branded with a C, for Croesus, which in this instance was not the name of a person but the name of an estate, a rather poor one, too, as it turned out. By these brands we were recognized, and if one of us died, her brand was checked and she was marked off the record book into which we were all entered.

“When they pressed the metal to the skin of a buttock or upper arm there was much pain. The swelling and burning continued for days afterward. Though the slavers dotted our wounds with a bit of vinegar and palm oil, nothing soothed like the milk from a nursing mother’s breast, a remedy with which all Africans were familiar, and though most Africans no longer believed in the worship of the mother, this last vestige of her power was believed in firmly. Luckily there were nursing mothers among us, although without their babies. Babies were not permitted on the slave ship, nor mothers too far advanced in pregnancy. Some of the babies were simply smashed against the ground by the captors of their mothers, some were left on the trail to die, some were sold or, less usually, adopted by a tribe that did not believe in or participate in the slave trade—that is, they refused to sell or buy anyone—and to whom small children, so recently inseparable from the source of all life, were especially sacred. I was also to learn of these people on the slave ship, for one of them, on his way from marketing his commodity of salt, had been captured by a white slaver and his black henchmen, who refused to hear his protestations that saltmakers were exempted from being captured, under a separate law. To which I imagine the slaver’s reply was: Under slavery, no nigger exists under a separate law.

“The breasts of the nursing mothers were a haven for the very young among us, who were permitted to drink the milk. Otherwise some of the more frightened and traumatized of the children would have died. And for the rest of us there was grace in the incredible kindness of these young mothers as they moved among us as best they could, with a drop here and a drop there on our festering wounds. When I was a child, I told Hal this story because he was the only one who wouldn’t laugh at me for thinking I remembered it; the next thing I knew, he’d found crayons and painted it. He painted the face of one of the women as if he’d seen it himself. It was a sight one does not often see, but I will always remember the way it made me feel; the small, and not so small, boys and girls plastered against the sides and stomachs of our grieving young women, who nursed them standing up, crowded together in the fetid barracoon, in the white man’s hell that he was permitted and sometimes even encouraged to build in our own land. And though I was big, there was a time in my despair when, in sorrow over the death of my mother and fear of the unknown journey ahead of me, I also nursed. In truth, for a period before we left the continent and for a time on board the ship I regressed to babyhood, even to the thumb-sucking stage. The first time I was raped by members of the crew on board the ship, I was in chains and sucking on my thumb. The second time I was violated, they chained me so that my arms and legs were spread out and my thumb was beyond my reach. There was nothing to solace me. But in the hold of the ship, somewhere in the awful darkness, I knew the mothers who had suckled me also lay, and sometimes I imagined their moans of despair were songs of comfort for me and for their own lost children.

“The morning of our sailing they led us to the shore of the ocean and there, in small coffles of three, they dragged us through the salt water to cleanse our skins. Then they dragged us to the ship. At the plank that led up onto the deck, our last remaining garment, the strip of cotton around our hips, was snatched away, and we were forced onto the ship bald, branded, and naked as we came into the world. I fought to hold on to that last small badge of modesty, but a white man struck me a blow to the head almost without looking at me—and because he had blue eyes, I fancied he must be blind—and I reeled onto the ship with the rest.

“
Of the style of packing slaves, you’ve read, and unfortunately all that you have read, and more, is true. We were packed as if we were sardines, for this two-month-long journey. Truly, sardines should not be packed so, and if it were in my power they never would be again. Our heads were in each other’s laps, a long chain connecting us by the feet along one row, riveting us to the wall of the ship, and there was no movement uncontested by one’s neighbors, of which one had four. In fact, an almost daily ritual was the cutting of the nails on hands and feet because there was, as you can imagine, much scratching in a quite futile effort to protect some small degree of one’s space.

“Those who lived were thankful to those who died, and many, especially among the children, died almost as soon as we left the African continent. Lack of sufficient food, lack of air and exercise—never had any of us been away from air and light!—all contributed; but many of us died from anger. I was, myself, consumed with anger, and helpless even to scratch the person next to me. My heart was strained, bruised. I felt it so! And I was glad when, for reasons of their own, the slavers switched us to the other side of the hold, and I could lie on my right side, thus relieving, to a degree, the pressure and congestion about my heart.

“After a month and a half of really quite unrelatable horror—the rats, the smell of a dead head covered with sores in your lap, the screams of women and men violated for the sport of the devils that passed as crew, the painful menstrual periods of the women and the blood running over one, the miscarriages, the pleas for mercy from everyone, not simply those suffering from dysentery and claustrophobia—after an eternity, we were taken up on deck for longer than our usual half-hour-a-day run, while they swabbed out the hold, during which several women and men fairly danced over the side of the ship and into the sea. Now we were encouraged, suddenly, to remember our culture—which to the whites meant singing and dancing—and to demonstrate it. Drums appeared. An infirmary suddenly existed to look after the sick. Buckets of salt water were splashed over us. Our bald heads were darkened with boot blacking if there were signs of gray. Men and women were given such garments as could be scrounged from the ship’s closets, so that you would see a tall broad-chested man wearing nothing but a much too small frilly pirate’s shirt or a cloth hat, held by a string, over his privates. Or you might see a young girl wearing a handkerchief. I was given a faded piece of rag that looked as though it had been used for sailcloth, and this I thankfully put around myself as I watched the somber merriment of those suddenly set “free” upon the sun-splashed, yet chilly deck. To warm ourselves we were ordered to dance, a whip striking at our feet providing the sole source of inspiration.

“Within days we were in sight of land, the young women among us pregnant by force and too young to know it, or to know that because we were delivered to our new owners already pregnant we earned a bonus for the master of the ship, many of whose sons and daughters—for he was a violator, with the rest of his crew—entered into American slavery with us, long before they actually issued from our bodies. The slavers did not care. Color made their own seed disappear to them; the color of gold was all they saw. But not if gold was the color of a child. We were left with this bitter seed, and—unfair to the children—burdened with our hatred of the fruit.

“I was sold to one planter, my sisters and brother to others. We never saw or heard from each other again. I bore a freakish-looking, gray-eyed girl child eight months after leaving the ship. The young mistress of Croesus plantation wanted her brought up as slave companion to the child she herself was expecting. This earned us a closetlike room under the back verandah. When my baby was two years old I ran away from the house and into the woods, only to step, almost at once, into a trap that the master had, he was to claim, set for bear. It crushed the bone in my left leg. The master saved my beating—for running away, but also for stupidity: no one, he declared, could be stupid enough to step into so large and obvious a trap, although I’d never seen or heard of such a hideous thing before—until I was strong enough to bear it. He waited nearly a month; he was drunk, and his anger over being still poor in spite of his dreams of riches drove him on. The strain of losing a part of my body, namely, my leg and foot, accompanied by the loss also of my child—given to another woman to bring up—whom, against all nature, I had grown to love, was a condition a heartless beating could only exacerbate. Underneath it, my weakened body gave up the ghost—in other words, I died.”