THE BOOK OF NEGROES (12 page)

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can’t see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.

So now I am in London, taking a break from twelve men and their swirling words. I sit alone in a separate room, spooning bees’ honey into my hot tea. Down the hall, I can hear the laughter of the leading abolitionist. A man who frequently removes his wig to scratch his scalp, he stands short and fierce like an exclamation mark. With me, however, he must appear solicitous. He opens his arms wide, as if to comfort me with his ample belly. His name is Sir Stanley Hastings, but I think of him as the jolly abolitionist. In his musical and enthusiastic voice, he has been
telling me that his wife and children have pledged to do without sugar in their tea. God willing, he says, no one in his family will drink from the blood of slaves. He says that what we really need—what would stop this trade dead in a minute—is an invention to stain all sugar products with red dye. Now he gesticulates like a man at the pulpit. Let the colour of blood spoil every teacup in the nation, he says, and our battles will be over.

They bring me out from my quiet time. Suffocating me with empathy, the jolly abolitionist asks if I feel ready to continue. Decisions must be made, and they must be made soon. Hear hear, the other men echo as they smile at me. We need to know if you will support our plan, Sir Hastings says, peering at me over crumpled manifestos.

The abolitionists call me their equal and say that we all conspire to end tyranny against mankind. “Then why—” I begin to ask. But they don’t let me finish. I hear whisperings about property and compensation and the rule of law. I observe the massaging of palms and the interlocking of fingers. Believing I am deaf, Sir Hastings murmurs to his neighbour that I can’t be expected to grasp the details in their complexity. He turns back to me once more.

Your story is one of virtue, he says.

Survival has nothing to do with virtue, I reply.

I am referring to your dignity and courage, he says. We need a human face for our fight, and here you are. A woman. An African. A liberated slave who has risen up, self-taught. For twenty years, he goes on, British parliamentarians have extinguished every abolitionist fire. But this time, he says, a woman like you could make all the difference.

The tension makes me tired. I do not care to fight. When I lower my voice, they all lean forward. I say, I can’t speak to your Parliament or meet your King without addressing the bondage of my people.

The men keep pressing. Any talk of outright abolition will unite planters,
shippers, traders and insurers. Can I not see that it is men of property who vote in Parliament?

But I am too old for cleverness. I cannot speak against the slave trade without condemning slavery, I say. Make the arguments that you must, I tell them, and let me make mine.

Forcing a smile, Sir Hastings says the British people are still haunted by the bloody slave uprisings in St. Domingue. Nasty business, all that butchering of white men. The most we can ask, he says, is to stop the trade.

Even if you destroy every slave ship, I say, what remains of the men and women already in bondage? What remains of the children who were born to them but belong to others?

The men turn to John Clarkson, the man who gives me lodging. It is plain to see that he has little standing among these men. He is too vocal with his ideals and is never mentioned in the newspapers. But he is the one Englishman with whom I have journeyed, and he is the one who brought me to the abolitionists. He does his best but cannot convince me.

So we are stuck with this problem. The abolitionists keep plotting. Already, there are talks of hearings into the slave trade. And one day, when the hearings are done, they will introduce yet another bill in Parliament. They say they can win this time, and I do want them to prevail. Their way is better than the alternative, but their way is not enough.

The abolitionists may well call me their equal, but their lips do not yet say my name and their ears do not yet hear my story. Not the way I want to tell it. But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion.
This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here
. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

John Clarkson whispers that they cannot go on exhausting me like this. The abolitionists all rise from their chairs. We have finished our talks
for the day. The men come to me one by one, full of handshakes and salutations.

One man asks if I have enough to eat, and if English food is not offensive to my palate. I reassure him that my palate has not been offended. A fellow with a bushy moustache offers distractions from inevitable boredom. There is an astounding display of African mammals and reptiles in town, he says. It is all the rage in London. Have I seen it? I have no great feelings for creatures preserved in alcohol, but I don’t want to insult the good man. No, I tell him, I haven’t been out that way.

Sir Hastings takes his turn: Then what, dear God, do you do all day? Are you not disoriented by the commotion of mongers, horses and carts? His mouth drops when I say that no such commotion compares to that in the belly of a slave ship. Another abolitionist asks about the thieving street urchins of London. Do they not trouble me? I am of no interest to street urchins, I reply, but at the corner of Old Jewry and Prince a ragged old African man stands under a hat sculpted in the shape of a ship. Sometimes I give a few pence when the hat man extends his palm. The abolitionists howl in concert: I must take great care, they say, not to be duped by London’s idle connivers. No disrespect intended, they say, but rascals and layabouts have the black hearts of highwaymen.

I step toward the door. One persistent chatterer pleads with me to say how I spend my time. I volunteer that I have someone who takes me to the library. He has a chuckle over that. I can imagine heads turning, he says.

Don’t laugh, John Clarkson says a little too sharply, I bet she has read more books than you.

At the end of each meeting, the abolitionists bring out little gifts. At the last meeting I received a book, a newspaper and a piece of hard yellow candy with two peanuts inside. This time, Sir Hastings presents me with a new quill and a glass inkpot decorated with swirling lines of indigo blue. I love the smoothness and the heft in my hand. I rub the surface but the
indigo is buried deep in the glass. Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.

Standing too close and bumping into one another, the abolitionists escort me from 18 Old Jewry Street. Down the stairs I go and out into the heart of London. I take hold of the offered arm, and John Clarkson walks me back to his house. He lives nearby. These days, it takes me time to cover two city blocks. People stream by as we inch along, but that does not matter. I am still upright and I am still walking.

Back in John Clarkson’s home, I will have a bit of bread with some sharp Cheddar. I like all foods with voices: mangoes, malaguetta peppers, boiled ginger with honey, rum. John Clarkson’s wife was quite scandalized when I first asked for it.
Rum?

After a snack and a nap, I hope to pick up my quill. If I live long enough to finish this story, it will outlive me. Long after I have returned to the spirits of my ancestors, perhaps it will wait in the London Library. Sometimes I imagine the first reader to come upon my story. Could it be a girl? Perhaps a woman. A man. An Englishman. An African. One of these people will find my story and pass it along. And then, I believe, I will have lived for a reason.

WE WERE BROUGHT TO AN ISLAND just off the coast of the toubabu’s land. There were about one hundred of us left. We were all placed inside a square barricade. Toubabu stood as sentries at the gate and patrolled inside with clubs and firesticks, but mostly we were left alone to wonder what would now become of us.

It seemed to me that we had travelled to the other side of the sun. On this side of the world, the sun was worn out and not to be trusted. My fingers grew thick and numb every night and throbbed every day as the sun climbed the sky. My ears were cold. My nose was cold. Like the others, I had been given a rough cloth barely long enough to wrap around my backside. I shivered at night on the sandy earth, and one morning I awoke to find smoke trickling from my mouth. I thought my face had caught fire. I thought that someone had bedevilled me during the night, or branded my tongue. I waited for the burning. I prepared to scream. I
held my breath. No smoke. I breathed. Smoke again. It came from within me. No burning. Just smoke. The smoke in my breath continued until the sun began to climb the sky. And then I noticed that others, too, had smoke mouths in the morning.

Most of the other homelanders were gaining strength every day. But here on this tiny island, my bowels issued streams of brown water. My body was giving up.

Biton came to sit by me one morning. “You crossed the big river, child. Don’t die now.”

I blinked. I had not the strength to answer. He stayed by my side, patting my hand.

Twice a day, without fail, the toubabu placed buckets of food and water just inside the gate. They always left enough for all of us. Fanta poked around in the rice and yams and picked out bits of meat that she said smelled like pork. She and I wouldn’t touch them, but the others ate them readily. I sipped water but had lost my appetite. I felt that I would sooner die than eat pork. Still, Biton came to me each day and told me I must eat. He balled some rice on his fingertips and brought it to my face.

“Look,” he said. “No pork in this rice. To live, child, you must eat.”

Fanta muttered that pork had contaminated the entire bucket of food, but Biton shooed her away and brought the food to my lips. I was too weak to protest.

On days that I couldn’t lift myself up off the ground, Chekura brought me food and Fomba brought water. Fanta said she would pull my ear if I didn’t move again, but even in my illness, I did not want her to mother me. Nobody spoke of the revolt or the killings, but I could not forget the things Fanta had done. We, the survivors of the crossing, broke off into little groups to eat and to sleep and to spend our days waiting together. I found myself with Biton, Chekura, Fomba and Fanta and a young woman
named Oumou. At night, the six of us slept close together, for comfort, but I did my best to avoid lying next to Fanta.

The toubabu left us cold water for washing and brought us bowls of oil to rub on our skin. They dropped off food buckets twice a day and kept their distance from us. But they watched who was eating and rubbing oil and who was not, and they threatened to club any captive who resisted. Chekura offered to rub the oil into my dry, cracked skin. Fanta stood between the two of us and said she would take care of it. I preferred Chekura’s gentler manner, but had not the will to object.

“So now they fatten us,” Fanta said, oiling my shins, “and we know what that means.”

I tried to pray in Papa’s way. I thought that if I could find my way back to Allah, someone might rescue me. By now, the people of Bayo and other villages would know what had happened to me. They could put together enough men to overwhelm the captors with firesticks, trace my steps, and come save me. Bent down, with head lowered, I turned toward where the sun rose. I turned in the direction of my homeland.
Come save me. Someone, please come save me
. I began the ritual prayers. But Biton forbade me, hand on my shoulder, stern and unmoving. Biton said that just a day earlier a man had been beaten for praying in my manner. I was not to pray. Not to expose myself to beatings. In my state, he said, I would never survive a beating. First and foremost, he said, I had a duty to stay alive.

“Remember your mama and your papa,” he said. “You carry them in your heart. Listen to them. They will tell you what to do.”

“And all those people who jumped overboard, had they not mamas and papas?”

“Turn your mind from the ship, child. It is nothing but a rotting carcass in the grass. The carcass has shocked you with its stink and its flies. But you have walked past it, already, and now you must keep walking.”

“Do you think they will come for us?”

Biton helped me back up on my feet and looked at me with darkening eyes. “Who?”

“The homelanders. Our people.”

Biton looked out toward the water. I followed his gaze, and noticed that the ship that had brought us was no longer there. It must have sailed away in the night.

“No, child,” Biton said, “they will not come.”

I told myself that Biton didn’t know about these things. He didn’t pray. He had no knowledge of Allah. He had to be wrong. But perhaps he could help me in another way.

“One day, when we are strong again, could you take me back across that river?”

“Do you know the thickness of a rabbit’s foot?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s how close we all came to dying. Only six moons ago, I taught the boys in my village to wrestle. None of them could beat me. And now I am already old. Too old for the thing you ask. And you are too young to think of it.”

“One day,” I said.

“Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.”

Once or twice more, I recited the ritual prayers in my head.
Allaahu Akbar. Ashhadu Allah ilaaha illa-Lah. Ash hadu anna Muhamadar rasuululah
. It wasn’t the same as praying at home in a quiet spot with all thoughts of the world behind me. At home, even during the Ramadan, when we fasted during daylight for a full cycle of the moon, praying came easily. But in the toubabu’s land I couldn’t pray by myself. Praying inside my head felt lonely and futile. As the nights came and went, thoughts of Allah faded.

We ate on Sullivan’s Island around communal buckets. On our third day, Fanta would not stop glaring at Fomba during a meal. He scraped some
food up into his palm and wandered off to eat alone. Biton stood abruptly, followed Fomba and brought him back with a hand on his shoulder.

“He eats with us,” he said in Bamanankan, and made me explain it to Fanta. He said it didn’t matter if Fomba and certain others were slaves in our homeland. Here, in the toubabu’s land, we would eat together. We would reveal no differences. The toubabu were to know nothing of us.

Fanta kicked over the bucket. “I was not to be a captive,” she muttered. “I am freeborn.”

A BUNCH OF US HUDDLED TOGETHER to sleep on the cold, hard sand. Biton. Fanta. Chekura. Fomba. Oumou. A few others. And me. Never in Bayo had I seen numerous men and women all sleeping together. It never would have been tolerated. But here on this island, pooling our warmth in a nest of bodies gave us comfort.

I awoke one night to see the stars on fire. I missed the feel of Oumou’s warm leg over mine, and the sound of Biton snoring. Chekura was there. Fomba was nearby. Fanta, unfortunately, was right beside me. But Oumou and Biton were gone.

I rolled over and sucked in my breath. There they were. Biton and Oumou! Just a few steps away. They were riding each other, gasping, thrusting their loins one into the other. They were locked together like dogs. I heard the sound of wet flesh slapping. It made me think of the medicine man taking the women always at the same time of day: after eating and after firewater, but before sleep. At home with my parents, sometimes I had to rise in the night to relieve myself. But first, I had to look. Mama and Papa might be together, rocking and heaving just like Oumou and Biton. Now I couldn’t get up. I would have to lie still. I would shut my eyes and hope they would stop soon, and wish I never saw it again.

In the morning, when I awoke, Oumou and Biton were back among us, and nobody said a thing.

A SHIP CAME TO THE ISLAND. The toubabu began to round us up, starting with those of us who still had fluids draining from our bodies. My body wanted to drop. It wanted nothing other than to spread out and be cradled by the earth itself. Straw. Grass. Earth. Sand. I was beyond caring. Any sort of bed would do. But they forced me up on my feet and made me bend over. I feared that they would burn my flesh again, but lacked the strength to fight. They pushed my head lower, pulled out my hips and slid a plug of grass deep into my anus. It stung and brought on sharp cramps, but I could not expel the thing. I was made to stand straight again. They made each of us remove the rough cloth we had been given and throw it into a raging fire. We were led onto a ship and sailed across the water, toward the land that was in view.

An unmistakable stink blew in with the wind. I smelled it before I turned around. Another ship from my homeland. I could barely make out the people bunched together on the deck. Their ship drew slowly toward the island we had just left. I felt relieved that I would not have to look into their eyes, or to confront their misery. I hoped I would never meet them.

The toubabu gave us each another bit of cloth, just as rough as the first. I put my arms through it and pulled it down over my head. The coarse material scratched my skin, but it didn’t hurt as much as the white rope that they bound around my wrists. Planks were laid from the ship to a wharf, and we walked down into the toubabu’s land.

Never had I seen a place so crowded or strange. I saw toubabu boys and toubabu men, straight-haired and yellow-toothed, walking, riding horses or sitting in carts. Some wore rags and others fine layers of cloth with thick boots.

Strangest of all, I saw homelanders everywhere carrying goods, sweating and shouting. In their voices I sometimes heard notes of joy and play. No shackles bound their wrists or ankles, but not one of them fought or tried to run away. Some of the working homelander men wore nothing but breeches. The homelander women took their time on the streets, parading their backsides and sporting coloured head scarves. I could not take my eyes off the reds and oranges and blues that ran and swam in those scarves. Some of the women laughed with the toubabu. I saw one toubab man place his hand on the backside of a homelander woman. She smiled at him, open mouthed.

Toubabu boys laughed and threw pebbles at us. On the street, on steps, on porches, on top of wooden buildings and on horse-drawn carts, people yelled and stared. The world had gone mad.

I saw a toubab woman. She held a round object over her head for shade. Her hands were as white as bones. No. Not bones. Not possible. Her hands were the colour of scrubbed elephant teeth. I looked again. That wasn’t skin. It was something else, covering her hands. It looked soft and delicate. How I longed for that material. Perhaps it would save my fingers from feeling cold and swollen through the nights.

The toubab woman looked straight at me. Cheeks, pink and fat. Lips, thin and pale. Her eyes made me think of a rock-strewn river, with deep, dangerous water calling out to me,
Jump in, child. Jump right in. It won’t hurt
.

Our eyes met. The woman’s hand flew up to her mouth. I could feel my scalp itching where the hair had fallen out, the running sore on my knee and the plug of grass that choked my backside. I wished to become the woman who was growing inside me, to find my dignity and never have it stripped from me again.

I stepped in a hole and lost my balance. Even with his hands bound, Chekura managed to use an arm to keep me from falling. “Aminata! Walk correctly. Walk!”

Everywhere I looked, I saw goods. Sacks of grain, stacks of corn, hay for horses, piles of nails, cows and pigs being led across streets. No goats. But chickens everywhere, bunched together five or more, feet strung, hanging upside down from the same rope, carried along by boys or by homelanders.

The streets and gutters were filled with waste. Rotting fruit, dead cats, human feces and green meat, all of it picked over by fat-bellied, big-winged birds of death that circled and spun and looped in the air. I thought they eyed me too as they flew past, and I imagined they were thinking,
In good time we’ll get you too
.

In my homeland, the towns I knew were set up in a circle so everybody could be together. In this place, people walked off in all directions, taking dusty roads running either side by side or at sharp angles to one another. I didn’t believe I could ever find my way in such a place.

We were herded into an open space in front of a building made of wood, built to the height of five grown men. So many people were packed into the space that I thought it was a market. I looked around for piles of squashes, salt or shea nuts, but saw only people—my people—bound and roughly clothed. Chekura was pulled away from me, and so were Fanta, Biton and most of the others. I called out to Chekura, but the sounds of shouting men drowned out my voice. The healthy captives were shoved into one large circle, and into another circle went the rest of us—those who limped or bled or had gone blind or had ribs protruding like half-built ships. Somebody nudged me. I looked back. It was Fomba. His eyes were glassy, and he walked off balance, head cocked far to the side. It seemed that the toubabu already knew that Fomba was not quite right.

“Fomba,” I said. He looked at me. He raised his tied wrists so he could nibble a fingernail. His mind had left him, but I could bring it back. “Don’t lean like that. Straighten your head.” If he looked valuable, perhaps he would be spared a beating, or worse.

Two toubabu men stood on a platform. The healthy captives were led up to them, one by one. Most of them stood with shoulders slumped and heads down while the toubabu shouted. When the shouting stopped, they were taken down from the platform and led out through the crowd.

When Biton was brought up onto the platform, he held his chin up. He had a cut on his shin and a scar on his face, but he stood tall and straight. His skin was oiled and shiny. I hated that he had to stand there like that with all eyes turned on him. A toubab lifted up Biton’s cloth to look at his shrivelled penis. He dropped the cloth back into place and tested a biceps. When the shouting grew loud, Biton looked around and caught my eyes. He opened his mouth.
Aminata Diallo
, he said. I couldn’t hear a thing over the noise of the crowd. But I saw his mouth move and I knew he was saying my name.