THE BOOK OF NEGROES (5 page)

“Here in the middle is safest,” Fanta whispered. “This is where my husband would tell me to walk,”

“What happened to him?” I whispered.

“When I was carried off, he was fighting two men,” she said.

“And the village?”

“Half of it was burning.”

Fanta pressed her lips together and turned her face away, and I knew better than to ask another question.

We passed scores of villages. I heard the beating of tam-tam drums, saw buzzards circling lazily in the sky and caught the smell of goat meat riding in the breeze, but there was no rescue. There weren’t even any objections from villagers.

One day, as we were passing a village, a man was taken from a walled enclosure and led to our captors. He was bound at the wrists, and was followed by children who watched the villagers negotiate with the captors. Finally, in exchange for copper manillas and salt, the captors took the man and yoked him to the last person in the coffle. The children began taunting the new captive. As the clamour grew, some of the bigger boys threw stones and rotting fruit peels at us. A stick flew into my thigh, drawing blood. I gasped and swallowed the cowrie shell that I had been keeping in my mouth for company. I choked as it made its way down, and ran behind Fomba for protection. Fomba did his best to block the flying objects and shouted at the boys to stop. Stark naked, hair matted and filthy, head held angled to the side, hands waving wildly, he was quite a sight. He was hit
by a few stones and mangoes before the coffle leaders chased away the boys and hustled us from the village.

I could not understand why we had been the amusement of those village boys. True, the children of Bayo—myself included—had teased Fomba all the time. But we had never hurt him. We had never yoked him by the neck, or deprived him of food. I had never seen captives passing outside our walled village. But if we had seen men, women and children yoked and forced to march like
woloso
, only worse, I hoped that we would have fought for them and freed them.

That evening, Chekura brought a calabash of water and some soap made from shea nuts, and offered to help clean the wound on my thigh.

“I can do it,” I said.

“Let me help,” he said, aiming a thin stream of water so that it ran over my cut.

“Why do the children in the villages taunt us?” I asked.

“They are only boys, Aminata,” Chekura said.

“And all these villagers who sell goods to the captors and stand guard over us at night? Why do they help these men?”

“Why do
I
help them?” he said. “What choice have they?”

“They were not all sold by their uncles,” I said.

“We do not know their stories,” Chekura said.

The next day, when we passed a town, I felt relieved that nobody came out to throw stones or hurl insults. A few women bearing fruits and nuts clustered around our captors, and one of them watched me carefully, followed me for a moment, and then walked beside me. She removed the platter from her head and handed me a banana and small sack of peanuts. I could not understand her words, but her voice sounded kind. She placed her dry, dusty hand on my shoulder. It was such an unexpected gesture of kindness that my eyes filled with tears. She patted my shoulder, said something in an urgent tone and was gone before I had the chance to thank her.

I HAD MY FIRST BLEEDING during our long march. I tried to calm myself by thinking that I wouldn’t live much longer, and that my humiliation wouldn’t last long. Cramps shot through my belly. In my nakedness, it was impossible to hide the blood running down my legs.

When Chekura approached me, I hissed at him, “Go away.”

“Are you ill?”

“Go away.”

“Have some water.” I sipped from his skin of water, but refused to acknowledge him.

“Have you been cut?”

“Are you stupid?”

“I can help you.”

“Leave me alone.” He walked beside me for some time, but I was silent. Finally, he turned to walk away. As he did, I called out, “When we stop tonight, find me a woman from a village.”

He nodded and kept going.

We settled for the evening on the outskirts of a village. Chekura disappeared. Later, two women walked up to my captors, pointed at me and had an animated talk. They gave the captors some palm wine and then came up to me.

The women chattered in a language I could not understand. One woman tugged my hand. I looked toward Chekura, who nodded that I was free to go. The woman led me by the hand while the other followed. We left the captives, who were settled under trees, and wandered past a sentry and inside a walled village. I saw a well, some round storage huts and some rectangular homes with mud walls similar to those of Bayo. The women led me behind a small home. Evidently, it belonged to the woman who had taken me by the hand. They brought me a cauldron of warm water and let me wash myself. When I was done, they led me inside,
where it was cool, and had me sit on a bench. I looked for signs of knives or other instruments, wondering if they meant to do something to me, now that my womanhood was emerging. Just as my terror was reaching such a peak that I looked to see if anybody was blocking the door to prevent my escape, another woman came in carrying a blue cloth. She gave it to me, and signalled for me to wrap it around myself. It was long and wide enough to reach around my belly and backside. I felt so much better, and safer, with my privates covered. Suddenly I was hungry, and I realized that the shame of nakedness had kept my appetite at bay. Now that I was decent, they invited me to sit and eat with them, chatting at me all the while.
Take the food
. This I heard my mother saying to me, from the spirit lands.
Take the food, child. These women won t hurt you
.

They gave me some goat meat with malaguetta pepper, dripping in a hot peanut sauce. It was delicious, but rich. I could feel my stomach revolting, and could only eat a little. They pressed a pouch of peanuts into my hand, as well as dried, salty strips of goat meat. They kept chattering at me, and I assumed they were asking about my family and my name. I answered in my own language, which made them shriek with laughter. Finally, they led me back to my captors. They seemed to be negotiating, offering, cajoling, but they could make no headway with the men in the group, who shook their heads and waved the women off. The women came back to me, squeezed my hands and touched the moons on my face. They told me something over and over again that I could not understand, and turned and left. I wished that I had been allowed to stay with them. I settled again under a tree, guarded by my captors, and felt too confused to sleep. I had no idea whether the people of the next village would show brutality or kindness.

The coffle increased in size daily. Every morning, when we were roused and made to start walking again, there were two or three new captives. Only the women and children were allowed to walk without neck yokes.
At night, when the men were released from the yokes so they could lie down and sleep, guards watched our every movement. My feet formed blisters, grew painful and became leathery and calloused. Fomba showed me the soles of his feet after a long day’s walking. They were yellowed and thick and tougher than goatskin, but also dried and cracked. He was bleeding between his toes. I convinced Chekura to get me some shea butter at a village, and one night, while Fanta clucked in disapproval, I rubbed the butter into Fomba’s feet.

“Daughter of Mamadu and Sira, I thank you,” he said.

I didn’t know who his parents were. I didn’t know his family name. “You are welcome, Fomba,” was all I said. He smiled and patted my hand.

“Daughter of Mamadu and Sira, you are good.”

Fanta clucked again.

“Wife of Chief,” Fomba said, addressing her. “Puller of Ears.”

I broke into laughter. It was the first time I had laughed in a long time. Fomba smiled, and even Fanta saw the humour in it.

“Is there any shea butter left?” she said.

Fomba rubbed some into her feet, and she promised to never pull his ears again.

I WAS WALKING ONE DAY BEHIND A YOKED MAN who Swerved without warning to the left. I had no time to react, and my foot sank into something wet and soft. Something like a twig cracked under my heel. I let out a scream. Under my foot was the body of a naked, decomposing man. I jumped away and ripped leaves from the nearest branch. In a frenzy, I wiped a mass of wriggling white worms from my ankle. I was shaking and wheezing. Fanta took the leaves and wiped my foot and held me and told me not to be afraid. But my hysteria escalated, even though Fanta barked at me to calm down, and I could not stop screaming.

“Stop it right now,” Fanta said. She grabbed me, shook my shoulders and clamped a hand on my mouth. She twisted my chin around until our eyes met.

“Look at me,” she said. “Look. Here. In my eyes. That is no longer a man.”

My lungs began to settle down. As they stopped heaving, I was able to breathe more easily. Fanta took her hand off my mouth. I did not scream again.

“It’s just skin and bones,” she said. “Think of a goat. It’s just a body.” Fanta put an arm around me until my trembling subsided.

From that point on, snakes and scorpions were not the only things to watch out for on the increasingly well-worn path. Soon we were stepping over at least one body a day. When captives fell, they were untied from their coffles and left to rot.

WE WALKED THROUGH AN ENTIRE REVOLUTION of the moon, and then through another. Along with the coming and going of the moon, I now had my own body to mark passage of time. Between one bleeding and the next, I encountered more villages, more captives sold into our coffle and more guards to tighten the knots around our ankles at night.

When people ask about my homeland now, they all seem to be fascinated by dangerous beasts. Everybody wants to know if I had to run from lions or stampeding elephants. But it was the man-stealers that I had to worry about most. Any man or woman who disrupted the coffle was beaten severely. And anyone who tried to escape was killed. Wild animals were the last thing on my mind. One night, however, as we settled under a cluster of trees, a baboon raced out of the bushes. Its shoulders and haunches swung riotously, and it shot straight like a bee into our midst. We stood and yelled. The captors yelled too. The baboon swept up the
small girl who had been walking for two moons with her father and stole away with her, tearing back into the bushes. Even after she was out of sight, I could hear the girl wailing. The father jumped to his feet, crying for help. Chekura cut through the rope around the man’s ankle and ran off with him in pursuit of the baboon.

They were gone for a long time. Long enough for us to eat our food glumly, waiting for news of the girl. We heard the father wailing before we saw him, and then we saw Chekura and the man descending a hill. The father was carrying his inert daughter in his arms. Her neck was open and bright red. The captors did not tie him back up. They let him dig a shallow grave for the girl. He covered her up with the soil, got down on his knees and wept uncontrollably. It was the first time that a man had cried in my presence. The distress made my stomach heave. It wasn’t right to see a grown man sobbing. It seemed impossible that his daughter had been taken from him so abruptly. I found it unbearable to contemplate his pain, yet I could not escape the sound of his agony. Although I was allowed to walk freely with the coffle in the daytime, I was tied up at night. I tried to focus on other things around me—the palm trees, the rocks, the outline of high mud walls around a village in the distance, a rabbit hopping in the moonlight. The other captives also turned away from the grieving father.

The others eventually fell asleep, but I could not stop thinking about the man and his daughter. When I could no longer hear his sobs, I looked for him in the darkness, but the place beside the grave was empty. Finally, I noticed him approaching a tree some twenty paces behind us. Up and up he scaled, pulling himself onto one branch after another. The tree was taller than twenty men stacked one above the other, but the man kept climbing.

I willed him to climb back down. I prayed that he would come to his senses. Perhaps his wife was dead too, but one day he might be free again. One day he might find another wife and have another daughter. I stood
up and stared and hoped. A captor noticed me, and then hollered at the father to come down. Still the man kept climbing. The captives heard the shouting and awakened and saw what was happening, and moved—bound as they were in pairs, by the ankles—away from the tree. At the top, the father climbed all the way out on a branch jutting from the trunk. He howled one last time and dropped through the air at an astonishing speed. Never had I seen a body fall from such a height. I turned away just before he struck the ground, but I heard the
thud
and I felt the vibration run under my toes. Our captors refused to bring him to his daughter, or to bury him or even to touch the body. They were unwilling to acknowledge this act of self-destruction. On their orders, we walked for a good spell through the night and finally settled under another set of trees far removed from the bodies of the father and his child.

OUR OVERLAND JOURNEY CONTINUED for three cycles of the moon. One day, our captors stopped at a fork in the path and saluted a new breed of man. Skin speckled, like that of a washed pig. Shrunken lips, blackened teeth. But big, and tall, and standing like a chief, chest out. So this was a toubab! My fellow captives’ eyes widened to take in this strange creature, but the villagers on the path didn’t react at all. I realized that they had seen toubabu before. He joined our captors at the head of the walk. He was tall and gaunt and bearded and thin lipped, and he had crust around his eyes. He spoke a few words in the language of the captors.

I caught Chekura’s eye, and when he came up beside me, I asked, “Where is the toubab from?”

“Across the big water,” Chekura said.

“Is he a man or an evil spirit?”

“A man,” Chekura said. “But he is not a man you want to know.”

“You know him?”

“No, but you don’t want to know any toubab.”