THE BOOK OF NEGROES (9 page)

Holding me by the arm, the medicine man led me down a new set of stairs. He pushed through a crowded room where men slept in hammocks slung from beams overhead. We passed a cook working by a huge pot, then through a narrow space lined with doors. The medicine man opened one of them and we entered a small room. He shut the door. It was just the two of us in there. It was a relief to be away from the fetid sleeping quarters and away from the crowded deck. But alone with the toubab in his room was not a good place for me.

He yawned, stretched his arms and removed a jacket. His shirt was yellow around the armpits and he gave off a sharp smell. He sat on the bed. It was a wooden platform raised above the floor and covered with a lumpy cloth bag stuffed with straw. He motioned for me to sit. I remained standing. He banged the edge of the bed. I sat, uneasily, wishing some others were with me. In this situation, Fanta would know what to do.

The medicine man uttered a toubabu word, pointing where I sat.

“Bed,” he said, over and over, waiting for me to point and say the same.

“Bed,” I said, and he seemed happy.

He struck his own chest, thumb pointing toward his breastbone, and repeated another word. “Tom,” he said many times.

“Tom,” I repeated.

Then he pointed at me. I said my name. He scrunched up his face. “Aminata,” I said once more.

But he pointed at me and said something else. Over and over. He wanted me to repeat it.

“Mary,” I finally said. He pointed to me again, and I did it too. I used my thumb, just like him. “Mary,” I said softly. I pushed the word through my lips and told myself it would be the last time I would ever say it, or his name.

He jumped up and clapped his hands. “Mary,” he said, over and over.

I got up too. I wanted to be with the women again. But he put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down, leaning his face too close to mine. There were orange hairs on his chin, and huge whiskers shooting out from his ears and his face. On the side of his face, near his ears, hair grew as thick as his thumbs. He crossed the floor of his room, rummaged through a trunk, and brought out some red cloth. It was wide and long and made of soft linen. He draped it over my arm. I jumped up and wrapped it around my backside and privates, knotting it at the hip. He seemed to marvel at my knot, and at the speed of my hands. After making me sit once more on the bed, he left the room.

Opposite the bed was a small hole in the wall. I went over to look, and caught a fine spray of mist on the face. We were riding over calm waters. I could hear the gentle flapping of the ship’s linens, but a strange new sound came from behind me. I stood still. Although the door had not opened, I was sure somebody was watching me. My heart pounded. I spun around. Nobody. Nobody at all. And then the sound came again, from a corner of the room. There, on another table, was a metal cage. Inside was a blue and yellow parrot with a nasty beak. Its wings rustled. I jumped back. It was only moving on its perch. It could not escape, and it could not get me, for it was locked in that cage just as surely as I was locked in the ship.

It put its head to one side, as if to get a better look at me, and suddenly uttered a string of words. I could not understand a thing. The bird was not singing. It was speaking. And it did not use a homelander language. The bird spoke the toubabu’s language.

Beside the cage was a dish with nuts. I bit into one. It tasted full, and rich. I put two more in my mouth and chewed them. The bird looked at the nuts and at my mouth. Back and forth it looked, squawking wildly. I dropped the nuts. Next to them was a yellow fruit with a thick peel, about half the size of my fist and pointed at the ends. I bit into it. It was bitter, so I put it down.

I turned when the door opened.

“Oh oh oh,” the medicine man said. He came up to me and inspected the yellow fruit with my teeth marks. He reached for his belt and pulled a knife from a sheath. I backed to the bed and pressed my lips together to keep from crying out. But he did not point the knife at me. Instead, he sliced the fruit into sections, took some light brown crystals from a jar and sprinkled them on the fruit. He raised a section to his mouth, bit into it and sucked the flesh away without eating the peel. He gave a section to me. I raised it to my mouth, sucked, and gagged on the sourness. The medicine man put on more crystals. I sucked again. My mouth danced with taste, and I was suddenly aware of my hunger and thirst.

He had brought me two cocoa-nut shells. One held water, and the other, boiled yams with palm oil. I ate the yams too fast, drank the water as if someone might steal it, and then felt my stomach threatening to revolt. The boat was rocking again on the waters. “Food,” he said, pointing at what I ate.

I repeated the word.

“Hungry,” he said, tapping his belly.

I tried to say that.

He tapped the surface on which I was sitting once more. I remembered the word.

“Bed,” I said.

He smiled and indicated that I should lie down. This did not seem like a good idea, but I had no place to go. The ship was a mystery. If I broke free and ran from the medicine man, I wouldn’t even know how to find the homelander women. And even if I did, I would have to sleep again in the stinking hold of the ship. He pulled a woven cloth over me, stroked my shoulder, and repeated, “Mary.”

His hand slid under the cloth and moved lower down my back. I turned sharply and drew the cloth over my body. I lay face down, legs clamped together. He slipped his hand onto my back again. I turned over, sat up and hissed at him.

“Don’t do that, or my father will return from the dead to strike you down,” I said. “I have just eleven rains.”

The toubab had no idea what I was saying, though he must have sensed my anger and fear. When some animals smell fear, they attack all the more fiercely. But the medicine man turned away sharply, head in his hands. After a moment, he reached for a white object on a table and clutched it to his breast. It was an oddly simple carving, with one stick running down and the other across. He pressed this to his chest, mumbled something softly and covered me with the cloth. He patted my shoulders and kept mumbling. His hand did not drift down my back again. I stayed rigid, lying on my back so I could watch him, incommunicative. Finally, I must have fallen asleep.

I awoke in the darkness. I had been shoved over to the far side of the bed, right up against a wall, and I was not alone. Beside me two figures, one atop the other, rocked back and forth. Both breathed loudly. One had a high, protesting, frightened voice. She was a homelander woman, gasping and uttering words I could not understand. She was underneath. The medicine man lay on top of her, grunting and pushing, up and down, up and down. I pressed myself flat against the wall and closed my eyes. I
knew that a man was never to touch a woman like that, unless she was his wife. Even if Papa had not taught me parts of the Qur’an, I would have known that.

“Aaaaah,” the toubab sighed. The bed grew still.

I felt the medicine man’s weight fall into the space between the woman and me, while she gasped and cried. Eventually his breathing slowed and so did hers. I watched their chests rise and fall in the night for a long time, until I too must have fallen asleep.

I awoke with light streaming through the window. The medicine man was gone. The woman was gone. I pulled the red cloth tight around me. The window was shut. On the table beneath it, I found some cowrie shells and three hard metal objects. Not even the thickness of a ladybug, they were round like my thumbnail, but bigger. They were silver coloured. I bit into one of them, but it would not give. A man’s head was sculpted into one side of each object.

OVER THE NEXT DAYS, the orange-haired toubab showed me how to get out of the cabin and go up on the deck, and where to find compartments there for the male and the female captives. The women could visit the men’s area, but the men remained chained and couldn’t leave theirs. Armed sentries were posted to keep them to their small patch on the deck.

By day I moved freely on the deck, but at night I was expected down in the medicine man’s room. He showed me how to care for his bird. I was to cover the birdcage with a cloth at night and to remove it in the morning. I had to clean out the cage, feed the bird nuts, and give it any other treat that the toubab brought into the room. Banana. Cooked meat. Yams, millet, rice. That bird ate anything. When the medicine man wasn’t around, I ate the food myself. The bird squawked when I ate the nuts, so I gave him some of them. If I ever made it back to Bayo, the people would
never believe me.
The toubab medicine man loved a bird. Let it perch on his arm. Loved it so much he taught it to speak the toubabu’s language
. I could only imagine their reaction. They would throw things at me and howl in laughter and talk about it for two moons straight.
Tell me again about the man and his bird
.

The medicine man never tried to touch me when the bird was watching. First, he made me slip the cloth over its cage. There are men whose eyes burn with the intention to hurt, but this toubab had weak, blue, watering irises—even when the bird could not see us. Whenever he put his hand on my shoulder or back, I gave a sharp shove and an angry shout. He would recoil like a kicked dog and begin to read from a book that he kept in the room. He read out loud. It sounded as if he was saying the same words, over and over again. Oddly, in those moments, he would give me whatever I asked for. Food. Water. Another arm’s length of cloth from the wooden trunk in his cabin. Or one of his mysterious metal discs with a man’s head sculpted into one side.

THE TOUBABU BROUGHT THE HOMELANDER men up from their hold in small groups every day. I would see them emerge from the darkness, stumbling, wincing in the blazing sunlight and covering their eyes with the crook of their arms. Confined in their little compartment on deck, the men were given water and food, and sometimes allowed to wash themselves. I saw one older man tumble over face-forward as he attempted to wash himself. He could not get up. His ribs were showing and he looked utterly spent. A homelander woman—also older, and also weak—was tending to him, caressing his forehead and tipping a calabash of water to his lips. Four toubabu pushed her aside and seized him by his knees and armpits. He sagged in their arms, and barely had the strength to resist. The woman screamed and pleaded and tried to loosen the toubabu’s
fingers. They bumped past her, lugged him to the side of the ship and threw him over.

In the next days, the woman’s sadness was so great that nobody wanted to stand near her on the deck, or crouch beside her at the food bucket. From Sanu, I heard that one day the woman would not come up on the deck any longer. After two more days, she was no longer moving. She was carried out and thrown into the deep, the same as her man. Nobody fought or pleaded for her. And nobody wanted to speak of her, when she was gone. I asked Fanta if she thought the woman had died, at least, before they took her out of the hold.

“Shh,” she said, and turned away.

AS THE DAYS WENT BY, I saw that the more the women were free to move about, the more they risked. Fanta told me that I was a fool to go with the medicine man. She said she would rather sleep by the shit buckets in the hold than in the bed of a toubab. She usually stayed in the hold, and because she was so big with child, the toubabu let her do so. But I didn’t have much choice, and many of the other women were made to spend nights, or parts of nights, with the toubabu leaders. The medicine man took a woman into his bed every few nights. He had three or four favourites, and made me stay in the bed even when he had a woman. I would push myself up against the wall and plug my ears and hum loudly and try to ignore the heaving and vibrations. I knew that almost as soon as his body quit shuddering, he would fall into a short sleep. The woman would get out of bed as gingerly as she could, and rustle around the medicine man’s room, sometimes pulling an object out of a storage box and slipping it inside her wrap. The toubab would wake with a start, get up, give the woman some food or water or coloured cloth and send her out.

In his room at night, the women never looked at me or met my eyes. I understood that I was not to speak to them. I would never tell that the homelander women stole whatever they could from the boxes brought daily in and out of the medicine man’s cabin. I saw iron files disappear inside cloth wraps. I saw one woman take an orange with his consent, wait for him to turn his back, pick a nail off the floor and plunge it deep inside the fruit.

Up on the top deck of the ship, I heard the women talking. They said that the grand chief of the toubabu was built like a donkey and never gave the women anything but the stink of his body. The women said that hair covered his neck, his back and even his toes. Fanta just grunted, warning that one of us would surely end up in his stomach, right next to his hairball.

After ten days at sea, the toubabu removed the irons from some of the men allowed up on deck, but reshackled them later when they were pushed back down the hold. Biton encouraged me to learn all the toubabu words that I could, so that I could give him information. And he was always telling me to take objects from the medicine man’s cabin.

“If Biton loved you like a father,” Chekura warned, “he wouldn’t try to put you in danger. Tell him you can’t find anything.”

FOMBA STAYED SILENT AND CHAINED. I knew that Biton had told me not to ask for favours for Fomba, but I couldn’t bear looking at the raw skin and the blood on his ankles. He wouldn’t even complain to me. I got the medicine man to understand that Fomba could be trusted to be let out of chains and slop the food from the cooking pots into the buckets. I also managed to get a waistcloth for Fomba. But after that, it worried me to see women sometimes approaching Fomba and passing him objects when the toubabu were not looking.
Keep away from trouble
, I imagined my father telling me,
and stay safe
.

I saved food from the medicine man’s cabin for Fomba, Chekura, Fanta and Sanu, passing it to them on deck. One day, when I brought Chekura an orange, he ripped it apart, slurped out all the guts, and threw the remains overboard. He had juice and pulp all over his lips and face, and he looked like a child just learning to eat with his own hands, but he didn’t care. He was bursting with news.