The Call of Zulina (3 page)

Muco paid her no mind.

Grace, hands on her hips, positioned herself directly in front of Muco. “Mama Muco!” she demanded. “Talk to me!”

Mama Muco, her face grim, tipped her bucket over and poured soapy water across the stones. With a silent vengeance, she renewed her scrubbing.

“What is all this?” Grace asked, pointing to the dark stains splattered around her feet.

“Blood,” Mama said.

Blood? On the courtyard stones? Why, Lingongo would never allow such a thing. No. She would… .

And then in a flash, everything became horrifyingly clear. Dinner last night. The tender roasted meat laid out so generously before the insatiable Jasper Hathaway.

Grace fell to her knees and shrieked, “Bondo!”

Mama, her hair flying wild, rose to her feet and flung her black arms wide. “I told her I would not do it,” she said in a voice pulsing with controlled fury. “No, I said, not Grace's own gazelle. I will not put it to the knife, I said. Not even for fear of the whip, will I do that.”

Bondo! Her dear pet! Grace covered her face and dissolved into wracking sobs. So great was her distress that she never noticed the shadow pass in front of her and stop.

“So I did what my slave refused to do.”

Lingongo stood over her.

“Stop that this instant! I will not have such foolishness at my house!”

Choked with grief and shaking with rage, Grace stood up before her mother's crushing presence. But when Grace opened her mouth, her words tumbled over each other, and the best she could manage was to stammer out a tangled, “How ever could you dare to …” and “You had no right …” and “It isn’t fair … !” Always it was the same. Grace, overwhelmed with passion. Grace, mute with fury. Grace, helpless before her mother.

Poor Bondo. Back when the monsoon rains flooded the fields, Grace had dared defy her mother and splash out to sit in the relative shelter offered by the canopy of mango trees. A flash of black and brown—that's what first caught her attention. But as she looked more intently, she saw a flicker of white. When she crept close, she found a tiny gazelle trembling in pain and paralyzed with terror. Too injured to run away, it cowered in the trees, resigned to its fate. Grace reached out and picked it up.

“Attacked by a caracal is what I guess,” Mama Muco had said when Grace carried the injured animal to her. Though how so little a one could possibly have survived such an attack even Mama couldn’t imagine. “Sometimes a creature is just supposed to live,” she said. “No way to explain it except that's the way God wants it to be.”

“How do you suppose the gazelle got over the wall?” Grace asked.

“It did it because it had to,” Mama told her. “No wall is high enough to block out cold, hard desperation.”

At Mama Muco's direction, Grace had run back out into the pouring rain to gather fruit from the ghariti tree while Mama built up a fire in the African oven. Then under Mama's supervision, Grace had boiled the oil out of the fruit to make a healing poultice that she tenderly pasted onto the gazelle's wounds. Bondo survived, and with no more to show for his ordeal than a lame leg. And as the gazelle healed, he also grew tame. Grace could grab a handful of fresh millet from the storage huts, and Bondo would walk up to her and nibble the grain from her hand.

Now, as Grace glared at Lingongo, she demanded through trembling lips and clenched teeth, “Why, Mother?”

Lingongo's eyebrows arched in mock amazement. “Why? A true daughter of Africa would never ask such a question. That creature was weak and useless. Surely, even you know that. It was put on this earth to be a gazelle and nothing more. A gazelle does not make a good plaything. But it does make an impressive dinner for an honored guest.” Turning to Mama, she added, “Roasted to perfection, Muco. I thank you and pass along compliments from our guest.”

Mama Muco, her jaw clenched tight, glared at Lingongo.

“So, you see, Grace, nothing is completely worthless, despite how it may appear,” Lingongo continued. “It is all a question of how it is put to use. Remember that lesson, Daughter. It will serve you well.”

B
linded by tears and spurred on by fury, Grace sprang from the courtyard and sprinted across Mama Muco's kitchen garden. She bounded through the squash and jumped over the calabash gourds, then ran past the millet fields and out into the barren land beyond.

The last of the sweet potatoes had already been dug from the fields closest to the house. In the distance, Grace saw a line of slaves working the field with hoes. Perhaps because she knew how much it infuriated her mother when she talked to slaves, she walked directly toward them. Old men … lame men … young boys … women. Not prize workers, any of them, which was precisely why they made up the majority of the slaves at their compound. Except for planting time and harvest, Joseph Winslow saw no reason to work valuable young men in his fields when he could sell them to the slave ships at inflated prices. That was why Grace immediately noticed the muscular young slave at the head of the line who was doing twice the work of anyone else. When she got closer, she saw something that snatched her breath away
—
this muscular young slave had just half an ear on his right side.

“Yao!” Grace gasped.

Slaves came and slaves went. In the busy season, many worked the fields. Harvest time, too
—
always strong young slaves aplenty then. Soon they disappeared, though, and Grace never saw them again. But Yao … she had spent her childhood with him. He had grown up working in her father's fields, and to Lingongo's dismay, the two of them had devised all types of ways to play together. One day, as they climbed the ghariti trees, just when Yao was pointing out the village path to his mother's house, Lingongo happened by. Immediately, her whip had knocked the boy out of the tree. How Yao had howled! When he took his hand away from the side of his head, it was covered with blood and half his right ear was gone.

After that, Grace didn’t see Yao again. For months she mourned the loss of her playmate, but she was not allowed to so much as mention his name.

That was years ago. Now, here he was, back working in the fields
—
tall and proud, and not at all like the child she had run and played with.

Grace made her way toward the line of slaves, all of them swinging their heavy hoes up over their heads and then heaving them down onto the dry dirt clods, all chopping in rhythm. She stopped behind Yao.

“You are with slaves,” Yao said without breaking rhythm. “Your mother will not be pleased.”

“She doesn’t know I’m here,” Grace said.

Yao's hoe thudded down. A gust of wind snatched up the freshly chopped dirt and tossed it high into the air. His head didn’t move, but his eyes shifted toward a stand of trees off to the side of the field.

“Does anything happen here that your mother does not know?” he asked.

Grace followed Yao's eyes. The overseer
—
a slave named Tuako, though Joseph Winslow called him Tuke
—
stretched himself in the late afternoon shade and gazed back at her. An immense feeling of despair washed over Grace. No, not one thing did happen without Lingongo's knowledge. Not one. Fighting back tears, she surveyed the sandpapered land before her. Hopelessness was never clearer than when viewed through a cloud of blowing sand.

“The harmattan winds … ,” she began. “Some say they tell of dangers.”

“Bubuanhunu,”
Yao said in rhythm with the chopping of his hoe. “Dangers too many to count. They hide in the places you least expect.”

Dangers, yes!
Grace wanted to scream.
On our own courtyard!
But instead she blustered, “Well, maybe I won’t be waiting for dangers to come to me! Maybe I’ll leave this place. Maybe I’ll follow the road down into town, or perhaps I’ll board a ship and sail across the sea to England.”

“No. You will not,” Yao said.

Chop. Chop. Chop.

“And just how do you know what I will or will not do!” Grace demanded.

“You will not leave this place because you are a slave here,” Yao said.

“I am no slave!”

“A slave is exactly what you are.”

Chop. Chop. Chop.

“You are the slave, not me!” Grace shot back.

What a thing for Yao to say! Angry and perplexed, Grace glared hard at him: his back, crisscrossed with scars from Lingongo's whip … his ankle, bolted into an iron manacle … Yao's entire black body glistening with sweat. He swung the heavy hoe all day long, even in the sweltering noonday sun. Nothing like Grace's family. Oh, no. They all sat inside when the sun was high and entertained guests with food cooked by their slaves, and then they rested and sipped cool drinks and waited for the air to cool. But Yao, he worked through the blistering heat, and he would go right on working until the sun sank into the sea—even longer if his master desired it. That was what slaves did.

“You make no sense at all,” Grace protested. “Just look at you!” She pointed to the scar on Yao's shoulder where her father's branding iron had seared the Winslow property mark into his flesh. “Right there! Anyone can see it's you who are the slave!”

“The weak only make the strong stronger,” Yao replied.

Chop. Chop. Chop.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Grace asked impatiently.

Tuke called out to Yao, and Yao put down his hoe and moved to the outer edge of the field. He hefted a barrel of oil onto his shoulder. As Grace watched in sullen silence, Yao toted the barrel over to a pile of dry vines, tipped it on end, and thoroughly doused the vines. Though it took some doing, Tuke managed to strike a flint, and Yao set an oil-soaked rope against the spark. When it flared, he tossed it onto the pile. With a whoosh and a roar, flames leaped into the air. Grace let out a cry and jumped back, but Yao did not flinch.

“You belong to my parents!” Grace insisted. “So
you
are the slave, Yao! You, and not me!”

For the first time that day, Yao actually looked at Grace. The quiet control of his voice didn’t come close to matching the fierce flames reflected in the depths of his black eyes.

“I belong to your parents? How is that different from you?” he asked.

Grace stared at him. She wanted to explain … to argue … to prove her case. But the winds whipped the fire into a roaring field of flames, and its heat beat her back.

“The road divides, and each of us chooses our own way,” Yao said. “You will stay a captive here forever because you need all this. I need nothing but my wits, and so I will not stay. I will go to the place of my choosing, and then I will—”

The roar of the fire swallowed Yao's words. Grace jumped away, frightened and confused. Tuke called out orders, and the slaves bunched together. In the gathering dusk, Grace could no longer see Yao.

“Will what?” Grace called. “What will you do?”

But no one answered.

Because she had nowhere else to go, Grace walked back to the house. Not through the vegetable garden, though. She refused to look at those stains on the courtyard stones again. Instead, she went around the garden, all the way out to the cobblestone road and then up the path that had carried Jasper Hathaway's carriage away the night before.

When Grace opened the front door, Lingongo met her with simmering rage. “This is
my
house!” she informed her daughter before Grace could shut the door behind her. “
My
compound! Everything here and everyone in it belongs to
me
! I can and I will do exactly as I please with any one of them.”

Grace stole a glance at her father, who nervously busied himself shuffling through a stack of papers. He physically flinched as though he had been hit in the face. Grace said nothing. Nor did she look her mother in the eye. But Lingongo had hit her mark, and she knew it.

“I paid dearly for what I have,” Lingongo added. “If I must live in this English house, at least it will be mine.”

“Me darlin’—” Joseph began in what he meant as a conciliatory voice, although it came out as more of a wheedling whine.

“And you, Grace Winslow. Why did I ever expect more of you?” Lingongo pronounced. “However you may look, your heart is English!”