The Call of Zulina (30 page)

Lingongo looked out over the clutch of white men still gaping in wide-eyed, open-mouthed amazement. “You disgust me!” she spat at them. “Every one of you!” She turned to Joseph and said, “You! You are the worst of a bad lot!”

“Lingongo, me dear—” Joseph whimpered.

“Go ahead and make your plans,” Lingongo said. “Talk all night if you like. But remember this, white men are not in control here. You never were and you never will be. Africa is not your land. Africa's men and women do not belong to you.”

With an air of regal superiority, Lingongo swung around until her back was to the men, and then she swept out of the room.

For many moments, the men remained transfixed. It was Joseph Winslow who finally rallied himself and made his way back up to the front of the room. He attempted to carry on the meeting as planned, but no one could get the sight of Lingongo out of his mind. One by one, each man suddenly remembered a compelling reason why he must be off.

“Good-bye, Admiral Winslow. So sorry I have to leave,” each said with an exaggerated pretense of respect before he made his hasty retreat. “You do have my support, of course, but … uh … well, right at the moment …”

There was no doubt in anyone's mind that come the dawn, something would happen at Zulina, and when it did, Lingongo would be leading it. And everyone in the room was certain that Lingongo would get no argument from her husband.

Mama Muco opened the door for each man as he left. She prayed the right person had found her folded headcloth—someone who knew where Grace was, someone who could read the long point to her. Grace would understand. Grace would be ready.

“N
o, no, no! Don’t put your hand in the
foufou
, you stupid fool!”

Grace looked over the crowded knots of people, searching for the source of this latest angry commotion.

“You be filthy!” a woman scolded as she shoved another woman away from the common pot of food. When the rejected woman hungrily grabbed at the pot, a man jumped in and sent her reeling with the back of his hand.

Grace ran to the woman and helped her to her feet. “Never mind, Moussa,” she murmured. The group, talking together angrily, closed their circle against both Grace and the rejected woman. Grace took Moussa's arm and led her to another pot of food in a different part of the room.

“Go ahead,” Grace urged. “Eat here.”

When Moussa finally reached her hand into the pot and settled down to eat her share, Grace made her way back to where she sat with Ikem and Cabeto. Sinking down between them, she asked, “How could Moussa know the Ga people touch food only with their right hands? How could she know she offended them because her ways are so different from theirs?”

“Not-alike people have not-alike ways,” Ikem observed. “To other eyes, not alike can look wrong.”

“We must not have fights that come from misunderstandings,” Cabeto stated. “These walls have already seen too much fighting and too much pain.”

“It is because too many people are coming out of the cells too fast,” said Gamka.

Now that Antonio and Tungo had gone through the fortress's maze of corridors and passageways and released captives cell by cell, things were indeed growing more crowded and confusing. And more and more difficult, as Gamka continually pointed out.

“We can’t just leave them chained up to starve or to die of thirst!” Grace told him.

In many rooms, Antonio and Tungo found nothing but empty manacles and piles of chains. But then they would throw another latch and push open another door, and once again they would be face-to-face with absolute horror. In one room, more than a dozen people lay piled together in chains, in their own filth. Most were too weak to do more than moan in misery. But one poor soul managed to lift his head and groan,
“N nin saasaa le mu.”

“Estan enfermos,”
Antonio said.

“They got the flux!” Tungo cried out. Quickly, he backed away. “Close the door! Lock it!”

Antonio hesitated. The poor wretches cried out, pleading for help.

“Lock it!” Tungo insisted. “You want us all to die?” Antonio knew the disease all too well. Tungo was right—it was a killer.

Tungo kicked the door shut and slipped the bolt into place.

Antonio shook his head sadly and closed his ears to the pitiful pleas of the dying captives. He forced himself to turn the key and move on to the next cell. To leave them locked in to die alone was horrible. To think of the flux sweeping through the entire ragtag group of survivors was unthinkable.

Just down a dark, narrow hallway they discovered a red clay slave house with twenty-one people chained inside. At first, when Antonio and Tungo began to free them from their chains, the captives were confused about what was happening.

Antonio urged them toward the door.

“Didhte waw?”
one man asked. “Where are we going?”

“To freedom,” Tungo said.

As quickly as Antonio and Tungo unshackled captives, Sunba gathered them together and guided them through the winding passageways. The newly released slaves winced and shaded their eyes as they emerged from the darkness into the large corner room bathed in sunlight. This was where Joseph Winslow and the white sailors had spent so many hours drinking, carousing, and gambling away their gold at fast hands of lanterloo.

When Grace heard the released Africans speaking in their different tongues, she smiled broadly and greeted them, each in his or her own language.

“Assalamou!”
she said to the three whom Sunba just led up. “Peace be to you!”

“Bakham!”
they answered, their broad faces beaming. “Thank you! Oh, thank you!”

“Come,” Grace said. She walked over to another clutch of Wolof sitting together. “You will be welcome here. You are one people.”

Grace did her best to help all who came up from the chains below to find others who understood their tongues and knew their ways. Already groups from the Yoruba and Fanti tribes had come together, and some from the Hausa and Ga people had found each other as well.

All at once, angry voices rang through the corridor, followed by what sounded like rocks crashing. Cabeto sprang up and ran to the door.

“What's going on?” Grace called after him.

A group of three men and two women ran past them. All five dashed over the rubble and on toward a jagged opening at the far end of the corridor. The door to the outside had been blown apart.

“Stop!” the guard called out to them. He held a musket, but he wasn’t certain what to do with it. The weapon was never intended to keep the captives in. “If you go out, you be killed!” the guard warned.

“We not stay in this place!” one of the men called out.

Cabeto sprinted after them. “No!” he pleaded. “Please! You must not go out there!”

“We not captives to you!” the man yelled back. “We be free!”

The first man squeezed through the opening and jumped. A woman followed right behind. Just as the next man began to push his way through, gunshots exploded outside, and the man caught in the opening froze. Then another shot rang out. The man fell forward, through the doorway, and out of view.

Silence enveloped the corridor. Even so, a fourth man sprang up and he, too, jumped through the opening.

Immediately, another shot sounded. The last woman in the group backed away from the door in horror.

When the four went through the doorway to their deaths, the sun was at its zenith. By nightfall, several more had jumped through, each followed by gunfire from outside. In the fortress, one argument after another erupted. Several people attacked others. Then a knife fight left one man dead.

“Set up armed guards around the food and water,” a grim Cabeto instructed Antonio.

“If it's this bad in the daylight,” Grace said, “what will happen when darkness falls?”

“I cannot think about it,” Cabeto answered.

It was Grace who first suggested moving apart.

“We have the entire fortress,” she reasoned. “Let's encourage those who speak alike and have the same ways to move out into some of the empty cells. They can settle their own arguments and solve their own difficulties according to their customs.”

“It be a good idea,” Ikem agreed. “Each people can mark out their own place.”

“And over each, we can set up a leader who will have final say about any disputes,” Cabeto said.

“Tomorrow we do it,” Ikem said. “Tonight we stay awake. Tonight we stand guard.”

As newly released captives arrived from the dungeons and cells, Grace searched their faces for a straight nose and a strong chin with a tuft of dark hair, and she looked at the sides of their heads for half an ear. But she never found such a face.

“Antonio,” Grace said as she came up behind him. “You once said you had seen a man named Yao who had my father's brand burned into his shoulder. Do you remember?”

“Lo siento mucho,”
Antonio told her. “He is locked in a cell alone on the other side of the fortress. The part we did not release. I am sorry.”

Grace couldn’t trust herself to speak lest in her disappointment she dissolve into tears.

“We will still try to make a way over so we can unlock those cells too,” Antonio said.

“When?” Grace asked. “Maybe tomorrow? Or the next day?”

“When will the lioness attack us again?” Antonio asked anxiously.

Grace stared at him. Fear etched his face; terror brimmed in his strong, black eyes.
How totally amazing
, Grace thought.
So much fear at the mention of my mother!

Grace longed to say something comforting, something reassuring. Instead she told Antonio the truth: “I don’t know when she will come. I only know she will. Antonio, if you can remember exactly where it was that you saw Yao, maybe—”

“When she comes back, it will be
ultimo vez
,” Antonio said flatly. “It will be the end, no?”

“Tomorrow, Antonio?” Grace pressed impatiently. “Will you release the other side of the fortress tomorrow? The side where Yao is?”

Antonio stared blankly.

“When the lioness returns,” he repeated, “then it will be the end.”

O
nly a white man would confuse the beat of a dancing drum with the words of
ntumpane.
A dancing drum was meant for a single village alone. Its sound did not catch on the wind and fly far and wide. But the
ntumpane
were made from the tweneboa tree with the hide of an elephant's ear stretched taut over the end so that each word would sound clear and sharp. Every drummer searched out his own forked branches of ema wood, and from them he made drumsticks that could carry the talking drums’ messages up and down the coast. The words even traveled across to the inland, flying from one
brono
to another.

Porcupine of Africa …

… beat a thousand to death …

… a thousand will rise anew.

The wind grabbed up the words of the drums and sent them soaring in every direction. When the words blew in through the open window of the London house, Lingongo heard them and she smiled.

Finally, her father's warriors were on the way. With them in the fight by her side—with them giving her strength from the ancestors—she could not lose, no matter what the white men did.

Lingongo knew the language of the royal drums perfectly. But she didn’t know everything.

Prince Obei reclined in his private residence in the most powerful chiefdom in the Kingdom of Gold. He was so busy admiring the carved stool with which his father had gifted him that he didn’t immediately pay attention to the words of the
ntumpane
—not until he stopped running his hands over the smoothness of the pounded gold long enough to cock his head to listen to the message of the drums. They were calling the warriors to fight! So the Great and Powerful One had listened to his wise words after all. Already, warriors were on their way to help the rebels.