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."
"My papa said, fear no man, but come to know him."
"Fear the toubab."
"How can he breathe, with a nose so thin? Do those nostrils admit air?"
"Do not look at the toubab."
"He has many hairs."
"To look directly at the toubab is a mark of defiance."
"Chekura! There are even hairs growing from his nostrils."
"Walk carefully, Aminata."
"Are you my captor or my brother?"
Chekura shook his head and said no more. I had heard that toubabu were white, but it was not so. This one was not at all the colour of an elephant tooth. He was sand coloured. Darker on the forearms than on the neck. I had never seen wrists so thick boned. He didn't have much of a backside, and he walked like an elephant. Thump, thump, thump. His heels struck
the earth with the rudeness of a falling tree. The toubab was not barefoot like the captives, nor in antelope-hide sandals like the captors. Thick shoes rose past his ankles.
The toubab kept a chain about his neck, and at the leather belt around his waist he had an object covered in glass that he often consulted. He shouted and waved his hands angrily at our two lead captors. Under his supervision, the captors promptly brought the women and me back into neck yokes. Fanta was placed directly ahead of me in the coffle. One end of a wooden yoke was fastened around her neck and the other around mine. The yokes were bound fast at the back of our necks, and no amount of tugging could get me free, or accomplish anything other than to rub my skin raw.
While the toubab watched, our captors led three more captives into the coffle. A new woman was brought to us. She too was big with child. She was placed between Fanta and me. It wasn't a bad change. Fanta often muttered complaints, which made the days seem long, and the new woman was shorter, closer to my height, so it was easier to walk with my neck attached to hers. That night, when I came to rest under a tree, she lay on her side and I could hear her laboured breathing.
I settled in beside her.
"I ni su," I whispered, Good evening. These were my first words to her, in Bamanankan.
"Nse ini su," she replied, in Bamanankan.
I asked if she would have her baby soon. Very soon, she told me.
"This is a bad time," she said. "I wish the child would wait."
"The child doesn't know our woes," I said. "Do you think it will be a boy?"
"Girl. And she doesn't want to wait."
"How do you know it's to be a daughter?"
"Only a petulant little girl would come at such a bad time. Only a girl would defy me. A boy would not defy me. He knows that I would beat him."
This woman made the time pass. I liked her. "And you would not beat a girl?"
"A girl is too wise. She knows how to avoid a beating."
"Then why is she defying you now?" I asked.
"You are very clever. What is your name?"
I told her.
"I'm Sanu," she said.
"Sleep in peace, Sanu," I said, yawning.
"Yes, girl woman. Sleep in peace."
In the morning, we were yoked again. Once more, I was placed behind Sanu. She moaned as she walked, and I could tell, by the way her soles slapped the ground, by the way she pushed in her backside to relieve the tension in her lower back, by the way she let her hands ride on her hips while she walked, that before long, she would have her baby. As the afternoon progressed, she began to slow the coffle.
"She will have her baby soon," I said to Chekura.
"What do we do about that?"
"I have helped at births. My mother and I bring babies to the light. It is our trade. Our work. Our way of life."
Sanu spoke. "The child is right. I am ready."
"There is a village ahead," Chekura said. "I will have them stop there."
Chekura moved ahead to the front of the coffle and spoke to his superiors. We settled under a grove of trees. Chekura came back, with an older captor and the toubab, and he released us from our yokes.
I spoke to Chekura only: "The woman and I will settle quietly under that big tree, over there. Leave us alone, but bring me one woman to help. I will need a sharp knife that you have cleaned properly. And water. Go to the village and get three gourds of water, one of which should be warm. And some cloth."
The toubab held a firestick by his side. He stared at me. He spoke to the older man, who spoke in yet another tongue to the younger man, who in turn spoke to me. "He asks if you know what to do."
"Yes," I said. "Bring me the things I need."
Fanta had turned her back and walked away. Another girl, just a few rain seasons older than I, was sent to help. At least she did what I told her. When the warm water came, she poured water over the knife and cleaned it properly. She arranged for the woman to lie down comfortably, with bundled leaves under her head, and some furs and skins under her body, keeping her off the ground.
Our captors stood and watched. Thinking of my mother and what she would do, I opened my palm wide, and shoved it at them with elbow locked and arm straight. They raised their eyebrows, and the toubab stared at me again. He muttered something to one of the captors, who passed it on to another captor, who asked me in Bamanankan if I was sure that I knew what I was doing. I gestured once more for them to go, and this time they retreated.
I rubbed Sanu's shoulders and back with shea butter. "You will be a fine mother," I said to her, and she smiled gently and told me I would make my mother proud.
Sanu told me about her husband and her two other babies. She described how she had been taken captive while carrying food to the women who were working in the cassava fields, pulling the roots from the ground. With the baby so full inside her, she had chosen not to fight.
I encouraged her to keep breathing steadily, even when the contractions shook her. She dozed off momentarily.
When she awoke, Sanu said, "I am ready now, child. If we live, I will name her Aminata. After you."
The moon was blazing again, and I could feel heaviness in the air. Dampness. A big wind flailed about like a child in a tantrum, but Sanu was silent and still.
The baby came out head-first, just as it should have, and the rest of the body slid out into the world. I tied the slippery cord off at the belly and hacked through its thickness. The baby started bawling. She had huge, swollen female parts—even this I could see in the moonlight. I got the baby wrapped and warm and up against the mother's nipple, and then I waited for the afterbirth and helped bring that out. It was the fastest birth I had ever seen.
"Aminata, my baby," Sanu said.
I didn't know if it was wise to name a child so quickly, or to name it after me. Perhaps it would bring bad luck to name a child after someone in such danger. But Sanu was set on the idea. I was touched to see her gentleness as she turned the baby and brought her close to a nipple.
The tiny Aminata began to suck on her mother with such intensity that one might think she had already been doing it for months, and Sanu and I touched fingers. Tears sprang from Sanu's eyes, and that unlocked all the sadness within me. I heaved and shook and cried until my eyes were emptied, and Sanu's tears rolled steadily down her cheeks as she held still and fed the baby. It was bad luck, I knew, to cry when a baby was born.
In the morning, we were tied again. With cloth that Chekura had brought, Sanu slung the baby low on her back. Blood from her childbirth coursed down her legs as we climbed and descended mountain paths and crossed valleys and forests full of kola-nut traders.
To pass the time, since I was walking directly behind her, I watched the baby Aminata. When her head bounced around too much, I called out to Sanu to tie her up tighter. The baby had little tufts of softly curled hair at the back of her head, and I spent hours imagining how this little girl would someday grow her hair, comb it and braid it. For two days, I lost myself in daydreams while staring at the tiny baby bundled up close against her mother.
On the third day of walking after Aminata's birth, the coffle slowed at the crest of a hill. Although the morning was still young, the sun was already hot. I took my eyes off the back of Aminata's head and looked out at the world again.
What I saw seemed impossible.
Over to my right, where the path led, the river flowed fast and wide. It was wider than ten stone throws. At the shore of this angry river waited many canoes, each with eight rowers. I had never seen so many boats and rowers. To my left, the water expanded into eternity. It heaved and roared, lifted and dropped. It was green in some parts, blue in others, forever shifting and sliding and changing colour. It foamed at the mouth like a horse run too hard. To my left, water had taken over the world.
The captors led us to the shore. The toubab shouted directions as the captors released our yokes and shoved us into the middle of the canoes. It confused me to see them force Chekura into my canoe. The rowe
rs were naked, other than loincloths, and they reeked of salt and sweat and dirt. Their muscles glistened in the sun. The canoes pulled smoothly over the water as the river widened, until I could not make out the details on the distant shore. As we left the land, a captive in the boat next to mine struggled to his feet, bellowed and rocked his canoe. Two huge oarsmen stopped rowing and bashed him mightily with their oars. Still he kept struggling. When the canoe began to pitch, they dropped their oars and quickly threw the captive out into the fast-moving waters. He thrashed and sank and was gone.
We were rowed through the morning. The sunlight reflected off the water and burned my eyes. The river widened so dreadfully that all I could see of the land was that it was mountainous to my left and flat to my right. Chekura sat in the canoe, unbound but among us, and he whispered to me as we travelled.
"You are one of the lucky ones," he said. "A big boat is waiting, and nearly full. All of you will be sold and will travel across the water in very short time."
"Lucky?" I asked.
"Others will have been waiting on that ship for moons. Dying, slowly, as it fills. But you will not have to wait."
A horrid smell wafted along with the breeze. It smelled like rotting food. It smelled like the waste produced by a town of men. I scrunched up my face.
"The smell of the ship," Chekura said, his voice trembling. "We will soon be parted."
"Walk gently among your captives, Chekura. One will be sure to have a knife, and be waiting for you to make one false step."
"And you, Aminata, beware of your own beauty, flowering among strangers."
The foul-smelling breeze smacked us again. "How could anything flower, or even live, in that kind of stench?" I said.