Chekura's lip quivered. The boy who had been smiling through three revolutions of the moon was now frowning. I never had a brother, but now he seemed like one.
"Where will they take us now?" I whispered.
"Across the water."
"I won't go."
"You will go or you will die," he said.
"Then I will return."
"I have taken many men to the sea," Chekura said, "but not once have I seen one return to his village."
"Then I will sleep by day and walk at night. But listen to me, friend. I will come back. And I will come home."
THE CANOES PULLED UP TO A WHARF by an island, where I saw a castle on a hill. More toubabu and men of the colours of my homeland swarmed about, loading goods and leading people. We were marched up a steep path and behind the building. I noticed that Chekura was still with us. Ahead lay two penned areas, side by side, bordered by sharpened stakes jutting out of the ground to the height of two men. The captors pushed open the gates and shoved the men into one pen, and the women and children into another. I looked back for Chekura, but he was gone. I couldn't see Fanta either. Perhaps I could find Sanu, with her baby. There they were, twenty steps to my left. I wasn't bound any more, so I ran over to be with them.
Two toubabu with firesticks guarded my penned area, but men of my homeland also stood ready with clubs, knives and firesticks. Locked inside this pen, naked and sore and bleeding, we stood tight together in sandy soil that stank of urine and feces.
We waited and watched as the sun edged across the sky. They brought us boiled millet and dumped it in a trough. Some of the women picked at it. I couldn't bring myself to do so, but when we were passed calabashes of water, I did drink.
Women from my own homeland washed us with cold water and rubbed palm oil on our skin, to make us look shiny and healthy. Inside our pen, homelander women who were clothed and cold-eyed dragged one female captive to a corner, where toubabu and homelander men stood waiting with a metal device heating over glowing embers. I looked away, but heard the woman screaming as if someone had torn off her arm.
I vowed not to give them the pleasure of my pain. But when my turn came, I surrendered to their coarseness and their stink. They dragged me to the branding corner. Their wounding metal was curved like a giant insect. As they brought it toward me, I defecated. They aimed a finger's length above my right nipple, and pressed it into my flesh. I could smell it burning. The pain ran through me like hot waves of lava. The people who had been pinning me down let me go. I could think only of heat, and of pain. I could not move. I opened my mouth, but no sound came. Finally, I heard a moan escape my lips. Arms around me. Another woman's scream. And I was gone.
When I awoke, I was unsure how far the sun had moved in the sky, or if it had moved at all. Then I slept again. I thought I dreamed that Chekura was touching my hand. Big men were grabbing him, pinning him as he cried out in protest. When I awoke again, my chest was still burning. The heat twirled and danced under the ugly, raised welt on my chest. All the other women had the same welt.
I couldn't sleep that night. When it began to rain, I stood. At least a good rainfall would clean me. I liked the cool water running down my face. It was good to see the mud sliding off my legs, but I cupped a hand over my raw wound to protect it. The rain felt soothing until the thunder rolled in and the lightning began lighting up the sky. Water fell on me as if it were being dropped from a hundred buckets, and the thunder boomed in the night, echoing over and over again in the mountains. The rain kept up with such fierceness that I prayed for it not to sweep us all into the big river below. In the women's pen, some twenty of us huddled together in the storm. I held Fanta with one hand, Sanu with the other. The noise was such that it drowned out the crying of Sanu's baby. When the explosion from the clouds ceased, we found ourselves in a field of mud up to our ankles. We spent the whole night standing.
IN THE MORNING, MY WOUND STILL burned. Fog hung over our pen. As the sun rose, the thick vapours cleared and the day became bright. Homelander women in clothes and sandals dumped more boiled millet into the trough. Still and tired, we stared at the food. I imagined that we would be left to stand there until our hunger overcame our disgust.
But the gate swung open. We were all hurried out of the pen and back down the path to the water. We were tied and tossed into the bottoms of the canoes, and rowed straight out into the widening water. A wave splashed up against my canoe and smacked me in the face. I thought I would welcome the long drink, but I gagged and choked and then vomited the burning water. Salt. Each wave stung the cuts on my feet and the welt on my chest.
I dreaded the big boat up ahead, growing larger with each oar stroke. In size, it dwarfed a twelve-man canoe, and it stank worse than the pen they had put us in on the island. The boat terrified me, but I was even more afraid of sinking deep into the salty water, with no possibility for my spirit to return to my ancestors. Let them do what they wanted with my body—on land. Then, at least, my spirit would travel, and I would return home to my ancestors, and I would no longer be alone.
The oarsmen kept paddling us over the rolling waves. We slid up to the side of the toubabu's boat. It was a huge and strange affair with poles towering like palm trees. On the deck above, faces stared down at us. Homelander faces and toubabu faces, all working together. Waves smacked against the giant sides of the boat, which rose and fell but seemed mysteriously pinned to one spot in the water.
One of the captives screamed and rocked and struggled, but his feet and wrists were tightly bound with vines, and finally he was clubbed until he fell silent. Men and women shook and trembled. I grew quiet, and calmer. "Fear no man," father had said, "and come to know him."
Something bumped our canoe. It was another small boat, pulling up beside ours. Among the bound men and women, I saw Chekura. His face was bruised and his expression defeated. His head was slumped. What a stupid boy. He should have fled on land, near Bayo, where he knew the forests and the people. He should have fled long before they turned on him. I did not call out to him. I clenched my teeth and looked out over the water at all my people tied in canoes and being pushed, prodded and pulled up a long plank rising along the great wall of the ship. I turned back to see my homeland. There were mountains in the distance. One of them rose like an enormous lion. But all its power was trapped on the land. It could do nothing for any of us out on the water.
We glide over the unburied
ONE DAY, IF I EVER GOT HOME, perhaps they would make an exception and allow me to become a djeli, or storyteller. At night, in the village, while the fire glowed and the elders drank sweetened tea, visitors would come from afar to hear my curious story. To become a djeli, you had to be born into a special family. I used to wish that I had been, for the honour of learning and retelling the stories of our village and our ancestors. Early in life, a child born into the djeli family would be taught the story of the crocodile who carried off five children, and of the man who was so rich that he had seventeen wives but so cruel that each one ran away, and of the first time that a man in our village returned from Timbuktu with the mysterious Qur'an in his hand. It was said that when a djeli passed away, the knowledge of one hundred men died with him.
When I was carried up the ladder and dropped like a sack of meal on the deck of the toubabu's ship, I sought comfort by imagining that I had been made a djeli, and was required to see and remember everything. My purpose would be to witness, and to prepare to testify. Papa was not supposed to show his daughter how to read and write a few lines in Arabic. Why did he break the rules? Perhaps he knew that something was coming, and wanted me to be ready.
On the ship and in all the years that have followed, I have thought of how much my parents planted in my mind in the short time we had together. They made sure that I learned how to cultivate a millet field. As a young child, I was just as quick and capable as an adult when it came time to seed. I knew how to dig with my right heel in the soil, drop seeds in the little hole, cover up the ho
le with the toes of my foot, move on a step and do it again. I knew how to pull weeds, and I understood that you hoed the soil so that the rain, when it came, would kiss the soil and marry it—not kiss it and run away. Yes, I knew how to cultivate a millet field, and I had been shown that the mind had to be grown.
A series of coincidences saved my life during the ocean crossing. It helped to be among the last persons from my homeland to be loaded onto that vessel. It also helped to be a child. A child had certain advantages on a slave vessel. Nobody rushed to kill a child. Not even a man-stealer. But, also, the child's mind has elasticity. Adults are different—push them too far and they snap. Many times during that long journey, I was terrified beyond description, yet somehow my mind remained intact. Men and women the age of my parents lost their minds on that journey. Had I been twice the age of eleven, my mind might also have departed.
On that slave vessel, I saw things that the people of London would never believe. But I think of the people who crossed the sea with me. The ones who survived. We saw the same things. Some of us still scream out in the middle of the night. But there are men, women and children walking about the streets without the faintest idea of our nightmares. They cannot know what we endured if we never find anyone to listen. In telling my story, I remember all those who never made it through the musket balls and the sharks and the nightmares, all those who never found a group of listeners, and all those who never touched a quill and an inkpot.
THE SHIP WAS AN ANIMAL IN THE WATER. It rocked from side to side like a donkey trying to shake off a bundle, climbing on the waves like a monkey gone mad. The animal had an endless appetite and consumed us all: men, women and babies. And along with us came elephant teeth, sacks of yams and all manner of goods that working homelanders hauled up in nets.
Above the cries of the captives and the shouts of the toubabu and the working homelanders, Sanu's baby wailed on and on. It seemed to sense our fate. It howled and gasped and cried again. Goosebumps covered my arms. I fought to keep myself from screaming. Instead, I choked on the stink of the ship and vomited. For a while, the nausea was a distraction.
Around my right ankle, I had an iron claw which was attached to a claw clasped around Sanu's left ankle. Beside her was Fomba, chained to another man. Person by person, we were hauled on board and added to the growing chain. One captive broke loose before they could clap the iron around his ankle and jumped out into the angry water. He was naked, except for one red bandana around his neck, and I felt sorry to see the man's head and bandana bobbing in the water. I had hoped that he would get his wish and sink to a quick death. But homelanders working on the deck pelted the poor man with oranges, and other homelanders in the canoes followed the trail of raining fruit. They scooped the man out of the water, smacked him about the head, and sent him into the arms of a giant homelander standing on the ladder outside the ship. The giant carried the man right back onto the deck and held him until his ankle was clasped.
Trembling in the wind, I feared that I would faint. I tried to steady myself and to keep from falling, because captives who went down on their hands and knees were beaten until they stood. I tried to calm myself by imagining a mother soothing a hysterical child. Look about, I imagined my own mother telling me. Look about, and do not fear.
Homelanders were hauling barrels up onto the deck. One of them fell through a hole in a net, crashed to the deck and burst open, spilling water over our feet. Amid the hauling and the shouting and the clasping of claws around captives, I was able to see a pattern. A toubab in fancy dress and another man were moving along a long line of captives, inspecting them one by one. Once inspected, the captives were sent down into the stinking belly of the ship.
The toubab was a tall, skinny man with hair the colour of an orange. The hair fell straight down from the sides of his head. On top, he was bald. He had blue eyes. I couldn't have imagined such a thing, before I saw it. The same blue as river water on a sunny day. The toubab's helper looked neither dark-skinned nor light, neither toubab nor homelander but a blend of the two. This helper had yellow-brown colouring, and a scar running in a raised ridge of flesh from one eye all the way to his mouth. It wasn't a mark of beauty. It was a knife mark.
When they reached me in the line, the helper pinched my arms. He grabbed my cheeks roughly to force my mouth open. The orange-haired toubab stopped him, and stepped forward. He signalled for me to open my mouth, and reached inside with a hairy index finger. I gagged. He ran his hands along my neck and shoulders, touched my back and made me move my elbows and knees. While the toubab inspector worked on me, the helper smacked Fomba in the face. Fomba's mouth hung half open, lips unmoving, eyes as wide as mangoes. The helper smacked him again and mumbled something in a language vaguely like Bamanankan. Something about bending his head down. Fomba said nothing. He did nothing. The helper cocked his arm back again.
"Fomba," I called out. "Bend your head."
Fomba looked to me, and bent his head.
The helper and the inspector turned to face me. "You speak Maninka?" the helper said.
"Bamanankan," I answered.
"And you speak his language too?"
"Fulfulde," I said.
The helper and the inspector conferred in the toubab's language. I looked again at the toubab inspector. He had a firestick attached to one hip, a sword attached to the other and pinched nostrils. I listened to the strange words flying between them. Then the helper switched to Maninka and, to my surprise, the inspector understood.
Using baby words so that the man would understand, the helper said, "She speaks his language, and she speaks Maninka."
The inspector gestured for another toubab and pointed at my chains. The other toubab ran up, bent down, jammed a piece of metal into the iron loop around my ankle, and released me. The helper pulled me over to Fomba.
"Tell him to open his mouth and not to bite," the helper told me.
I told Fomba what to do. The toubab inspector stuck his finger in Fomba's mouth, tested the teeth and seemed to find them solid.
"Tell him not to move," the helper said. The inspector tapped his ribs and saw Fomba wince.
"Broken?" the helper said.
"Fomba, look at me again. Do your ribs hurt?" Fomba mumbled an almost inaudible "yes," but instinctively I changed his answer when I translated it for the assistant. It seemed safer to lie. "He says he is fine, and that the ribs don't hurt too badly."
The orange-haired toubab looked in Fomba's ears and inspected every other part of him—even his penis, which he picked up and tugged. Fomba's mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. The inspector spoke to the other toubab, who stood beside me and used a quill to scratch symbols on thin parchment. The hand moved the wrong way across the parchment, leaving nothing but senseless symbols. They were done with Fomba. Two homelanders pulled up a heavy door lying flat in the floor. It grew wide like a crocodile's mouth and kept widening, until it was lifted straight up. The stench of human waste rose from it in thick clouds, and with it the cries of grown men. Fomba and the man chained to him were shoved down the hatch and out of sight. The door was slammed shut. The toubab inspector turned to me. He spoke, but I couldn't understand.
Pointing at Sanu and her baby, the assistant said to me, "Toubab asks if you are the one."
"Say again?"
"Are you the one who caught that woman's baby?"
I wondered how they knew. I wondered what else they knew about me. I nodded.
The inspector asked me a question. I didn't understand. He asked again. I picked out the word rains in Maninka.
"Eleven," I said.
"Walk long time?" he asked.
"Three moons," I said.
"Where mother?" he asked. I said nothing. He pointed at Sanu. "Mother?" he asked again. I shook my head from side to side. He pointed at Fanta, who stood next to Sanu. "Mother?" Again, I shook my head.
"What are you saying to him?" Fanta called out. I tried to ignore her, but she shouted out that I must not speak with th
e evil man. The helper took a step in her direction, but the toubab inspector pulled him back.
"No mother?" the inspector asked.
I stood silently and said nothing.
The helper and the inspector examined Sanu. She and her baby, who was now sleeping, were sent off. I wished I could go with them.
While toubabu men led Sanu away, the helper pulled me over to Fanta and let me go. I stood, with no arm or foot held, bound or clasped in irons, and looked out over the side of the ship. I could have run and jumped, but I weighed my fear of the water against my fear of the ship, and stood motionless.
"Open your mouth," the helper told Fanta. The inspector stood there waiting.
She mumbled in Fulfulde that the helper was a horse's ass. He sensed the insult and drew back his hand. She stood before him, unflinching, defiant.
"No speak Maninka," I said.
"Tell her to open her mouth, and no biting," the helper said.
I told her.
"Never," Fanta said to me. "They are going to eat us, anyway."
I did not want to see Fanta beaten, and I feared that they would punish me for her disobedience.
This time, I did not plan the words. They just came out of my mouth. "He says he will hurt me if you don't," I said.
Fanta opened her mouth. The inspector looked at her teeth, poked at her round belly and told me to tell her to open her legs.
"They say to open your legs," I said.
"Never," Fanta said.
"Baby soon," I said to the toubab inspector.
"Baby when?" he asked.
"One moon," I said.
The inspector hesitated. He made noise when he breathed. It was a whistling, wheezing sound. I wondered if his small nostrils were blocked. His mouth held black teeth, and I caught a glimpse of his gums, flaming red like turkey wattles. He was an ugly man who seemed to be rotting from the inside out, but I spotted no hurting intentions in this man's eyes. I took another chance.