Blonde Roots (23 page)

It was the bitter, heavy scent of myrrh that I hadn’t smelled for so long I almost fainted when it was whisked directly underneath my nose. It was heavenly. For a moment I was back singing “Loving Shepherd of Thy Sheep” accompanied by the old organist Mr. Braithwaite inside the damp chapel at St. Michael’s Church, surrounded by a family I’d taken for granted until I lost them.

The high priest started to recite a prayer that the congregation knew by heart. His voice quieter, manner serene.

In de name of de Fadder an de Son an de Holee Gost.

O mi Gahd, I glad to be here in dis place at mass an I iz veree sorree to sin against yu an by de help o-yur grace I will nyot sin again.

Dear Jesu, have mercee on all de poor peepals who hav neva heard
yur
name.

I love yu above all tings. Aaah-mi!

The priest produced a chunk of cornbread in a bowl, offered it to the crucifix.

Dear Hevenly Fadder, please accept dis here bred which iz goin becom we Lord body. I offer yu all mi joy an all mi sorrow. Aaah-mi!

He poured some palm wine and water into a goblet and offered this too to the crucifix.

Ye Memé’s voice rose above mine, loud and sanctimonious, and I couldn’t help but recall how often I’d heard my dear friend whisper through gritted teeth, “Iz dere a Gahd on dis island, Miss Omo? Iz dere? Well, mi neva see him, mi neva heer him, an him neva help me wid nuttin.”

Dear Hevenly Fadder, I pray dat mi offerin become a part-a we Lord‘s, jus as de drop-a water now a-part-a de wine, which soon change into preshus blud. Aaah-mi!

I got into the spirit too:

“Lord Jesus, present within me, I adore you. I thank you for coming to me. Help me and all your children to keep close to you.”

After all these years I found myself praying in a public place of worship to my own God.

“Dear Lord, thank you for all your graces at mass. Help me to remember them when I leave church and go home. Help me to be in all things, at work and at play, a true child of our Father in heaven.

“Dear Jesus, bless us all, now and always. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Thanks be to God, Amen.”

(P.S. And please help me to find a way to escape, ASAP. Thanks!)

Then the drums started up again, the doors were opened and the congregation resumed its noisy convulsions.

MOST SUNDAYS AFTER THE SERVICE I taught Yao to write, using a slate and chalk.

Classes began with the Ambossan numbering system of addition, subtraction and multiplication—all to express one simple number, which I had learned, with great difficulty, while handling Bwana’s accounts. It was more complicated than the counting system I’d known, the 10s, 20s, 30s of back home, and Bwana had scoffed to hear me count thus, like I was a backward child, he said, typical of my genus who cannot comprehend basic arithmetic.

The Ambossan number 12, for example, is expressed as 20 minus 5 minus 3. The number 45 is expressed as 20 times 3 minus 10 minus 5. The number 525 is 200 times 3 minus 20 minus 50 minus 5.

Yao was hungry for any activity that exercised more than the muscles in his body. He didn’t need to be cajoled into study; he understood the luxury of an education. No exercise brought complaints, no class was too long, there was no whining such as
Dis too borin, Auntie Omo.
Instead, my model student was excited at the new thoughts coming into his head, making it feel bigger, he said.

Counting up to 40,000 may have been a mouthful (10 times 2,000 in two ways), but he soon mastered it. As he did the Ambossan alphabet, consisting of 150 characters. It was really quite easy, once you’d learned it by heart.

We sat side by side on the floor inside the tiny, claustrophobic hut for two hours until noon, the other kids banished, the door closed, sweltering, the hatch ajar to let in streaks of sunlight that radiated on the clusters of his knotted golden hair as he applied himself, head down, to the lesson at hand. I stroked his curls as he worked, untangled them or wrapped them around my fingers, remembering that I had a son of my own, somewhere, out there.

And two daughters.

I discovered that I was a natural, patient teacher, enjoying passing on what I knew so that one day, perhaps, this child could do something useful with it—for our people.

As his brain cells multiplied, I watched him grow in confidence, assume a knowingness that made him stand out—perhaps a little too much. Yao was already a striking child, tall for his age, like his mother, with a back not yet bent by cane and a spirit as yet unbroken.

Sunday afternoons Ma Marjani came over to ours to teach me to cook food New Ambossan style, at the behest of Ye Memé, who was always busy tending to the allotment and washing her kids.

Ma Marjani was raising Ye Meme’s son Dingiswayo as her own—a strapping eleven-year-old, with a stubby-blond brush that ran the length of his shaved head. He strutted about the quarter in a pair of outsized, hand-me-down cotton pants worn so that the waist hung (somehow)
beneath
his bum. It was in poor imitation of the local teenage troublemakers who walked with an exaggerated, determined, lopsided limp, arms swinging. I always thought they looked like drunken conscripts marching to war, trying to appear sober, or punch-drunk ones returning home from the front line. They’d grab the bulge in their crotches sporadically, and give it a good squeeze too, presumably to check it was still there.

How many times did I hear Ye Memé say within earshot of these boys who had commandeered the silk cotton tree and were trying to intimidate all passersby:

“Jus tink how dose great slave rebels of de past must be turning ina de grave to see dis lot. Dey rise up to lead rebellion against de massas on dese islands an giv demselves good, solid, historical nik-name like Willyam Konkara or King Alfred, nyot stoopidness like Bad Bwoy, Totallee Kross or Machete Monsta like dat lot ova dere. Dose boy pikney intent on self-destrukshun, like dem have powa, but wurz kinda powa, violent one. Miss Omo. It so sad, enh?”

Then she’d shout out, “Sumbuddy should send fe dem fadders an tell em to clip de damn earhole of dose
eeedyots
!
”

Ye Memé’s younger children sprinted toward the cool older brother they saw only on a Sunday when he walked up the lane with the silly swagger that made men smile wistfully and women shake their heads at the sight of another aspiring gigolo. Sitting on the stoop with the little ones gathered at his feet, he showed them the blade he’d bound with twine with which he could kill and gut a crocodile—“Yes, mi do it! Like dis so!” Pretending to be a mythical hero he felled the beast again and again for the benefit of his rapt audience.

Occasionally I caught Yao walking behind his older brother, trying on the skanky, high-shouldered, lopsided limp—and shuddered.

Dingiswayo took Yao, Inaani and Cabion to pick ripe ackee from the trees, teaching them that they must only pick red pods that had burst open to reveal the pale yellow arils inside, otherwise it was poisonous. Akiki and Lolli were made to stand at the base ready to catch the fruit in a basket.

The party returned up the lane, Dingiswayo in the lead, the basket on top of his head, Akiki and Lolli proudly trailing at the back, sneaking glances to see if their little playmates could see they were part of Dingiswayo’s posse.

LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE SHE UNDERTOOK, Ma Marjani’s cooking was an entirely physical experience. With a work-a-day wrappa tucked over her chest, her brittle, burnt-straw hair tied back with string and her browned, brawny, scarred arms, she was ready to do business.

She kneaded dough as if pummeling an opponent, then split open the head of a coconut with an ax. She shred callalloo by ripping it into thin strips and mashed boiled pumpkin by bashing it with her fist. She broke a marrow in two like it was a loaf of bread, scooped out the seeds with the spoon of her hand, diced it, fried it, and instructed me to lay the seeds out on a cloth in the sun to dry. She rolled yam balls between her palms and tossed them in a sizzling pan until they were crisp and golden. On the rare occasion we had fish, she scored them and descaled them, deboned, barbecued, salted, fried, stewed or smoked them.

“We cane peepal wurk so hard we hav to eat good-good on rare okashun we git de chance. Once yu cook good, yu will get a man, dats fe shure.”

“But I don’t want one,” I replied, too quickly.

“What? Yu mad? Yu don’t want a fella to give yu a likkle someting like dat Qwashee who got his eye on yu?”

Qwashee worked in the First Gang and lived alone in a hovel barely twice his height and width a few doors down. He was often to be found hovering outside his door when I was around. He had no charm or looks to speak of. He was balding, aquiline, skinny, had weedy shoulders, short legs, a long spine, yet whenever he spoke to me—“Mornin, Miss Omo” or “I hope de day bring yu joy, Miss Omo” or “Mi have two hen egg fe yu, if yu don’t mind acceptin” or “Yu sleep tite now, Miss Omo, an wake on de morrow refresh and hinvigorate”—I surprised myself by feeling touched.

I wanted a kind man. A gentle man. A good man.

Ma Marjani was everything I was not and, because she was, wasn’t afraid to tell me so: “Miss Omo, yu too mawga gyal” or “Mi neva did trust a quiet purson.”

When I did manage to open my mouth to speak, she might say, “Yu too damned speakey-spokey”—her wintry gray eyes clouding over, even as she offered me her toothy yellow smile. But she was devoted to Ye Memé, who had given her a child, and I was part of the package.

The country she lived in was the country she was born in: “Mi born ina dis island an mi mammy too an she mammy an pappy an all-a-dem bak-a-yond dat, far as I know.”

Ma Marjani knew about cooking and she knew about cane. She knew that she could bear no children and that the son she

was bringing up as her own was becoming the kind of man she loathed. She knew that she was a “nobudee, becorze we all nobudee here,” and she knew that the new slaves from the shores of Europa hated being on her island because they had known a country called Freedom and they were always running off in the name of it.

Those born on the island showed little curiosity about the places we newcomers came from. When I tried to tell Ye Memé or Ma Marjani about the teeming metropolis of Londolo they looked blank, even bored, and turned the conversation back to whether “Ba Beduwa child reellee faddered by Kicongo man? An if Kicongo ever find out? Why! Miss Beduwa end up wid-a stump fe hand too. Nobudee shud mess wid Kicongo becorze she will mess wid dem badda.”

Under Ma’s guidance my cooking specialty became gelatinous cowfoot stew with butter beans and scallions. The rest of the cow’s meat was eaten by the masters, except for its genitals, which formed the basis for cowcod soup—“provan to aid virilitee.” The same claim was made for Strong Bak Drink, about which Dingiswayo, stroking his crotch, confidently told Yao, “It mek big-man like me strong, long and hirresistabel to de hos and bitches dem”—unfortunately within hearing of Ma Marjani, who called him over and whacked him upside his head with an iron pan. This reduced him to the tears of the little boy he really was inside, followed by the protracted sulk of the teenager he was desperate to become.

Ma cut her eye at him, laughed like a pan-scraper and threw a “Wotless bwoy!” his way.

(Taking me aside, she whispered, “Wha cyan mi do? It’s de hinfluence of dose older boys. Gyal, it mek me worry so much bout mi likkle chile.”)

When Ye Memé was seeing a new paramour—“Laydies dis here mi new gennalman frend so be
nyicee-nyicee
to him, yu heer!”—he had to be one with more resources than most. The men who lasted the longest managed to bring a whole chicken to jerk every once in a while.

Most of the time we had to make do with dumplings, sweet-corn, yam, greens, breadfruit, cornbread and the fruits of the island.

But when times were good, and our stomachs were full—and those are the times I will forever savor—we would sit in a circle around a large round raffa mat on a Sunday evening, citron-scented candles stuck into the neck of gourds to keep insects and mosquitoes away. Ye Memé sat at the head, Ma Marjani to her left, me to her right and the children gathered around. We dug into portions of whatever meal I’d had a hand in making, everyone talking at once, teasing each other:

Yao jumping up, trying to outdo Dingiswayo’s swagger.

Lolli trying to stick out her bottom and push out her lips like her mother when she was being feisty, flirty or tchupsing.

Cabion trying to pinch food from Inaani’s plate and Inaani snatching it right back while Yao distracted Cabion’s attention.

Akiki mimicking my speakey-spokey voice.

Ma Marjani pretending to throw a strop like Lolli—who was the mistress of them.

Dingiswayo trying to act manly and cool and above such childishness until Lolli and Akiki jumped on him and tickled him until he pleaded with Ma to pluck the little terrors off him.

And Ye Memé. Dear Ye Memé:

“Oh mi Gahd! Yu peepal mek such noise an kayos an mess I don’t know what a-do wid yu all! Is dis mi familee? How can dat be when I iz so well-mannard an shy an butta-no-meltish? Oh Gahd up dere, if yu really heer me, an we nyot extablish dat fact yet, give me anudder famlee becorze dis lot iz one big unrooly pane in de bottok!”

She’d throw her head back and laugh—her beautiful, full-mouthed, rotten-toothed, throaty, raucous, up-yours cackle. We’d all throw our heads back and let it all out too, seeing who could laugh loudest, longest, silliest, by snorting, trilling, ululating, honking, until our eyes ran and our sides hurt and we begged each other to stop.

We let our laughter stream up into the sky and ricochet between the mountains.

It was almost as if our lives were normal.

As if we were free.

MY CHILDREN: YAO, INAANI, Akiki, Cabion and Lolli slept each night sprawled out around me and their mother, their warm little limbs flopped over mine, messy, sleeping heads cradled under my arms or openmouthed and dribbling onto my stomach, heads so light I could barely feel their weight. When they awoke screaming or in a cold sweat, I caressed them back to sleep, stroking prematurely defined muscles, massaging calloused hands or picking twigs, leaves, sugar sap from matted, sticky hair that would only feel the cleansing lather of coconut shampoo when their mother bathed them in the Dong River on a Sunday.