Blonde Roots (24 page)

I
stepped out of sleep into the ghostly vapor of dawn’s dew-soaked clouds as they began to float up and disperse over the mountains.

White oleander blooms had been planted to ornament the pathways, their sweet fragrance competing with the nauseous stench of the quarter’s nighttime shit buckets.

The flowers never failed to take my breath away, and sipping their milky sap could do just that, slowing down a heartbeat until it came to a final, irreversible stop.

Toxic—the story of the islands.

Hurrying through the half-light, we were all going up the hill to our jobs-of-work—in my case, the cane fields. Yes, Massa Rotimi had demoted me to make way for cute little Lyani, who was now working alongside Ye Memé—until she was ready to give birth to his child.

I now worked in a gang with Ma Marjani, Kicongo, Ba Beduwa and Qwashee.

I was a cane-cutter, which went like this:

The slip of a machete could mean loss of a body part.

Stalks, stumps and sharp leaves left me riddled with cuts.

Bending over all day to cut the cane was crippling.

Setting fire to the fields to destroy the weeds and pests, but not the cane, created fumes that left me wheezing for weeks.

(Sometimes people were trapped in the thicket and burned alive. I’d not seen it, but I’d heard the stories.)

Prolonged exposure to the sun left me with permanent headaches, severe dehydration and burned skin.

And should I survive all of the above, venomous snakes were lurking in the undergrowth to nip one of my ankles with poisonous fangs.

YET TWO YEARS AFTER ARRIVING at Home Sweet Home, I’d acclimatized to an alarming degree.

Detesting my work, I took perverse pleasure in moaning about it. I relished Sundays and dreaded Monday mornings. My limp, rag-doll arms were now those of a toned, pumped-up muscle-woman. I could cook up a storm out of the most humble ingredients and cuss out the baddest
brudder
—all of which made me more likable to the women in the quarter.

But freedom had become an abstract concept: my home over Jordan, my campground, my gospel feast, my promised land—something outside my comfort zone. It didn’t help that most of those who tried to run away didn’t make it out of the man-trapped forest, and if they managed to climb the perpendicular mountain slopes, they were caught by the patrols on the mountain roads.

I often had to witness the kind of punishment meted out to runaways for whom death would have been the easy option.

Pepper, salt and lime juice rubbed into whip cuts meant getting off lightly.

Having your nose sliced off meant you didn’t.

Massa Rotimi once nailed a repeat offender’s ear to a tree, left her there for thirty minutes, then sawed it off, as if cutting through the gristle of beef.

He repeated the procedure with the remaining ear.

As for Massa Nonso, I’d seen him in action too, at a distance, hiding myself deep in the crowd so as not to be recognized. One time he forced a runaway to lie down and another to shit in her mouth. Two men forced it open, and when the deed was done, clamped it shut.

No kidding.

I had seen men castrated and women lose a breast. I had seen limbs removed, skin scalded, cheeks branded.

Once a man was hogtied and roasted over a spit, alive.

Another was suspended under a spit of pork so that the scalding fat removed his skin.

AS FOR MY OWN GETAWAY?

Only one essential ingredient was missing—courage.

THESE DAYS I WAS stepping out with Qwashee. He adored me and wasn’t fazed by my repellent back, although when he cooed that it had “karakta” and “told storees,” he was pushing it a bit far. Yes, horror stories, I countered.

I shared his hovel on some nights but not all, let him love me up, while I offered him all the love I did not hold in reserve for another.

After so long it was time for
closure
with Frank, I knew that, yet the stories I heard about the Maroon Magik man had rekindled a hope that, without proof, became faith—blind faith.

ONE MORNING A LONG LINE of us traipsed through the battalions of tall cane on our way to a remote field about four miles away. I could see Ma Marjani stomp up ahead as usual, barefoot, barebacked, with an energy that could be mistaken for an eagerness to get to work. I had long ago decided that like many of us—child, woman, man—Ma was just plain furious, although she’d never admit it; while her fury was channeled into cooking and killing cane, others found an outlet in sex, violence, singing, gambling, drinking, sugar, tobacco, even religious fervor.

Qwashee trod the ground lightly in front of me, shoulders loose after a night of lovemaking; my bald-headed, bony-arsed man who was thin as a whippet but “strawng like croc.” Every so often he’d glance back with a shy, reassuring smile—revealing his motley assortment of stained, misshapen and missing teeth—to check that I was okay, although he knew full well that I was “hunkee-doree dis mawnin, speshally, tank yu, Mista Qwashee.”

When I told Ye Memé we were stepping out together the Sunday evening after he’d taken me for a stroll—“mebbe yu fancee a likkle afta-noon perambulate, Miss Omo?”—around the quarter (where else?), she pretended not to hear, although she must have known. (Secrets in our confined world? Are you kidding?) When I repeated it, loudly, she mumbled something about me getting “a
real
man,” and flounced off down the lane, joshing with passersby with such cheeriness you’d think she and her children had just been emancipated. But her shoulders were so thrown back that the blades almost shook hands with each other, the skin in between squeezed into crushed, reddened folds.

“Real” men were both loved and loathed at Home Sweet Home. They talked dirty and fucked hard and could wind and grind the most
screw-up
-faced woman into submission, and if she didn’t want to go down, he turned on the charm—“Gwan, do it fe me, baybee. Be a gud gyal fe yu big poopa.” Real men were so damned sexy women got wet just looking at “dat fine-lookin hunk-a beef ova dere.” Women cried, fought, poisoned, even killed over them, but when their real men let them down, they complained about having to put up with “dat bastard filandara” and “dere iz no good man in-a dis place.” But the good men—not tall enough, broad enough, well-endowed, sexy, handsome, confident, cocky, muscular or sweet-talking enough—weren’t
real
men so they didn’t count.

My dearest friend Ye Memé had had more than her fair share of them. All the fathers of her children were
real
men. And what was she?

Alone.

AS SOON AS WE REACHED the field, we set to work. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t complicated either. You picked up a machete and severed the cane for the Second Gang to collect. Ma Marjani always worked faster than most. To wear out the body was to tire out the mind. It didn’t help to think too much.

The slave drivers who kept us in control were themselves controlled by the overseers—usually blak men working for a short while on the islands before returning to Great Ambossa with enough cash to purchase a home in the capital, Londolo. The slave drivers were whyte trusties who kept their positions of privilege through exerting a certain whip-happiness. One was a young mulatto called Ndewele. His mother was part of the slave aristocracy, only glimpsed by us masses from afar, because she lived behind the Great House and never came down to the quarter.

She was Bwana’s mistress, under his protection, and the mother of his children. Her name was Iffianachukwana, and it was said that she was the kind of whyte person or mulatto who would own a few slaves herself if she was ever freed. (It wasn’t unheard of for freed slaves to do this.) Rumor had it that this was on the cards when Bwana popped his clogs, which would be sooner rather than later, I thought to myself, if he kept stuffing his fucking face with fu-fu!

Her son, Ndewele, was slight and russet-colored, which contrasted with his very blond frizzy curls. The long, pinched symmetry of his rather melancholy face reminded me of my father’s. Mostly he tried to affect a haughty disdain, as if destined for better things, sitting astride his horse or sprawling out on a mat in the sun, hat pulled down low over his extraordinary violet eyes. He’d suck on straw or chew a lump of tobacco while we sweated around him. I could see he was masking a terrible boredom and frustration with the only thing he had going for him—superiority.

As Iffianachukwana’s son Ndewele had nothing to prove and little to fear, rather than turn him into a budding despot, this brought out the best in him. He was a lenient slave driver.

I worked next to Qwashee, knowing that each time he swung back his arm and brought it down, it was to will me to do the same. We worked twenty slaves in a row and sang.

Out there in the fields the vibrations of sound reverberated from deep within our bellies with a power to match our physical exertions. We had to be loud enough to be heard in an outdoor space filled with a chorus of a cappella voices, and we were always so full of soul because we poured our hearts into the music. Even the overseers and drivers could sometimes be spied gazing off into the middle distance, as if transported.

The newly arrived Border Landers among us broke down when we sang:

Preoccupied with trying to tune up my amateurish warble so that I didn’t balls-up the harmony, it wasn’t until Massa Nonso blocked out the sunlight astride his dappled gray mare that I noticed him loom above me like an equestrian statue with its forelegs raised.

I looked up into the face of the man who owned me. Horrified.

Those clear, cocoa-brown eyes, which had registered every attention lavished on his younger brother, now slid behind puffy lids and had the color, substance and emotional caliber of newly delivered horse dung.

Topless, he revealed a distended stomach as crusty, dried up and coarsely haired as coconut husk.

His horse kicked up the ground with a hind leg, shook its mane, sneezed phlegm right into my face and, if that wasn’t bad enough, proceeded to graze my lips with its huge, wet, flared, rubbery, smelly nostrils. I had to stand there and take it (even a horse had more status than me), while its passenger struggled to make a sentence come out of his mouth.

He produced vomit instead.

Gunge dripped down his bare chest like porridge.

Christ! He was drunk as a skunk when it was still, by the sun’s reckoning, only ten o‘clock.

He slumped over, head level with his mare’s.

With conspiratorial familiarity, he slurred thickly, as if his mouth was still full of bile, “Look
you,
the interfering old sod is on his way here for a surprise visit accompanied by that smarmy, smart-arse brother of mine, Bam
weasel
. Since my holier-than-thou bookkeeper has absconded back to Londolo and been telling tales out of school, you, our naughty little runaway, will immediately relocate to the Great House to sort out my ledgers so that they are shipshape and Bristol fashion when the old sod arrives. Otherwise, he’ll have my guts for garters and I’ll have yours. Understood?”

He thumped the mare, which about-turned and cantered off, its long, shapely legs kicking up the soil with bespoke, U-shaped shoes.

HIDDEN BEHIND A PARADE of conifers and reached via a long driveway lined with logwoods, the wall of the Great Compound was painted with the most audacious geometric symbols layered onto each other: triangles, squares, circles, hexagons, pentagons, stars. Embedded in the images were tiny versions of the evil-eye motif of the ancient sun god Horus.

Interspersed with these were picturesque “naive” paintings of daily life on the plantation:

Head-wrapped slave women strolled down flowery lanes in Sunday-best whites twirling lacy parasols.

There we were singing our hearts out with an eye-rolling passion at the temple.

Or lazing on the banks of the Dong River smoking clay pipes.

And our children danced around a maypole with giddy smiles plastered all over their rosy-cheeked little faces.

All this in such an attention-grabbing array of colors that I almost got a headache just looking at it. There was garish yellow boiled from marigold; reddish-orange boiled from bloodroot; bright purple boiled from mulberries; various shades of green from spinach, grass and red-onion skin; pastel pink from roses; screaming-red from cherries; black from charcoal; white from slaked lime.

Statues of the gods were mounted on top of the wall in between giant, white-painted clay balls.

The wall was intended to both display wealth and inspire awe in the workforce. I recognized the distinctive artwork rendered by Ndebele artists who would have been brought in from Aphrika to do the job.

As I walked around the wall of the compound to the back entrance, I tried to digest what was happening to me now. It was midmorning and yours truly wasn’t bent over with a machete in her hand—so no complaints there. Whether I would return to the quarter that night or sleep in the compound, I didn’t know. I couldn’t think about when I’d see Ye Memé and the kids or Qwashee again, and I certainly couldn’t entertain the thought of seeing Bwana again—so I blocked them all out.

I looked back down the drive, across the lush, green, rain-nurtured meadows and over to the cane fields so far in the distance you couldn’t see or hear the workers and beyond that to the mountains. Up here among the gods, where the only sounds were of the parakeets and macaws, was a view so breathtaking, so removed from the beleaguered population in the valley below, that one could feel so spiritually elevated one could convince oneself one was in the Garden of Eden.

King Shaka was waiting for me at the back gate, his eyebrows arched in the style of Well!
Yu iz a dark horse, ain’t it.
He told me to follow him to a pump in one of the courtyards where I had to scrub up behind a screen and put on a clean wrappa.