THE BOOK OF NEGROES (10 page)

“Fomba may not speak, but he sure can use his hands.”

“What did he do?”

“Down in the hold, he brought out a nail and snapped off his shackle. Biton thought it was a fluke. Fomba closed it back up, and snapped it off again. Biton tried to do it, but couldn’t. All night, he tried to open his own shackle with the nail. Couldn’t do it. Called over Fomba, who did it for him in an instant.”

ON DECK ONE AFTERNOON, before the captives’ meal, the toubab chief showed up carrying the carcass of a picked-over chicken. He tossed it into the thick of the male captives. The men kicked and fought for the remains, licking and sucking what they won, combing bones for scraps of meat and crunching them for marrow. Another chicken carcass was thrown into their midst, and once more the men wrestled. The sailors doubled over in laughter, then threw in another.

Biton was among the group of homelanders on deck. I heard him issuing orders, and saw the men stop fighting and back away from the third carcass. Biton picked it up and threw it back at the toubab chief. “You don’t dare kill me,” Biton shouted. “I’m too valuable.”

The toubabu had no idea what he was saying, but they whipped him anyway. Ten lashes, on the back. I watched the first lash tear into his flesh, and then I went to the medicine man’s room. I couldn’t bear the sight of Biton being whipped.

The next day, he was back up on deck, walking stiffly but without complaint. From that day forward, Biton was the undisputed chief of the captives.

THE HOMELANDERS HATED NOTHING MORE than being made to dance over a whip that the assistant raked over the deck. One day, when the toubabu’s helper had taken ill and left a toubab sailor in charge of the whip, I began to sing a song while we danced, naming all the people I saw. I tried to name every single face, and give the name of the person’s home village. Already, I knew a few.

“Biton,” I began, “of Sama.”

“Chekura,” I sang, “of Kinta. And Isa, of Sirakoro. Ngolo, of Jelibugu. Fanta, of Bayo.” The homelanders’ spirits picked up, a little. When I sang out a name, a man or woman would clap if I got it right, and the others would call it out, once. When I got a name wrong or didn’t know it, the person would clap twice and dance a little with me and sing out his or her name and village. Everybody took to this activity, and on other occasions when we were made to dance, homelanders took turns calling out the names and villages of the people around them. Some of the others were able to count out as many as fifteen names and villages, but after several days I could call out the names of almost every person I saw.

Biton made us sing the naming game and dance so lustily that the toubabu would come closer to admire us. The toubabu assembled in their natural order, with the toubab chief, his second in command, the medicine man and other leaders in the front of the other toubabu. Biton would do a dance himself and sing for us all to hear.

He began with a question, which he made to sound like a song.
“Is the toubabu’s helper here? Please tell me that, my friends.” “No,”
someone sang back,
“the helper is not here.” “Look again, my friends, to be sure,”
he called
out. And when he was reassured that the helper was not present, Biton stepped up his dance and sang some more:
“This one, with the hairs just on his chin, is Second Chief. He operates the ship. He lives. And this second one, with the belly as big as a woman with child, he is Toubab Chief, and he dies. But first, we wait for Fanta’s baby.”

WE HAD BEEN ON BOARD for a full cycle of the moon. Homelanders were dying steadily, at a rate of one or two a day. The dead were shown no respect. The splash of a man or woman hitting the water horrified me more each time and insulted the spirits of the dead. It was worse, to my way of thinking, than killing them. I listened for the splash, even though I dreaded it, but the one thing that disturbed me even more was not hearing it at all. To me, silent entry suggested that the bodies were sinking into oblivion. At night, my dreams were haunted by images of people falling from the edge of Bayo, disappearing without warning and without sound, as if they had walked blindfolded over the edge of a cliff.

Toubabu sailors died too, on board. I saw some of them, sick and dying, on days when I followed the medicine man around. They had gums rotting and overgrown, spit full of green phlegm, black spots breaking out on their skin, and open sores that stank terribly. When a toubab leader died, he was thrown overboard with his clothes on. When a toubab sailor died, he was stripped of his clothing and tossed to the sharks that trailed us like water vultures. Sailors tossed all sorts of garbage overboard daily-pails of shit, split barrels disgorging rotten food, swollen rats-but it got so that every time I heard a splash, I feared the worst.

There were no children my age on board. There was no one to play with. Other than a few babies, it was just men and women. I was lucky not to be confined with the others in the hold, but too often there was nothing for me to do. Alone in the medicine man’s cabin, sometimes
I would sleep to pass the time. Or I would amuse myself by throwing peanuts at the parrot, or teaching it words such as
the toubab will pay
in Fulfulde. And I staged conversations between my parents. I would have them argue, back and forth, about me.
She will sleep with the women, in the hold. No, she won’t, it’s better to leave her with the toubab because he’s harmless. Harmless? Is he harmless with the women, at night?
When that sort of conversation made my head pound, I would steer the subject toward home.
You spend too much time visiting women in other villages and we haven’t planted enough millet. The women complain every time you avoid going to the fields with them. I am not visiting women. I am catching babies, and I bring home chickens and pots and knives, and once I even brought a goat. I don’t care about your stupid women in the fields. Do they plant chickens, out there? Do they plant goats?

One evening on the top deck, Fanta told me that her belly was in convulsions and that she was ready to have her baby. I signalled to Chekura, who was just being led back down into the hatch for the evening with the other men. He nodded when he saw me point to Fanta, cup my hands together and thrust them out from my lower belly.

I had been coming and going every day between the deck and the medicine man’s cabin below, and nobody had dared stop me because I belonged to him. This time, I brought Fanta with me. It was the first time she had descended into the toubab’s living space. She saw the cooking pot for the toubabu leaders, and said, “We should kill them before they boil us all.”

In the medicine man’s room, I covered the bed with extra cloths and brought close a pail of water. I hoped this birth was going to be fast.

“I could be here all night, if this takes a long time,” Fanta said. “And I will not spend the night in bed with any toubab. I will die first. Or he will.”

I put my hand on her shoulder and told her to think about the baby. She grunted.

“I stopped caring about that a long time ago. No toubab will do to this baby what they have done to us.” A shiver ran through my body.

I had to get away from Fanta for a moment. I had to collect myself, so I did what the medicine man had shown me before. I took a wide metal wash bucket from the room, stepped out for a moment and motioned to the junior toubab working at the cooking fire to throw two red-hot iron bricks into the bucket. I returned with them to the cabin. Inside, Fanta was pointing at the bird with her mouth wide open. The bird was squawking at her. I tossed it a few peanuts and hung a sack over the cage to make it shut up.

“Don’t give food to that thing,” Fanta said. “Take the food for yourself. Give it to the others. Or give it to me.”

“I have to feed this bird or it will die. And if it dies, the medicine man—”

“I know, I know,” she said.

I dumped several pails of water into the metal bucket and got Fanta to step in. She crouched, careful to avoid the red metal.

“I haven’t had warm water like this since we were back in Bayo,” she said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“Do you do this?”

“Sometimes.”

“Does he watch you?”

“Yes.”

“Touch you?”

“He has tried, but I won’t let him.”

“You can do that?”

“He stops when I look in his eyes and speak fiercely.”

“He’s a weak toubab. And the weak die first.”

I did not dare ask which weak people Fanta had in mind. Homelanders or toubabu?

Fanta relaxed a little. I watched her ride out a few convulsions. She finished with the bath, dried herself off with a cloth I handed her, shivered and climbed onto the bed.

“Do you call him anything?” Fanta asked.

“Who?”

“The medicine man. Do you call him by a name?”

“He has a name. Sounds like ‘Tom.’”

“Do you call him that?”

“No. I never call him anything. I just speak to him. No name.”

“Good.”

The convulsions shook Fanta for some time, but eventually they diminished and she fell asleep. During that time, the medicine man came into the room. His arms flew up. He looked shocked.

“Baby,” I said. “Catch baby.” He had taught me these terms.

“No.”

I stood up. Looked him in the eyes. This was the only way. It had worked when I pushed his hands away from me, and I hoped it would work now. “Catch baby,” I said again, and in Bamanankan, said firmly, “Go. Mother sleep.”

“When?” he asked.

“Catch baby soon,” I said.

He removed an orange from his pocket and unsheathed from his belt a long knife with a handle made from elephant tooth. Then he sliced open the fruit, set the knife and fruit down on a small table and indicated to me that Fanta and I could eat the food. He turned, picked out another cloth from his trunk and left it near Fanta’s feet. My eyes fell on the knife. The medicine man had forgotten it on the table. He drank quickly from a bottle, stuffed it back under the cloth in his trunk, gathered a few more things and left the room.

I sat on the bed and waited for Fanta to wake. She snored. I thought
about teasing her later, and telling her that she sounded like a wild boar. When she finally awoke, she sat up quickly, looked around and remembered where she was. She moaned and lay back. Her breathing was speeding up. I rubbed her back.

“You need to know something,” she said.

“No one will be eaten, so stop thinking about that now,” I said.

“In just a rainy season or two, you were about to become my husband’s next wife,” Fanta said.

My mouth dropped, and I yanked my hand away from her. “That’s a lie.”

“That’s why I never liked you,” Fanta said. “You were so young, not halfway a woman yet, and I knew that one day you would be my husband’s favourite.” Beads of sweat had broken out on her forehead, but I did not move to wipe them. “I would have made your mother leave you at the door,” Fanta continued, “and as soon as we were alone, I would have given you a royal beating. I would have made you pay.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “My father and mother never would have agreed.”

“No? What do you think a jeweller would tell the village chief? Wouldn’t it be better to accept and to negotiate good terms?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t you want to know what you went for?”

“No.”

“One day you will hate people just like me. You won’t have that childish look on your face that makes everybody want to love you and clap their hands with pride that a little runt like you can already catch babies. You know what, Aminata? Anyone can have a baby, and any idiot can catch one.”

I was so angry that I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to stab her with the knife. I wanted to rip her hair out. I wanted to scream and shout that she was a liar and that my parents would never have let me go to that
old man. Even if he was the chief. But I knew I couldn’t hurt her, and I couldn’t scream. My mother had taught me well. When you catch a baby, you are calm. The mother may behave like a tyrant or a wild child, but you cannot. When you catch a baby, you are not yourself. You forget yourself and you help the other. I gulped. I swallowed. I wondered if what Fanta had said was true. Sadness had been welling inside me during three moons overland and more than one moon in this stinking toubabu’s vessel, and now it burst. Tears shot from my eyes and my breath grew short. I heaved and sobbed and stood there useless, while Fanta lay back and watched and waited. I shook terribly for a few moments, both feet planted beneath me, eyes shut, fists clenched. I swayed, and rocked, and finally settled down. I had nothing to do but to appeal, as I hadn’t in a long, long time, to God.
Allahu Akbar
, I mumbled. God is great.

“Don’t waste your time on that any longer,” Fanta said. “Can’t you see that Allah doesn’t exist? The toubabu are in charge, and there is only madness here.”

Perhaps it was true. Maybe Allah lived only in my land, with the homelanders. Maybe he didn’t live on the toubabu’s ship, or in the toubabu’s land. I said nothing. I tried to shove all the things Fanta had said into a little room in my mind, and I tried to close the door. I imagined my mother’s voice, calm and capable.
We have a baby to catch
.

Fanta’s body started shuddering again. I offered to check with my hand to see if she was ready, but she refused. The contractions began rolling hard and long and often, and I left it to Fanta to decide when to push. I would not guide her. I would offer her water, and hold her hand, and wait for the chief’s wife to make up her own mind about what to do next.

She pushed for a long time, and then she lay back and rested. Something seemed to grab her body again, and she pushed once more. She rested again, then pushed so mightily that I could smell her bowels moving. “Now,” Fanta said. She pushed three more times. I saw hairs on a head
starting to part her, but the baby wouldn’t come yet. She pushed once more, and the head came all the way out, blue and purplish and light coloured and specked with bits of whiteness and blood. Fanta pushed again, and out came the shoulders. The rest slid out quickly: a belly, a penis, legs, feet. I used the toubab’s knife to slice the cord, then I wrapped the baby and gave him to Fanta. The baby cried, and Fanta let it howl good and long before allowing it to root for her nipple. She was not a proud mother, but an angry one. I tried to settle Fanta comfortably on the bed, but she pushed me away.