THE BOOK OF NEGROES (14 page)

On our second day of walking, I saw a woman approaching. I could tell by the way the pail was balanced near the front of her head, and by the way the baby was slung low on her back, that she was a Bamana.
“I ni sógóma,”
I cried out as she came near,
Good morning
.

The woman stopped in her tracks.
“Nse i ni sógóma,”
she answered,
And good morning to you
. “Child!” she continued in Bamanankan, “you are but a bag of bones. Whose daughter are you?”

“I am Aminata Diallo, the daughter of Mamadu and Sira, from the village of Bayo, near Segu, and we have been walking two suns in this land.”

“I am Nyeba, daughter of Tembe, from Sikasso, my child, here now for five rains. You are very strong to have survived the crossing.”

“Where am I going?” I said.

The toubab got off his cart and walked angrily toward me.

“Go,” Nyeba said, “or you will be beaten.”

“Where can I find you?”

“If you are lucky, you will find some people in the fishnet.”

“The fishnet?” I asked.

The toubab cuffed me on the head and shouted until Nyeba walked away. I was cuffed once more, and after that, dared not even look back over my shoulder. On I walked with the others. All of my sorrow was coiled in the very organs of my body, wanting to explode but with nowhere to go.

We came to a river the width of a stone’s throw. We waited half a day. Eight homelanders came to fetch us in a long canoe carved out of two trees. We were untied and led into the canoe. The toubab climbed in with us but left the homelander and the horse and cart behind.

The bare-backed men dug long oars into the water, pushing off the bed of the river and out toward an island, not far away. Cords of muscles rippled under their skin, but several had the criss-cross scars of the lash across their backs. Fomba watched the homelanders closely as they dipped their oars in the water. He seemed fascinated. He nudged a homelander, grunted and grabbed an oar. The working men watched and laughed as Fomba struggled to stand balanced and pull with the oar at the same time. But Fomba quickly found the rhythm. They let him keep using the oar, and sang a low song in unison as they worked. It was the most mournful
melody I had ever heard, bubbling out of troubled and weary souls. I believed they too must have survived the water crossing. How else could they sing like that? I nudged the one who had given his oar to Fomba.

“Bamanankan?” I whispered.

“Maninka,” he answered, without moving his head. “Learned from my mother. She was from Africa.”

“From where?”

“Africa. Your land.”

I stared at him excitedly. I wanted to leap into his arms. He raised his head casually. He bore no tribal marks. He looked to make sure that the toubab wasn’t watching.

“What is the fishnet?” I asked.

“It is how we find each other, passing messages from one to another to still another.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To work on an island. Stay by the women and learn from them.”

“You have no marks on your face.”

“Those are country marks. They are fine moons, child. But I don’t want that.”

“Why?”

“I was born here. In this land, we don’t use country marks.”

“Were others born here too?”

“Yes. But we say that the ones who survive the great river crossing are destined to live two lives.”

I didn’t want to live two lives. I only wanted my real life back. “Why have they done this to me?”

“You were taken from Africa to work for the toubabu.”

“Africa,” I said. “What is that?”

“The land of my mother. The land you come from.”

“They call it Africa?”

“Yes. If you were born there, they call you an African. But here they call all of us the same things: niggers, Negroes. They especially call us slaves.”

“Slaves?” I said.

“Slaves. It means we belong to the buckra.”

“And who are the buckra?”

“The men who own us.”

“I belong to nobody, and I am not an African. I am a Bamana. And a Fula. I am from Bayo near Segu. I am not what you say. I am not an African.”

“The toubab is watching us.”

“Where is he taking me?”

He seemed to give me an admiring look. “You are like my mother. Your mind is fierce like a trap. But now you must eat and learn and make yourself valuable. The toubab is still watching. We must stop talking.”

“I am a freeborn believer,” I said.
“Allaahu Akbar.”

He seized my forearm violently. “Stop,” he whispered.

I gasped and looked into his face. Anger had clouded his eyes. His fingers were like claws, squeezing tighter and tighter.

“You must never pray in that manner. It is dangerous, and the toubab will correct you with the whip. The toubab will correct us all.” The man who had called me an African dropped my arm, seized the oar from Fomba and returned to his rowing.

We glided over some reeds and pulled up to an island. Fomba and I were the first to be led off the boat. We stumbled through a swamp and up onto dry land, and were met by a homelander with a firestick who took us away.

I WOULD HAVE BEEN ABOUT TWELVE when I arrived on Robinson Appleby’s indigo plantation. I believe it was the month of January, 1757. The air was cold, and around my waist I had nothing but a bit of rough osnaburg cloth. It bit into my hip, leaving it red and raw, and the toes of my left foot were bleeding. Two of them felt broken. I could barely walk. As I stumbled into a big yard in front of a white home bursting with importance, it occurred to me that I couldn’t even balance a platter of food on my head. Entrusted to me, oranges or bananas would have gone crashing to the ground.

Into the yard I limped, Fomba at my side. I gaped at the many men, women and children. I saw dark brown skin like mine, and I saw light brown. Among the children and babies, I saw some who had skin of the faintest brown, and others who were as washed out as the buckra. And then there were the heads. Cornrows. Bunches. Braids. Bald heads. Heads with patterns shaved through tight hair. Heads with scarves of the brightest
colours. Red. Orange. My gaze locked onto a yellow scarf and I wondered if I might ever have one too.

It must have been a Sunday, the day of my arrival. Women were tending to a pot over a fire. A big pot, but only three sticks burning. A long, slow stew. An aroma rose on the wind. Meat. Vegetables. Peppers. It was my first encounter in half a year with food that smelled good. One man was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, with his back up against another man who sat on a bench, legs wide. The man on the ground bent his head, and the one above slid a long knife along the back of the neck, shaving off the hair, rinsing the knife in a calabash of water, shaving again. I was so tired that I could barely stand, but I remember thinking,
That man has a knife and he’s not even using it. If he’s got a knife and still can’t run, what will become of me?

Among all these Negroes was one toubab with a long jacket buttoned down the front. He had a sharp nose, a thin chin, and hair as straight as parchment. Sunlight reflected off the buttons on his long coat, and his breeches were made of a smooth, shiny material. With legs apart and feet planted wide, he looked like he owned the world. Beside him a straw-haired woman dipped a quill in an inkpot held by a Negro and began to write into a book. Left to right. Left to right.

The toubab chief had a Negro helper who was dressed better than the others of our colour and who stood with the aid of a cane. The Negro helper signalled to Fomba to bend down, and inspected his face and chest. With his cane he tapped Fomba’s shins, ribs and back, and then he turned to me.

The helper peered into my eyes. He was issuing an order. I saw a single gap between his lower front teeth. I couldn’t understand. The toubab came forward, ripped the cloth away from my waist and motioned with his hands. He wanted me to spread my legs. All the other Negroes were watching. I stood motionless. The signal came again, but I could not move. I could not submit to one more inspection. The toubab slapped
me, and I fell. I stayed on my back, thinking that he would have to exert himself to bend over and keep striking me on the ground. The Negro raised his cane. I drew my arms around me and closed my eyes. I heard a voice. It was the toubab barking an order. When no blow came, I opened my eyes and saw the cane drop slowly to the Negro’s side. The toubab crouched low and I looked into his eyes. Blue. Moving up and down my body. Lingering. It wasn’t the welt on my chest that drew his eyes. It was something else. I felt my own nakedness acutely in that moment, knowing that he was evaluating the buds on my chest. He said something else, and the Negro with the cane crouched down low as well. Now they were both yelling at me.

A woman’s voice cut through the din. I saw a red scarf, a neck as dark as mine, a broad nose, a flash of teeth. The woman had a small cloth tucked into her clothes at the waist. I saw her rub her hands once on the cloth, and heard her sing abuse at the Negro with the cane. Her mouth let fly a thousand words. They flowed together like soup, and it didn’t seem possible that anyone could understand her. The Negro and the toubab took a step back and the big woman scooped me up in her arms.

Up and down I bumped against the woman’s biceps. I could hear the breath whistling out of her nostrils as she carried me, but she did not speak. At the far end of the clearing, we came to a series of homes with mud walls and thatched roofs. The woman manoeuvred her broad body through a doorway. Inside, two men were standing in a damp room, bent over and laughing and clapping hands. The woman put me down on my feet, but held me by the arm so I wouldn’t fall. The men fell silent and motionless. It was as if they had never seen anything like me before.

The men backed out of the tent as if retreating from a miracle, and the woman led me to a bed of straw. She covered me with a blanket and brought a gourd of water to my lips. I took a sip. Her eyes were deep brown and hard to read. She didn’t look like she would die anytime soon.
I felt safe in her presence, and fell into a sleep more profound than any I had known for many moons.

Sometimes I was aware of the sound of the woman fussing with a collection of calabashes. Their hard leathery surfaces tapped each other musically, almost like toy drums, and made me dream of home. I knew vaguely that I was being propped up and made to drink. A warm, wet cloth moved across my face. One time I heard a bird singing in the pitch black of the night. For whom, I wondered, was it chirping? Maybe it was calling to me. A warm body slept beside me. I liked the smell of the woman and felt reassured by her snoring, the deep life inside her singing out.

When I emerged from my long sleep, I had a rough gown hanging from my shoulders. The woman who had been sheltering me in her bed took me by the hand to greet all the people living under the thatched roofs. The men stared at me in wonderment, sometimes touched my wrists and spoke words that I did not know. The women clasped my shoulders, hugged me, used their fingers to trace the moons on my face, laughed insanely and brought me calabashes of water, boiled cornmeal, sometimes meat. I sniffed the meat and turned away. Pork. The big-armed woman who slept with me snatched a chicken from a pen, held it by the feet, pointed to my mouth. Yes, I nodded, I would eat chicken. But no, I waved my finger, pointed at the big animal with the snout in the mud pen. Not that. Not pork.

Three men emerged from a hut, and I saw that one was Fomba. His eyes grew wide, and I ran to him. He felt sturdy and strong; he felt like he had been eating. He opened his mouth and tried to say my name, but no sound emerged.

“Fomba,” I told the woman. “He is Fomba, from my village of Bayo.”

She smiled. She didn’t seem to worry or wonder about what I was saying. And I knew why. I knew exactly why. She was a Negro, but she was not a homelander. She was from this place. This place was her home. It was not for her to understand me. It was for me to understand her. I could
go nowhere and understand nothing until I could learn to speak with this woman. I knew that I would have to learn for myself, but also for Fomba.

When we got back to our own sleeping place, the woman sat me on a stump outside the door and spoke slowly to me. She gripped my hand in a palm twice the size of mine. She had broken nails, calloused fingers and skin creased like a dried riverbed. She tapped my hand, slid her finger along my rib cage and sat her palm on my shoulder. She dug a finger into her own breast, said “Georgia,” and opened her hands toward me.

“Aminata,” I told her.

Three times, Georgia made me repeat it, but the best she could do was to say “Meena.” In this new land, I was an African. In this new land, I had a different name, given by someone who did not even know me. A new name for the second life of a girl who survived the great river crossing.

THE MOONS CAME AND WENT. The air was warming up, growing heavy. Mosquitoes hummed angrily, landing in my ears, stinging my calves and back and neck.

We had to work “albees albees albees,” as Georgia said. “Albees,” I came to see, meant until we had done our work, six days out of seven. There were hogs to feed and kill. There were hens to pester for eggs, soap to make from ashes and lye, and clothes to wash and mend. Robinson Appleby, the toubab chief, was away most of the time, and his woman rarely joined him on his visits to the plantation. When Appleby was gone, another toubab lived in the big house and watched over our work.
Overseer
was one of the first words I learned. But not more than a moon or two after Appleby had left, the overseer died and Appleby returned. When he left a few days later, Mamed—the Negro with the hitting cane—was in charge. Mamed had two helpers. All of them had firesticks, clubs and whips. Most of the time there was nobody on the
plantation but fifty Negroes, watched by a Negro overseer and his two Negro assistants. There was not a toubab in sight, but still nobody tried to escape the island.

Georgia took me everywhere she went, talking all the time, naming every thing she did. She gathered long grasses and wove them into baskets. When men brought her possums, she skinned them. When others brought her turtles, I watched her put them in soup. The shells came off easily after she boiled them. Georgia was forever gathering leaves, berries and roots. “Elderberry,” she said one day, examining a tall leafy plant with white, bunched flowers. Back at her cooking pot, she brewed the leaves in hot water and kept the liquid in a calabash. She stewed the flowers in hog fat and stored that concoction in a ball-shaped gourd with a thin neck. The gourd came from a collection of calabashes of every size and shape that hung from sticks and nails in the walls of her cabin. “Elderberry flowers and lard,” she said, over and over, until I could repeat it. One day, she smeared this concoction on the open sore festering on the foot of a man who came to her home. He gave her a gourd of his own, filled with a strong-smelling liquid. She drank a big gulp and opened her mouth, as if exhaling fire. “Likker,” she said.

I repeated every word that came from Georgia’s mouth. After one or two moons, I was accustomed to the way she spoke. As it became possible for me to follow her speech, and to talk to her, I came to see that she was teaching me two languages. It was like Maninka and Bamanankan—different languages, but related. One sounded a little like the other. There was the language that Georgia spoke when alone with the Negroes on the plantation, and she called that Gullah. And there was the way she spoke to Robinson Appleby or to other white people, and she called that English. “Bruddah tief de hog” was Gullah, and “brother done steal the hog” was the way to say it to the white man. “De hebby dry drought ’most racktify de cawn” was one way to speak, but I also had to learn to say “The long drought done spoil
the corn.” “De buckra gib we de gam; demse’f nyam de hin’ quawtuh” was Georgia’s normal way of speaking, but I also had to learn to say it another way: “The white people done give us the front quarter, they done eat the hindquarter themselves.”
Buckra
was the Negroes’ word for white people, but, Georgia warned, I was never to call a man “white.”

“You call a white man white, he beat you black and blue.”

“So what do I call him?” I asked.

I was to call the man who owned this farm “Master Apbee,” Georgia said, explaining that when he spoke to me, he would say “Master Appleby.” His wife was to be called “Missus,” or “De Missus.”

The lessons and instructions were never-ending. Appleby had the first name of Robinson, but I would surely be beaten for addressing a buckra by his first name. If I didn’t know the last name, “Master” or “Missus” would do. I was never to look a buckra in the eye when he spoke to me, nor to act like I knew more than him. It was equally foolish to act stupid, Georgia said. The best approach was to follow the buckra’s conversation like a well-trained dog. I was to do my utmost to keep away from Appleby, especially when I was alone. Finally, Georgia said, I was never to forget that the buckra did not know Gullah. They understood only their own way of speaking. I was never to teach a buckra a single word or expression that the Negroes used. And I was never to let on that I understood too much of the buckra’s way of speaking.

Georgia was clearly pleased that I had learned to speak so quickly. She started taking me to other women and men on the plantation, so she could boast about my progress.

“She done learn so fast,” she said. “Zing zing zing. Words fly out her mouth like eagles.”

I laughed. I did love to hear that woman talk. Every time she opened her mouth, she said something astounding. Something in her way of speaking made life tolerable.

“Honey chile,” she said to me one day, “why don’t Fomba speak?”

I said that he had lost his words on the big ship.

“He done crossed the river with you?” “Yes.”

Georgia nodded and put her hands on my shoulders. “You done cross the river, and your head is on fire. But grown man done cross the river and shut his mouth forever.” Georgia seemed to be thinking about it, making sense of it all. She crossed her arms and put her hands in her armpits. “You all done cross one nasty shut-mouth river.”

I didn’t tell Georgia that Fomba had been the village
woloso
. I didn’t want anybody to know. “He works good,” I said. “Strong like an ox.”

“I know,” Georgia said. “Yesterday he done lift a hog off the ground and string him up in a red oak to bleed. Work for three men, but he done string the hog up lonesome.”

I wanted Fomba to live. I worried about him being unable to speak. On this plantation, I learned that there were two classes of captives. There were “sensible Negroes,” like me, who could speak the toubabu’s language and understand orders. And there were the other ones. The insensible ones. The ones who couldn’t speak at all to the white man, and who would never be given an easier job, or taught an interesting skill, or be given extra food or privileges.

I thought that if it were widely understood that Fomba could lift and string and bleed a hog by himself, perhaps he would be taken care of and left in peace. I understood enough about him to see that he became distraught when people confined him. But when he was free to throw quicklime in ponds to stun the fish and scoop them out, he did well enough. In those moments, he was capable and strong. I hoped desperately that he would stay that way. Around me I wanted only the strong.