THE BOOK OF NEGROES (3 page)

“Did they do this to you?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, “or your father would never have married me.”

“Did it hurt?”

“More than childbirth, but it didn’t last long. It is just a little correction.”

“But I have done nothing wrong, so I am in no need of correction,” I said. Mama simply laughed, so I tried another approach. “Some of the girls told me that Salima in the next village died last year, when they were doing that thing to her.”

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind,” I said, employing one of her expressions. “But is it true?”

“The woman who worked on Salima was a fool. She was untrained, and she tried to do too much. I’ll take care of you when the time comes.”

We let the matter drop, and never had the chance to discuss it again.

IN OUR VILLAGE, THERE WAS A STRONG, gentle man named Fomba. He was a
woloso
, which in my mother’s language meant captive of the second generation. Since his birth, he had belonged to our village chief. Fomba wasn’t a freeborn Muslim, and never learned the proper prayers in Arabic, but sometimes he kneeled down with Papa and the believers, facing in the direction of the rising sun.

Fomba had muscled arms and thick legs. He was the best shot in the village. Once, I saw him take sixty paces back from a lizard on a tree, draw back his bow and release the arrow. It shot right through the lizard’s abdomen, pinning it to the bark.

The village chief let Fomba go hunting every day, but released him from the tasks of planting and harvesting millet because he never seemed
able to grasp all the rules or techniques, or to know how to work with a team of men. The children loved to follow Fomba about the village, watching him. He had a strange way of holding his head, tilting it way off to the side. Sometimes we gave him a platter of empty calabashes and asked him to balance it on his head, just for the pleasure of watching the whole thing slide off and crash to the ground. Fomba let us do that to him time and again.

We teased Fomba mercilessly, but he never seemed to mind us children. He would smile, and put up with rude taunts that would have gotten us beaten by any other adult in Bayo. On some days, we would hide behind a wall and spy on Fomba while he played with the ashes of a fire. This was one of his favourite activities. Long after the women had done their cooking and we had eaten millet balls and sauce and finished using soap from the ashes of banana leaves to clean the pots, Fomba would bring a stick to the fire and poke around in the ashes. One day he trapped five chickens in a fishing net. He brought them out one by one, wrang their necks, plucked and cleaned and gutted them. Then he drove a sharp iron rod through their bodies and set them over a fire to roast.

Fanta, the youngest wife of the village chief, came running from the millet-pounding circle and smacked him about the head.

It seemed strange to me that he didn’t try to protect himself. “The children need meat,” was all he said.

Fanta scoffed. “They don’t need meat until they can work,” she said. “Stupid
woloso
. You have just wasted five chickens.”

Under Fanta’s gaze, Fomba kept roasting the chickens, and then pulled them out of the fire, cut them up and handed the pieces to us. I took a leg, burning hot, and grabbed a leaf to protect my fingers. Warm juice ran down my chin as I sucked the brown flesh and crunched the bone to suck out the marrow. I heard that night that Fanta told her husband to beat the man, but he refused.

One day, Fomba was sent to kill a goat that had suddenly started biting children and acting like its mind had departed. Fomba caught the goat, made it sit, put his arm around it, patted its head to calm it down. Then, he drew a knife from his loincloth and sliced the neck where the artery was thick. The goat lay still in Fomba’s arms, staring like a baby at him as it bled ferociously, weakened, and died. Fomba, however, hadn’t positioned himself cleverly, and blood ran all over him. He stood in the middle of the village compound, ringed by mud homes, and called out for hot water. The women were pounding millet, and Fanta told the others to ignore him. But Mama had a soft spot for Fomba. I had heard her once, at night, telling Papa that Fanta mistreated the
woloso
. I wasn’t surprised when Mama took leave of the millet pounding, grabbed a prized metal bucket, poured in several calabashes of hot water and carried it over to Fomba, who lugged it into the bathing enclosure.

I thought the bucket was magical. One day, I snuck into Fanta’s round, thatched home. I found the bucket and brought it into the better light by the door. It was made of smooth, rounded metal, and reflected sunlight. The metal was thin, but I was unable to bend it. I turned it upside down and beat it with the heels of my palms. It swallowed sound. The metal had no character, no personality, and was useless for making music. It was not at all like goatskin pulled taut across the head of a drum. The bucket was said to have come from the toubabu. I wondered what sort of person would invent such a thing.

I tried lifting and swinging it by the looping metal handle. At that moment, Fanta came upon me, ripped the bucket from my hand, hung it from a peg in the wall, and popped me on the side of my head.

“You came into my house with no permission?”

Slap
.

“No, I was just…”

“It’s not for you to touch.”

Slap
.

“You can’t beat me like this. I’ll tell my father.”

Slap
.

“I’ll beat you all I want. And he’ll beat you again when he hears that you were in my home.”

Fanta, who had been planting millet in the boiling sun, had beads of sweat on her lip. I saw that she had better things to do than to stand there hitting me all day. I ducked and ran out of her home, knowing she would not follow.

PAPA WAS ONE OF THE BIGGEST MEN IN BAYO. It was said that he could outwrestle any man in our village. One day, he crouched low to the ground and called for me. Up I climbed onto his back, all the way to his shoulders. There I sat, higher than the tallest villager, my legs curled around his neck and my hands in his. He took me outside the walled village, me riding high up like that.

“Since you are so strong and can make such beautiful jewellery,” I said, “why don’t you take a second wife? Our chief has four wives!”

He laughed. “I cannot afford four wives, my little one. And why do I need four wives, when your mother gives me all the trouble I can manage? The Qur’an says that a man must treat all his wives equally, if he is to have more than one. But how could I treat anyone as equally as your mother?”

“Mama is beautiful,” I said.

“Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.”

“What about the old people?”

“They are the strongest of all, for they have lived longer than all of us, and they have wisdom,” he said, tapping his temple.

We stopped at the edge of a forest.

“Does Aminata go wandering off alone this far?” he asked.

“Never,” I said.

“Which way is the mighty Joliba, river of many canoes?”

“That way,” I said, pointing north.

“How far?”

“Four suns, by foot,” I said.

“Would you like to see the town of Segu one day?” he said.

“Segu on the Joliba?” I asked. “Yes. If I get to ride on your shoulders.”

“When you are old enough to walk for four suns, I will take you for a visit.”

“And I will travel, and cultivate my mind,” I said.

“We will not speak of that,” he said. “Your task is to become a woman.”

Papa had already shown me how to scratch out a few prayers in Arabic. Surely he would show me more, in good time.

“Mama’s village is over there, five suns away,” I said, pointing east.

“Since you are so clever, pretend I am blind and show me the way home.”

“Are we cultivating my mind now?”

He chuckled. “Show me the way home, Aminata.”

“Go that way, past the baobab tree.”

We made it that far. “Turn this way. Take this path. Watch out. Mama and I saw three white scorpions on this path yesterday.”

“Good girl. Now what?”

“Ahead, we enter our village. The walls are thick and as high as two men. We come in this way. Say hello to the sentry.”

Papa laughed and saluted the sentry. We approached the chief’s rectangular house, and passed the four round homes, one for each wife.

“Let me know when we pass Fanta’s house.”

“Why, Papa?”

“Perhaps we should stop in and drum your favourite bucket.”

I laughed and slapped his shoulder playfully and told him, in a whisper, that I did not like that woman.

“You must learn respect,” Papa said.

“But I do not respect her,” I said.

Papa paused for a moment, and patted my leg. “Then you must learn to hide your disrespect.”

Papa walked on, and soon, two women came upon us.

“Mamadu Diallo,” one called out to Papa, “that is not the way to educate your daughter. She has legs for walking.”

My father’s real name was Muhammad. But every Muslim man in the village was thus named, so he went by Mamadu to distinguish himself.

“Aminata and I, we were having a little chat,” Papa told the women, “and I needed her ears close to my mouth.”

The woman laughed. “You spoil her.”

“Not a chance. I am training her to carry me the same way, when I am old.”

The women bent over, slapping their thighs in laughter. We said goodbye, and I continued to direct Papa past the walled enclosure for bathing, past the shaded bench for palavering and past the round huts for storing millet and rice. And then Papa and I came upon Fanta, who was pulling Fomba by the ear.

“Stupid man,” she said.

“Hello, Fourth Wife of Chief,” Papa said.

“Mamadu Diallo,” she said.

“No salutations for my little girl today?” Papa said. She grimaced and said, “Aminata Diallo.”

“And why are you dragging poor Fomba thus?” Papa said. She still had the man by the ear.

“He led an ass to the well, and it fell in,” she said. “Put down that
spoiled girl, Mamadu Diallo, and help us fetch out the ass before it soils our drinking water.”

“If you let go of Fomba, who needs his ear, I shall help you with the ass.”

Papa let me down from his shoulders. Fomba and I watched Papa and some other men tie vines around a village boy and send him deep into the well. The boy in the well wrapped more vines around the ass, and was hoisted out. Then Papa and the men hauled out the ass. The animal seemed undisturbed, and on the whole less bruised than Fomba’s ear.

I wanted my papa to teach me how to tie vines around the belly of a donkey. Maybe he would teach me everything he knew. It wouldn’t hurt anybody if I learned to read and write. Perhaps, one day, I would be the only woman, and one of the only people in my entire village, to be able to read the Qur’an and to write in the gorgeous, flowing Arabic script.

ONE DAY, MAMA AND I WERE CALLED from our millet pounding to attend a birth in Kinta, four villages away in the direction of the setting sun. The men were weeding the millet fields, but Fomba was told to fetch his bow and a quiver of poisoned arrows and to walk with us for our protection. When we arrived in Kinta, Fomba was given a place to drink tea and rest, and we went to work. The birth stretched from the morning into the evening, and by the time Mama had caught the baby and swaddled him and brought him to his mother’s nipple, fatigue had gripped our bones. We took some millet cakes in hot gumbo sauce, which I loved. Before we left, the village women warned us to stay off the main trail leading from the village, because strange men—unknown in any neighbouring villages—had been spotted lately. The villagers asked if we would like to stay the night with them. My mother refused, because another mother in Bayo was expecting her baby at any time. As we prepared to leave, the villagers gave us a skin of water and three live chickens bound by the feet,
along with a special gift of thanks—a metal pail, like the big washing bucket Fomba used the day he killed the goat.

Fomba couldn’t carry a thing on his head because his neck was always bent to the left, so Mama told him to carry the pail, into which the chickens were stuffed. Fomba seemed proud of his acquisition, but Mama warned him that he would have to surrender it when we returned to the village. He nodded happily and set out ahead of us.

“When we get home, can I have the pail?” I asked.

“The pail belongs to the village. We will give it to the chief.”

“But then Fanta will get it.”

Mama held her breath. I could tell that she didn’t like Fanta, either, but she watched her words.

We walked under a full moon that blazed in the night sky and lit our path. When we were almost home, three hares dashed in front of us, one right after the other, disappearing into the woods. Fomba set down his bucket, lifted a throwing stone from a flap at the hip of his loincloth and cocked his arm. He seemed to know that the hares would scurry back across the path. When they reappeared, Fomba pegged the slowest hare in the head. He stooped to pick it up, but Mama held him back. The hare was thick around the middle. Mama ran her finger along the body. The rabbit had been pregnant. It would make a fine stew, Mama told Fomba, but next time he saw rabbits streaking across the trail, he should sharpen his aim and take the fastest one—not the female lugging babies in her belly. Fomba nodded and draped his swollen prey over his shoulder. He stood up and resumed walking, but suddenly bent his neck even further to the side and listened.

There was more rustling in the bushes. I looked for another sign of the hares. Nothing. We walked more quickly. Mama reached for my hand.

“If strangers come upon us, Aminata—” she began, but got no further.

From behind a grove of trees stepped four men with massive arms and
powerful legs. In the moonlight, I could see that they had faces like mine, but with no facial carvings. Whoever they were, they came from another village. They had ropes, leather straps and knives, and an odd, long piece of wood with a hole at one end. For an instant, they stared at us and we looked at them. I heard the click of fear at the back of Mama’s throat. I longed to run. Never could one of those thick, clumsy, loud-breathing men catch me whirling and dashing and sidestepping among the trees, flying down the forest paths just as quick as an antelope. But Mama had the water skins balanced on a platter on her head, and I had some pineapples balanced over mine, and in the instant that I hesitated, wondering what to do with those platters, worrying that the fruit would tumble to the ground if I moved too awkwardly, the men encircled us.