Blonde Roots Page 2

  “To see my girls in those crinolines with expensive whalebones that those ladies up there wear, pretty paste on your cheeks, pearls around your swanlike necks; to see you swirling around at dances with kindly gentlemen on your arms, winning smiles on your lips and glass slippers on your feet.”

  “Oooh, don’t be so soppy,” I’d say, before going to fetch the looking glass to see if my neck really was “swanlike.”

  That night I dreamed of a lacy yellow crinoline with puffed-up sleeves. My gown was so exquisite, my glass slippers so dainty, that when I ran across the meadows, hair flowing in the wind, everyone gasped at how elegant I’d turned out.

  Then I ruined it by getting bunions because the slippers were too tight and one of them cracked and the glass cut into my foot, waking me up with the pain of it.

  PA WOULD RISE BEFORE DAYLIGHT had kicked nighttime into touch. He’d return after dark, when he’d be mardy until he’d eaten.

  He liked a tankard of ale (only ever admitted the one) of a Friday night after dinner when he’d go to Johnny Johnson’s barn over at None-Go-By Farm for a “wee session” with “the lads”—all old men pushing forty. He’d come home reeking of the barley and herbs in his ale, singing a bawdy song, which we could hear from fields off, then catching his breath as he leaned against the opened door frame blasting cold air into our parlor, ranting on about how “the working man will have his day,” before staggering inside in his manure-caked boots and collapsing into his chair, legs sprawled open, head thrown back so that his bristly Adam’s apple stuck out and quivered.

  “How are the lads?” Mam would say out loud once he was snoring, not looking up from her knitting needles, which clacked like warring swords.

  I’ ll never forget the first time it was my turn to take Pa hot bread and dripping for lunch.

  The clouds had sunk so low from the heavens I couldn’ t find him for ages, until there he was, looming out of the fog, one hand rested on his pitchfork, looking for all the world like a scarecrow, and I suddenly saw how all the backbreaking work had drained him.

  He was singing, but not one of his usual smutty songs that made us girls giggle and our mam scowl. Instead he sounded like one of the choir boys at church whose voices hadn’t become coarse and mud-filled and angry from years of breaking up icy ground with shovels, slopping out donkey shit or chopping wood for hours in freezing winter dressed in rough sackcloth, with their bare feet shod only in clogs.

  It was the voice of the boy inside the man. The child inside my father.

  His heart was full of yearning, for something he’d lost or wanted to have.

  My heart crumbled like stale bread.

  Are you going to Scarborough Fayre?

  Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,

  Remember me to one who lives there,

  She once was a true love of mine.

  On my tenth birthday it was my turn to go out onto the fields blindfolded to pull up the first cabbage of the season. Aged ten you’d already survived the pox, the sweat and just about every other disease that spirited children away early, so it was likely you might grow to adulthood. If the cabbage came up with a lot of earth attached, it meant you’d be rich; if not then you’d be poor.

  That spring dawn we all trekked across the damp grass and past trees beginning to unfurl the tiny lavender-colored petals of blossom.

  I’d already decided on my career path. I was going to become one of those rare silk-trading women, like that young Margaret Roper from the village at Duddingley who went off on the back of a cart and came back in her own carriage. Like her I’d be apprenticed for seven years; then I’d run my own business. First I had to persuade Pa to persuade Percy to let me go. I knew Pa would scoff at the idea of one of his silly daughters becoming a proper businesswoman.

  It didn’t put me off.

  The debt would take many years to pay off but eventually I’d be rich enough to settle it myself.

  I had it all sorted.

  As you do, when you’re ten.

  The cabbage came up with a huge clump of sod attached.

  I did a cartwheel, singing out, “Wey, hey, hey, the cat and fiddle and the cow jumped over the moon.”

  Oh, so it really sodding worked then, didn’t it?

  MEMORIES WOULD NOT GET ME to the station on time.

  I flew out of Bwana’s office like a leopard on kola nuts and rushed across the compound, the largest in the city. Across the freshly sprinkled, squeaky-green lawn, past the rockery studded with cacti, past the wide-hipped, big-mama palms of the pineapple grove, past the orange and pink slides and roundabouts of the adventure playground, past the saccharine scent of the mangosteen, pawpaw and vanilla trees, past the open-air swimming pool with mosquitoes buzzing over its stagnant surface, past the camel paddocks, and behind all that, finally, to the secreted slave quarters, which had been considerately built next to the sewage dump and pigs’ pen.

  There I entered the tiny hut I shared with my roommates: Yomisi and Sitembile.

  Yomisi was in her thirties, like me. Only she’d been born Gertraude Shultz on a wheat farm in Bavaria. Aged eighteen she was kidnapped by slave catchers as she made her way back from church one chilly Sunday morning, foolishly taking the shortcut across the graveyard. She eventually ended up in Londolo, sleeping side by side with yours truly. It was an unlikely bonding: I was the optimist, she the pessimist. I clutched my return ticket to my chest, always dreaming of escape; she’d ripped hers to shreds the very first time she was gang-raped by her three kidnappers shortly after capture.

  She’d been hell-bent on revenge ever since.

  Yomisi was Bwana’s cook. Steel-thin, green-eyed, heavy-lidded, she was forced to wear an iron muzzle in the kitchen to prevent her eating on the job. It encaged her face in metal bands that clamped a perforated plate over her mouth. A lock secured this contraption at the back.

  Her lips cracked. Her mouth dehydrated. Her tongue swelled. Her gums bled.

  Even when the muzzle was removed at night she spoke through gritted teeth.

  Sometimes Bwana vomited the night away or one of his children ran a fever. The runs were commonplace. Bwana’s regular hallucinations bordered on insanity, and the entire family frequently broke out in rashes so unbearable they could be seen clawing off layers of skin in a communal frenzy.

  All fingers pointed to the juju of Bwana’ s business enemies, none at the passive, sticklike cook.

  Crushed glass.

  Rotten meat disguised by strong herbs and spices.

  Fungi.

  Plants she would not name.

  It was the only thing that gave her pleasure.

  My second roommate was the cheery young Sitembile, who was in her early twenties. She liked to remind us lesser mortals that she was born Princess Olivia de Champfleur-Saxe-Coburg-Grimaldi-Bourbon-Orleans-Hapsburg in a palace in the ancient land of Monaco. Taken hostage in a war with the French, she was sold into captivity when her father, the king, wouldn’t pay for the release of a girl child when he already had five sons in line to inherit the crown.

  Sitembile held the honored position of household toilet cleaner, emptying approximately fifty toilet pots each morning, before spending the rest of the day scooping out the bog holes and hosing them down with lime disinfectant to deter bugs and flies.

  When time allowed, and it rarely did, she sat on our stoop, chattering away, embarking on a conversation in her head, letting the listener in halfway through and then being surprised when we complained we didn’ t have a clue what she was going on about.

  She’d sit there twisting her hair into pigtails mixed with clay, rubbing ocher into her skin to darken its pigment in the hope that she might be spotted by one of Bwana’ s nicer, younger, more handsome business associates and be whisked away to a new life as a favored mistress. With substantial curves either side of a naturally tiny waist, it was just possible.

  Yomisi tried to dampen Sitembile’ s enthusiasm with her oft-declared dictum that dreams and disappoint
ment were inseparable bedfellows.

  I helped rub ocher into Sitembile’s smooth, undamaged back, countering that dreams kept our spirits buoyant.

  We three women had slipped into one another’s lives and found a way to be together.

  Now I was slipping out.

  Without saying a word.

  OUR SHACK WAS CONSTRUCTED out of corrugated iron that was boiling on summer nights. Not for us the fancy, cool, whitewashed wattle-and-daub residences spread out at the top end of the compound with palm-thatched roofs and mangrove posts and windows and wraparound verandas. No, we either roasted or we froze in our grubby tin boxes, and our neighbor next door was a twelve-foot-high termite mound, which we daren’t disturb as it would most likely rebuild itself inside our dwelling.

  As I entered our hut, I knew that the others would be occupied elsewhere in the compound because we never stopped working. Even when it seemed that every job was completed, Madama Blessing, Bwana’s imperious Number One wife, kept everyone busy. The story goes that she was once the sweetest young virgin in town, but that after years of marriage to Bwana, and his accumulation of more and more wives for her to control, the power had gone to her head and she had turned into the gargoyle we all knew and hated.

  That day she had been wearing a chunky gold chain, which hung from the folds of her neck, with a ruby-and-diamond-studded Akua’ ba fertility doll as pendant. It was quite ridiculous when she was obviously postmenopausal. A gold ring in the shape of a snarling lion’s head leaped from her manicured hands, so that even when she was trying to be nice, you were reminded that she wasn’ t. A beautiful glared ‘ivory bone shot through her nose, and a lip plug pierced through her bottom lip showed she was a woman with a husband (like anyone needed reminding).

  On this most festive of days, she had woken up in one of her charming early-morning moods and ordered every available slave to get down on their hands and knees and scrub the immeasurable lengths of her cherished beige flagstone floors—with soap and a nailbrush. To get deep into the grooves, she explained, sweeping her eyes at the assembled bare feet of her staff before propelling her bulk from the hips and shoulders down the hallway with all the grace of a three-legged, half-blind, three-thousand-pound hippo.

  As the eyes are the window of the soul, if she had bothered to look into ours, she would have seen an ax murderer in each and every one of them.

  Madama Blessing herself had large startled eyes that dominated her face, and when they swooped and swerved, you prayed they would not rest on you, because if they did it would be with shocked outrage at a crime for which you had to be punished, even though you had not committed it yet. At the same time she had bucket-loads of self-pity, which was often the case with our masters—they were the injured ones, not us. She wore her favorite outfit made out of Adinkra cloth. It was stamped with the design known as Atamfo Atwameho, which means “Enemies Surround Me.”

  I gathered up a bundle of my clothing and threw it into a basket, grabbed a wrappa and whipped it over my shoulders. It would hide the nice personalized tattoos that ran across my shoulders. As was the fashion with slave society, the name of my first mistress, Panyin Ige Ghika—PIG—was inscribed.

  I was once the companion of PIG’s daughter—Little Miracle.

  Oh Little Miracle—more about her later.

  When Bwana bought me he had me tattooed with his initials too-KKK.

  Can you imagine having a red-hot poker searing into your skin? Twice? The delayed shock reaction as it sizzles and smokes, then the warm bloody tears streaming down your arms and spine?

  I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH to take with me. We didn’t wear much because of the heat, which I never did get used to, nor to the Ambossan dress code—the wraparound wrappas—or having to go barefoot, which felt so uncomfortable, especially when I had such fond memories of wearing clogs. How I longed for their cool molded insoles, to feel a mild shudder when the wood impacted on hard ground. And going topless is no joke when you’ve had three children and your breasts swing like soggy butternut squash. And don’t get me started on the hairstyle Madama Blessing insisted I adopt as the household’s most high-status slave. My long straight blonde hair was threaded through with wire and put into plaited hoops all over my head. I wanted to protest that we whytes just didn’t have the bone structure to carry it off. But she expected me to look respectable when I opened the door to her distinguished guests and not like some uncouth wretch from Europa. The guests were usually Members of the House of Governors, the UK’s ruling body, many of them fellow plantation owners who had purchased a seat in the House.

  All these thoughts were whirring around in my brain as I raked through the sandy ground beneath my sleeping pallet and brought up an old goatskin pouch filled with forty-six cowrie-pounds. I had managed to pilfer a shell here and there over the long years while out shopping for Bwana and his family. I always hoped I would need them one day.

  I quietly shut the door, checking the coast was clear. I put my basket on my head and crept through a gap in the bushes. It led to a back alley, which was the means by which we slaves sneaked in and out of the compound to engage in romantic trysts with our lovers, myself included, although I had been single a long time. I was a very monogamous person, holding on to the one-man, one-woman practice of my own culture, no matter how much the polygamous Ambossans ridiculed it as uneconomical, selfish, typically hypocritical and just plain backward.

  THE LOVE OF MY LIFE had been Frank. His slave name was Ndumbo, but I never called him that in private. A maker and mender of things, he was a renowned carpenter. He said he never felt more alive than when facing the silent congregation of the severed limbs of the forest at their mortuary—the logging camp at Golda’ s Green. There they underwent seasoning by the elements until ready to be reincarnated into functional or decorative artifacts by their High Priest—my Frank.

  Frank was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, dark haired—a gentleman.

  He never once spoke sharply to me, or bossed me around, and whenever he smiled at me, it was with an appreciation that took a while for me to accept. I was so used to being taken for granted.

  We spent what free time we could together and our pleasures were, by necessity, simple:

  Sharing a slice of coconut rum cake Yomisi had pilfered from the kitchen.

  Lying in the grass and counting the stars in the night sky.

  The wooden bangles and anklets he made for me, engraved on the inside with my name and his.

  I secretly taught him to write his name on a slate: Frank Adam Merryweather, son of Frank William Merryweather, of Hull, England.

  The look on his face when it was first accomplished without any spelling mistakes. How he beamed like an elated child.

  At night Frank’s dexterous carpenter’s hands roamed so expertly over the contours of my back and limbs that my deadened body was resensitized and reshaped into a work of art.

  The next day I’d go about my duties with softened bones and looser joints and weightless muscles and a wandering mind that could settle on nothing and no one but him.

  Frank was such a harmless man, but his mistress, that five-foot-nothing Madama Subria, accused him of sexually assaulting her and reported him to her husband. He sold Frank on to one of the islands of West Japan but not before he’d endured fifty lashes of the cat-o‘-nine-tails at the whipping post at Cumburlasgar Gateway up the road. Every slave in the neighborhood was forced to attend.

  Imagine how I felt watching that. Poor Frank’s shredded back. His stubborn silence, then pitiful mewls, until he let rip such terrible screams they tore open the fabric of the skies.

  The irony was that Madama Subria was always trying to seduce him with her petulant pouts and hip-hugging wrappas, flouncing about, rolling her ample Ambossan bottom (so that each cheek moved independently of the other—quite a feat) whenever he walked behind her in the corridor. He ignored her advances until one day she got him to repair the hinges on the gold and ivory chest in the master bedroom. She sudd
enly stripped off her clothes and stood there completely starkers.

  What you have to understand is that Madama Subria was as spoiled as every other mistress of means. When you have an army of slaves at your beck and call, you expect to get what you want when you want it.

  Lesson Number One—slaves do not reject their masters’ advances.

  My man learned that the hard way.

  She was livid. She took her revenge.

  We slaves don’t end relationships. Other people do it for us. Often we don’t start them either. Other people do it for us. We’re encouraged to breed merely to increase the workforce.

  My three were sold on.

  Each time they promised I could keep the child. A bold-faced lie, because some expectant mothers would rather kill themselves if they knew their child was going to be taken away at birth.

  As I went into labor, crouched on a tattered raffia mat, the midwife, Ma Ramla (Sigfrieda, from Germany), mopped my brow with a damp cloth, burned sandalwood joss sticks, held me from behind and encouraged me to push.

  Each child was placed into the guardianship of a wet nurse, until each one was sold. Another strategy, I discovered, because it had been known for mothers to become uncontrollably violent when told to hand over the infant they had breastfed for months.

  Two girls and a boy.

  I never saw my children again.

  SOMETIMES, WHEN I PLACE my hand over my stomach, I can still feel their little kicks.

  I remember how carrying the extra weight of a child filled me up.

  How I’d sing nursery rhymes to them in the womb:

  Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

  And doesn’t know where to find them.

  Leave them alone, and they’ ll come home

  Bringing their tails behind them.

  I remember Frank was there at the birth of the first child, squeezing my hand.