Blonde Roots Read online

  The men inside Shuga could sniff out a slave a mile away. Hounds to a fox, one and all. Some were agents for Amarikan or West Japanese planters, there to buy new Europanes; others were middle-class householders seeking new staff.

  I had always tried to console myself with the fact that while they were destroying us they were also destroying themselves. Such was the demand for sugar, the price of a sweet tooth was a toothless smile. Such was the demand for coffee, the price of caffeine was addiction, heart palpitations, osteoporosis and general irritability. The price of rum was chronic liver disease, alcoholism and permanent memory loss. The cost of tobacco was cancer, stained teeth and emphysema.

  I had stopped directly outside Shuga while my mind took off on yet another sprint of its own. Years of suppressed rage were rising to the surface because freedom was so close. I had done the very thing I should not. I had looked inside its “rustic” spit-and-sawdust room with the mandatory portrait of President-for-Life Sanni Abasta in prime position above the counter.

  I found myself staring at a male on the auction block.

  The air was charged with tobacco smoke and pungent with steaming coffee beans.

  Men were bidding for him.

  He was about fifteen, I reckoned. A prize buck, then. He had his back to me but his pimpled, fisted face was turned toward the door, away from the men.

  It was flushed with adolescent shame rather than the teeth- grinding rage of a fully fledged male.

  He was completely naked, and his pallid back and buttocks were crawling with what looked like cockroaches but were lumps of congealed blood. Maybe he’d tried to run away or had spoken his native language or had committed some similar crime.

  My eyes roamed over the crowd of men with their animated, perspiring faces, hand-printed robes draped over a shoulder or knotted at the waist, puffing on pipes, sitting with their legs akimbo so that they took up twice their body width. Their hoarse, booming Ambossan voices batted back and forth as they bid for the boy. I suddenly locked eyes with a very young man sitting apart and looking bored, head tilted, twizzling a pigeon feather in his ear. He was staring straight at me through the haze and the bartering with a surprise that was rapidly working itself up to a realization.

  He knew me.

  It was Bamwoze.

  Bwana’ s second but most favored son.

  Of all people.

  Bamwoze.

  I had wet-nursed the little bastard. I had wiped his scuzzy little arse and rocked him to sleep. I had breastfed him when my first newborn had been taken away and I was still heavy with milk.

  All the while I was in mourning for my lost child.

  I swaddled Bamwoze with all the love meant for my own.

  I even kidded myself, at times, that he was indeed my own.

  He took to me like a leech and wouldn’t let go.

  Then he grew up and was sent off to the forest to be initiated into manhood. When he returned from being buried up to his head in dirt for days to prove his endurance and killing a crocodile with his bare hands to prove his strength, he began strutting around the compound like a mini-Bwana, and I, whose teats had produced full-fat milk that had formed his bone, brain, skin and muscle, ceased to exist for him.

  Nanny no more.

  Invisible, see.

  SOME TIME AFTERWARD, Bwana discovered Bamwoze had gotten a local slave girl pregnant, a rite of passage for the sons of masters, but he had tried to elope with her to Europa of all places, which was taking the piss. What were they planning? A Grand Tour?

  Bwana disinherited Bamwoze and kicked him out of the house. I don’t know what happened to the girl—dead or in the New World, probably. We were all filled with a newfound respect for Bamwoze when we discovered he had forfeited his inheritance for a mulatto. Some time later we heard he’d become a trader in slaves himself, in order to continue living in the comfort to which he was born. The girl had been an aberration, we all realized—just a pretty mulatto trophy or simply part of his teenage rebellion against Bwana. What I knew for sure was that he couldn’t give a damn about the rest of us.

  And here he was after all these years, locking eyes with me, knowing full well that I was where I shouldn’t be and that there could be only one reason for it. He’d been a big lad and was a big man now, typical of the Ambossans. But I recognized the familiar expression of self-pity sweep across the plump face of the child before he became the man; before bones started pushing through his cheeks and shaping his face into something fierce and arrogant.

  Here was the spoiled boy who got everything he wanted—more giraffe burgers, more vanilla drops, yet another baby camel to take him riding around the compound. He had never been denied anything as a child, and so, as is the way with the blessed of this world, nothing was ever enough for him.

  The wretch still felt sorry for himself.

  I didn’t move and neither did he. I could see the indecision in his eyes, weighing up the options, which one would benefit him the most. If I moved, I would make up his mind for him and he would raise the alarm. Seconds passed. The sensory overload of the smoke and smell and shouts of the bidding faded away. I knew better than to plead with my eyes because he would feel manipulated and resist. If I looked afraid, he would despise me. So I just went blank—the slaves’ default position. Then I sensed a thought take shape in his mind. To let me go would be a way to get back at his father.

  We both knew that I had read him.

  He smiled to himself, then gestured at me with a magnanimous roll-of-the-eyes and an Oh, go on then nod to be on my way.

  Seconds later I was running.

  I didn’t care anymore. I had no time left.

  If someone stopped me, so be it.

  I found the dusty bushes with little effort, using all my strength to open the round iron manhole. I levered myself down and felt strong hands catch my slim hips with such warm, solid strength it was like being caught by my father after he’d thrown me into the air when I was a kid. Would they be a safe pair? Turning round, I saw an elderly Ambossan holding a pottery lamp reeking of kerosene. His head was as bald, hard and uneven as a gourd, and a band of antelope teeth was draped over it. His welcoming lopsided grin reassured me that he was not out to ensnare me.

  “Greetings, Omorenomwara, from your friends at the Resistance. I am your Conductor. We are glad you made it.”

  Omorenomwara was the slave name PIG gave me when I was first enslaved. It meant “This child will not suffer.”

  I PAUSED.

  I could finally give my real name to an Ambossan. It was like reclaiming my identity. I trembled, stuttering.

  “Please, call me Doris. I am Doris. My name is Doris.”

  He grinned and tried to repeat my real appellation, slowly, looking embarrassed, breaking it down into three elongated syllables, his tongue stumbling over the strange phonetics. He looked so pleased when he managed to pronounce it.

  Honestly, it was truly endearing.

  “Dooo-raaa-sha,” he said.

  Bless.

  I smiled encouragingly nonetheless. At least he’d tried.

  “We must make haste,” he added. “I will lead you to the Bakalo Line, where your train awaits you.”

  THE GOSPEL TRAIN

  It was silent down there except for the scurrying of rodents and lizards and the muted echo of our footsteps. The floor gave way in places, and it took an age to descend the escalator as I eased my way down, gripping the rubber banister, my fingernails scraping up mushy dirt. Who knew when I’d be able to wash again? I was a fastidious person and liked a hearty wash-down at least once every two weeks.

  When we reached the bottom, my anonymous guide turned right into a corridor reeking of must and so clotted with dust that I gagged. But my guide didn’t turn around. I was supposed to be a brave escapee, not a wimp. I was a mature woman, not a child. Yet something was stirring deep inside of me. When had I last been in such a dark, enclosed, claustrophobic space?

  Cobwebs stretched before us like
veins of forest foliage. He brushed them away with his swaying lantern, step by step. I could sense the surge of all those Ambossans who for years had filled those brightly lit tunnels during what they called the Rushing Hour. All those scurrying feet and harried minds. All those sugar-loving, coffee-drinking, baccy-smoking, rum-sipping commuters, most of whom hadn’t a thought about who provided their little pleasures, their little dependencies.

  Like the caves deep in the hills of my homeland that the sun could never penetrate, these were catacombs running underneath a landmass that weighed down upon it, and it was chilled to its abandoned bone. In time the soil of the land and underground rivers would complete nature’s reclamation.

  My guide shuffled ahead, his lantern creating spooky patterns of light and shadow, which looked like ghouls looming toward us.

  He carefully stepped over little craters in the ground and piles of powdery plaster from the caved-in ceilings, glancing behind to check that I did the same. He needn’t have worried; I was at his mercy. The Tube was strange territory and I had no bearings. When I looked behind, the tunnel had closed in on us.

  When something wet, hairy and slithery crawled onto my foot, I merely bit my lip and managed to kick it off. There were probably more small beasts in that subterranean jungle than I could bear to contemplate, families of tarantulas and scorpions for whom my ankles would be a once-in-a-lifetime delicacy. What had happened to the farm girl I used to be? The girl who could wring a chicken’s neck, gut a rabbit, deliver a calf, who had kept a dog as a pet.

  The Ambossans regarded the keeping of animals as domestic pets as downright primitive. The very idea of sleeping with a flea-ridden, molting cat or dog in the same bed, or kissing a canine or feline mouth that licked its own anus, was disgusting.

  I turned my attention to my guide. He wore a bleached-orange wrappa and nothing else. He was short for an Ambossan, and tubby, although his fat had the hard substance of a man who has known a lifetime’s manual labor rather than the slack softness of one who has not. I was used to reading people from behind, an emotional state emanating from someone’s posture, a state of mind indicated by the tilt of the head. There were those who carried a self combusting anger in their backs. Others had the defeated trundle of a loser, the imploded chest and listless arms that asked, Why should I bother?

  I longed to possess the confident thrust of a person with the freedom to pursue her own course of action.

  My guide’s body language was that of someone battling a storm. His shoulders were set in a permanent hunch. His forehead was ready to head-butt any opponents. Doubtless he came from one of the slums. No way had he been born with a silver spoon feeding his mouth, yet he had chosen compassion over resentment.

  I liked him. Of course I did.

  I could always tell whether Bwana or Madama Blessing were in a good mood or, more likely, ready to crack the proverbial whip, and I was usually prepared when they did. It is the skill of a great slave to predict the master’s moods and needs before he himself knows what they are. I relied on knowledge of Bwana’ s daily schedule (forewarned is forearmed), eavesdropping—which is the advantage of those who blend into the decor until called upon to carry out an errand—and I was expert at reading his facial expressions, body language and intonation. Peripheral vision was also essential, as well as an ability, after so many years, to sense his deeper yearnings.

  When Bwana ambled into his den after a dinner of, say, egusi stew, pounded yam, cow leg and a flagon of palm wine, burping and flatulent, reeking of musk oil, chewing a kola nut and aiming its juice into a spittoon, or stopping to piss into a chamber pot that a slave boy held in the right position for him, I usually knew whether to pour him rum-on-the-rocks, a banana daiquiri or a piña colada, or whether to leave him alone or order in some takeaway sex from one of the high-class agencies like Ladies of the Night, recruited from one of the poorer Aphrikan countries like the Congo or Malawi.

  As intimately as I knew him, he barely registered me. My job was to make sure his office was run efficiently.

  The Ambossans were generally a proud, stalwart people. A commonly held joke was that the Gambians knocked on a door, the Ghanaians pushed it open, but what did the Ambossans do? Why, they just kicked the door down, man!

  Bwana was indeed a true Ambossan chief. He had the moist, spongy lips of a man used to having them gratified, a broad porous nose that puckered when irked and oozed perspiration when enraged, the intractable shoulders of a muscle man and an expansive girth that gave him the gravitas of an aging military dictator.

  The rich Ambossan male was often whippet-thin when young but built up an armor of fat as he aged. A big man was supposed to take up a lot of physical space too. This one also walked with the unhurried sway of someone whose authority was without question. A slight gesture of a hand, a raised eyebrow or a stern look sent his minions scurrying. Needless to say, women adored him. The wives of friends and acquaintances who came to visit dissolved into girly titters when he turned his charms on to each one in turn. The number of surreptitious, passionate glances—I could not begin to count.

  Naturally, Bwana was foremost in my mind as we burrowed underneath the city of soil and sand. When he discovered my escape, his nostrils would emit flames so hot his lips would melt.

  I turned my attention to the posters on the tunnel walls: stained, crinkled, slumping in their cracked glass cases like people with humped backs, sloppy bellies and weak knees. They were advertising dramas of yore: the classic Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner, To Sir with Hate, Little Whyte Sambo, Esq., and the famous tragedies The Tragic Mulatto, The Tragic Quadroon and The Tragic Octoroon. One poster made me do a double take. It was for The Whyte and Blak Minstrel Show.

  The Ambossans still flocked in their thousands to see it at the Palladia Arena during the rainy season. It featured Am‘ bossan performers as whvte-face minstrels, faces smeared with chalk, lips thinned down to a red slit. They sang out of tune in reedy voices, their upper lips stiff as they danced with idiotic, jerky movements while attempting the hop, skip and jump of Morris dancing. They wore clogs on their feet, bells on their ankles, waved hankies in the air and rubbed their bottoms up against each other. All the while singing music hall songs about being lazy, lying, conniving, cowardly, ignorant, sexually repressed buffoons.

  Bwana and his huge extended family went to the Palladia every year. They took up the entire stalls and returned singing the minstrel songs very loudly, thinking they were being so damned funny. It was a kind of madness, because the performing caricatures they mimicked bore no relation to the whytes in their service. Still, credit where it’s due, it was the only time they tried to entertain the staff.

  Suddenly my guide did a sharp right, jolting me back. He led me down a short set of stairs that opened on to tunnels on either side.

  One dusty sign on the wall read BAKALO LINE—Southbound via Baka Street, Marbone, Ox Fordah Crossroads, Embankere, Wata Lo, Londolo Bridge, Kanada Wadi.

  The other sign read BAKALO LINE—Northbound via Pharoah’s Plains, m’ Aiduru Valley, Kenshala Dunes, Harlesdene, Kentouni, Harro Wa.

  We did a right turn onto a platform with rail tracks, and standing before us was my gift from the Resistance-a one-carriage train. Another man was sitting in the driver’ seat in a little cabin at the front. Perhaps Tuareg, he wore an indigo turban, which was wrapped around his mouth and jaw, hiding most of his face. Only his eyes and nose peeked out, deep creases running down either side.

  He nodded, once, clearly a man of few gestures and, as I discovered, even fewer words.

  This was it, then, one of the famous Tube trains that had shunted back and forth for an age underneath the city. It was a wreck-no windows, no doors, no seats.

  We had not spoken for the entire journey.

  My guide gripped my shoulders, and I surprised myself by wanting to cry. He was risking his life for me.

  Captured Resistance members were tortured, but I sensed this man would never spill the beans. If cau
ght, his fate was inevitable.

  “Take care, Doris,” he said. (This time it came out as “Duoro-sisi.”)

  “The driver will take you to Doklanda. My task is done but I pray that you will reach your homeland. When you do, you must send word to the Co-op. I want to hear you are safe.”

  His gaze held mine. This really was it.

  “Do not drop your guard until you reach home safely.”

  He clasped my shivering hands in his warm, stubby ones.

  “Trust only those who earn it.”

  Before I could reply he had vanished from whence we came. Now I couldn’t disappear back into the labyrinth of tunnels and return to Mayfah even if fear got the better of me, and it had been tugging my arm like a child.

  The driver stared ahead and started the engine. I walked into the shell of a carriage, found a spot in the middle of the floor where I could hold on to a metal pole.

  The Tube started to move with the quiet stealth of a cobra.

  I had visions of hundreds of angry Ambossan men descending into the tunnels in loincloths, torchlights searching, the cracking of muskets, bloodhounds braying.

  Bwana was a major mover and shaker in this city. News of my escape would spread like bush fire. He’d suffer public humiliation if I wasn’t captured. Slave and master alike would gloat. As his PA, I wasn’t your common or garden-variety house wigger. I’d be the talking point around every communal eating bowl in the city. I was probably at that very minute going down in recent history.

  £C250

  FOR THE RETURN OF THE SCRAWNY

  BLONDE SLAVE WOMAN

  OMORENOMWARA

  • PREFERABLY MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE ‘ •

  To the Ambossans we “scrawny blondes” all looked alike. It would be in my favor for once.