Blonde Roots Read online

He was the youngest of the men. They had tried to make him talk.

  Garanwyn’s eyes sought mine and when he found them he mouthed, “Shhhh!”

  I thought he might be angry with me, but no, he was still thinking of my welfare.

  They strung him up.

  The cat-o’-nine-tails whizzed through the air, ripping open the skin on his back, buttocks and legs and slashing it to pieces.

  The sailors charged with whipping him took it in turns. Four shifts.

  They just wouldn’t stop.

  On and on it went.

  There was no need to see if he was alive before he was thrown overboard.

  It was all my fault.

  I would live with the guilt for the rest of my life.

  THE OTHER MEN WERE let off with thirty lashes apiece. They had to heal by the time the ship docked, to be healthy bucks capable of fetching a good price.

  There were four hundred slaves at embarkation, and two hundred and twentyseven survived.

  Which was about the international average.

  CAPTAIN WABWIRE PUT IN an appearance that morning. He hadn’t been sighted for ages. He watched the proceedings while rocking backward and forward on his feet. The canary-yellow caftan he wore that day was encrusted with food droppings. The plaits in his hair were dried up and coming undone. His eyes had lost their sheen. His skin was dulled. His expression, numb.

  He staggered toward us captives as if to make an announcement, as if to lecture us on the futility of insurrection.

  But when he opened his mouth to speak, he fell to the ground.

  Two sailors rushed to pick him up and escort him back to the master cabin.

  It dawned on me that he was drunk out of his head.

  AFTER THAT, OUR SHIP sailed uneventfully toward its destination—the paradise island of New Ambossa on West Japan.

  OH LITTLE MIRACLE

  Upon arrival at the port of New Ambossa, I was subjected to the traditional slave-market scramble. We were shoved into a holding pen until at the appointed hour the gates were flung open and a howling mob of men burst in like a pack of starving hyenas about to rip us to shreds.

  They grabbed at the slaves they wanted, tied us up with rope or simply dragged us out of the pen by whatever limbs or body parts they could lay their hands on.

  I collapsed in the middle of the scrum and was stampeded on. The man who pulled me up wanted me, but so did another, which resulted in a tug-of-war as they each tried to dislodge a shoulder from its socket.

  The victor bound my wrists with rope so tightly that they bled, then dragged me out of the pen like I was a goat (not for the first time).

  I wet myself, but I was used to that by now.

  He tied me to a post, inspected my scalp and ears, pulled apart my lips and invaded my mouth with fingers that stank of tobacco and left their bitterness on my gums. I filled my mouth with spittle but the foul taste lingered for ages afterward. He cupped my chest, slapped my bottom like it was a cow’s shank and squeezed each thigh to test its musculature. Then he made me sit down and spread my legs so that he could “inspect” my vagina, pushing those meaty fingers of his inside my virginal self. I didn’t cry. I was determined not to cry. At the end, I had to stand up and bend over so that he could “inspect” my anus too.

  I cried.

  No one paid any attention.

  Satisfied, he went off to purchase me from Captain Wabwire, who was dressed in a spotless cream linen gown with black tasseled borders. He sat straight-backed at a trestle table under a canopy of banana leaves, looking most respectable and dignified after his seafaring ordeal, although I did notice an imperceptible wrinkling of his nose, whereupon he would open a tiny snuff box and take a sniff.

  I watched him count up the cowrie-pounds from my sale in little pyramids and enter the transaction in a ledger—no doubt with a flourishing, well-educated, calligraphic script.

  Before we left the port, I was forced to my knees and branded on my shoulder with the initials for Panyin Ige Ghika—my new mistress.

  It took weeks for the different layers of encrustations to shrivel up into scabs and drop off.

  I was bundled onto the back of a cart, and a sack was put over my head. We traveled for hours over potholed roads. My branded shoulder hurt so much I almost bit through my bottom lip. My wrists and ankles were still bound and bleeding. And I was itchy with urine and feces (yup, that too), which attracted the attention of flies as my naked posterior was exposed to the indifferent air.

  Late that night we pulled up at the Roaring River Estate, where I was to spend the rest of my childhood.

  I never saw any of my fellow passengers from the slaver again.

  Never got to say good-bye to anyone, either.

  Pushed into a hut with no windows and bolted in, I was washed down the next day and my wounds were dressed. I was then led up to the Great House where I was presented to my new owners, the Ghika family: Massa Tschepi, Madama Panyin Ige and, after many miscarriages, the wonderful, the incredible, the bestest in the whole wide worldest, yes she is, you know she is, the amazing—drum rolls, bugles, praise singers—LITTLE MIRACLE! Rapturous applause, stamping feet, mass hysteria.

  Trussed up in rustling ivory silks, the little brown dumpling sat between her regal parents like a princess.

  Madama, whose slick plaits were pulled tight off her face into a topknot, wore eight brass neck rings, which stretched her neck to twice its original length. She barely moved her body when she talked and she glided rather than walked.

  Massa Tschepi had a mouth full of gold teeth. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Were they real? Surely not.

  All were seated on thronelike seats in a room crammed full of furniture and objects, which were even stranger than Percy’s aristocratic assembly of stuffed animals.

  Who were these people? Like the sailors, they were so dark I couldn’t (yet) easily read their faces, nor could I understand a word they said. All those clicks and clacks again. Were they kind or angry? Everything was weird: the furniture, their clothes (which had no arms or legs), the stuffed giraffe by the window—what kind of creature was that? Had it once been alive? Really? Even the flowers were odd, and why uproot them and put them in bowls? How come one bunch looked like birds with spiked orange heads and another like purple cabbages on a stem? Cabbages as decoration? And the heat made me feel like I was boiling in a vat of oil. It took me years to get used to it.

  And why hadn’t my daddy come to rescue me?

  If I’m honest, I don’t think I ever really forgave him.

  Ever.

  I started to snivel, which my new owners ignored. Then again, I was beginning to realize these people couldn’t see me.

  Little Miracle sat prized and protected by the plantation titans.

  Her juicy Ambossan lips had such a pronounced natural pout it looked like she was deliberately puckering up her mouth. Her nostrils were in a permanent flare. She had ballooned cheeks, and a neck so nonexistent that her shoulders looked hunched.

  She wore one neck ring. Others would be added as she aged.

  She aimed a greedy little smile at her new plaything, like she couldn’t wait to get her mitts on me.

  Her parents called her Missy, and her new “companion” was renamed Omorenomwara, which took weeks to pronounce properly.

  “Omorenomwara,” Madama repeated, overenunciating. “It’s easy. Break it down into six syllables, O—MO—RE—NOM—WA—RA. Try harder, dear.”

  (The name’s Doris Scagglethorpe, actually. Now you try and pronounce that!)

  The Ghikas bought me for their child because there were no Ambossan playmates within a thirty-mile radius, and rather than have her roughhousing with any of the louse-ridden, booger-nosed, scuff-kneed “field rats” on the plantation, they wanted one who could be turned into a little lady.

  Heck, I wasn’t about to complain. After the slave ship, I was grateful for all mercies.

  My predecessor, a girl called Madisa, had contracted yaws. When h
er skin broke out into blackberry-type bumps she was quarantined in an out-of-the-way hut.

  Food was left under the door, until she passed away.

  Little Miracle, jumping up and down (with some effort), told me that now I was her best friend.

  Her very own friend, she mimed. All hers and no one else’s.

  She tugged at my long, straight hair until I went “Ouch!”—then giggled. Tweaked my straight nose until I spluttered—giggled some more. Pinched my pale skin until it turned bluish and giggled so much she almost choked. When I began to speak in my language, she almost had a seizure.

  I laughed too.

  My job was to please Little Miracle.

  Her job was to please herself.

  WE WERE BOTH ABOUT eleven years of age, or rather eleven rainy seasons as I soon learned to say, but Little Miracle appeared younger because she was short and rotund, like a young girl still covered in the lumps and creases of an infant’s body.

  I was tall, thin and angular.

  “You ugly,” she said, putting on baby-speak, as if that excused her rudeness, pointing at my face in the reflection of a pool of water after the rains.

  “Me pretty,” she said, preening herself.

  She was right, of course.

  And there was no one in that society to tell me otherwise.

  As SOON AS I could speak basic Ambossan, she secretly began to teach me to read and write, as it was illegal for slaves to be literate on the island. I soon worked out that it was because she wanted me to read her the Anancy spider fables at bedtime, and do her homework. Not that I think her tutor was ever hoodwinked; she just knew better than to criticize the one and only daughter of the Ghikas.

  Once, while I was reciting the Ambossan alphabet to Little Miracle, I saw Madama peering sideways around the doorway, a crystal chandelier-style earring trembling in her right ear the only sign that she was furious. When she saw me looking, she slid out of view, but never said a word.

  “FOLLOW ME,” LITTLE MIRACLE SAID, walking off with her flat-footed duck-waddle down the corridor into a bedroom bursting with Aphrikan Queens in various get-ups, a collection that must have run into the hundreds.

  A special Doll Maid kept them damage- and dust-free.

  She told me their names, each and every one.

  Nothing was ever handed down to me. At first I wondered why she didn’t give me the things she no longer used. My sisters and I had shared everything. But Little Miracle hoarded everything: clothes, dolls, jewelry, toys. She got hysterical if anything went missing, ensuring one of the other slaves was whipped by an overseer until they confessed to the “theft.”

  Not me, though. You-Me-Best-Friends, she kept telling me.

  I soon realized I wasn’t.

  I wasn’t allowed to touch any of her possessions without her permission.

  If I did, she pinched my arm, hard.

  In fact, I couldn’t do anything without her say-so. I couldn’t talk to any of the other house slaves, especially those our age, or go for a walk outside alone.

  When I broke the unspoken rules in those first few weeks, she’d throw a wobbly and threaten to have me sent to the fields. HER LOW WOODEN BED was carved from a single block of cherry wood with a raised headrest and carved side panels illustrated with flowers and spiders.

  There was no mattress or pillow; the Ambossans didn’t use them.

  She had an indigo sheet stencilled with animal shapes.

  I slept at the foot of her bed on a sleeping mat, covered by whatever wrappa I’d worn that day.

  At the beginning of my new life, I dreamed of my family at night. Just before sleep, I replayed every memory I had of them, imagining I was still there, trying to keep them alive in me.

  Even when I didn’t go to sleep crying, I woke up with the salt of tears encrusted on my cheeks.

  I began to force myself to think of other things at night. My most popular fantasy was to imagine myself as my mistress, the girl with everything. I had a perfect complexion, perfect parents, perfect status, perfect home, perfect possessions.

  I’d wake up with a smile on my face.

  During my waking hours I was everything my mistress wanted me to be.

  During my sleeping hours—I became her.

  I HAD NIGHTMARES in those early years too—of drowning.

  But when I screamed, Little Miracle shouted at me to keep quiet or else she’d tell her parents I was disrupting her sleep.

  When she had nightmares, I had to climb into her bed and cuddle her.

  “Huggles,” she’d snivel. “Huggles for Missy-me.”

  MADAMA BROUGHT IN SKILLED craftsmen to satisfy her daughter’s whims.

  We were taught how to print Adinkra cloth together, cut stars and squares onto halved potatoes, dip them in dye, stamp them onto white cotton. We used an Aphro-pick to create wavy lines.

  We extracted clay from the base of termite mounds and rolled it to make pots.

  We made masks from leather, metal, leaves, vegetable fibers, grass and red abrus seeds, which were poisonous.

  We made hair for our masks from raffia.

  We made drums from wood and hide, playing them loudly when the grown-ups weren’t around.

  We learned to weave kente strips too, on a loom her mother bought specially and installed in a purpose-built hut. We were taught a pattern called “My skill is exhausted” and another called “My ideas have come to an end.”

  She showed all our handiwork to her mother who said she was such a clever, clever, clever little girl. Yes you are, you know you are, my sweetie pie.

  Whatever we made became the property of Little Miracle.

  I PLAITED LITTLE MIRACLE’S HAIR, sewing in brass disks, shells, amber beads, coral and pearls.

  Mine was worn in a pigtail.

  Every morning we went on her constitutional down by the Roaring River, which ran through the estate.

  We both loved sitting by the waterfall, the dangerous excitement of all that water leaping over the side and crashing down as creamy froth into the rocky river so far below you couldn’t hear it land.

  And every afternoon we had her nap.

  Once a year Madama took us all the way to the capital to visit a boutique for little girls called Angels, where she bought material for Little Miracle’s outfits. They were embroidered, painted or stamped with flowers, fruits, birds and fishes.

  As we got older, her Missy was having none of that. She made her mother take her to the capital’s edgy fashion boutique, Funked Up. She became the epitome of cool in fluorescent prints splashed with images of the imperial capital of Londolo’s high-rise towers, skateboarding kids and the silhouettes of youngsters shaking their moneymakers at raves.

  Her mother winced when she saw what her daughter was buying.

  She needn’t have worried; it was all lip service.

  I mean—what did her daughter have to rebel against?

  THE YEARS COALESCED LIKE sap leaking from a rubber tree.

  Living in luxurious isolation in the claustrophobic Great House, I became languid, my emotions dampened, the boundaries between who I was and what I had been blurred.

  Little Miracle and I were together 24/7.

  When there were visitors, I wasn’t allowed to join in the conversation.

  She was the only person who heard my words.

  SOMETHING CHANGED ON THE DAY I turned fourteen.

  I woke up and thought, You know what? That girl called Doris? Where the hell did she go?

  Soon after, Little Miracle came down with such a severe bout of malaria she slept for large portions of the day.

  I was bored and one afternoon found myself slumped against a wall in the corner of her bedroom, doodling on a writing slate. Before I knew it, I started writing a diatribe against my mistress.

  Little Miracle sucks. Shoot da bitch. Boom, boom, bye-bye.

  I couldn’t stop myself:

  She thinks she’s it, but she’s shit. She’s like totally spoiled, y’know?
r />   The vitriol poured forth.

  It’s all me, myself and I with that dumb-ass airhead mistress of mine.

  If my sentiments were shocking, I shocked even myself.

  Up to that point if you’d asked me what I thought of my boss, I would have declared total devotion. There was never any doubt about what I was supposed to feel and I couldn’t distinguish otherwise.

  Ah, but the river had flooded its banks.

  Damn! There was no going back.

  When I ran out of words in that exhausting, rainy-season midafternoon heat, I flopped my head onto my chest and closed my eyes, just for a second.

  Before I could stop myself, I’d conked out—without wiping the slate clean.

  JUST MY LUCK, that Little Miracle woke up with her fever broken.

  Calling out for me, she found me sleeping.

  Coming over to me, she found my writing.

  Before I could start to explain (somehow!), she suggested we take a walk down by the river.

  Not angry, not calm—her emotions seemed suspended.

  I followed her across the lawns as the skies broke open.

  Within minutes it was hailing down. We traipsed in the downpour through the papaya and avocado orchards and over to where the river began its journey to the falls.

  It was like she was in a trance, I thought, watching a soft brown back made progressively more erect over the years through the addition of neck rings, which were beginning to do the inconceivable—give her a certain elegance.

  A frosty organza wrappa bound her knees tightly, as was the fashion.

  She was gauging how to respond, I decided, which was ominous coming from someone who always expressed her emotions spontaneously, without fear of causing offense or reprisals.

  We had reached the thunderous roar where the falls began.

  She walked right up to the river’s edge, then turned around to face me and said, tearfully, raising her voice above the din, “You have betrayed me, Omo, and I am, like, totally devastated. How could you backstab me when I have always been so nice to you? I thought you were my best friend ever.”