I put on my broad little girl smile and shrugged my I don’t know how it came to be so fluent either shrug, my apologetic and surprised by my own ingenuity shrug, so that he would not realise that I had worked at the mastering and not, like they assumed, acquired it by accident, or oversight. I smiled the smile that was rose patterned wallpaper over the extant unpapered cracks through which, if they looked hard enough, they might have seen a room within a room. A bulb, naked and alone. A table bare, covered in layered faded scrawl, its wood splintered and creviced. An empty chair. Against the wall a shadow of something or someone that had already long left. And at the far end, barely visible, but there, an open door.
Nnedi Okorafor
She is a Nigerian American author of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for children and adults. Her works include Who Fears Death (currently being developed by HBO into a TV series), the Binti novella trilogy (currently being developed by HULU into a TV series), the Book of Phoenix, the Akata books and Lagoon. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. She has also written comics for Marvel, including Black Panther: Long Live the King and Wakanda Forever (featuring the Dora Milaje) and the Shuri series. Her science fiction comic series LaGuardia (from Dark Horse) was released in late 2018. She lives with her daughter and family in Illinois.
Zula of the Fourth Grade Playground
In my fourth grade class, I was Zula from the second Conan movie.
In Conan the Destroyer, Zula was an African warrior who becomes one of Conan’s loyal allies (What part of Africa? It was never specified). Conan initially comes across Zula as she’s fighting back a mob of men. She was svelte but muscular and clad only in a sparse fur-trimmed leather outfit. Dark-skinned, beautiful, and powerful, Zula was played by the vibrant singer/model/actress/wild woman Grace Jones. Yeah, I was Zula, except I was nine years old, instead of fighting with a stick, I used my bare hands and instead of fighting a bunch of paler-skinned barbarians during some past ancient time, I was fighting a bunch of white-skinned boys of suburbia in the early ’80s.
When I was nine, I went to a Catholic school and not only was I the only black person in my class, but I was also the only person of color. To top it off, to say that my school had a bit of a racial problem was an understatement. Nevertheless, though my parents were strong believers in peace and tolerance, I was not raised to take bullshit. I was baptized, had received my First Communion, and went to church every Sunday with my family, but I refused to “turn the other cheek.”
My road to becoming Zula isn’t hard to plot. I am the youngest girl in my family, my two sisters being a year and two years older than me. Not only am I the youngest girl, but though I am tall, I have always been the shortest and skinniest. Even my little brother, who is seven years my junior, eventually outgrew me. So, as I was growing up, it was either yield to the prowess of my Amazon sisters or fight like a banshee and earn their respect.
The fights I used to have with my sisters as we were growing up were not the “screech, scratch and pull hair kind of fights.” Only my oldest sister had the long pretty nails and all of our hair at the time was so damaged by relaxers and jheri-curl juice that it only grew a few inches. Our fights were all out brawls. Our mother would let us go at it until we finished. So in this way, I learned how to fight and not fear those who were bigger than or outnumbered me.
And I’ve always had a sort of leadership quality. When I was in preschool, my mother received a call from my teacher. This teacher claimed that I had usurped her authority in the classroom; that the students were even coming to me to ask to go to the bathroom instead of her. I don’t quite remember doing this but I can see myself being a sort of tyrant. Definitely. And mix that tendency with the lack of social skills of a preschooler . . . yes, I can certainly see this happening.
By the fourth grade, things started changing. More than ever, my classmates and I were aware of our gender. And this was most evident on the playground where the girls would only play with the girls and the boys with the boys. Nonetheless, once in a while, the two groups would meet and interact.
I usually led the girls’ group. If not me, then Michelle Medoza, the “prettiest” girl in our grade. She had shiny red brown hair, pale skin, rosy cheeks and dark captivating eyes. So it was either Zula the African warrior or Jehenna the Princess, the powerful or the beautiful one as leader; there’s a lesson in that, isn’t there?
We’d all migrate to the back of the school where the playground monitors could not see us. To this day, I wonder why those teachers never noticed that two-thirds of the fourth grade class had momentarily disappeared. Usually there would be some sort of challenge from either the boy or the girl group and we’d all talk shit back and forth about why girls were better or boys were better, sometimes we’d talk about music or something on TV. Maybe someone would have a crush on someone else and a note would be passed. Or someone’s parents had divorced and someone would comment on it. It wasn’t about the conversation as much as it was about the girls getting close to the boys and the boys getting close to the girls.
And then there were the fights; these were what everyone really hoped for. They didn’t happen often, but they happened often enough. I was always the one challenged and insulted. Never any of the other girls. The boys would treat the other girls—girls who were all white—with a sort of deference. These girls were potential dates, or they were girls that they’d grown up with, whose parents were friends with their parents. My family and I had recently moved into the neighborhood, so I had no real history there yet. Plus, I was that “ugly nigger black girl” with hair like a “crow’s nest” (a phrase coined by my own teacher in the middle of class that year).
The boys would change during these times behind the school; they would become full-fledged villains. “I can kick your ass back to Africa,” “Why are you so ugly?” “Are your cousins monkeys?” Then whichever boy had spoken would look to his male friends and laugh. Some of the girls would giggle, too. None of them would stick up for me.
“Come and say that to my face!” I’d retort, or some other challenging reply.
It was usually a boy named Joey who would step to my face. He was almost as tall as me but much stockier. Joey was the definite leader of the boys in my class.
“Nigger,” he’d sneer, or some other racial epithet. Joey’s parents were Polish. He had a brother named Edmond who was a year ahead of me, in my sister’s class and he had a sister named Marta who was another year up, in my oldest sister’s class. Edmond and my middle sister weren’t friends, but they hung in the same group and they certainly didn’t go at it the way Joey and I did. And my oldest sister and Marta were friends.
I don’t know what it was about Joey. He was a white boy with deep dimples in each cheek and a lopsided smile that most of the girls thought was cute, including me (since everyone else did). It was Joey who took a rubber band and a sharpened pencil and accidentally shot the pencil into his left blue eye. He’d had to wear an eye-patch for a month. It was Joey who got all the boys in our grade to use erasers to rub the skin away on the backs of their hands. Some spelled their names, others etched satanic and anarchy symbols. Joey etched the word, “Fuck.”
On the school bus, months earlier, it had been Joey who was the first to call me a “nigger,” and then spit in my “ugly” hair. He went on to call his friends to do the same. I was so humiliated that the Zula-side of me retreated deep into my soul and I’d sat in my seat head down instead of kicking all of their asses.
It was Joey who pulled me aside and showed me a Penthouse magazine picture of some white woman spreading her legs. I’d stood there staring, feeling nauseous and wondering why the woman would do that, especially in front of a camera. When I’d glanced up at him, he was grinning.
And then there was that day in choir practice. Though I had a fairly decent voice, I refused to sing. F
or some reason, I hated our choir teacher. Whenever I looked at her, my eyes felt assaulted by her overly pale white skin and her voice sounded as if she had wet warm bread sitting deep in her throat. I hated when she sang. This day, she’d noticed that I wasn’t singing. She stopped the class and tried to force me to sing alone but I refused, so she sent me out of the classroom. To this day, because of that teacher and how she embarrassed me like that, I can’t sing in front of people. Oddly enough, it was Joey who came out after choir class was over, saw me standing there and said, “Don’t worry about it. She’s a bitch.” And then he walked with me back to our homeroom.
This was Joey.
I’d lost count of the number of times that I pulled a Zula on him. After he’d get in my face and sneer whatever cruel racist phrases came to his mind that day (which he probably learned from his parents), I’d push him back. All the girls around me would move back and disappear from my peripheral vision and my thoughts. During these times, I was alone and I was fearless, I was Zula.
Joey would throw a punch back, but I was always faster than him. At some point, I’d grab his arm and start to swing him around and around. I’d swing him so hard that his feet would leave the ground. Then I’d let go and he’d go flying. Then another boy would come at me and I’d do the same to him.
I often wonder what was really going on with these fights. They were so satisfying to me, like I really did have warrior blood in my veins. (This is something I’ve suspected for a long time. My father was a nationally known hurdler and my mother was so good at throwing the javelin that she made the Nigerian Olympic team in that event. I inherited my swiftness and strong arms from my parents. And how different is a javelin from a spear?) I’d grab these boys with quick hands and sharp un-even fourth grader nails and swing them in a swift circle and throw them as far as possible like a discus.
The boys seemed to enjoy these fights, too. I think they liked being thrown by the lanky strong black girl. They would never try and jump on me more than one at a time. Even John the short Italian boy who had an enormous crush on me (I knew this because he told me and bought me all sorts of things like candy and Michael Jackson pins and posters), would get in line and allow me to fling him as far as I could.
It was as if these battles of me against the white boys would take place in a vacuum. No other kids or adults came to stop us and none of us reported the fights. And there were never injuries worse than scratches and bruises and grass stains and sore muscles. Was this some sort of playing out of racial aggression and guilt? A story that began long before any of us were born, long before my Nigerian immigrant parents even came to this country? Maybe.
The fight would usually end when the bell rang. Then we would all scramble to get into our lines of boys and girls. As always, I lined up next to Joey and we’d both glare at each other and then turn our heads forward, so that our teacher wouldn’t yell at us.
My girl group would still be whispering words of awe and satisfaction. They were probably glad to have stood back and watched, been only mere audience to all the action. They’d rather be pretty than powerful. I had no choice because in our fourth-grade Catholic school world, I could not be pretty. I was too black, my hair was too coarse, my lips were too big. But I think even if I had a choice, I’d choose powerful . . . powerful and beautiful, like Zula.
Louisa Adjoa Parker
Of Ghanaian and English heritage, she lives in south-west England and writes poetry, fiction and black history. Her poetry collection Salt-sweat and Tears and pamphlet Blinking in the Light were published by Cinnamon Press in 2016, and her third collection, How to Wear a Skin, is due from Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. Her work has appeared in a range of publications, including Envoi; Wasafiri; Bare Fiction; Under the Radar; Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe); Ink, Sweat and Tears; Filigree and Closure (Peepal Tree Press). She has been highly commended for the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She has written for books/exhibitions exploring BAME history in the South West. She has also written articles for Gal-dem, Skin Deep, Black Ballad and Media Diversified, among other outlets. She has completed her first collection of short stories and is working on a novel.
Black histories aren’t all urban: tales from the West Country
The idea that black people only inhabit urban areas, and that the English countryside has always been white, is a myth. Yes, many black and brown people who came to the UK settled in our larger cities, but not exclusively—there are a multitude of rural histories which are yet to be heard.
The postcard image of the South West of England, with its rolling hills and coastline, evokes for some a nostalgic representation of Englishness, or rather, whiteness. Yet, as I discovered years ago, black history is rich within the land of this place; in spite of commonly held misconceptions, the region has numerous connections with Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. As a black British woman of English and Ghanaian heritage who has lived in the South West for most of my life, I had no idea about this history—locally or nationally—until one afternoon at university, while studying racism and migration, I heard there was a grave in Devon of a black eighteenth-century person. This knowledge sparked a curiosity in me, and since then I have carried out various research exploring the presence of BAME people in the South West.
This history is important—for people of colour who live in the region to see themselves reflected in local heritage; for the local white majority to understand that we belong, we are nothing new; and for those in urban spaces to understand that being black doesn’t equal urban—we have lived all over Britain for thousands of years. Local black history helps us all understand that as humans we are connected, and migration is not a contemporary phenomenon.
The West Country has been home to people of colour for centuries. They came as slaves or servants, sailors, teachers, writers, visiting royalty, boxers, students, and entertainers. The two world wars brought soldiers, prisoners-of-war and refugees. Some of these people simply passed through, leaving traces of themselves behind (and in some cases, children). Others settled in the region. Numbers may be lower than in cities, but their stories matter: here are just a handful.
Some, although not all, of the research undertaken in places such as Devon and Dorset explores links with Transatlantic slavery. Although we tend to think of Liverpool and Bristol when we think of slavery, British involvement has its roots in Devon—John Hawkins of Plymouth is recognised as the first English slave trader. Many South West ports were involved in slavery, as were many local families. According to Lucy MacKeith, author of Local Black History: A beginning in Devon, “People at all levels of society were involved: sheep farmers, spinners and weavers who created cloth which was exported to Africa and the Americas, wool traders, bootmakers, food producers, metal workers who produced slave chains, shipbuilders . . . The list goes on.” There are too many slave-owning families to begin to list. Names include the Willetts of Dorset and St Kitts; the Halletts of East Devon and Barbados, the Swetes of Devon and Antigua; the Draxes of Dorset, Jamaica and Barbados, the Calcrafts, the Joliffes, the Pinneys of Dorset, Bristol and Nevis, the Daveys, and the Beckfords.
Plantation owners often brought enslaved people with them when they returned from overseas. In Devon, Lady Raleigh, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh, was one of the first people in England to have a young African “attendant”. My book Dorset’s Hidden Histories includes black people recorded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dorset Parish Registers. Many were children, for example, “Henry Panzo, a Black Servant to Lieut. Brine R.N. aged 12 years, Poole, baptised 1817.” When Richard Hallett returned from Barbados to Lyme Regis in 1699, he brought “a retinue of black servants” with him. In 1702, Lyme Regis Town Court recorded that “a Black Negro servant of Mr. Richard Hallett called Ando” was accused of rioting in Broad Street. The way these people were treated would have varied according to the whims of their “owners”.
Some “servants” were left money by their masters. For example, the will of Thomas Ol
ive of Poole, 1753, includes the bequest of £900 to his “Negro woman”, Judith, and their daughters. Others were respected enough to have their own gravestone, such as the aforementioned eighteenth-century black servant at Werrington Church, Devon. Philip Scipio was brought to England from St Helena by the Duke of Wharton. Scipio was buried in 1784, aged 18. He was described in the church register as “A black servant to Lady Lucy Morice.” The bones of other black people must lie in unmarked (or as yet unrecorded) West Country graves.
After the slave trade was abolished in 1807 (with the help of abolitionists from the South West, such as Thomas Fowell Buxton) the government paid £20 million to British slave owners, who are listed in the Legacies of British slave-ownership database, as compensation for the loss of their “property”. This wealth, along with the profits of slavery, helped build an infrastructure, still visible today in the form of manor houses, estates, buildings and roads. Many sites are named after slave owners: the legacy of John Rolle, who owned plantations in the Bahamas, includes Bicton House (now Bicton College) and the Rolle Building at Plymouth University. Street names such as Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh also reflect this history.
There is much evidence of a continued black presence in the region post-slavery. Thomas Lewis Johnson settled in Bournemouth in the 1890s. Johnson was a missionary and former slave from Virginia, who spoke about Christianity and slavery and published a book called Twenty-eight Years a Slave. Black entertainers performed in the region. Historian Jeffrey Green compiled a list of West Country Blacks in Victorian times, which includes Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, son of a Freetown merchant, who attended Wesley College in Taunton, in 1869. His son was the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Not everyone was successful—like their city counterparts, many black people in the area were plunged into poverty, and spent time in workhouses.
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