by Ninie Hammon
“Right here is what they found.” He held up the dossier. “It’s all documented—everything I just showed you.”
Then Dan paused and returned to a previous point.
“If that many people had been hauled away, surely somebody would have noticed.” Dan quoted what Walters had said earlier. He paused again, and then quietly launched a single word out into the air and let it hang there.
“Who?”
A beat or two later, he continued. “Who would have noticed? Who is there to see, to come and tell the tale? If it weren’t for men like Burns and Johnson—and my brother—nobody would ever know. The victims are nobody’s favorite religion and nobody’s favorite color, and they can vanish without a trace, are vanishing without a trace, and nobody will ever notice or care unless we do.”
The congressman from New York was undaunted. “It will take more than some pictures—horrible pictures, I grant you—to convince me. Those are photos of what happens in a civil war. The two halves of Sudan are fighting each other, and people get killed in wars. It’s deplorable, but it is reality. None of that proves genocide. And it certainly doesn’t prove slavery.”
Margaret Bryan, a congresswoman from Missouri who was one of the most respected members of the delegation, took a verbal step in between Dan and the fiery New York representative.
“Excuse me,” she blatantly interrupted. “I want to talk about the elephant in the middle of the room.”
She put down her pen and aligned it carefully on the top of her legal pad, just for a moment or two, to let the dust settle. She was a veteran of many heated debates and she wanted to turn the burner down on this one. Then she leaned forward and looked all around the table.
“Can anybody say Tri-Cola and American Gum?”
There it was, out in the open. Dan knew they’d get to it eventually.
“Those guys—and some others—are heavy hitters,” she said. “They have huge investments in Sudan. Sanctions will not make them happy, and they can bury everybody in this room with their pocket change.”
Representative Dubois spoke again in his soft Cajun voice. “Tri-Cola and American Gum both have branch offices in my district. They’re good corporate citizens, models in minority hiring. Now, if I turn against them and vote for economic sanctions in Sudan, that chicken is going to come home to roost in my front yard when they start laying people off.”
There was a momentary silence while each person at the table did a mental tally of the hit he or she personally would take if they crossed giant corporations whose sales exceeded the gross national product of two-thirds of the countries in the world.
Dan walked to the window, pulled back the drapes and spilled afternoon sunlight into the room. “I know what you’re saying.” There was no boom in his voice now. “I’m up for reelection myself.”
He turned and faced the table. “And the soft drink and gum companies have put more than four hundred thousand dollars into my opponent’s campaign chest already.”
Representative Dorothy Warden from Ohio spoke for the first time.
“Why you, Dan?” Her voice that was almost too deep and husky for a woman.
Dan looked puzzled.
“You’ve grabbed hold of this Sudan thing and held on like a pit bull.”
Dan was a neighbor of sorts. Warden hailed from Cincinnati, a couple of hours upstream from Dan’s hometown on the Ohio River in Indiana. Middle America. Fly-over country. There was a bond there.
“And hanging on could very well cost you your career. I’m just curious. Why?”
“That’s a legitimate question, Dottie, and I wish I had a smooth, sound-bite answer for you. Truth is, I’m not sure.”
He stepped to the side table under the window where the coffee pot and empty cups sat. He picked up a crystal water pitcher and poured himself a glass, then slowly drank half of it. He was stalling. When he turned back around, he had made his decision.
“My family owned slaves.” He watched the surprise spread over their faces. Even Chad Mattingly looked a little shaken. “So did my wife’s family. Our ancestors in Virginia and North Carolina. We looked it up.”
The representative from Maryland, the powerful Avery Thompson, leaned forward in his seat. Dan had expected to be grilled by the politically savvy Thompson, Alonzo Washington’s mentor. But the man had not said a word, made a comment or asked a question. He had merely listened, as he listened now.
“And that would tie it up nice and tidy, wouldn’t it? Wolfson wants to absolve his guilt, cleanse the family name of shame. Case closed. And I’m ashamed to admit that’s probably at least part of it.”
Dan’s tone changed as he grew speculative. “It’s interesting...even though we’re a couple of hundred years removed from slavery in this country, we still don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to talk about it. It makes us uncomfortable.”
He spoke his thoughts as they formed in his mind. “Maybe acknowledging that slavery is alive and well somewhere else in the world forces us, as a nation and as individuals, to revisit our own trauma. And we just flat out don’t want to go there. That could be why we try so hard to pretend it’s not happening.”
He turned and set the glass down. When he turned back around, his face was hard.
“But it is happening. Right now. This minute. As we sit here safe in this comfortable room, on the other side of the planet, Arab raiders are kidnapping women and little kids, tying them with ropes and hauling them off to an auction where they’ll be sold, branded, beaten, raped, mutilated and forced to work against their will.” He walked back to the lectern. “I don’t need some other deep psychological explanation for why I’m so passionate. That’s reason enough. It’s wrong.”
His voice got quiet. “It’s just wrong.”
He looked down the long table; the faces that looked back at him were unreadable.
“Sure, this is a religion issue. Absolutely! Militant Muslims in the north are forcing Islam on Christians and animists in the south. But it’s a race issue, too. Arabs are enslaving tribals.”
He put the palms of both hands on the table, leaned over and said quietly, “I appeal to you today as survivors of the Middle Passage. The question isn’t why haven’t African Americans responded to this crisis? What I want to know is why African Americans who are descendants of slaves won’t fight to stop the enslavement of others.”
Dan straightened up. The orator was back in his voice, not in volume but in intensity. “Rarely does history grant an opportunity to confront a tormentor lost to time and place. You, we, I, have that opportunity right now.”
No one moved. Dan reached down and picked his briefcase up off the floor.
“Thank you for hearing me out. If you need to hear any other arguments on this issue, just listen to your conscience.”
Akin was sick. A pain deep in her belly had awakened her, and it still gnawed at her. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever felt. She knew she’d incur Pasha’s wrath if she didn’t grind the grain in her bowl, but the pain took all her strength away.
She hadn’t felt this bad since a millipede sting when she was five years old kept her on her sleeping mat for days. A sense of terrible loneliness suddenly washed over her. She felt so hopeless and abandoned, she feared she might burst into tears.
Pasha came out of the tent with a larger pestle for Omina. As she approached the girls, she stopped a couple of paces away from Akin and just stood there without saying a word.
Akin finally looked up to see what she wanted.
Pasha spoke, but Akin didn’t understand. She repeated the phrase again and pointed at Akin’s legs. The little girl didn’t take her eyes off Pasha’s face, just lowered her hand below the wrap-around skirt that reached halfway down her thigh. She felt something warm and sticky. When she looked at her hand, her eyes widened. Her fingers were red, covered with blood, and she saw a trickle of blood working its way down from between her legs on a slow journey toward her knee.
She stepped back in horror and looked up, terrified into Pasha’s face. She had seen Mbarka and Shontal, going through menses, but the sight of her own blood drove all those thoughts from her mind. Pasha turned abruptly, walked back into the supply tent and emerged a few moments later with a brown rag.
In the closest thing to kindness she’d ever shown to any of the girls, she walked to the still speechless Akin and handed her the rag. Akin began to daub frantically at the small streaks of blood. In a moment, she felt Mbarka’s arm around her shoulder
“Don’t be afraid. We all go through it.”
For the next few minutes, Mbarka helped the shaken little girl clean herself, and showed her how to attach the rag to her wrap-around, so it could catch the flow of blood. When Mbarka had finished her explanation, a thought popped into Akin’s mind. She couldn’t remember the last time Mbarka had been off limits to the men, which she was during her monthly flow.
“Does it happen always? I haven’t seen you with blood like this in a long time.”
Mbarka looked into the distance and said quietly. “I am pregnant.” She turned her gaze back to Akin. “When a woman is pregnant, with child, she stops her monthly flow of blood until after the baby is born.”
Pasha couldn’t wait to tell her master the little slave girl had become a woman. She had seen how he lusted after her.
When he heard the news, a wide smile spread across Sulleyman’s face, and he instructed his stewardess to have the girl prepared for her master’s bed after the celebration meal on their last night in camp.
“In the morning after I have taken her, I want you to circumcise her before we break camp,” he said. “She will be healed enough by the time we arrive home that I can use her until my youngest son returns from Senegal.”
He had planned to give Mbarka to his son, but she had turned up pregnant. After her baby was born and he disposed of it, she’d be sent to a brothel. Akin would be a good substitute.
“But my son cannot have her until after she has developed.” He was not talking to Pasha, he was thinking aloud. “As long as she looks like a child, she is mine.”
Omar’s mercenary friend, Julian, had squinted over the top of a glass of aragi in his smoke-filled bar in Jonglei and roared with laughter when Omar described his mission. Find one slave girl? Impossible.
But if he was determined to try, Omar should start his search in Kosti. Slaves passed through the river city 230 miles south of Khartoum like dark ghosts. Julian gave Omar the names of people to contact, and two days later, Idris and the mercenary were on a barge floating slowly north on the White Nile River through the largest swamp in the world, 12,000 square miles of black water. The Sudd was roughly the size of Belgium.
Idris sat on the side of the barge, watched the pattern of ripples spread back from the bow, and prayed. Prayer was all that brought him peace. The silent Omar leaned against a mango crate nearby. He watched the tall grass glide by and saw flocks of birds rise and settle in the swamp beyond the riverbank in a choreographed ballet of color. But he was not at peace. He never was. He mulled over the names Julian had given him, made a mental list of the people he would approach first and which ones he would pay and how much. And which ones he would threaten and with what.
When he turned from the sun’s glare on the water, Omar’s gaze fell on Idris. Even in repose, the African’s face had a determined set to the jaw. Omar had learned in the past weeks that there was absolutely no quit in the man.
“You would have been far better off to stay in your country village,” he said. Idris looked up. Omar knew he couldn’t understand. “I doubt that you will ever see your daughter again, and even if Allah smiles on us and we find her,” he paused, and there was something akin to pity on his face, “I don’t know that you will be able to stand what you see.”
Chapter 16
Leo Danheir had developed many skills over the years and plied many trades. All his endeavors had one thing in common: The only rule was there were no rules. Leo did whatever Leo wanted to do. His behavior was bound by no moral code of any kind; self-gratification was his only aim in life.
He and his black sidekick, Joak, had traveled from Bentiu to Kosti to lose themselves in the mosaic of the city, to blend into the layer of society there that had no soul. The pair had money. They had conned or stolen enough in the past few weeks to set themselves up for a while, so they could afford to be a little selective about their next business enterprise.
Such was the joy of life in a country torn apart by civil war. With government-sanctioned--no encouraged--murder, rape and pillaging unleashed on half the population, who would notice, or care, about the petty larceny of a sewer rat like Leo? Anarchy was, indeed, a fertile ground for the common criminal.
Leo and Joak were an effective team. Leo’s skin and language granted them access and unhindered travel through the Muslim portion of the country. And Joak, though he dressed garishly in brightly colored floral shirts and mismatched Western-cut pants, was a clever chameleon. He could use his skin color to find out what he wanted to know from the SPLA or to gain the trust of an unsuspecting tribal, like that stupid villager in Bentiu looking for someone to find his kidnapped daughter. Seldom in his checkered career had Leo met an easier mark. Fleecing that naive farmer had been a joy and a privilege.
In the past few years, the pair had gravitated more and more toward slave trading. You could make good money with little effort working as middlemen. If you were clever, you could find slaves to purchase at a bargain price from the Murahaleen, the guerillas, soldiers, anybody who had flesh to market, and then sell the captives to a larger, established slave trader who had customers in northern Sudan and other neighboring countries.
The standard operating procedure for Leo and Joak was to set up shop in a seedy bar or gambling house. There, they would simply wait, watch and listen. Criminals for hire could always find sources of income if they were willing to be patient and see what flotsam and jetsam the river of life washed their way.
The bar they selected in Kosti had been a thriving, fashionable business establishment, with a polished wood floor and shutters on the windows, in the early 1950s when Sudan was under British-Egyptian sovereignty. It had once had a name, too, but nobody remembered what it was anymore. Nothing was left of the sign that proclaimed its identity but two rusty hooks stuck in the ceiling of the roof that stretched out over the big double doors.
To its patrons, it was merely “the bar.” Like most everything else in the country, it had rotted like the carcass of a dead tree and was infested with the kind of slithering creatures that only come out at night. Roaches as big as a man’s thumb lived on the accumulated grime, spilled food and liquor on the uneven wooden floor. Pieces of wall had crumbled away, exposing holes and tunnels where rats came and went like paying customers. In the back of the dilapidated building was a room divided into three small sections by hastily erected cypress poles and scrap pieces of lumber. In those sweltering cubicles, smaller than most American closets, desperate Sudanese and Ethiopian women plied their trade and spread disease throughout the quarter.
Leo and Joak ordered a bottle of rice wine and found a table. The fermented liquid smelled so strong and tasted so bitter most Westerners couldn’t swallow it. Leo and Joak drank it like water. They made their best plans a little drunk.
As the brew began to warm their insides like the relentless heat warmed their outsides, Joak turned to Leo. “Are you sure it is such a good idea to do business with Faoud?” He didn’t often question Leo’s leadership, but he was far more frightened of the slave trader than he was of Leo.
“Oh, it is never safe to crawl into bed with a snake. But Faoud’s got the connections and the reputation to sell anything he can lay his hands on. If we hook up with him, we could buy cheap from freelancing soldiers who don’t know the value of their captives and sell them to Faoud at a good price.”
Joak nodded agreement, though he was far from convinced it was a good strategy. Bu
t Leo was a dangerous man to cross too.
“Maybe we can get on his good side by showing up for our meeting this afternoon with a few ‘presents’ to sell to him cheap,” Leo thought out loud.
“In Bagwe, I heard that the Murahaleens made a good haul in the south,” Joak said. “They could go up for sale any day now.”
“Go into the market and nose around. See if there’s any word yet on the Murahaleen raids. Maybe we could get to them early and buy something to take as a present to Faoud. I do not want to meet that man empty-handed.”
Ron, Masapha and Koto browsed the fruit stands in the Kosti marketplace and loaded up their packs with raisin cakes, bread and fresh fruit. They were scheduled to hook up with Dr. Greinschaft’s contact from the Swiss feeding center in Chumwe, several hours’ drive from Kosti, midmorning at the dock next to the market.
As Koto wandered around nearby, drinking in the sights of the first city he had ever seen, Ron and Masapha sat down to rest in the shade provided by a pile of boxes leaning against the last fruit stand on the street. Only a few passersby took notice of the light-skinned foreigner; Ron certainly took no notice of a particular African, dressed in a brightly flowered shirt and smelling of rice wine, who had edged up to the other side of the boxes of fruit in an effort to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Joak did not often see white men who were not Arabs, and the big blond man obviously was not. That made him out of place here, and the out of the ordinary was always worth investigating. Joak took a position behind the stretched muslin awning the vendor had erected over the ripest fruit. Cocking his head, he concentrated hard to block out the ambient noise around him.