Ama

by Manu Herbstein

  Ama screwed up her face and searched. Triumphantly she put a finger on the next instance of ‘Margery’ and raised her eyes to De Bruyn’s.

  “Excellent. Clever girl,” he said and rewarded her with a kiss. “Now find another ‘Margery.’”

  At his first attempt, De Bruyn had, almost by accident, succeeded in conveying to Ama the idea that each printed word was a symbol for a spoken word. Soon she could read the first sentence. Within a week she could read the first page. From that point on there was no holding her. Comprehension was another matter, but even a strange concept such as parish meeting presented few problems when interpreted as a gathering of village elders.

  De Bruyn had cut the pages of the English bible, Rev. Quaque’s gift. He was reading a few chapters each evening. Sometimes he would read to himself, sometimes aloud, savouring the beauty of the language. Ama would listen, straining to understand, but her vocabulary was still too small and Mijn Heer read too fast for her. She heard the words flying past and struggled to catch one which she thought she recognised, but even as she did, the torrent of new words continued and the one which she had captured was also lost, carried away in the turbulent stream, without meaning, its context destroyed.

  De Bruyn noticed her frustration and when she had mastered the children’s stories, he started her on the first chapter of Genesis, a few verses each evening. He tried to explain to her the meaning of the words she could not understand. Some he could not understand himself, for though his English was good, he was not a native speaker of the language. Then he would make a search in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Soon Ama learned how to use her knowledge of the order of the alphabet to find a difficult word in that marvellous book.

  Ama’s domestic tasks were as nothing to her. All her life she had worked. Work was part of her life. Even as a little girl, the games she had played were an imitation of her mother’s work: carrying firewood or water on her head, hoeing in the groundnut farm, washing, cooking, carrying a baby on her back. And as she had grown up, the games had changed imperceptibly into the real thing. She had never given it a thought. Life was work. Men had their work and women had theirs. Tabitsha's example had taught her to work with joy. Now she danced and sang through the dusting and polishing of Mijn Heer’s room and the washing and ironing of his clothes. She had no need to cook or wash dishes: for that the Governor had his own kitchen whose staff served him and his senior officers.

  Soon Augusta needed to instruct her no more, but still she came most mornings, out of habit partly, but also because De Bruyn expected it. She, in turn, needed to retain her connection with her former husband. And the young slave girl exerted a strange fascination upon the older woman. Ama treated Augusta like a mother. She trusted her absolutely and had few secrets from her. She told her about her childhood, about her mother Tabitsha and her father, Tigen; about her small brother, Nowu; about their home and how they lived; about her capture; about Yendi and Kafaba and Kumase; but she did not tell her that she had worked in the Asantehene's palace and she invented a lie to explain why she had been sent to Elmina.

  Of Itsho, too, she said nothing. She could not share her memory of him with anyone, not even with Augusta. She knew Itsho was dead. Had she not buried him herself? But she knew too that his spirit lived on in the place of the ancestors. Often, he appeared to her in her dreams. Almost always his spirit was kind and benevolent. But, in trying to rescue her, Itsho had died a sudden, brutal death and sometimes, especially when it was time for her period, she would see the hooves of Abdulai's horse rise in the air and come crashing down on Itsho's head, cracking his skull, scattering blood and brains. She would hear his last agonised scream and her own scream too, fading as she woke from the nightmare. De Bruyn, his sleep disturbed, would comfort her, but she would hardly notice his presence. How could she tell Augusta of all this?

  The other subject which she could not bring herself to speak of to Augusta was Esi, her much loved friend. For she remembered that when she had asked Augusta to intercede with Mijn Heer on Esi’s behalf, she had forgotten. Ama wondered where Esi was now. She felt guilty that she had been saved to live in comfort while Esi, whose only fault was that she had spoken up for Ama in Kumase, had been consigned to an unknown fate. Sometimes, her mind spoke in two voices, one telling her that there was no way in which she could have saved her friend, that both Augusta and Mijn Heer had been strangers to her at that time and that she had had no language then with which she might have communicated with the powerful white man. Yet still she felt guilty and could not bring herself to talk to either of them about her lost friend. The subject was too painful.

  * * *

  Van Schalkwyk was a methodical man. Ama could now recite her alphabet from A to Z and she could identify each letter, both lower case and upper, and the word in the primer which was the clue to its sound.

  She could recite the Lord’s Prayer by heart and he had started her memorising the Articles of Faith. As she made progress, so grew his ambition to save her soul for Jesus Christ.

  Van Schalkwyk had forgotten his intention to start to teach her to read using the children’s books; indeed, obsessed as he was with using education as a tool for spiritual progress, he had forgotten all about those books. He pictured himself demonstrating his success with her to Rev. Quaque. If he could succeed with Pamela, if he could make a Christian of her, perhaps he would open a school of his own for the little native girls of Edina.

  The bible lay open where De Bruyn had left it the previous evening.

  “Pamela,” said Van Schalkwyk, “This morning we are going to start reading. We will start at the beginning of the Holy Book, that is to say with Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1. This is such an important event that I think we should say a prayer first. Let us pray together to mark the occasion and to ask the blessing of our Heavenly Father for our enterprise.”

  Van Schalkwyk transferred his bulky frame stiffly from the chair to a kneeling position before the table. Ama had never seen him do this before and she watched bemused. He noticed that she was still sitting on her chair.

  “Come, do as I do,” he said, pointing to the floor.

  Ama complied. She watched him place his palms together and close his eyes.

  “Our Father,” he began but when he reached “Heaven” he noticed that he was praying alone. He stopped and made her put her palms together and close her eyes.

  “Now, together. One, two, three. Our Father . . .” and they recited the Lord's Prayer together.

  When they had finished with “Amen”, the Minister struggled to get to his feet and Ama had to help him. You are really very fat, she thought. I have never seen any one as fat as you. Though Augusta comes a close second.

  Van Schalkwyk read the first verse, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” he intoned.

  Then, pointing to the passage, he said, “Now you try.”

  Ama was already familiar with the story of Creation. She repeated, with only an occasional stumble, the passage that Van Schalkwyk had just read to her.

  “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” he continued, reading one sentence at a time and letting her read it after him.

  When she had read, “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” he motioned to her to continue, without waiting for him to read each sentence first.

  The fat Predikant was astonished. This was far beyond his expectations. She was reading intelligibly from the Good Book at her first attempt, her very first attempt. It was a miracle. He hardly had to prompt her.

  The first time Ama had read this with De Bruyn, she had tackled one word at a time, understanding some but not enough to extract more than the vaguest meaning from the passage. But by now she had read it so many times that she knew it practically by heart. Mijn Heer had patiently explained the meaning to her. Now she read quite fluently and appeared to Van Schalkwyk to understand what she was reading.

  “A miracle, a miracle,” the Mi
nister whispered to himself in Dutch as he listened, watching her with rapt attention.

  Ama was wearing a simple calico cloth wrapped around her under her armpits with one end tucked in to hold it in position. It had come a little loose as she rose from her knees and now it threatened to unwrap itself, slipping down to expose the upper part of her breasts. She needed to stand up to rewrap the cloth but all her attention was concentrated on her reading and she merely tucked the loose end in as a temporary measure.

  Van Schalkwyk watched her unobserved. He saw her profile, her round bare shoulders: he looked down the exposed cleavage between the swell of her breasts. He was moved. Astonished at her miraculous skill in reading, he felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. At the same time he was struck by the beauty of the girl’s young body. He felt his penis come erect. He loved this black girl. He wanted to touch her, to stroke her, to hold her. Automatically he helped her over a word when she hesitated. Her concentration was intense. He looked down. She was sitting with her legs apart, her cloth hanging between them, outlining her thighs. Unable to control himself any longer, he placed his hand on the inside of her thigh near the crotch and squeezed.

  Ama sprang to her feet in surprise. Her chair fell over backwards. The flesh had fled the Minister's hand, leaving it clutching a handful of cloth. The loose material unwrapped itself from Ama's body and fell to the ground, leaving her clad only in her beads. For a moment, Van Schalkwyk saw her naked body. It was a vision which would return to haunt his dreams. In an instant Ama had grabbed the cloth, wrapped it around her and tucked the end back in where it belonged. Her heart was thumping. She took a step back and stared at her teacher, old, ugly, obese and now contemptible. Van Schalkwyk stared back for a moment, hardly believing what he had done. Then he bowed his head, put his palms together in prayer and closed his eyes. Oh, Father, he whispered to himself in Dutch, What have I done? Forgive me, forgive me this abominable sin. A vision of the lake of fire and brimstone came to him. What shall I do, what shall I say? he prayed.

  He opened his eyes. Ama had moved to the other side of the table and was watching him warily, ready to slip away should he pursue her.

  “Pamela, forgive me, I beg you. I don’t know what came over me. I lost control of myself. Forgive me, please. I promise you that that will never happen again. I beg you. Please tell Mijn Heer nothing of this. I promise you, in the name of God I promise you, it will never happen again. I will do anything you ask of me.”

  Keeping her eyes on the man, Ama retrieved her chair and carried it to the opposite side of the table from Van Schalkwyk. She sat down. She was feeling calmer. What had he meant to do, she wondered. To rape her? He could never have succeeded. As a man, she had never given him a thought. Now she saw him for what he was, a lonely, ugly, pitiable old priest, without wife or family, far away from his own country. She stretched out and took the book, turned it round to face her and began to read again from where she had left off.

  “And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Although De Bruyn had been brought up within the narrow Calvinist conventions of the Dutch Reformed Church he was not a religious man.

  He read the English Bible because he loved the poetry of the language, not in expectation of some revelation of divine intentions, nor indeed as a duty or a penance for his sins. So when he had finished Genesis and Exodus, he did no more than skim the boring passages of Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy.

  Then he started reading Genesis again, this time with Ama, his pleasure increased by her wide-eyed enjoyment of the magic of the stories: the Creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers.

  By the time they had finished Genesis together, Ama was reading fluently, even when she didn’t understand all the words. De Bruyn’s eyes were troubling him so he decided to rest them and let Ama read to him. He asked Van Schalkwyk to confine his lessons to writing and arithmetic; to which the chaplain insisted on adding the catechism.

  So it was that the Director-General of Elmina Castle, Pieter De Bruyn, who had in his time bought and sold tens of thousands of slaves and even now had six hundred locked up in dark and filthy dungeons, which he never himself deigned to visit, this same Pieter De Bruyn sat down each evening and listened to his own private female slave reading to him the classic story of all times of delivery from slavery. If the irony of the situation had struck him, if he had had any inkling of it, he might have skipped the whole of Exodus. It did not strike him and he had no such inkling. The slaves of Elmina were one thing; the Children of Israel, slaves of Pharaoh, quite another.

  * * *

  Ama had finished her domestic chores; no speck of dust was to be found upon the furniture; the bed was made; the laundry hung upon the line to dry; Augusta had sent a message to say that she could not come today; the fat Predikant had sent another: he was confined to his room with fever, nothing serious, but bad enough for him to cancel the day’s lesson.

  Ama hummed a tune she had learned in Kumase. She grabbed a damp handkerchief from the line and danced a few steps of adowa. She was free. Nothing to do. She would choose a brand new volume from Mijn Heer’s library and settle down to lose herself for a couple of hours in the doings of the curious and wonderful people who lived their lives in books.

  She took up the telescope and glanced out of an east window. There was nothing new to see. She went over to a west window and sat herself on the broad cill. She aimed the instrument at the enormous canoe that was being carved on the far bank of the river and focused the lens. Progress was slow: the carvers had made several fires again, gradually burning away the heartwood of the log. Then she heard a noise, a great hubbub, shouting and laughter, the firing of muskets. Climbing down from her perch, she stretched out of the window and looked towards the hill of St. Iago and the Benya bridge.

  Approaching the bridge from the north was a long procession. Slaves! In the lead were musicians, beating drums to the slow rhythm of the march, blowing horns, singing and chanting. They were followed by the merchants, responding in a condescending manner to the greetings of the townspeople who lined their route. The male slaves wore only loin cloths. Ama could see the dust-streaked sweat on their naked torsos. They walked in pairs, shackled, chained and heavily loaded, taking one deliberate, painful step at a time, driven by the beat of the drummers and the occasional flick of a manatee-skin whip. The female slaves followed, their condition much the same as the men’s. Next were the children, boys and girls, stolen from their parents or forfeited by them, the unredeemed security for some trivial debt.

  Ama closed her eyes. She went to the basin and washed her face and arms with cold water as if she was also covered with the dust and sweat and grime of the journey. She rubbed herself vigorously with a towel. Then she went back to the window and aimed the telescope at the procession.

  Ignoring the musicians and their masters, she captured each slave in turn in the telescope’s circular frame. Their necks were not bent, but it was only the need to support their head loads which kept them erect. She searched each face for some sign of dignity and courage, for some pride which had survived the suffering; but all she saw was sullen fear, despair and an infinite weariness; or, worse, a blank, devoid of expression, as if drained of all humanity. Face after face was the same.

  Only once, in response to the flick of a whip on a naked back did she see a man turn his head towards the oppressor with a flash of hatred in his eyes. She tried not to think. She shivered as if she had fever. Perhaps she would recognise a face, a face from Kumase or from home. She started to look at the female slaves. Their expressions were no different from the men’s.

  Van Schalkwyk had painted for her a vivid picture of hell, the destination of all unreformed sinners when they died, he said. These slaves were clearly all in hell already; and yet they w
ere still alive. The living dead, she thought.

  Ama went to the tall mirror. She wiped the tears from her eyes and looked at her image. She kicked the soft leather sandals from her feet. She pulled the doek from her head and threw it to the floor. Staring at her own eyes, she unwrapped her body cloth folded it in two and wrapped it around her waist. Then she examined the image of her body, the round limbs, the full breasts, the healthy glistening black skin.

  She went back to the window. The procession had reached the parade ground, but instead of swinging left to enter the castle, it bore right and headed towards the market square. She caught a last glimpse of each face as they turned.

  She knew now what she had been searching for: it was her own face, hers and Esi’s. They had come to Elmina in just such a procession as this and she had forgotten, she had buried the unpleasant memories. And yet she was a stranger to nothing she saw down there. What have they done that their lives have been taken from them? What sin could merit such a punishment? The god of the white man must be without mercy, without compassion, she thought. And yet that same god had led the Children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt.

  Then she wondered, Why am I here, up here, and they down there? She heard a noise at the door and thought it might be Mijn Heer, but it was nothing. Mijn Heer is guilty, she thought, and Augusta too. Konadu Yaadom is guilty and Koranten Péte and all their people. Abdulai is guilty. And I am guilty, too, because I have been living a life of quiet comfort here, preoccupied with my lessons and my reading, and all this while my sisters and brothers have languished in the dungeons below my feet. Perhaps I am most guilty of all. Then the thought came to her, but what can I do? I am powerless. She thought of the child in the bulrushes. If I should become pregnant and bear Mijn Heer's son, she thought, I would call him Moses.