Ama

by Manu Herbstein

  And then the chorus again, “How many canes to cut today?

  Another woman offered a line, and then a third took her turn.

  “One fifty faggots fill a cart;

  “How many canes to cut today?

  “Twenty four cart-loads feed the mill;

  “How many canes to cut today?

  “Send more canes, the mill must run;

  “How many canes to cut today?”

  “Ring the bell; crack the whip;

  “How many canes to cut today?”

  “The furnace burns, the kettles boil;

  “How many canes to cut today?”

  “Eight loads of firewood, stacked to burn;

  “How many canes to cut today?”

  At each line the scythes swung. Then the men began to improvise.

  “Pity the downtrodden African slave;

  “How many canes to cut today?”

  “Curse the ships which brought us here;

  “How many canes to cut today?”

  “Senhorita Miranda, open your legs,” sang the wag.

  “How many canes to cut today?” came the automatic reply, but it was interrupted by laughter.

  They all straightened up and took a short rest to applaud the man’s impudence. The song was over.

  “What did he say? Why are you laughing?” a woman asked Ama.

  Warming to the applause, the wag spread his arms, looked beseechingly up at the heavens and mimed himself wooing the Senhor’s precious daughter.

  “Ah sweet, white, beautiful, innocent, virginal Miranda,” he said, adding more emphasis to each successive hosanna, “I beg you. By Saint Gonçalo, I beg you. Let Luis dos Santos make you a fine mulatto baby!”

  “Heh, enough of that,” interrupted Pedro the underdriver, trying to suppress his own laughter, but scared that he might have some explaining to do if any of this reached the casa grande. “Back to work.”

  At midday they stopped to eat the food left over from breakfast. A returning cart brought enough garapa to give each man a swallow. They took off only just enough time to down the food; then they were back at work.

  Swish! Thunk! Swish! Thunk!

  Now the sun was hot; the sweat flowed; backs ached and the pace flagged.

  Pedro flicked his whip. He had only recently been plucked from the ranks of the cane cutters and given a pair of leather boots, a whip and a bottle of garapa twice a week to mark his new status. But that was not all that had changed. His former mates now treated him with reserve. He sensed that an invisible barrier separated him from them.

  He regretted the loss of companionship. Yet he certainly did not regret his release from the grinding hard labour. He was getting special food rations too; those frequent pangs of hunger were a thing of the past. But it was not selfishness, he persuaded himself, which had led him to accept promotion. His wife had a baby daughter. He had made a sacrifice; and it was for the child's sake. As if he had had a choice anyway! Yet he was ill at ease. He was drinking too much. Most nights now he got drunk. And he had started to beat the woman. Afterwards he would be sorry; yet a few days later he would do it again.

  In the early afternoon they heard the approaching hoof beats of the overseer’s horse. They saw him stagger as he dismounted and exchanged knowing glances. This was not the time to trifle with the man.

  The first cutter completed his row and went to help the slowest member of the gang. No one would leave until the whole tarefa had been levelled. As the western sky turned crimson they regained a little energy and drove themselves to finish the work before sundown. As the men helped the women to load the last cart, their evening meal arrived. It was the same bland stuff they had eaten before.

  They filed back to the yard in the dark, dragging their heavy legs, tripping over the ruts in the track, too weary even to talk. By the light of a brazier they handed their tools in at the store. Senhor Vasconcellos ordered them to report at the mill. Ama asked for permission to go and relieve herself. At the back of the kettle house, the furnaces roared, sending great orange flames flickering upwards, silhouetting the glistening naked bodies of the stokers. Ama stopped for a moment to watch the inferno. There was a terrible beauty about it. Like the Christian hell, she thought.

  Her work was to collect the spent canes, the bagasse, and dump it outside the mill. Every muscle ached. Her eyelids drooped. The driver flicked a whip at her. By midnight all the cane had been milled. It would be morning again before the final ladle of sugar syrup had been decanted and the last of the sugar pots sent to the purging house.

  Ama hardly remembered finding her way back to her cabin and collapsing onto her mat.

  She dreamed. Fragments of an old Yendi nightmare. Decapitated heads boiling in a cauldron. Heads in a basket, still dripping blood, on the night of Osei Kwadwo’s death. Her work, to take the heads, one by one, and throw them into the furnace beneath the kettle house. They turned and grinned at her obscenely as they floated through the air. She woke up in a cold sweat, shivering, her bones aching.

  It was dark when the bell rang. Still exhausted from the previous day’s labour, Ama slept on. Old Esperança, who had risen earlier, prodded her awake.

  So it continued, day after day, week after week, month after month, each barely distinguishable from the one before.

  * * *

  On Sundays the bell was not rung until dawn.

  Milling started again in the late afternoon and the first kettle was filled soon after dark; but the field slaves generally had the full day off.

  Ama went to Mass.

  The Bishop had chosen for the site of the chapel a place which had once been sacred to the former owners of this land, the Tupi. The building was modest: earth floor, whitewashed walls. The furnishings, too, were simple: a wooden pulpit with two steps and a canopy, carved by Bernardo in the carpenter’s shop, a pair of silver candlesticks on a white tablecloth, two rows of benches and a curtained confessional.

  The Senhor and his extended family sat on the front bench; paid employees sat on the second; the slaves stood behind.

  The service was in Latin. The other slaves, Ama discovered, even the Crioulos, understood no more of the words than she did. But she enjoyed the incense and the bells and the sense of some special mystery. And unlike the interminable Dutch service at Elmina, this one didn’t last too long. Even the sermon (this in Portuguese) was short. If ever the young padre forgot himself, the Senhor would rap his knuckles on the bench and Father Isaac would terminate his homily forthwith.

  Now that she was beginning to master Portuguese Ama was expected to attend the Sunday school which Benedito the old catechist ran after Mass. There were a few adult African pagans like her; the rest were children. The Angolans left immediately after the Mass. They had all been baptised en masse before leaving the shores of their native land. Each carried a certificate of baptism in the form of an imprint of the royal crown of Portugal, burned into the skin of their breasts with a red hot iron. This brand, Jacinta told Ama bitterly, served also as a receipt for export duty paid to the Portuguese King.

  The Senhor’s mulatto son, Alexandre, always stayed on. He imbibed Christian doctrine with undiscriminating enthusiasm and planned to take holy orders when he grew up.

  “This is the power which the Holy Church has given to our Priest,” Benedito told them. “With a few words, the words of Jesus, ‘Eat this bread: this is my body; drink this wine: this is my blood,’ he can bring God Himself down into his hands. With a few more, saying, ‘May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us eternal life,’ he can save us from the everlasting flames of perdition, shut tight the fearful gates of hell and open wide for us the glittering portals of heaven.

  “In order to qualify for God’s mercy you must first be baptised. Until you have been baptised you will remain a savage, little better than the wild beasts which live in the forest. Once you have received the sacrament of baptism you will become a proper member of Christian society. Then you will be pe
rmitted to confess your sins and to receive the blessed Eucharist.

  “Serve our Senhor well. Bear the hardships of slavery with patience. God has sent these things to test us. He tells us ‘be not slothful.’ If we do His bidding we shall certainly have our reward. For it is written in the Holy Book, ‘blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’ and also ‘blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’”

  The children who had been born at the Engenho de Cima and had been baptised at birth, yawned and looked at the familiar dusty pictures of Saint Benedict the Moor and Santa Efigenia which hung on the wall; and at the little brown-faced statue of Our Lady of the Rosary in its niche. And when they became bored with the images, they scratched lines on the earth floor and played furtive games of tic-tac-toe.

  Ama’s experience, first with Van Schalkwyk at Elmina and then with Williams on board The Love of Liberty, had cured her of any possible predilection for the white man’s religion. But she suffered from an insatiable curiosity. This business of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus intrigued her. There is some mystery in it, she thought, something concealed and unspoken. Perhaps the first Christians were cannibals and the Holy Communion is a secret commemoration of the Apostles’ consumption of the physical remains of their leader? If not that, what can the strange ritual mean? Nana Esi must have heard something about this. Perhaps that was why she thought that the white man was going to cook her in his palm soup. Poor Nana Esi. Rather it was the sharks which ate her.

  Eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus is really not that different, she reflected, from the ceremony in which the Owner of the Earth would cut the throat of a white cockerel and let its blood flow onto the shrine. The Asante custom is similar, only they bring their sacrifices to the altar of Tano or another of their abosom. At bottom all religions seem to have common elements. And if that is so, why exchange your own customary beliefs for those of your oppressor?

  As for the priest’s constant harping on sin, that is just so much hypocrisy. It is the whites who are the greatest sinners; yet the priest is always accusing us.

  Ama was tempted to raise these matters with Benedito, but she decided against. The old Crioulo’s Christian faith is a crutch which helps him hobble through a difficult life, she thought. What purpose would be served by trying to sow seeds of doubt in his heart?

  She didn’t discuss her private views with Alexandre either. The Senhor’s bastard son was in the full flush of adolescent religiosity. Indeed, in his youthful enthusiasm, he regarded Ama as his first convert. Sometimes after Sunday School they would climb the forested hill behind the senzalas and find a quiet place to sit. Then, haltingly, she would read a chapter of Exodus or Ruth in the Portuguese bible which Alexandre had stolen for her, and the boy would correct her pronunciation or explain the meaning of a difficult word. Soon she began to pick up whole passages by heart. She would make time pass in the fields, when she was bundling cane, by rehearsing in her head the familiar stories in the unfamiliar language. She swore Alexandre to secrecy: nobody must know that she could read, neither his father nor any of the slaves. She saw how he relished the conspiracy, though she had no illusions as to how far she could trust his discretion.

  She soon discovered that the elegant classic language of the Portuguese Bible was of no practical use to her. The newcomers from Africa, arriving with so many different languages of their own, soon picked up what they needed of the basic utilitarian pidgin which had been developed by former generations of slaves. One step removed from pidgin was the dialect which all the Bahians spoke, both the white masters and the black and mulatto Crioulos. She discovered a higher level of Portuguese one day when she eavesdropped on the Senhor while he was conducting a distinguished visitor from Lisbon around the engenho. The Senhor struggled to express himself in an idiom in which he clearly lacked practice. The visitor’s face was a book in which she read his contempt for his host’s inadequate command of his own language.

  When the time came for her to be baptised she had no trouble trotting off the ten commandments and the creed. Josef and Wono were her god-parents. By this time the previous owner of the name Ana das Minas had died, so she inherited it. But only the priest ever used it. Vasconcellos still called her “One-eye.” To the slaves she remained Ama.

  * * *

  Sunday was a day of rest; and yet it was not really a day of rest.

  Truth to tell there was really no day of rest at the Engenho de Cima, at least not during the long months of the safra. But Sunday was different. On Sunday the slaves worked for themselves. Most of them worked on plots of land which the Senhor had allotted to them. This suited the Senhor, for the food crops they grew on their allotments supplemented their diet at no cost to him. Moreover, they offered him a cheap source of produce for the casa grande's kitchen: he could buy vegetables from his own slaves at half the price he would have had to pay in the nearest market.

  After Mass and Sunday school (and sometimes a secret reading session with Alexandre) Ama would join Esperança and Jacinta at their allotment.

  But first she had to do her week’s laundry. She put on her spare cloth, the old one she had brought from home, from Africa, and threw the coarse homespun smock, which she wore all week, over her shoulder. The laundry was a natural stone pool on the side of the hill behind the senzalas. Water tumbled into it from a leaky wooden aqueduct fed from the engenho’s stream. During the dry season the flow contracted to a trickle, but for most of the year it kept the basin full. At one corner, the overflow cascaded out over the rocks and found its way down into the forest below, where it disappeared into the ground.

  On her way Ama plucked handfuls of leaves from one of the soap bushes which grew prolifically on the path up to the pool. It was at this private place that the women bathed on those rare occasions when they were not at work during the daylight hours. There were two small girls there now, singing as they rubbed away at sheets from the big house. They answered Ama’s greeting shyly. Ama plunged her dirty smock into the pool. Then she crushed the leaves and worked them up into a lather, washed and rinsed her garment, wrung it out and hung it on a rock to dry. Then she took off the cloth she was wearing and jumped into the pool and soaped herself. The girls decided to join her and they splashed about together.

  This is what children ought to be doing at their age, Ama thought, rather than spending their time washing the Senhora’s sheets and table cloths.

  But didn’t you have to work when you were their age?

  Of course I did, but that was for my own mother and it was like a game. When Tabitsha gave me a task, I was proud to help her. It was a recognition that I was old enough to accept the responsibility.

  It is true that these girls are probably doing the Senhora’s laundry so that their own mothers can work on their allotments, but they are still too young for such a heavy load. And they are both so thin, like wraiths.

  When she arrived at the allotment she was still wet. One day, she thought, I will save enough to buy myself a towel. She spread her smock on a bush. Esperança was bent double, picking at the soil with her hoe. Jacinta stood by her, pointing at the weeds with her stumps. They were both waiting for Ama. There was little the two of them could achieve without her. The old Crioulo woman soon became tired. Jacinta’s main contribution was to carry a bundle of firewood or a basket of vegetables back to the senzala on her head.

  They needed little persuasion to sit down in the shade.

  “Do you know what you can do for me, my mother?” Ama asked, raising her voice.

  The old woman shook her head.

  “Brew me a mug of maté on your fire, I beg you.”

  She wound her cloth around her waist and set to work, hoeing, weeding, nursing the seedlings, transplanting. She knew the value of manure from home and had set some of the small boys who worked with the oxen to collecting baskets of dung from the paddocks. There was joy in this work. She always grew excit
ed as she approached the allotments after a week’s absence, anxious to see just how much her corn plants had grown in the seven days. She grew red pepper and groundnuts and some of the European vegetables which she knew she could sell at the Senhor’s kitchen. She recalled the guinea corn and millet which grew on the flat plain around Tigen’s hamlet and the rice and groundnuts and yams which they cultivated on the low hills nearby. She hummed the old prayers, begging the ancestors to bring rain and control the fierce unpredictable force of the wind, which could destroy a year’s work in less time than it took to eat a meal. Itsho had cultivated her own little groundnut farm for her. She had sold some of the crop and used the proceeds to buy this very cloth she was wearing. Itsho. She felt guilty. She had forsaken his memory. She would borrow some garapa and use it to pour libation to his spirit that very evening. And when this corn was ready for harvest she would brew beer from it and pour libation again with the fruit of her own labour.

  All along the contours below the forest there were similar allotments. This was the only activity in which the Senhor granted the slaves some independence, some little control over their own lives. On Sunday afternoon there was singing in the hills, not the measured worksongs of the cane fields, but songs remembered from home, songs of love, lullabies, poetry put to music.

  Sometimes Ama would straighten up to rest for a moment and just listen.

  * * *

  Alexandre lost interest in religion.

  Now he was crazy about sailing. The Senhor would not let him use the boat alone so Josef had to spend his Sundays on the water. Sometimes he took his own two boys along with him.

  One Sunday afternoon when she returned from the allotments, Ama collected her bible from its hiding place and headed up into the forest to the outcrop of rock which was their secret place. Alexandre, ever the willing thief, had brought her a pencil and some sheets of paper. She was working her way slowly but systematically through the Old Testament. When she came upon a word she didn’t understand, she would write it down. Later she would ask Alexandre its meaning and if he couldn’t explain he would ask the padre, who was his teacher. Father Isaac’s conviction that Alexandre would be an acquisition for the Church grew and he lost no opportunity to tell his patron so. He little guessed the source of the boy’s inquiries.