Kwame’s early years were carefree. Ama’s access to the kitchen stores ensured that he seldom went hungry. For his first six years he ran naked with his fellows, watched over during the day by ancient Esperança and a band of assistants who were scarcely older than their charges. He was invariably asleep when Tomba arrived at night, so it was only on Sundays and saints’ days that he saw his father. The three of them often spent that day working in Ama’s allotment. Almost before he could walk, Tomba started to take him to the forest to hunt and trap and fish.
The Christmas after he turned seven Kwame was issued with his first dress, identical to those given to the girls. He wore it with great pride for an hour and then, suffering the discomfort of the coarse cloth in the heat, he threw it off and went to play hide and seek, marbles and horseshoe pitching in his normal state of undress. Ama began with the best of intentions: she would teach him to speak Asante and to read and write Portuguese as well as speaking it; but as time went by her remaining eye began to lose its strength. The stresses of her earlier life were taking their toll on her and she often felt tired. So she told him stories instead. Stories from Africa. Stories of her own childhood. But never stories of the harsh episodes of her journey into servitude.
“Tell him,” urged Olukoya.
“Later,” she insisted. “He is still too young to understand.”
But by the time he was old enough to understand it would be too late to tell him.
Ama never did conceive again: Kwame was her only child.
Tomba seemed to shed his own frustrations during his nightly run from the Engenho do Meio to the Engenho de Cima and remained a kind and supportive husband and an indulgent father. Kwame’s fellows were not as lucky. Their fathers, subjected to the constant humiliation of slavery, often found temporary relief in beating their wives and children; or they escaped from the real world with the aid of garapa.
They rationalised the beating of their children thus: “In order to stay out of trouble when he grows up, he needs to learn to respect the whites and to obey them without question. Absolute obedience to his father is a first step in that direction.”
Olukoya, sustained always by an unwavering conviction of the value of what he had brought with him from Africa and by a vision of a better future, was a continuing source of strength, advising, arbitrating, leading by example; but in spite of Josef’s best efforts as a courier, his grand plans came to little.
Old Benedito, on the other hand, was confirmed in his faith by the steady growth in the number of converts. Olukoya was intolerant of human failings, particularly those that caused pain to others; on the other hand Father Isaac, behind the curtain of the confessional, casually dispensed total absolution from the most abominable behaviour at the price of a few Hail Mary’s and the admonition to go and sin no more.
The Senhor could no longer walk from his bedroom to his rocking chair on the veranda. Bernardo and Tomás the Hausa blacksmith fashioned a simple wheelchair for him. Then he became too weak to sit up and lay all day and night in his darkened bedroom. Ama fed him, washed him, changed his bedclothes and treated his sores as best she could. The Senhora visited him once a day, prayed, and then left him to the tender mercies of his female slaves. Father Isaac said a perfunctory Mass in his bedroom once a week. Then the Senhor became incontinent. Ama wiped him and washed him and dried him; but try as she might she could not clear the pervasive smell of piss and shit from his room. The Senhora stopped coming to pray by his side. Ama sat down at his desk, found quill and ink and wrote to Miranda. Josef took the letter to Salvador. Miranda sent her reply by word of mouth: she had one or two urgent matters to attend to; she would come as soon as she had dealt with them.
The Senhor was dying. He had not eaten for several days and his breathing was irregular. Ama called the priest. Father Isaac administered the extreme unction, fanning his own face while he did so in an attempt to dissipate the foul smell of illness and death. A pale wraith appeared at the door but did not come in; it was the Senhora. Ama was alone with the old man when he died.
“Senhora,” Ama told her, “the Senhor is dead.”
She did not appear to hear, so Ama repeated the words, loudly, in her ear.
“I heard you. I may be old but I’m not deaf,” she replied and crossed herself three times.
The priest, on hearing the news, made the same sign.
Ama went down to the carpentry shop.
“Bernardo,” she told the carpenter in Fanti, “dust off his coffin and send it up. I’m worn out. I’m going to tell Josef to take the news to Salvador and then I’m going to sleep. I’ll wash his body when I wake up.”
* * *
By the time Miranda and her brothers arrived, everything was ready: the grave was dug, Ama had dressed the Senhor’s shrunken body in the uniform of a colonel of the militia which she found in his trunk; the coffin had been placed on the veranda under an awning to keep off the sun, the kitchen staff had made their preparations to cope with the mourners expected from the surrounding districts.
Miranda lifted her veil and kissed Ama on both cheeks.
“You don’t know how grateful I am for all you have done,” she told her.
Williams silently nodded his concurrence.
“Elizabeth, dear,” said Miranda, “this is Ama. Remember I told you her son is just a week younger than you are? Ama where is Zacharias? I would love to see him.”
The girl was dressed elegantly in black, a miniature copy of her mother. Ama knelt down and took her hands.
“Elizabeth let me look at you. You are so pretty. How old are you now?”
But the child ignored her.
“Mama,” she said, “I want to see the horses and the sheep and the pigs.”
CHAPTER 35
The family met to read the Senhor’s will.
Policarpo was given his freedom. But Policarpo was already dead.
The Senhor’s property was to pass to the Senhora. The children would inherit only after their mother’s death. The Senhora crossed herself and took no further part in the proceedings. It was decided that the eldest son would administer the engenho, but since he was running a sugar plantation of his own, and running it successfully, it was necessary to appoint a manager. Jesus Vasconcellos was the obvious choice.
The Senhora would go to live with her daughter in Salvador. The engenho would no longer require the services of a resident priest; but fortunately for Father Isaac the senhor of the Engenho do Meio was looking for a chaplain.
“Ama, come with me to Salvador,” Miranda offered.
“What about Zacharias, Senhora? And João?”
“Of course you would bring Zacharias. But João doesn’t belong to us. I would have to talk to Senhor Williams about him.”
Williams made an offer to Tomba’s master at the Engenho do Meio, but the senhor refused to sell. Tomba had become a key man in the running of his mill.
* * *
Jesus moved into the casa grande as soon as the family had left.
His first action was to have everything removed from the Senhor’s room. He set the domestic slaves to scrubbing the floors and whitewashing the walls and ceilings. He consigned all the pictures and mattresses and curtains and upholstery to an outside store. Meanwhile Bernardo scraped every piece of furniture down to the bare wood.
Jesus treated each room in like manner, sending even the cooking utensils to the store. When he had finished, no trace of the Senhor or his family remained in the casa grande. He brought his own personal possessions up from the small house he had occupied for so many years. From Salvador he ordered the few things he needed to complete the change, nothing extravagant, just plain cotton curtains and a new mattress.
Next he cut the domestic staff by half, sending maids and seamstresses back to the cane fields or the mill from whence they had once been promoted.
The Senhor’s eldest son had set him a target, the net income achieved in the last year of the Senhor’s regime. Any surplus he could keep.
Jesus leapt at the chance. He knew how inefficiently the business had been run; by tightening up on discipline and implementing a program of austerity, he knew that he could put aside enough in five years to buy the young Senhor out. That was his private dream.
He instructed the overseers to make more liberal use of the whip. He extended the working hours. Saints’ days passed unobserved. Sometimes, at the height of the safra, he decreed that the next Sunday would be a work day. Children were set to work when they turned nine instead waiting until they were ten. Kwame joined the weeders.
Jesus rearranged the fallow fields so that at the next planting the area of each tarefa was increased. He trimmed the slaves’ food ration. He cut the prices he paid for the produce which they grew on their allotments. He bought the cheapest supplies in the market, fly-blown meat and grain infested with weevils.
At the same time he carefully favoured the slave drivers, deliberately driving a wedge between them and the other slaves. If anything, the drivers were better off now than they had been in the Senhor’s days.
Funerals became more frequent but Vasconcellos would not allow time off for the slaves to bury their dead so they often had to do so late at night. Bernardo was instructed not to supply free coffins, so the dead were buried in cloth.
Jesus kept all the keys himself. He stood by when anything was removed from the stores. Ama no longer had the opportunity to pilfer food from the kitchen. Kwame, now working a full day in the fields, was often hungry.
The talk around the fires on Saturday nights became more and more bitter. Plots were hatched.
One Saturday Jesus announced that the next day would be a working day. That night some person unknown dosed the boiling kettle of melado with lemon juice. The syrup failed to crystallise. The day’s tarefa was wasted. Jesus harangued the mill workers but the direst threats failed to persuade them to point a finger at the culprit. They spent Sunday scrubbing out the kettles. With the mill idle, no cane could be cut; but rather than give the cane cutters the day off, he set them to weeding.
Often hungry and ill, the slaves adopted go-slow tactics. They sabotaged the ox-carts and poisoned the oxen. They adulterated the sugar with sand, knowing that the inspectors in Salvador would reject it.
Jesus berated his overseers. One tried to reason with him and was sacked. Another resigned. Ignacio Gomes, the cabra tanner and leather worker, who was a free man, decided at last to abandon the ancient spirits of his land and seek his fortune in the capital.
* * *
The field workers returned after dark.
Kwame was so exhausted that he would have fallen asleep without eating if Ama had not forced him to stay awake. She had stopped delivering the produce of her allotment to the casa grande: the money was too small and there was invariably an argument about payment. The meat allocation was so worm-ridden that she refused to use it. Tomba brought them whatever he could spare from the slightly better rations at the Engenho do Meio. It was this and the yield of his trapping and fishing that kept them going.
Ama watched over Kwame as he fell asleep. She covered him and rose to return to the casa grande to serve Jesus his evening meal.
Leaving the cabin, head bowed, preoccupied with concern about her son’s future, she heard the cry, “Fire, fire.”
Looking up, she saw a red glow in the sky above the cane fields. Then the work bell rang: the slaves were being summoned to fight the inferno. Undecided as to what to do, Ama went back into the cabin and looked at Kwame’s sleeping form. It would be at least an hour before Tomba arrived.
“Kwame, wake up!”
The boy resisted, pulling the blanket back over his head. She grabbed him under the armpits and pulled him to his feet.
“Mama, what is it?” he asked groggily.
“Here take your blanket. You are going to sleep in the cave tonight.”
There was a small crevice in the rocks on the hillside where, in earlier days, Ama would go to read. Kwame still loved to hide in it: it was his secret refuge, the only place he could call his own. She pushed him before her, threading her way past the field slaves as they came stumbling out of their cabins in the dark.
* * *
Maria Cabinda, the cook, was standing at the kitchen door, looking out at the glow in the dark sky.
She was worried about her husband who would be fighting the fire and about her two young children. If the wind were to turn, the fire might cut the men off from the stream. Then they would be unable to stop the inferno sweeping from the fields, through to the yard and the mill, and on to the senzalas.
“Go and bring them up here,” Ama suggested but Maria was afraid of Jesus’ wrath. She had done that once before when one of them had had a high fever. Finding them asleep in a corner of the kitchen had driven him into a paroxysm of rage.
Ama told her what she had done with Kwame. Maria knew where the cave was.
“If you like, take them there and let them sleep with Kwame. When Tomba comes, I’ll ask him to go up and spend the night with them. Don’t worry: I cover for you. I’ll tell Jesus you have gone to help fight the fire. He could hardly complain about that. And I’ll finish the cooking.”
* * *
The fire turned out to be less serious than had at first seemed likely.
Prompt action confined the damage to three tarefas. Vasconcellos trudged up to the casa grande, his face streaked with ash. Ama suppressed a grin and quickly turned her head.
At first Jesus was exhilarated at his success in forestalling a potential catastrophe; but his mood quickly turned to anger. He would have liked to strangle the unknown arsonist. Of course he would impose a stern collective punishment; but that would do little to help him to meet his target this year. Output had declined. If he could not force an improvement his very job might be in jeopardy. It had all seemed so straightforward and simple when he had taken over.
“Rum!” he commanded.
He didn’t even notice the absence of the cook. Ama served him his food. By the time he had finished the second course the bottle was half empty. He started to mumble to himself. Returning from the kitchen with the third course, she saw him bang the heavy table with his fist. He turned and glared at her. She averted her eye.
When he had finished eating, she cleared the table. Then she went back to the dining room. He was still sitting there, staring at the empty bottle.
“Will there be anything else, Senhor?” she asked quietly.
He turned to stare at her. Then he drained the dregs of the rum from his glass.
“Will there be anything else, Senhor?” he mimicked. “Yes, One-eye, there will be something else.”
He rose and grabbed her at once by the shoulders, pulling her towards him. She struggled to free herself but he was too strong. He forced her lips apart and drove his tongue into her mouth. She tasted the foulness and the rum. Pulling her arms free she thrust his head from her. Then, almost instinctively, she attacked him at the only place where he was vulnerable: she sank her teeth into his lower lip. He screamed in agony and threw her away so violently that she fell backwards. Her head struck the stone floor. She lay there immobile, stunned. He dropped onto her and ripped her cloth off. Then he was inside her, thrusting away his hatred and frustration.
When he had finished, he rose and stood over her where she lay sobbing on the floor. He said nothing. She turned over on her side, away from him, hiding her face in her hands. He fingered his bleeding lip. Then he drew his right boot back and deliberately, with all his strength, kicked her in the buttocks. Ama screamed and then she lost consciousness.
When she came to, he had gone. Slowly, painfully, she got to her knees. Taking hold of the edge of the table, she pulled herself to her feet. She stood still for a while, dizzy, afraid that she would faint again. Then, step by step, she crossed the open space to the nearest wall. She closed her eyes and rested her weight against the door post. Step by step again, across the kitchen. She went out and, by force of long habit, took the key and locked th
e door. She met no one on the way. It seemed an age before she reached the senzalas. All was quiet: the exhausted fire fighters had dragged their heavy legs back to their hovels and quickly fallen asleep.
Tomba came out of the cabin. He had just arrived. The moon had risen. She could see the sweat glistening on his bare torso.
“Ama,” he asked as he saw her approaching, “where’s Kwame?”
Then he saw from her crippled gait that something was amiss.
“Ama, what’s wrong?” he asked as he went to help her.
“Senhor Jesus,” she replied. “He raped me.”
“Vasconcellos raped you?” he asked as if in disbelief.
It happened regularly. The women almost accepted it as part of the condition of their life. But it had never before happened to his Ama, not, at least, since they had been married.
“Tomba,” she asked him wearily, “bring me water, I beg you.”
He ministered to her needs, wiped her face, blew up the embers of a fire and put a basin of water on it. She told him about the fire in the cane fields and what she had done with Kwame. Then she stretched out to try and sleep.
“Have you got a knife?” he asked her.
“Not here,” she replied without opening her eye. “In the kitchen.”
“Where’s the key?” he asked.
She sat up.
“No, Tomba, no!” she commanded, her voice rising.
“Where’s the key?” he demanded.
She felt the corner of her cloth.
“I don’t have it. I must have left it in the door or dropped it on the way. Tomba don’t do it. I beg you Tomba. I beg you.”
She was sobbing now.
“Can you walk?” he asked her, gently but firmly forcing her to her feet.
“Tomba, what will you achieve? You will bring tragedy down on all our heads. Think of Kwame. Let it be. You cannot reverse what has been done.”
“Come,” he told her. “I might need your help.”
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