Ama

by Manu Herbstein

  * * *

  They didn’t find the key and it wasn’t in the kitchen door. He whispered instructions to her.

  “For the last time, Tomba, I beg you. Remember what we did together on the ship.”

  “It is because of that, that I must do this,” he said. “Now are you ready? Do what I say.”

  He banged on the jalousie shutters of Jesus’ bedroom. At first there was no answer and Ama hoped against hope that in his drunken state the man had fallen asleep somewhere out of earshot. But then they heard his half-awake slurred speech.

  “Who the hell is that making that confounded row?”

  “Senhor Jesus. It is I, Ama, One-eye.”

  “Go away. I’ll have you whipped to an inch of your life in the morning if you don’t stop that row.”

  “Senhor. The fire has started again. They have set the cane fields on fire.”

  That woke him up, drunk as he was. They heard him swear as he struggled to pull on his boots. They went round to the veranda. Ama stood a little way off where he would see her in the moonlight as he opened the door. They heard him fumble with the key. The door opened and he stepped out. He was holding a musket at waist height, his hand on the trigger. Tomba, standing beside the door, felled him with a single blow. The gun fell to the floor.

  In a moment Tomba had dragged him back into the house.

  “Ama, come quickly. Bring the gun and close the door behind you. Now lock it. Do you have a candle? And some rope to tie him with?”

  He had already stuffed his cloth into the man’s mouth. Now he wound it round and round his head to secure the gag. Then he turned him face down and sat on him.

  Ama returned, not with a rope but with a pair of manacles and a pair of leg-irons.

  “The keys are in the locks,” she told him.

  “Excellent,” he replied. “Now a knife, the sharpest you can find. Or, better still, a meat chopper or an axe.”

  “Tomba, I beg you. It is enough. They will torture you before they kill you.”

  “Never mind. Do as I say.”

  “What about Kwame? And me?”

  “I must do what I must do.”

  Ama thought, I cannot reach him. It is as if he has changed into some other person, as if he were mad. Then she remembered him telling her how the loss of Sami had driven him mad, by his own admission, mad. She shivered and felt she would faint. In the kitchen she sat down, sank her head upon the table and tried to consider her options. She could unlock the front door and run to Olukoya and Josef for help. But by the time they got back Tomba would already have found a weapon and done his worst. Then she would have to live out whatever time remained to her with the knowledge that she had failed him. And what could Olukoya and Josef do but give him up to the militia?

  “Well?”

  Tomba was standing in the doorway. She pointed to the drawer where the knives were kept. He turned the contents out onto the table.

  “Tomba, for the last time.”

  She put her arm on his naked back and caressed him. He shook her off and continued to examine each of the knives in turn.

  She went to the doorway and lay down on the floor, face down, with her head towards him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I am prostrating myself before you, as the Yorubas do before their gods. Kill me, rather.”

  He stepped over her. She rose and followed him.

  He turned the man over and sat down on his stomach. Jesus’ manacled hands were behind his back, under him. Tomba put the instruments down beside him. Then he removed the gag.

  “You may say your last prayers,” he told the manager of the Engenho de Cima.

  “Who are you?” Vasconcellos demanded. “I warn you. Release me at once or it will go hard with you.”

  “It will go hard with me anyway, shit-face. Make your confession and beg for absolution before I cut out your tongue.”

  Ama was shocked. She had never heard Tomba use foul language before. She hugged herself and rocked from foot to foot. Closing her eye she tried to summon up a vision of Itsho. But all she could see was a dark void.

  “Right, Senhor Jesus,” said Tomba, “you’ve had your chance. No prayers.”

  He forced the man’s mouth open and wedged a wooden spoon between his teeth. Then he seized Vasconcellos’ tongue with a pair of tongs and pulled it out of his mouth. In a moment he had sliced it off. The blood spurted over him. He stood up. Ama caught a glimpse of the terror in his victim’s eyes. Then she vomited.

  When she rose to her feet, Tomba had pulled the man’s pants down. Now he ripped off his blood-soaked shirt as well. The manager lay naked. Tomba took a cushion from a chair and put it under the man’s head.

  “I want you to have a good view of this,” he told Vasconcellos.

  Then, using his knees, he forced the man’s legs apart. He grabbed the end of his slack penis with the tongs and pulled. He waved the blood stained knife before the man’s eyes.

  “Tomba, no, no.”

  Ama tried to pull him away but he shrugged her off. She ran to the door, turned the key and in a moment was running down to the senzalas.

  * * *

  When they reached the casa grande, the front door was standing open as Ama had left it.

  “Tomba,” Olukoya called quietly.

  There was no answer. He went inside. Josef followed. Ama had insisted on returning with them. Seeing her state of mind, Josef had told Wono to come too.

  “Wono, don’t come in. Just look after Ama,” Olukoya called back.

  “I must see, I must see,” Ama cried.

  Breaking loose from Wono, she followed them.

  Jesus Vasconcellos lay dead in a pool of his own fresh blood. By his side were the severed organs. Tomba sat on the floor with his back against the wall, staring into space. He was still covered with the blood of his victim.

  Olukoya spoke to him but he did not reply. Olukoya shook him gently by the shoulders. Tomba did not react. Then Ama knelt before him. She said nothing, just took his limp, bloodstained hands and rubbed them in her own.

  “Josef, we may need Wono’s help,” said Olukoya. “Do you think she can take this?”

  “I’ll speak to her.”

  “Lock the door behind you. Then bring her through to the kitchen. We need to talk this out.”

  * * *

  Olukoya sat at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.

  “Wono. I’m sorry you had to see that. Josef and I need to talk, to make plans. I would like you to join us but I don’t think it would be wise to leave Tomba and Ama alone. And we are not ready to take them away. Will you sit and watch them?”

  Wono nodded.

  Olukoya said, “Josef, my brother, we are in real trouble. We shall be lucky if we come out of this alive. They will miss Tomba at his engenho early tomorrow morning. The first thing they will do is to send a messenger to ask after him. We must all be far from here before the messenger arrives.”

  “What about the body?”

  “My first thought was to burn it, and this building, too.”

  “There’s not much here to burn. The building is of stone.”

  “You are right. And it would delay us too much. We must bury the body in a place where they will never find it.”

  “What worries me is the overseers,” said Josef.

  “Yes, that is the first thing. Go down to the senzalas and round up ten men we can trust. While you are doing that, I will search the house for arms. Ama may be able to help. Don’t waste time telling the men why they are wanted: we can tell them all together when they get here. We’ll give them whatever arms we can find. But no more bloodshed, mind; not if we can avoid it. It will only make our situation worse.”

  * * *

  “My brothers and sisters,” Olukoya told the assembly. “Something has happened tonight which has put us all in great danger. I am going to tell you about it and what I think we must do to save ourselves. I want you to listen to me calmly and quietly. If
there are any questions, I will hear them when I have finished.”

  “Jesus Vasconcellos is dead.”

  A murmur of shock passed through the crowd. Then there was applause.

  “Hallelujah,” cried a Christian. “Praise the Lord,” and the reply came, “Amen.”

  Olukoya called for order.

  “I will not tell you how he died or by whose hand and I do not want you to ask me. The less each of us knows, the better for all of us.”

  “As soon as we finish this meeting brother Josef will choose four men to dig a grave. This work is dangerous and those who are asked may refuse. No one will hold it against them. Indeed no one will know who they are.

  “While this is going on the rest of us must prepare to leave this place. Go to your allotments and quickly harvest all the ripe crops which you can carry with you. If you have seed, bring that too. Collect together all your important possessions, all you can carry, and bundle them up. There is no need to wake your children, not until the last moment, when we are ready to go. Work in great haste. We must all be away from here well before dawn. I have one more thing to say, but before that: any questions?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “It would be unwise for me to tell you that. You will understand why in a moment.”

  “What about the overseers?”

  “They are safely tied up, locked up and under guard. None of them has been harmed. We have taken their guns and before we go we will take which ever of their possessions might come in useful to us.”

  “Shouldn’t we take them with us as hostages?”

  “Good question. That hadn’t occurred to me. But I don’t think it would be a good idea. If we took them we might find ourselves having to deal with the army rather than just the militia. No more questions? Good, it seems that I made myself clear.

  “Now there may be some of you who, for one reason or another, might be reluctant to join the rest of us. I understand that and I will ask you no questions. All I ask is that for our protection and for your own, you declare your intentions now. Then we will tie you up and lock you up like the overseers so that it will look as if you resisted us. That way there might be less trouble ahead for you; but that is something, of course, that I cannot guarantee.”

  * * *

  “Feed your children and yourselves as best you can,” Olukoya told them when they reached the clearing. “Then get some sleep. We are all tired out. It will take them some time to get organised so we will take a chance and post no guards until after we wake up. Remember just one thing as you fall asleep. We are no longer slaves. We have thrown off our chains. We are free men and women. May the ancestors watch over our sleep and wake us up well.”

  “Mama,” yawned Kwame as he lay down, “what did Uncle Olu mean? Have we come here to pray to the ancestors?”

  Ama searched for an answer but the boy, like his father beside him, was already fast asleep.

  She searched Tomba’s face, looking for a clue. He was relaxed, his breathing regular, seemingly at peace with the world. For twelve years they had lived together as man and wife. Yet last night she had discovered within him a festering wound whose existence she had never suspected.

  She lay down. I wonder whether Olukoya and Josef have been damaged in the same way, she mused. She tried to sleep; but sleep would not come. Again and again scenes of the previous night’s events passed before her. She summoned the spirit of Itsho; but either he refused to come or he lacked the power to suppress those awful visions.

  When she awoke, Olukoya was returning from the shrine. All around, shaded from the midday sun, lay the sleeping forms of their companions.

  “Where’s Tomba?” Olukoya whispered.

  She panicked and leaped to her feet, silently blaming herself: in his despair he must have run away. He might do himself some damage, she thought. I should have stayed awake to watch over him. But Olukoya had seen him. He beckoned to her and pointed: Tomba was sitting by the stream, fashioning a conical fish trap from reeds.

  “Bra Tomba,” Olukoya greeted him.

  Tomba looked up.

  “I thought, ‘What are we all going to eat?’” he said and went back to his work.

  Olukoya put his hand on Tomba’s bare shoulder and squeezed.

  “There is one thing I want you to know,” he said. “We are all in this together. What you did was long overdue.”

  Tomba looked up at him but said nothing. He took another reed from the bundle beside him. I wonder if he remembers anything, Ama mused. She knelt by his side and hugged him. He turned and looked deep into her eye. Then, again, he went back to his work. Twelve years we have lived together and now he has become an enigma to me, she thought.

  “It’s time to wake up the others,” Olukoya said. “There is much to do. Tomba, I have an urgent task which will need your special knowledge; and I don’t mean about making fish traps.”

  Not for the first time Ama was lost in admiration for Olukoya’s skill in dealing with people. He was trying to draw Tomba back into the web that held them all together, to make him feel that he was needed. Is it a natural gift, she wondered, or something he learned during his training for the priesthood?

  * * *

  The altar site was an unsuitable location for a quilombo: it was true that it lay hidden deep in the forest and that it had water; but it was easily approachable on all four sides and there was no height from which a look-out might detect the approach of strangers.

  Olukoya sent Tomba out with Josef. He wasn’t optimistic. He had made the same search himself many years before and had found nothing suitable. But he thought that there was just a chance that Tomba’s past experience might help him to locate a more defensible site.

  While they were away he began to organise his people. He had them pool their scant supplies of food. The cooking would have to be done after dark: a plume of smoke would invite detection. They would certainly be pursued: of that he had no doubt; but the militia would have to find them first. He collected the arms which they had appropriated from the casa grande and the overseers’ houses. Their powder might be spoiled at any time by a shower, so he had a pit excavated on higher ground, lined with leaves and covered with a roof of branches and leaves and soil. It was too early to think of building a more permanent armoury. If they were lucky Tomba would soon return and lead them to a sheltered hillside in some remote wooded valley. There, he told himself, without much conviction, there would be a cave which could serve as a store for their weapons and ammunition.

  Olukoya had no illusions about their capacity to resist an attack by a force of any strength. But if they had sufficient warning of the approach of their pursuers, he thought, and if they planned well in advance, they might be able to disperse, to melt away into the forest, leaving the militia without a visible target. The trouble with this strategy was that the fugitives feared the forest, particularly at night. He would have to overcome that fear. He set a ring of day and night guards and sent out scouts.

  After defence their most pressing problem was food. What they had brought would last them no more than a few days. Olukoya began to plan a raid on the Engenho de Cima, or on another engenho nearby, to steal a few sheep and some bags of grain.

  Tomba and Josef returned to report failure. There was no option but to make the best of their present camp. Olukoya set everyone to work: he knew that if he allowed the soldiers in his little army to sit around and talk they would soon become despondent. He invented tasks to keep them fully occupied during all their waking hours. They told him that he was making them work harder than they had ever done as slaves. But they said it with a smile.

  That night they all sat around a fire, all except those who stood as sentinels in the dark forest beyond and those who had been sent on an expedition to spy on their former home and steal what food they could find.

  Ama had the Bible which Alexandre had stolen for her all those years before. She offered to read a story and the offer was accepted with acclamation. So she
lay down on her stomach, with the book close to the fire, and, with her one weak eye, read to them from Exodus.

  When she had read the passage in which Moses kills an Egyptian for beating one of his Israelite brothers, and buries the body, she paused and asked for water to wet her throat.

  “That Egyptian was called Vasconcellos,” came a comment from the dark perimeter.

  There was approving laughter.

  “And who is our Moses then?” another responded.

  “Enough of that,” Olukoya interrupted. “No one knows who killed Senhor Jesus. I warned you not to speculate on that matter. It is dangerous talk which could be our undoing. Ama please go on.”

  She came to the episode where the Pharaoh punished the Israelites for Moses’s insolent demands by increasing their tarefa, the daily quota of bricks each slave had to make. Again they saw the parallels between the story and their own history.

  As Moses visited each of God’s plagues upon the Egyptians there were cries of approbation and when he led the Israelites out of bondage Ama had to stop until the cheering subsided.

  When she read of Pharaoh’s pursuit with his soldiers and horses and chariots the murmurs were more muted. The Israelite fugitives displayed their lack of faith in their leader and their god and there was a cry of “Shame;” but the echo was half-hearted. Ama wondered whether she had selected the wrong story. Yet they cheered again when the Lord parted the waters and Moses led his flock out of Egypt and into the desert and freedom; and Ama’s faith was restored.

  By this time her eye was watering from the smoke of the fire and her throat was sore.

  “I think that’s enough for one night,” she told them. “If you like, I’ll continue some other time.”

  “Tomorrow,” demanded the children.

  “Tomorrow,” she agreed with a smile.

  But that tomorrow never came.

  * * *

  Olukoya assigned Josef, his most able and trusted lieutenant, to lead the raiders.

  With great enthusiasm, Pedro, the alcoholic slave-driver, volunteered to join the party. Olukoya had some misgivings about including him. However, having finished off the garapa he had brought with him, Pedro had been sober for several days and had vowed that he was a reformed character. Moreover he would be leaving his wife and daughter behind in the camp and that was surely some sort of guarantee of good behaviour.