Blonde Roots

by Bernardine Evaristo

  Occasionally I caught Yao walking behind his older brother, trying on the skanky, high-shouldered, lopsided limp—and shuddered.

  Dingiswayo took Yao, Inaani and Cabion to pick ripe ackee from the trees, teaching them that they must only pick red pods that had burst open to reveal the pale yellow arils inside, otherwise it was poisonous. Akiki and Lolli were made to stand at the base ready to catch the fruit in a basket.

  The party returned up the lane, Dingiswayo in the lead, the basket on top of his head, Akiki and Lolli proudly trailing at the back, sneaking glances to see if their little playmates could see they were part of Dingiswayo’s posse.

  LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE SHE UNDERTOOK, Ma Marjani’s cooking was an entirely physical experience. With a work-a-day wrappa tucked over her chest, her brittle, burnt-straw hair tied back with string and her browned, brawny, scarred arms, she was ready to do business.

  She kneaded dough as if pummeling an opponent, then split open the head of a coconut with an ax. She shred callalloo by ripping it into thin strips and mashed boiled pumpkin by bashing it with her fist. She broke a marrow in two like it was a loaf of bread, scooped out the seeds with the spoon of her hand, diced it, fried it, and instructed me to lay the seeds out on a cloth in the sun to dry. She rolled yam balls between her palms and tossed them in a sizzling pan until they were crisp and golden. On the rare occasion we had fish, she scored them and descaled them, deboned, barbecued, salted, fried, stewed or smoked them.

  “We cane peepal wurk so hard we hav to eat good-good on rare okashun we git de chance. Once yu cook good, yu will get a man, dats fe shure.”

  “But I don’t want one,” I replied, too quickly.

  “What? Yu mad? Yu don’t want a fella to give yu a likkle someting like dat Qwashee who got his eye on yu?”

  Qwashee worked in the First Gang and lived alone in a hovel barely twice his height and width a few doors down. He was often to be found hovering outside his door when I was around. He had no charm or looks to speak of. He was balding, aquiline, skinny, had weedy shoulders, short legs, a long spine, yet whenever he spoke to me—“Mornin, Miss Omo” or “I hope de day bring yu joy, Miss Omo” or “Mi have two hen egg fe yu, if yu don’t mind acceptin” or “Yu sleep tite now, Miss Omo, an wake on de morrow refresh and hinvigorate”—I surprised myself by feeling touched.

  I wanted a kind man. A gentle man. A good man.

  Ma Marjani was everything I was not and, because she was, wasn’t afraid to tell me so: “Miss Omo, yu too mawga gyal” or “Mi neva did trust a quiet purson.”

  When I did manage to open my mouth to speak, she might say, “Yu too damned speakey-spokey”—her wintry gray eyes clouding over, even as she offered me her toothy yellow smile. But she was devoted to Ye Memé, who had given her a child, and I was part of the package.

  The country she lived in was the country she was born in: “Mi born ina dis island an mi mammy too an she mammy an pappy an all-a-dem bak-a-yond dat, far as I know.”

  Ma Marjani knew about cooking and she knew about cane. She knew that she could bear no children and that the son she

  was bringing up as her own was becoming the kind of man she loathed. She knew that she was a “nobudee, becorze we all nobudee here,” and she knew that the new slaves from the shores of Europa hated being on her island because they had known a country called Freedom and they were always running off in the name of it.

  Those born on the island showed little curiosity about the places we newcomers came from. When I tried to tell Ye Memé or Ma Marjani about the teeming metropolis of Londolo they looked blank, even bored, and turned the conversation back to whether “Ba Beduwa child reellee faddered by Kicongo man? An if Kicongo ever find out? Why! Miss Beduwa end up wid-a stump fe hand too. Nobudee shud mess wid Kicongo becorze she will mess wid dem badda.”

  Under Ma’s guidance my cooking specialty became gelatinous cowfoot stew with butter beans and scallions. The rest of the cow’s meat was eaten by the masters, except for its genitals, which formed the basis for cowcod soup—“provan to aid virilitee.” The same claim was made for Strong Bak Drink, about which Dingiswayo, stroking his crotch, confidently told Yao, “It mek big-man like me strong, long and hirresistabel to de hos and bitches dem”—unfortunately within hearing of Ma Marjani, who called him over and whacked him upside his head with an iron pan. This reduced him to the tears of the little boy he really was inside, followed by the protracted sulk of the teenager he was desperate to become.

  Ma cut her eye at him, laughed like a pan-scraper and threw a “Wotless bwoy!” his way.

  (Taking me aside, she whispered, “Wha cyan mi do? It’s de hinfluence of dose older boys. Gyal, it mek me worry so much bout mi likkle chile.”)

  When Ye Memé was seeing a new paramour—“Laydies dis here mi new gennalman frend so be nyicee-nyicee to him, yu heer!”—he had to be one with more resources than most. The men who lasted the longest managed to bring a whole chicken to jerk every once in a while.

  Most of the time we had to make do with dumplings, sweet-corn, yam, greens, breadfruit, cornbread and the fruits of the island.

  But when times were good, and our stomachs were full—and those are the times I will forever savor—we would sit in a circle around a large round raffa mat on a Sunday evening, citron-scented candles stuck into the neck of gourds to keep insects and mosquitoes away. Ye Memé sat at the head, Ma Marjani to her left, me to her right and the children gathered around. We dug into portions of whatever meal I’d had a hand in making, everyone talking at once, teasing each other:

  Yao jumping up, trying to outdo Dingiswayo’s swagger.

  Lolli trying to stick out her bottom and push out her lips like her mother when she was being feisty, flirty or tchupsing.

  Cabion trying to pinch food from Inaani’s plate and Inaani snatching it right back while Yao distracted Cabion’s attention.

  Akiki mimicking my speakey-spokey voice.

  Ma Marjani pretending to throw a strop like Lolli—who was the mistress of them.

  Dingiswayo trying to act manly and cool and above such childishness until Lolli and Akiki jumped on him and tickled him until he pleaded with Ma to pluck the little terrors off him.

  And Ye Memé. Dear Ye Memé:

  “Oh mi Gahd! Yu peepal mek such noise an kayos an mess I don’t know what a-do wid yu all! Is dis mi familee? How can dat be when I iz so well-mannard an shy an butta-no-meltish? Oh Gahd up dere, if yu really heer me, an we nyot extablish dat fact yet, give me anudder famlee becorze dis lot iz one big unrooly pane in de bottok!”

  She’d throw her head back and laugh—her beautiful, full-mouthed, rotten-toothed, throaty, raucous, up-yours cackle. We’d all throw our heads back and let it all out too, seeing who could laugh loudest, longest, silliest, by snorting, trilling, ululating, honking, until our eyes ran and our sides hurt and we begged each other to stop.

  We let our laughter stream up into the sky and ricochet between the mountains.

  It was almost as if our lives were normal.

  As if we were free.

  MY CHILDREN: YAO, INAANI, Akiki, Cabion and Lolli slept each night sprawled out around me and their mother, their warm little limbs flopped over mine, messy, sleeping heads cradled under my arms or openmouthed and dribbling onto my stomach, heads so light I could barely feel their weight. When they awoke screaming or in a cold sweat, I caressed them back to sleep, stroking prematurely defined muscles, massaging calloused hands or picking twigs, leaves, sugar sap from matted, sticky hair that would only feel the cleansing lather of coconut shampoo when their mother bathed them in the Dong River on a Sunday.

  IN MY MASTER’S HOUSE

  I stepped out of sleep into the ghostly vapor of dawn’s dew-soaked clouds as they began to float up and disperse over the mountains.

  White oleander blooms had been planted to ornament the pathways, their sweet fragrance competing with the nauseous stench of the quarter’s nighttime shit buckets.

  The flowers never failed
to take my breath away, and sipping their milky sap could do just that, slowing down a heartbeat until it came to a final, irreversible stop.

  Toxic—the story of the islands.

  Hurrying through the half-light, we were all going up the hill to our jobs-of-work—in my case, the cane fields. Yes, Massa Rotimi had demoted me to make way for cute little Lyani, who was now working alongside Ye Memé—until she was ready to give birth to his child.

  I now worked in a gang with Ma Marjani, Kicongo, Ba Beduwa and Qwashee.

  I was a cane-cutter, which went like this:

  The slip of a machete could mean loss of a body part.

  Stalks, stumps and sharp leaves left me riddled with cuts.

  Bending over all day to cut the cane was crippling.

  Setting fire to the fields to destroy the weeds and pests, but not the cane, created fumes that left me wheezing for weeks.

  (Sometimes people were trapped in the thicket and burned alive. I’d not seen it, but I’d heard the stories.)

  Prolonged exposure to the sun left me with permanent headaches, severe dehydration and burned skin.

  And should I survive all of the above, venomous snakes were lurking in the undergrowth to nip one of my ankles with poisonous fangs.

  YET TWO YEARS AFTER ARRIVING at Home Sweet Home, I’d acclimatized to an alarming degree.

  Detesting my work, I took perverse pleasure in moaning about it. I relished Sundays and dreaded Monday mornings. My limp, rag-doll arms were now those of a toned, pumped-up muscle-woman. I could cook up a storm out of the most humble ingredients and cuss out the baddest brudder—all of which made me more likable to the women in the quarter.

  But freedom had become an abstract concept: my home over Jordan, my campground, my gospel feast, my promised land—something outside my comfort zone. It didn’t help that most of those who tried to run away didn’t make it out of the man-trapped forest, and if they managed to climb the perpendicular mountain slopes, they were caught by the patrols on the mountain roads.

  I often had to witness the kind of punishment meted out to runaways for whom death would have been the easy option.

  Pepper, salt and lime juice rubbed into whip cuts meant getting off lightly.

  Having your nose sliced off meant you didn’t.

  Massa Rotimi once nailed a repeat offender’s ear to a tree, left her there for thirty minutes, then sawed it off, as if cutting through the gristle of beef.

  He repeated the procedure with the remaining ear.

  As for Massa Nonso, I’d seen him in action too, at a distance, hiding myself deep in the crowd so as not to be recognized. One time he forced a runaway to lie down and another to shit in her mouth. Two men forced it open, and when the deed was done, clamped it shut.

  No kidding.

  I had seen men castrated and women lose a breast. I had seen limbs removed, skin scalded, cheeks branded.

  Once a man was hogtied and roasted over a spit, alive.

  Another was suspended under a spit of pork so that the scalding fat removed his skin.

  AS FOR MY OWN GETAWAY?

  Only one essential ingredient was missing—courage.

  THESE DAYS I WAS stepping out with Qwashee. He adored me and wasn’t fazed by my repellent back, although when he cooed that it had “karakta” and “told storees,” he was pushing it a bit far. Yes, horror stories, I countered.

  I shared his hovel on some nights but not all, let him love me up, while I offered him all the love I did not hold in reserve for another.

  After so long it was time for closure with Frank, I knew that, yet the stories I heard about the Maroon Magik man had rekindled a hope that, without proof, became faith—blind faith.

  ONE MORNING A LONG LINE of us traipsed through the battalions of tall cane on our way to a remote field about four miles away. I could see Ma Marjani stomp up ahead as usual, barefoot, barebacked, with an energy that could be mistaken for an eagerness to get to work. I had long ago decided that like many of us—child, woman, man—Ma was just plain furious, although she’d never admit it; while her fury was channeled into cooking and killing cane, others found an outlet in sex, violence, singing, gambling, drinking, sugar, tobacco, even religious fervor.

  Qwashee trod the ground lightly in front of me, shoulders loose after a night of lovemaking; my bald-headed, bony-arsed man who was thin as a whippet but “strawng like croc.” Every so often he’d glance back with a shy, reassuring smile—revealing his motley assortment of stained, misshapen and missing teeth—to check that I was okay, although he knew full well that I was “hunkee-doree dis mawnin, speshally, tank yu, Mista Qwashee.”

  When I told Ye Memé we were stepping out together the Sunday evening after he’d taken me for a stroll—“mebbe yu fancee a likkle afta-noon perambulate, Miss Omo?”—around the quarter (where else?), she pretended not to hear, although she must have known. (Secrets in our confined world? Are you kidding?) When I repeated it, loudly, she mumbled something about me getting “a real man,” and flounced off down the lane, joshing with passersby with such cheeriness you’d think she and her children had just been emancipated. But her shoulders were so thrown back that the blades almost shook hands with each other, the skin in between squeezed into crushed, reddened folds.

  “Real” men were both loved and loathed at Home Sweet Home. They talked dirty and fucked hard and could wind and grind the most screw-up-faced woman into submission, and if she didn’t want to go down, he turned on the charm—“Gwan, do it fe me, baybee. Be a gud gyal fe yu big poopa.” Real men were so damned sexy women got wet just looking at “dat fine-lookin hunk-a beef ova dere.” Women cried, fought, poisoned, even killed over them, but when their real men let them down, they complained about having to put up with “dat bastard filandara” and “dere iz no good man in-a dis place.” But the good men—not tall enough, broad enough, well-endowed, sexy, handsome, confident, cocky, muscular or sweet-talking enough—weren’t real men so they didn’t count.

  My dearest friend Ye Memé had had more than her fair share of them. All the fathers of her children were real men. And what was she?

  Alone.

  AS SOON AS WE REACHED the field, we set to work. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t complicated either. You picked up a machete and severed the cane for the Second Gang to collect. Ma Marjani always worked faster than most. To wear out the body was to tire out the mind. It didn’t help to think too much.

  The slave drivers who kept us in control were themselves controlled by the overseers—usually blak men working for a short while on the islands before returning to Great Ambossa with enough cash to purchase a home in the capital, Londolo. The slave drivers were whyte trusties who kept their positions of privilege through exerting a certain whip-happiness. One was a young mulatto called Ndewele. His mother was part of the slave aristocracy, only glimpsed by us masses from afar, because she lived behind the Great House and never came down to the quarter.

  She was Bwana’s mistress, under his protection, and the mother of his children. Her name was Iffianachukwana, and it was said that she was the kind of whyte person or mulatto who would own a few slaves herself if she was ever freed. (It wasn’t unheard of for freed slaves to do this.) Rumor had it that this was on the cards when Bwana popped his clogs, which would be sooner rather than later, I thought to myself, if he kept stuffing his fucking face with fu-fu!

  Her son, Ndewele, was slight and russet-colored, which contrasted with his very blond frizzy curls. The long, pinched symmetry of his rather melancholy face reminded me of my father’s. Mostly he tried to affect a haughty disdain, as if destined for better things, sitting astride his horse or sprawling out on a mat in the sun, hat pulled down low over his extraordinary violet eyes. He’d suck on straw or chew a lump of tobacco while we sweated around him. I could see he was masking a terrible boredom and frustration with the only thing he had going for him—superiority.

  As Iffianachukwana’s son Ndewele had nothing to prove and little to fear, rather
than turn him into a budding despot, this brought out the best in him. He was a lenient slave driver.

  I worked next to Qwashee, knowing that each time he swung back his arm and brought it down, it was to will me to do the same. We worked twenty slaves in a row and sang.

  Out there in the fields the vibrations of sound reverberated from deep within our bellies with a power to match our physical exertions. We had to be loud enough to be heard in an outdoor space filled with a chorus of a cappella voices, and we were always so full of soul because we poured our hearts into the music. Even the overseers and drivers could sometimes be spied gazing off into the middle distance, as if transported.

  The newly arrived Border Landers among us broke down when we sang:

  Shud ole akwaintance be forget

  An neva bring to mind

  Should ole akwaintance be forget

  An ole lang zine ...

  Preoccupied with trying to tune up my amateurish warble so that I didn’t balls-up the harmony, it wasn’t until Massa Nonso blocked out the sunlight astride his dappled gray mare that I noticed him loom above me like an equestrian statue with its forelegs raised.

  I looked up into the face of the man who owned me. Horrified.

  Those clear, cocoa-brown eyes, which had registered every attention lavished on his younger brother, now slid behind puffy lids and had the color, substance and emotional caliber of newly delivered horse dung.

  Topless, he revealed a distended stomach as crusty, dried up and coarsely haired as coconut husk.