Just above the rocky waters, the Mankana-kil’s confusion of limbs scaled the steep cliff face. It had grown to a giant size and chewed through the rock and earth, slowly erasing the foundation of Akasha’s life. At the rate it was going, the house was headed for a brutal tumble into the ferocious waves below.
Not-Akasha teetered on the edge as the ground beneath her feet slowly disappeared.
The real Akasha turned back with wet eyes to Norman Chang.
“But I thought—” She tried to slow the racing of her mind. “I thought it would only eat the frightening ones. I wasn’t afraid.” Norman’s expression was thoughtful as he peered beyond her.
“I was.”
He turned around so they were side-by-side, shoulder-to- shoulder. Small thickets of trees dotted the field in which they stood. The ocean was behind her. The sun overhead shined spiritedly, but there wasn’t a shadow in sight.
Toward a Peacock Poem
by Tiffany Austin
Its sound rushes like a woman with a hurt face
I will not hear, near Strawberry Field.
Appearing as the horse rode in, as the men clothed in smell,
alone, from nowhere, with no family.
Then it was gone, but for
a hoped for time, we were loosed in its maleness.
Yet it’s not shameful to be puckered by a living, legs
waiting for a machete, near broken and hard water.
Before Lovers Leap*, I could hear her say,
I aimed directly at the back of the heart
and asked for a look from him.
At times, a prayer to ravish, then shank, then
let the sun walk away.
I can see a hole in the dark, he must have said.
In the middle of their touch,
apple breaking
fleshes like rose,
nearby bauxite.
I would like to meet the father who made you,
he said again,
passes the words from the fire to her hand—an ageless tongue.
I imagine her as a seamstress; we
have not recovered from this mean wound.
I imagine her as heaving moist—
because what do you do when beauty suddenly turns upon you?
She wanted a look;
he gave, “Soon.”
*Lovers Leap is the place from which two slave lovers leaped from a cliff in Jamaica according to local residents.
Mama
by A.D. Koboah
DEATH
The end of my life sees me sent not to the white man’s paradise or the spirit world. It sees me sent instead to a netherworld that is bleached of colour and light, a place where I will wait until she needs me.
This netherworld is so devoid of substance of any kind I almost wish for the darkness of long ago when, as a frightened fifteen year old girl, I was snatched from all I knew and taken over water to a land of pain and misery—and the life of a lowly slave.
During that journey I awoke to darkness and suffocating heat, confusion, fear, and dread like a half forgotten dream that would not release me from its grasp. Groans, a dark song of pain, reached my ears. The stench of human bodies bathed with acrid-smelling sweat and human waste filled my nostrils. It settled in my throat like a thick, wet ball every time I breathed in.
I had been lying in my own filth ever since they brought me into the belly of this wooden beast. Over what could have been days, or mere hours, I lay there shackled, watching them bring other men and women into the belly of the wooden beast until there was room for no more. Time did not seem the same in this world. I could blink and perhaps a second, hours or days seemed to pass.
The world had shrunk to a ceaseless night and all that flowered in the belly of this wooden beast was human misery.
In this darkness I could only think of my grandmother. I recalled her squat, plump body, her coal-black skin, her piercing black eyes and her strength. The memory I always pulled to me was of the last time I had seen her. We had sat in the compound of her home in the gentle evening heat, sitting on earth the colour of a ripe, red sunset as insects nipped lazily at our skin. The trees in her compound stood still and lazy in the evening heat, the soughing of the leaves in an occasional breeze like gentle laughter. Descended from a long line of witches, I had been seeing spirits for as long as I could remember, and felt them everywhere that evening, in the friendly sway of the trees, the thrum of the earth beneath my feet. I felt their power in everything, but especially I felt the power of the moon as it bathed us in its gentle silver light. My grandmother had told me once of a god that had made the moon its home, and since then I had always felt an affinity with the moon. And even during the day when the sun scorched the sky a deep blue, I searched for it, and fancied I saw its pale outline and felt its strength.
Movement from above brought a swell in the groans and pleas for help. I closed my eyes. I could not recall when our captors had last brought us the tasteless swill they called food, and I did not care for I had resolved not to eat it. Death had claimed many here and I intended to let it claim me, too. I heard one of our captors enter. He moved among us, ignoring the desperate cries around him. I was not aware he had stopped by me until I felt rough hands tug at my sore flesh, unshackling me.
Despite my resolve, I felt hope, and the same pleas for help I could hear around me gushed out of my mouth.
He ignored my cries and dragged me along with him. I ascended stairs behind him on shaky legs, cowed each time the wooden beast dipped, throwing me against my rescuer and when it pulled me away from him I clung to him even tighter. Soon, we were in open air, and into the same night sky that used to hover over my village. That was the only familiar thing I saw. I uttered a strangled cry,
the salty air of this new world saturating my mouth. When I was captured I hoped I would be able to escape and find my way back to my village. However, the world I had known was gone. Black treacherous water, as thick as oil in the darkness, had replaced it.
It slapped and pushed against the wooden beast, making it tilt and lurch in response. It was like a sentient, malignant entity, and terror thrilled through me for it was all I saw everywhere I turned. My attention was brought back to my captor when water was thrown over me. He gestured for me to wash myself. I obeyed numbly.
When I finished washing I did not wonder why he led me elsewhere instead of back to be chained with the others. I could only look out over the black water that raged beyond. I wept silently, mourning all I had lost, the rasping voice of the water the crowing of a jubilant foe.
#
Back amongst the other prisoners, I was thankful for the stench that hid his scent which lay dank and wet on my flesh. My body, however, would not let my mind ignore what had just taken place. The flesh of my wrists screamed of the memory of meaty white hands fastened on them. My thighs whimpered at the shock of being grasped and pulled apart. The pain between my legs spoke its own tale. I had been too shocked to fight him, too small, too weak to do more than beg. I sought the comfort of the memory of my grandmother, but it would not come to me. All that came to me was the hands around my wrists, his weight crushing me. I could only weep.
It happened a few more times and each time it did, I did not fight, I just waited for it to be done. And, afterward, I would lie in the dark with the other prisoners, trying to recall the memory of the last time I had seen my grandmother. It never came.
One night they took me above, and for a few moments, my captor’s attention was taken away from me. I stood at the edge of the wooden beast looking out over the water and in a swell of despair I grasped the side of the wooden beast, meaning to throw myself into the water. I was ready to climb over the side, and into the water when I felt something, hands pressing against my arm. I looked down, but saw no one beside me, yet still I felt those hands, frail, beseeching hands on me as soft as a caress. I stood still, unable to launch myself into the water, my soul momentarily soothed by those hands, the want and need
I sensed in that touch keeping me rooted to where I stood. Seconds later I heard a shout and then my captor was pulling me away, the opportunity gone.
Later, instead of the assault that had just taken place, I thought of those soft, beseeching hands against my arm, and the plea I had sensed in them. Only a powerful spirit could manifest itself so strongly, but why had it chosen to show itself to me in the form of those frail, pleading hands? I did not have the answer, but for the first time since I had been snatched away, I felt life stir within me. Although the malignant water had eaten my world, some of it—the benevolent spirits I had been seeing my entire life—remained. Those soft, beseeching hands were proof of that.
That meant that the power of my blood, the power of ancestors, remained. I had not fought him, but that did not mean I could not fight at all. I reached tentative hands toward the spirits I had always sensed around me. I expected nothing, but their presence engulfed me with a shock and the air was thick with them like the sharpness of lightning. The belly of the beast swam with their silvery translucent bodies that never took on a solid recognisable shape, but just undulated and twisted in the gloom. However these were not the kind of spirits I was used to seeing. These were obeyifo. Evil entities my grandmother had warned me of that fed on evil and human pain. Of course it was the perfect place for them, a place where acute pain and human misery were never ending. These spirits could only be channelled with an offer of blood. They gave nothing without exacting more in return than what they gave and my grandmother had warned me never to turn to them. I shivered and meant to close myself off from them. Then I remembered the warm, sweaty body moving above mine.
#
The next time I was taken to him I returned clutching a torn piece of rag, string and long strands of his hair, things I had stolen as he lay sleeping. I spent the rest of the night fashioning it into the crude figure of a man, the strands of his hair imbedded within. Rubbing my wrist against the metal shackle until the skin gave and blood glistened on my skin, I called upon the obeyifo swimming in the dark around me. The obeyifo drew closer to me, the pain and suffering of the prisoners having made them strong. I soaked up their power, my hand tightening around the effigy I had made. He would be dead in mere days. But not before suffering pain beyond anything he knew of this world.
LOVE
I searched frantically through the countryside of the land I had been brought to. The scene before me was a vivid green with lush green trees and ripe, colourful flowers ripening and wilting in the hazy afternoon heat. I wiped sweat from my brow, anxiety chasing me as I moved further away from the plantation. The foreman had dragged one of the slave girls into the woods thirty minutes ago.
They would return soon. I sneered at the fear that washed over me at the prospect of what would happen if I were caught sneaking away from the cotton field. Sneer though I did, the fear was still there and I quickened my steps for this was important. I knew of a way to ease some of the burdens of this life that saw me worked from sunup to sundown, unable to refuse the white man that owned me or the male slaves he sometimes sent to me at night. Some of these slaves apologised as they did what they could not refuse to do. Others had been in this land for so long they thought they were animals and they treated me as such.
However, my master’s sister had come to stay for a short while. A desperate woman can tell another desperate woman when she sees her and her desperation had screamed out at me. I knew how I could ease her burden and lighten mine. I knew because it had been shown to me in a dream. Yet, to be sure, I had summoned one of the obeyifo that resided in this land. This one was a powerful one and instead of a loose shapeless body and a glimpse of silvery claws and sharp teeth, it was able to take on the shape of a human form, although it was still translucent. The form it always chose was that of a white female child with shoulder length hair in two bunches on either side of its head, its small lips spread in a sly smile.
It spoke in my tongue the night I summoned it deep in the woods. “If you help her, your master’s sister will take you with her and no other male, including her husband, will ever force himself on you.”
The laughter that accompanied those words had not registered, only thoughts of being free of those nights an exhausted, downtrodden slave climbed on top of me and did his work ferociously as if the master he was so afraid of was standing behind him whip in hand.
I came to a stop in the deep, golden sunlight. Was that a cluster of white a few feet away? I ran through the field. Yes, this was the plant I had seen in my dream, flat, small white clusters of flowers like lace. This plant could be used to prevent a woman from conceiving. I reached down and plucked one only to be startled into bolting upright like a frightened horse by a voice behind me.
“That’s not the one you need.”
I spun around shocked to see a tall, well built man standing a few feet away, skin the colour of dark honey glistening in the afternoon sun. His long, thick black hair hung loose around his arms and back. He was what the whites called an Indian. He wore what looked like a large, square loin cloth, his legs protected by tube-like fitted leather pants with fringes at the sides. His muscular chest was bare. A horse stood a few feet away from him lazily nipping at the grass. I had sometimes seen Indians in the distance, but I had never been this close to one. He was at least fifteen years older than me, his large, dark eyes staring intently at me from a face that was harsh with its high cheek bones and angular shape. I found myself staring at his face, seeing beauty in it.
“There is no fence around this field,” I spat at him. “Nothing to say I should not be here.”
“We do not see land as the white man does, so we know it is not something we can own. You can take that if you wish. But it will be of no use to you.”
I stared blankly at him, caught between tears at the wasted journey, fear he would tell the foreman he had seen me here and mistrust at his words.
I jumped back when he reached into an animal skin bag he carried. He tensed, but then pretended not to notice. He pulled out a flower that was similar in appearance to the one I held with shaking fingers, but even from this distance I could see the one he held was the one I had dreamt of.
“How—?” I began only to falter to a stop.
He smiled. “Your grandmother always told you that sometimes the great spirits conspire to make you collide into people. This is one of those times.”
I could only gape at him. He pulled out two small cloth bundles.
“This is what you need.” He held them out to me.
His demeanour was relaxed, but I knew he wanted something from me. His entire being seemed hinged on that something and, in my eyes, that made him dangerous. I had also never met such a power seer before and I was scared. However, desperation—mine and another’s—made me take a few steps forward and timidly take the cloth bundles out of his hand.
Relief poured through me, so much so I was trembling. I thought I saw a trace of pity in the way his eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly and his mouth softened.
At that I straightened, my voice coming out firm, my chin jutting out.
“Thank you,” I said.
The pity disappeared behind a careful mask and the briefest of smiles flit across his face. He looked away then, and pointed across the fields, the first time he had taken his eyes off me since I found him standing behind me. They returned to me quickly as if even those seconds away from me were seconds squandered.
“We are camped in that direction. I can meet you in the woods near the cotton field on your plantation and bring you to my camp. I have plenty to show you about herbs and there is much you can show me. It is why fate threw us together like this.”
He moved away and leapt onto his horse. I sensed a lie in his words. He wanted something from me, but I could have no way of knowing what and I was still afraid of him and the way his caramel coloured eyes seemed to speak words to me every time they met mine. Words that had never been spoken to me before.
“I will be wai
ting beneath the trees at dusk,” he said. “If you are frightened, bring one of your men with you.”
With some effort, he tore his gaze away from me and turned the horse around. As I watched him ride off slowly, mesmerised, I knew his heart was racing, the fingers that were wound in the horse’s mane not quite steady. Then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be here. I turned and ran back toward the plantation, fear thrilling through me marvelling that a lone Indian had made me forget I was a slave for a few precious minutes. Perhaps I would meet him at dusk after all.
#
I sat in the dark staring up at the perfect blank face of a full moon, thinking of another moon. For that was the meaning of his name in the white man’s tongue.
Moon.
Tomorrow I would leave with my new mistress to a place called Mississippi and there was only one person I would be sad to leave behind. Moon, the man fate had thrown in my path when I went searching for herbs that would lessen one woman’s burden along with my own. I had met him every evening that week and never had I encountered such kindness since I was brought to this land. He had shown me many things and even how to focus the power of my ancestors so that by the end of the week I could pluck the thoughts out of his mind as easily as plucking an apple from a tree. Although he found excuses to touch my hand or place his hand against my arm, he never attempted to do more than that and each night I left him with the weight of those restrained touches and what they could have led to. It had been weeks since I had seen him and my heart, chest and head were heavy with thoughts of him.
I stood up, my gaze still on the moon. I was about to return to my cabin, but on impulse moved off towards the woods near the cotton field, wanting to be somewhere Moon had been for that was the closest I could get to easing the heaviness of his absence.
I saw him before he saw me. He was waiting where he used to wait for me, his back to me, his hand across his horse,
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