"They're coming!" Aborişade said over the deafening roar. There was no time to strategize. Only time to react.
Dust rose into the sky, obscuring the bright moon and stars, even in the darkness. The roar reached a crescendo and then stopped.
"Sweet Olódùmarè, protect us," I whispered.
In an instant, we were attacked on all sides by a force moving too fast for us to see.
"What kind of beast are you?" Aborişade yelled into the fracas of moving bodies pushing, shoving, and slicing at us.
A blade sliced at my arm and I yelped, more from surprise than from pain. I looked down and saw the flesh wound already healing itself.
"Just swing!" Ogundiya shouted.
We swung our fists into the air and every third swing landed on something. It slowed the white blurs around us down ever so slightly. I decided that, rather than punch, I would grab.
I had a handful of hair in my hand, still attached to the head of one of the monsters trying to attack us. It was soft and long.
"Lasciami andare, bastardo nero!" The monster growled at me in his foreign tongue and slowed down enough to reveal himself to me.
He looked human, on the surface. He had eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, and fangs, just like us. But he was different. His eyes were a light brown, such as I'd only seen in the amber beads of the women in my tribe. His features were sharp, angular and angry. His nose came to a point. His brow was strong and low. And his skin…his skin was a ghostly white.
I bared my fangs and he lunged at me with both hands outstretched toward my neck. I deflected his arms and grabbed him by the waist with both hands. I could see he wore a plain white shirt with buttons, black pants, and black boots. I picked his light frame up, hoisted him over my head, and hurled him to the ground. I kicked him in the lower back in an attempt to stun him.
He merely laughed and hopped back up on both feet again.
"Si presenterà alla mia volontà!"
"I don't know what you said, but I know that you're going to be my meal," I responded.
My own body must have looked like a brown blur as I attacked the man. My lips met the vein in his neck and I bit him as hard as he could. He tried to fight me off, but I was too strong for him. My fangs sank into him and his hot blood soon filled my mouth.
It tasted like nothing I'd ever had before. I didn't like it.
I spat his vinegary blood to the ground and tossed him aside. All around me, similar fights were unfolding. And the terrorists just kept coming. Before I got a chance to pull one of them off Eşusanya, two more had overpowered me and taken me to the ground. I tried to fight them off, but before I knew it, they had placed heavy iron shackles on my feet. I tried to reach down to take them off, but each of the men twisted my arms behind my back and bound me with more shackles. The harder I fought, the more they laughed. Finally, one grabbed a stone from the ground and bashed it against my skull, knocking me out cold.
The voices swirled around me for the next few minutes, a mixture of the foreign language of our attackers and the shouts, growls, and hisses of my own people. People walked over me. I heard our elders shouting at us to remain calm.
I felt someone being thrown to the ground behind me.
"Aragbaye," he said. It was Aborişade and he was breathless. "Wake up."
"What's happening?"
"They drink blood just like we do."
"What?"
"They're soldiers of some kind. They're on a mission."
"Haruna," I said. "Haruna sent us to our deaths. This was the plan all along."
"I think so, too. Wait; quiet."
The ghostly men ran long chains through the loops in our shackles.
"We're slaves. Aborişade, they're taking our freedom!"
"We will never be slaves and we will never be their food. We will get out of this."
From where we were lying, I could see the monsters rummaging through our belongings. One opened up an iron cask and held up several jewels to the moonlight. A second pawed over one of our scrolls.
"Rimetterlo. Gli schiavi e i loro beni sono un pacchetto," a third man said. The first man hissed at the third. For his insolence, he was punched in the nose by the third.
"Ho detto rimetterlo."
The remaining man slowly loaded our things back on a cart. As soon as the man turned around, I saw him sneak one of our scrolls under his shirt, leaving three others behind.
"That bastard took one of our scrolls," I whispered.
"We will get it back. We will get out of this."
Before we knew it, we were being slapped on the arms and chest and forced to stand upright. We had been chained to each other in one huge coffle. I looked to my left and to my right and saw the dead bodies of several men I'd known, mostly elders. Ogundiya, the elder, was chained several rows over from me. He nodded in acknowledgement when I saw him. Babarinde was not far behind him.
The pale-faced men seemed to have a leader barking orders at them. He pointed in one direction, then pointed toward the sky. Soon, the men started cracking their whips, and we began marching across the countryside.
As we marched, they sang a song in beat with our footsteps.
.
A bi bo,
goccia di limone,
goccia d'arancia,
o che mal di pancia!
Punto rosso, punto blu,
esci fuori proprio tu!
.
Every time one of them said "tu" they would crack the whip and try to hit one of us in the face with its tip. They were successful more often than not. But in spite of this humiliation, our wounds healed almost instantaneously.
We would never have dared marching at night. It's not as though we were afraid of anything in particular, but there was no reason to risk being caught by surprise if we didn't have to be, whether by springing traps set by other tribes, or by waking a sleeping den of animals.
These men had no such concerns. We marched with haste through unfamiliar territory. We could handle it. We were Razadi. Our stamina was legendary.
They knew we were different. They callously and arrogantly pushed us along, laughing and taunting all the way. But who were they and why did they want us? What would happen to us?
Within time, we were actually running—shackles and all—through the savannah to get to wherever it was we were going.
Before we knew it, we were in a compound overlooking the sea. There were about a dozen short, squat, windowless buildings that had been erected out of lumber. Each had a single door with a complex system of locks on the front. I presumed that's where we'd be housed.
The men who had kidnapped us anchored us to the ground. They worked furiously, as though working on a deadline. They finally secured the last stake in the ground.
"Affrettatevi!" their leader shouted, pointing to the sea as the sun began to rise. The men scattered and entered their quarters while we lay shackled to the ground.
The sun's first rays reached our skin as the last bolt locked the doors of the men's quarters from the inside. Aborişade rested his head on my back and fell asleep, exhausted from the journey. I, too, was tired, but my mind was too busy to rest.
There were other settlements closer to the shore, but we were too far to see who they were or what they were all about. We needed to get away from here and get anywhere else. I felt I'd rather die than be a slave.
My mind wandered off to sleep, even as the sun heated the air around us. We thrived in the sun. We'd be energized as we slept.
~
I wasn't sure how much time had passed by the time I woke up, but the majority of our men were awake, alert, and ready to fight. Babarinde and Ogundiya the elder kept admonishing us to keep our wits about us, and to not do anything that would endanger the whole.
Even as the different white men down by the shore walked up to our encampment, our elders told us to be calm, to always take the path which would lead to the fewest number of lives lost. The men, more tanned than the ones who captured us, wal
ked with long sticks of wood and metal, heavier on one side than the other.
The white men came to us and spoke to each other in a language I was only later able to translate. And so much time passed before I learned their language that much of what they said remains lost to time. But I can tell you what they did.
The talked to each other for a long time. They couldn't decide how to proceed. The word I remember being repeated was "dangerous."
They began unpinning a section of our group from the stakes we'd been chained to, and my brothers immediately rose up against them. Twelve of them broke loose from the chains and began fighting the white men down. These men were weaker than the ones who had captured us. One fell backward immediately with the force of a single punch. My brothers descended upon him and drank as much as they could.
One of the men with a stick aimed it at my drinking brother and pulled what I know now was the trigger. He was killed instantly. That's how I found out what a gun was.
My brothers who were freed were shocked to see one of their own dead and on the ground, but they rushed the men with the guns anyway. One by one, my fellow Razadi were felled by these men's bullets. Blood spattered across the grass.
The leader spoke. I don't remember all that he said, but I remember him saying something about not being afraid to kill all of us if need be.
Through whips and muskets we were subdued. There was no more fighting back if we wanted to live to see another day. Mama Abeo hadn't sent us out in the world only to be murdered by strangers. We were charged to be the seeds of our culture. And we were determined to do that, wherever we ended up.
We were forced to march over the dozen corpses of our fallen, not giving them proper Razadi funeral rites. I remember each of their names to this day and I hope their spirits torture the people responsible for their massacre.
We were divided into two groups of no particular order or importance to our slavers. My group, including Babarinde, Aborişade, Eşusanya, and Ogundiya the younger, were marched onto the beach and forced onto a ship called La Coeur. The shackles and chains were built for the ship. I lay down on hard wooden planks next to Aborişade and pondered whether I would have a future.
The rest of our people, about half, boarded a ship called La Tête. Ogundiya the elder and most of Mama Abeo's other sons ended up on that ship.
The iron casks of jewels, the seeds, and two of the remaining three scrolls came with us on board our ship. La Tête took the textiles, the weapons and tools, and the third scroll.
It wasn't long before the ships set sail from what we later learned was the city of Eko, a place that we thought was a hub of commerce and culture for our region of Africa, but which turned out to be nothing more than a slave trading port.
We had been tricked into slavery by the Oyo as one last "fuck you" to our people. We thought we performed a noble act by leaving, mostly willingly, to make our fortunes elsewhere, never suspecting that we would be marching to our own executions. Even now, I wonder what life would have been like in our village had we never left, if another compromise had been worked out where we'd all stay together, insulated from the evils outside our own people, always safe within each other's arms, ostensibly able to live forever, even if another child was never born among us.
Perhaps that was how it was meant to be. Perhaps Mama Abeo was wrong. Maybe the Razadi were not being punished by becoming infertile. Maybe there was just no place else to go in the gene pool. We had reached the top and there was no more reason to reproduce the way we had known.
Instead, we were made into the living seeds of the culture, spread across the world like seeds from a dandelion, spread from the puff of air that was the will of Mama Abeo herself.
And rather than being planted to grow in the next fertile ground, we were made into property, conquered by the only beings on this earth that could possibly beat us. Those terrible creatures who couldn't even face us under the light of the sun, who'd made some insidious agreement with common, weak white men who'd never have been able to take us without the treachery of the Oyo, the assent of mercenary vampires, and the gunpowder of European muskets.
This conspiracy was so twisted that it seemed like fate itself had plotted to steal us from our homeland and plant us in the western hemisphere. It was the perfect crime.
The only comfort any of us had was that we had not died—not yet—and so long as we lived, there would be a time for redemption and a time for revenge.
Loss and Liberation
Horrifying, humiliating, and demoralizing. Those are the weakest words in your language that can be used to describe the torturous middle passage. But I experienced it, just as the hundred or so surviving men in my tribe did, and as the millions of other Africans taken from the continent had, whether they were sold as prisoners of war or taken by entrepreneurial private kidnappers, as we'd been.
We feared for our lives. The sticks, which had sent invisible spears through the bodies of our kinsmen, terrified us. Indeed, they were the only things that kept us subservient. We could survive the lash or the cat-o-nine tails. But this great instrument of instant death, this "gun"-this was the thing we knew we could not surmount. There was no defense against it. There was just survival.
The slave ship was not large. It was on the small side, as was the space inside it. Small and dark and made of wood. It was too short to stand up inside. We could only lie down or scoot up to sitting position if the chains were loose enough. There were no pillows or blankets or anything to make it comfortable. It was just hard wood and our own bodies.
The darkness of the cargo hold of the ship was like nothing I'd experienced before. It was pure black. Nothing in Africa was this black, not even the backs of my eyelids. I was scared, but there was no time to turn away, nowhere to run, no possibility of fighting.
The first day at sea was bad. Several of us had been in canoes before, but the vast majority had not known what it felt like to float in deep water. The up and down motion of the ship made us violently ill. Many of us became sick to our stomachs and vomited. If we had known, we might have tried to focus and center ourselves to manage our health better, for the vomit that came out of us wasn't draining anywhere, nor was anyone going to come by and clean it up.
There were no private corners to excuse ourselves to when we had to urinate or defecate. We held it for as long as we could that first day, but when we had to go, we went. We tried our best to pull down our pants if our chains allowed us the freedom, and we aimed ourselves away from our brethren if it was possible. But it usually wasn't. We soiled ourselves and each other in the process of handling our natural bodily functions.
Every other day or so, the hatch to the holding cell would open and men with the guns would peer in. I couldn't understand it at the time, but there was one word they kept saying over and over until I came to understand it was what they were calling us:
Négro.
No, I am not Négro. I am Razadi.
Négro.
No, I don't know what that is, but it's not my name.
Négro.
No. No. We are Razadi. We will never answer to a name other than that one.
We had to share a jug of water to drink and pots of a disgusting, lumpy porridge to eat. That was it. The slavers considered us to be quite dangerous, so our meals were delivered to us by a contraption that was raised and lowered down to us. Only those closest to the contraption could reach it due to the chains. They passed the food and water to the people behind them. We soon determined that we'd eat only twice a day and in small quantities.
The floor soon became slick with our excrement. It was a sludge that wouldn't soon leave the cell. The hatch closed and we baked in the heat and humidity.
Sweat.
Tears.
Piss.
Shit.
Vomit.
The stench.
The wails.
We lived in hell, tossed to and fro in the ocean for weeks, called a word we had never heard before but that we kn
ew must mean the lowest of the low.
I wanted to die. I wanted my life to end. If there had been a way for me to kill myself, I would have. We all wasted away, constantly sick from the stench and filth, unable to clean ourselves. My body itched and ached. My head was in constant pain.
Babarinde tried his hardest to comfort us. He was the ranking member of our group, as Ogundiya the elder was on the other ship. We sang sometimes. We chanted sometimes. And we prayed. We prayed fervently and often, sometimes so long and hard that we lost our voices.
But I knew that Babarinde was just as scared and lost as the rest of us. This wasn't what he'd signed up for. This hell on the ocean wasn't what any of us had signed up for.
Many weeks into the ordeal, on one of those nights we were convinced we'd just float forever, the ship tossed violently, worse than it ever had before. We could hear the wind whipping around the ship while thunder exploded around us.
"Oya!" Babarinde shouted above the din. "She has come!"
Not that it made a difference in the blackness of the hold, but we closed our eyes and prayed that Oya would liberate us. We whispered. We shouted. We tried to speak to her as one body, one mind.
Upstairs, chaos. The slavers shouted in their native language to one another in panicked tones. If they were scared, I knew we would be alright somehow.
The hatch door flapped open against the wind and we could hear the white men ever clearer. They kept saying "La Tête! La Tête!" which we knew was the name of the other ship. It was night, but I could see no stars, only black sky tainted gray with the storm clouds overhead and the surreal streaks of lightning slicing through the air like a spider's web.
The ship tilted suddenly to the left and one of the unarmed crew members tumbled down into our space. He screamed on the way down. His back hit the bottom with a terrible plop and he struggled to stand in the scum.
Even amid the howls of the wind, he must have heard the fifty or so sets of fangs elongate with a pop at the same time.
"Mon dieu…" he whispered.
The two Razadi closest to him reached out and grabbed his arms.
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