Candlelight threw the horror into abstraction, but perhaps my imagination is better than most. Or perhaps I can see more than I want, even when my eyes are closed, and that sight is more a curse than a blessing at such times.
That inborn sight has always been an issue for me, and one I have worked hard to hide. It was better all around that I remain invisible via my skin color and position in this most human of human worlds. I still had some hope to make it out of this deplorable condition of slavery before being found out as something not quite as I appeared, and hopefully with all of my senses and accouterments intact.
My role at that bedside was ambiguous at best—to myself, at least—and well apart from my maleness and other incongruities. I was small enough, physically, that is, that most of those others present scarcely seemed to remember I was there at all. So perhaps the nerves that rose in me came more from a kind of excited anticipation of all that might unfold, now that events had been fully placed in motion.
I had noted, well before this time, the propensity of the white men, the Inglés, in particular, to look past me when I happened to occupy a room. Of course, their wives would coo and fuss over me on occasion, and not only for the reasons they gave when asked—that my supposed father had been a house servant since long before my birth, which afforded me a pet-like status not given to all of the young slaves on the plantation, certainly not the males, even when I appeared to be in my teens and twenties.
Whatever the true reason, the white women felt they could spoil me with impunity under the guise of training me for a future role as a loyal house slave, like that undertaken by the African man who raised me.
Luckily for me, that role was one which a certain amount of contact with my betters might well explain, as well as the ability to converse with them pleasingly. I kept the bulk of my knowledge to myself, of course, but I let them know I could sound out some letters, that I knew snippets of the more formal cadences of their discourse, without ever letting them know the extent of it.
I had been told by my surrogate mother, also a slave and an African, as she teased me with a full-lipped smile, that I cast a spell on females of both species, in part from the intensity of color contained in my eyes—which were a kind of ‘tiger yellow,’ according to the white mistress, this same Giselle D’Alendria that now suffered in this very birthing room.
Both my surrogate mother and my white mistress described my eyes compelling to stare at, if only for their unusual tint.
The magic man perhaps singled me out for this very reason.
Well, I had thought that in the beginning, at least.
Ironically or not, I was fated to a life of magic, whether I chose to exert that same power over the females of the species or not. I could not stop people from seeing small hints of who I am, no matter how much I shuffle my feet and pretend to know nothing of what they speak.
It is inevitable, I suppose, that we all find people who see us.
Through no fault of my own, and over the vehement protests of my aforementioned surrogate father, I had been named assistant to the Ndi-obeah, or magic-man, less than a year prior. The magic man announced that his advancing age and the portents he’d read—likely in chicken innards and cast stones and other such highly stylized showmanships—required that he obtain a full-time apprentice with whom he could impart the greater part of his wisdom, so that the plantation would not be left without a traditional “doctor” when he died.
I was so named, although the naming did not please me, either.
Truly, it felt like a death sentence in some ways. Magic men, from what I knew, had a somewhat colorful legacy in the islands. Their notoriety did not make them immune to the noose any more than the next man, either, and likely marked them for it more often than most.
Whether the old magic man truly had some claim to the vision or it simply came of ill chance on my part, I could not be certain. I could only succumb to my fate, which he wisely announced publicly during a religious festival of the slaves and tolerated by Master D’Alendria—likely to brook no dissent from me, as he doubtless did not expect it from others. Well, apart from perhaps the “parents” who had taken care of me since I landed on these shores.
Even so, some part of me must have seen the rest of it coming.
Certainly, the naming felt more like an end to me than a beginning. Then again, as I now know, that timing was not at all coincidental to what later occurred, either...for the magic man had seen something in me, too.
Whatever of these thoughts made their way through my head on this day, however, already occurred too late.
Now, I could only witness.
Whatever pieces had been set in motion, it was too late to stop them.
The birthing room smelled of death to me, even before that unfortunate child came to be born. The metallic taste of blood lived at the back of my throat, along with the sick smell of burnt skin from the hot stones the magic man placed on the white mistress’s skin, trying to drive away the spirits that would try to take her in her birthing, and the child, too.
Despite the lavish trappings of the room, the flickering candles and the chanting of the magic man gave it an ominous feel, like nightmares I suffered after eating rich food from the table scraps of my betters...or the one time my African father filled a tin cup with French wine and fed it to me with a grin and a wink not to tell Mother.
I felt sick in that gloom, and uneasy with what would come after.
Things could unravel so quickly in this turbulent humanity.
The English doctor didn’t want the magic man there, either.
I heard the English doctor mutter under his breath, glaring at the tattooed and scarred magic man as he attempted to assist in the birth. The English doctor’s hard, blue-stone eyes shone out below a slightly-askew wig and the powder running down his cheeks in rivulets from the unrelenting heat and exertion from his attempts to save Master D’Alendria’s young bride.
Despite the wig that still adorned his head with its limp curls and the running makeup, the English doctor wore only a cotton shift and no jacket or vest by this time, the shirt’s sleeves rolled up past his elbows, the fabric stained a dark color in the flickering candlelight that I knew to be blood, but that shone with a slick blackness that made me think of something rotting, and that went too well with the putrid smell of unwashed bodies and baking skin inside the shuttered plantation house.
The other white women from the township hovered here and there, along with those females of black skin, bringing fresh, steaming pots of water from the stove and gently dabbing the white mistress’s head with wet cloths made cool from the bucket of ocean water someone had fetched, too.
Mistress D’Alendria’s temperature remained high, however, her eyes glassy, almost as if she dreamed from some place far from this sweat-smelling room.
I hoped she would not die.
Truly, it had never occurred to me before now that she might...that such a simple thing as birth could put her in so much danger.
A few of those white women from town paused beside me long enough to pat me on the head, my seeming youth making me harmless in their eyes, de-sexed and like a tamed animal they could fuss over to distract themselves from the moans of our mistress on the bed, who thrashed like a shark in shallow water.
The mistress looked weak to me by then, her thin limbs even whiter against the dark stain of blood and the dark hair sweated against her head and around her pallid face.
I felt sorrow for her, I really did.
I also felt strange flickerings of anxiety—a new feeling for me in relation to my white masters—in the event of Mistress D’Alendria’s possible passing.
Unlike others in this room, the mistress had never done direct harm to me.
There was nothing I could do for her, however. I stood mute, in a sort of locked paralysis, even more invisible than before. The wheels of time had ground into motion, and I could only watch now, to see the seeds blossom.
When the new chil
d had finally finished punishing Mistress D’Alendria for its own creation—when it left her body and came out into the wider world that would not welcome it or treat it with even a shred of kindness—a collective sigh came up from the group. The squall of the child’s voice filled the dim, candlelit space. The fog did not lift from around the bed itself, but a silence fell in those few seconds, as everyone seemed to believe the worst was now over.
Then, as if from some soundless cue, every set of eyes in that dank room smelling of metal and burnt cloth and sugarcane and seawater, shifted down to peer at the bundle in the English doctor’s arms.
Once they had, I heard—or perhaps, felt—a collective gasp of shock.
For there, even in that dim light, could be discerned a baby with skin so dark it appeared blueish in the candles’ flickering heat, lighter but still brown eyes, and the barest fuzz of pitch black hair on his tiny, perfectly-round head.
They stared at it, blinking as if in unison, as if to wipe its reality away.
I knew, looking at that baby, that she might well have given birth to something of cloven hooves and a forked tail as far as these white women and the English doctor were concerned. They stared at the baby as if they’d walked in on the act of copulation itself, as if they’d been forced to view the child’s instant of creation and its accompanying throes of passion. In the same manner, they seemed unable or unwilling to look away from that bloody bundle, even as it raised a tiny, black-skinned fist in the air, as if protesting the manner of its own entry into the world, and the shocked stares it encountered upon arrival.
Even as I thought it, I felt regret for the thing.
Then the nearest of the attending women dropped the porcelain, clam-shaped bowl she had been cradling in her arms, letting out a loud gasp. The heavy bowl bounced on the dusty-rose carpeted floor without breaking, but instead splashing its contents in a deceptively high arc that moved with captivating slowness, forcing my eyes to follow every segment of the wave as it coiled up into the air. Salt water, blood and sweat hit at the level of the English doctor and the wriggling bundle held against his sweat- and blood-stained chest.
When the water hit, the monstrous thing in the English doctor’s arms began to scream.
***
I did not come to this place as most of the slaves had.
True, I rode a slaver’s ship, and I had been sold at auction as they had, on the docks of a distant land I scarcely remember for all of my fantastic mind and mental powers. But my origins were different.
I knew that I was destined for greater things than the vast majority of those dark-skinned faces, no matter how much they looked like me. I knew that most of them would cut cane in the fields until their backs broke under the strain, cook and clean and carry for Master D’Alendria and the other whites, up until the very day they died. I, however, would not.
Of that simple fact, I had absolutely no doubt.
I kept the truth of my origins to myself, of course, but I still had friends, in a manner of speaking. I had one friend, in particular—Lara, who had ridden with me on that same ship, who had held my hand while we huddled in the dark together, vomiting up wormy gruel and getting sick with the runs until we were nearly skeletons with skin stretched over bone by the time we reached the shore.
Lara was younger than me, but Lara’s eyes held something much older.
We had both been orphans, too. Both assigned to ‘slave parents’ upon being sold, as if that fiction would somehow soften the fact that we were animals in their eyes, and needing more of the strap than any care or concern. I did do what I could to ensure that Lara and I were sold to the same white man, however, endeavoring in the few skills I had to make it so.
Master D’Alendria bought us both at the same auction, within a matter of minutes of one another, on the first day of the sale and despite our sickly condition.
All of that felt so long ago now. Like a few hundred years ago or more, although the truth lived closer to six or seven.
“Have you heard anything, Ruli?”
Her voice pulled me out of my reverie, as only that particular voice could do.
I had been walking silently behind the magic man, carrying his worn, leather bag of various mixtures and potions, ironically thinking of Lara and that dubious beginning of ours, on the ship and then in the slave markets, before we came to be living here. Ironically, Lara felt further from me than she ever had.
Even so, my eyes found her at once, crouched out of the tropical sun by the nearest of the slave shacks, which stood a few hundred yards away from the back of the main plantation house, but only a hundred from the ocean cliffs.
For the first time since I’d known her, I had trouble holding her gaze.
I glanced reflexively over my shoulder, perhaps to hide that fact.
“Go back inside, Lara,” I told her softly, looking back at her, but still without meeting her eyes. “And call me Robert. Or Stanley. Or Robert Stanley. The master doesn’t like us using the other names...”
Lara smiled at me, quirking a dark eyebrow.
My heart melted, even though I knew it shouldn’t.
She had been given to another a year hence, despite her only being fourteen. The magic man had done it, the same man behind whom I now trudged, carrying all of his wares for him like a badly-equipped pack mule. The magic man sealed Lara’s fate in yet another religious gathering of our people, giving her to Chaote to take, since the portents told the magic man that Lara had reached her first bleeding and thus needed to be wed.
Lara did not dispute this. In her lack of protest, for which I still could scarcely forgive her, her marriage to Chaote was sealed.
I could only watch it happen, shock hitting me down to my bones. The magic man did it in public, so there was nothing I could say, no way to lodge my own protest. I knew the reasons for this, too. I knew they made sense.
Yet, despite my gifts, I had not seen this coming.
I had seen nothing at all.
I still could not think of it without some part of me screaming.
At the time, minutes after the ceremony had closed and congratulations and exclamations had begun to recede into the distance, the excited whispers and discussions carried on by small groups of slaves as they returned leisurely to the quarters, I approached the magic man.
Unable to control my feelings in any way, I railed at him, shouting up and down my rage and protests as to Lara’s fate, but to no avail. The magic man’s coffee-and-cream-colored eyes had regarded me shrewdly all throughout my alternating and torrential outbursts of anger, grief and betrayal. He viewed me without emotion, the scar patterns on his African face as immobile as the rocks perched at the tops of the island cliffs.
“You know why I must do it,” the magic man said patiently when I had finished, or at least when I had run out of breath. The magic man spoke gently, using the language of that other continent, the one in which I had been taught before I was owned. “She stands out. She stands out as I do...and as Chaote does, in his own way. It is dangerous for our kind. You know this. She must be disguised. She must disappear. It is the only way.”
“Why him?” I demanded. “Why must you use him for this purpose?”
The magic man smiled, his eyes knowing more than his words allowed.
“You would rather it have been another?” he asked innocently.
When I could only fume at him, curling my hands into fists, his coffee and cream eyes turned darker, holding an overt warning.
“I will tell you a small story, Ruli-Seh,” the magic man said, his voice now holding nothing, no tone or emotion I could recognize. “I knew a man here, long before you were born. An Oriental, from lands far, far north of the home country...” The magic man paused, his eyes still gauging mine, as if he saw the tiger in them, and it made him cautious. “He told me a story of magic men of his world. Creatures with strange eyes who could see into the minds of other men. Who could make them do things they would not otherwise do. Who could live in th
eir dreams, cause them pain or pleasure or madness, all through their will that it be so. All through the power of their minds...”
I stared at him, feeling the skin of my face go cold.
“Why are you saying this to me, old man?” I barked at him, when he didn’t break the silence. I deliberately used words in his tongue that stripped my meaning of respect. “What use is your fairy tale to me, when you have sold my sister like cattle? When you treat us like dogs? Like the whites treat us?”
“You cannot have her, Ruli-Seh,” the magic man said softly.
“Why?” I shot back, speaking without thought as to its wisdom that time. “Why can I not? Why?”
“Because you stand out, too,” the magic man said simply.
Again I could only stare at him.
His mind was a blank wall, however, impenetrable to me along with those evasive eyes. The magic man, as if feeling my desperation in some way, or perhaps just my pain, shook his head, his eyes kind.
“Whatever you try to pretend you do not know, Ruli-Seh,” the magic man said. “Eventually, you will be found out.”
Losing my temper, I railed at him more after this, trying to bend his mind.
It did not work. He did not care anything for me, or speak any more words.
Nor could I change them with my own, silent or aloud.
At the end of my tirade mixed with impassioned pleas, the magic man only shrugged.
“It may not be enough,” the magic man said, speaking gently again, gripping my shoulder with an uncharacteristic affection. “For you...or for her. It may not be, Ruli-Seh, but it is all I can do.”
There was not much I could say to this.
Not then.
Still, a cold anger took me over that never fully dissipated. It sat in my stomach, like a disagreeable meal that refuses to be digested.
Choate had been amenable to the arrangement with Lara, even though he must be a decade older than her, if not two. It did not surprise me at all that Chaote would be amenable to such a thing. Lara was young. She was, as far as any of us knew, untouched...and she was beautiful. Her long limbs had a grace that mesmerized me, that pulled me in ways I did not have a name for yet, even though I am older than I look.
Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift Page 19