Beyond the low walls around us, the sun came up, day after day, lifting light and color out of the far edge of the water. And day after day, the sun dropped behind the hills, leaving the sky black.
After a while, most of my sores healed. Then a pale man came and touched me with his dirty hands, smeared oil all over me, made my body shine and reek. My breasts had just started to grow, but he rubbed them a long while. It hurt. I begged him to stop, but he laughed and took his time. Then he slapped my backside and shoved a piece of filthy white cloth at me. It was so small, I could only wrap it around my hips. He flicked my nipples and laughed again.
When he had finished with all the girls and women, the man pushed us into a big, hot room. We were scared. We huddled in a corner. So many white men, talking, laughing, looking at us. I linked arms with the girl next to me, but the man with dirty hands pulled me away, pushed me high up on a box. Head aching, I kept my face down, didn’t want to see the men all around me. Smoke from sticks burning in their mouths filled the room, stung my eyes. Some of the men chewed something, spat into pots, spat onto the floor. So many men, so much smoke. Hard to breathe. They came close, walking around me, touching me. I smelled their sweat. They pulled up the cloth, looked under it. I hated that. One climbed up on the box, opened my mouth with a stick, poked the stick through my hair.
A shout. Then more. Faster. Louder. Like drums banging. Everywhere. My ears almost bursting.
Then it got quiet. My heart pounded loud and fast.
A man pulled me off the box, put a rope around my chest, and yanked me to a wagon filled with black people. I was glad to get out of the room, but I was afraid.
The bumpy road tossed the wagon up and down. I held on to the sides so as not to fall. My hands pained, but I didn’t let go. The sun, hot and angry, cruel and white, clawed my back. I looked over the side, saw the burned red soil. Around us, fields of big leaves rolled like a green ocean.
After a long time, the wagon stopped. The sun was low and orange, kneeling and hiding behind a forest. The trees were tall and straight, the branches too far up to reach. So different from the twisted tree that watched over my village and my ocean.
People in patched-up clothes hanging loose on them, rags on the women’s heads, gathered around the wagon. Some of them were dark like me, some golden and brown like the wet sand back home. Some had wide noses and full lips like mine; some had thin noses and lips like the men in the smoky room had.
We climbed down. A small boy touched the cloth on my body. A wide-shouldered woman took my hands in hers. A thin woman wrapped her arm around my waist. She wanted to touch the bead in my hair. I let her.
The two women, a girl following behind, took me to a hut. Left me there. It was dark inside, but fading orange skylight came through gaps in the wallboards. I knelt down on a mat, and when my eyes got used to the dark, I saw women and girls standing along the walls, their faces hidden in the shadows.
An old woman carrying a bucket of water came and sat down on a stool beside me. She lit a candle, and yellow light flickered over her wrinkled face. Reminded me of the elders at home. Pearly rings shone around the black part of her eyes. Her lips were sunken, and when she smiled at me, her mouth opened like an empty cave.
I heard a familiar sound, and when I turned toward it, I saw the old woman’s knotty hand sweep a rag through the bucket. The rag splashed, swished, fluttered. Then, like a dead bird, it hung, dripping water through her fingers. She gestured for me to stand up. After I did that, she lowered the sack off my body and wiped cool water over my naked skin. I shivered. She rubbed away the bad-smelling oil and poured a cup of water onto my feet. Caressing two crossed twigs joined with string, the old woman bowed her head and prayed.
In silence, another woman wiped me dry. Another slipped a patched-up, clean cloth over my head and slid my arms through holes in the sides. Another tied a rag around my hair. Motioning for me to sit, the elderly woman set a bowl of mush on the floor next to me. She lifted my hands with hers and placed the crossed twigs onto my upturned palms.
All the women and girls left. I was alone.
I didn’t know what that cross lying on my hands was for, but I knew it was important, so I set it on my lap, very careful. I sat there awhile. Then I dipped my fingers into the bowl and let the cornmeal mush settle thick on my tongue. I swallowed. Outside, the orange light was gone. I stayed on the dirt floor, eating in the candlelight. Far away, a woman hummed sad and sweet. Her voice came from nowhere and everywhere, soothing my battered spirit and telling me I was alive. I was alive, and I knew how I would get through whatever was going to happen to me: I would not tell anyone the secret told to me when I entered the world. Never.
8
Beads
My husband and I, both physicians, worked long days. Often, our only time together was a late-night meal. One night in the spring of 1993, Lee and I sat down to dinner at eight thirty. He was quieter than usual and did not seem interested in his broiled lamb chops and sautéed green beans, one of his favorite dinners. When I asked how his day had gone, he let his head fall onto the chair back. Gazing at the ceiling, his voice tinny with fatigue, he said, “The OR was insane; nothing went right. The pharmacy delivered the wrong anesthetic; a surgical clamp snapped open, so the patient’s blood pressure tanked; the nurse, a big guy, fainted when a little blood squirted onto his shoes . . . I could go on. And when I got to the ICU, it felt like every patient in there was trying to die.” He sat up and pushed his plate away. Staring vaguely at the calendar on the wall, he said, “I’ll be fifty this year, but sometimes I feel ninety.”
“Maybe we should take some time off,” I suggested. “We could hang out on a beach for a week or so. A place with no phone service.” Being on call through many nights, in addition to being on our feet eight to ten hours a day, five or six days a week, was wearing us down. I was more than ready for a break from runny noses, ear infections, behavior problems, and distraught parents, not to mention the constant battle with insurance companies.
“I can get time off. Folks know I’m way overdue,” Lee said. He leaned forward. “How about Portugal? The Travel section of last Sunday’s Times said the beaches in the Algarve area have rock formations that look like prehistoric sculptures, and the resorts are secluded and peaceful.”
“Sounds perfect.” I felt my spirits lift. “I’ll get someone to cover the office.”
“The resorts probably have telephones,” he warned, smiling. “You’ll have to leave your pager at home.”
“You too.”
“We can rest, stuff ourselves, and then maybe go to Lagos.” Lee pulled his plate back and lifted his fork. “We might find something for your research there.”
“I know that’s where the slave trade got started, but I’ll have to read up on it before we go.” I found myself smiling too. I had wished for more free time to hang out in libraries and bookstores, and I’d been thinking about cutting back my office hours so I could do more research. I was energized by Lee’s suggestion. But I was also scared.
Though friends said I was as cool as a cucumber, I was still struggling to put my fury with the dentist and his smiling wife behind me, and I worried that when I set foot on the soil where the transatlantic theft and sale of black people had begun, I would become even more enraged. Yet I suddenly knew that going there was essential. Meeting Carolyn and T.O. in Virginia had helped me see that what I had embarked on was more than a genealogical account of one kinship.
In June, we went to Portugal. Borders of lavender-blossomed jacaranda trees shimmered in the heat as Lee and I meandered down Lisbon’s multicolored-tile sidewalks. We dodged traffic and discovered tiny shops jammed with colorful pottery in haphazard arrays on shelves and tables and intricate needlepoint rugs lying across chairs, benches, and floors. We chose a rug with a mauve and Wedgwood-blue floral design. Between us, Lee was the more persistent negotiator, so I stood aside while he bargained with the shop owner and got a good price.
On
the recommendation of the hotel concierge, we took a day trip to Sintra. A quaint and rickety wooden train carried us up steep inclines to the storybook town. Castles—some built in the eighth and ninth centuries—crested soaring tree-covered hills and overlooked plunging valleys. Blithely glancing down from one of the tiny balconies on the fifth floor of the ornate Quinta da Regaleira, I felt vertiginous as the bottom of the chasm below seemed to rush toward me. I stepped back.
The following day, we drove along the coast toward the Algarve. Motorcycles, cars, vans, and trucks zoomed around our diminutive rental car while we crept ahead on the narrow and, in some places, barely paved road. Finally, I pointed to the sign, not much bigger than a postcard, it seemed, for our resort.
For the next few days, Lee and I lounged among startling orange, red, and gold rock formations jutting out of glistening, pristine shores. I could feel my muscles relax in the warmth of the sun. For most people, beach food is salads and sandwiches, but once we’d tasted the Portuguese cabbage and potato soup in the dining room on our first night at the resort, we could not get enough of it. The waiters thought we were strange to want hot soup in hot weather, but they brought soup to our seaside lounge chairs every day.
After a few days, Lee and I decided to leave our beach refuge and let our trip take a more serious turn. Five centuries earlier, the citizens of Lagos had seen the first ship sail toward the African continent, beginning the devastation of millions of African lives.
I knew from my research that the governor of Lagos, Prince Henry the Navigator, was a patron of exploration. His aim was to spread Catholicism throughout the world, but another, less virtuous, motive was to find a sea route to the ivory and gold of sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1441, Prince Henry sent two ships to Africa. They landed on an island off the coast of current-day Mauritania. The explorers came upon a market crowded with black Muslims and captured twelve of them. Among the captives were two Moors of noble birth who offered “ten blacks, male and female,” in their place. The twenty Africans were taken to Portugal, shown to Prince Henry, then auctioned off in Lisbon.
In a series of voyages, the prince’s men explored the African coast and discovered large urban complexes governed by dynasties as well organized and technologically advanced as those in Lisbon and other European cities. A vigorous trade relationship quickly burgeoned between African and Portuguese merchants. In the trade’s early years, European goods, including brass, pottery, and linen, were exchanged for African treasures, including ivory, silver, and, especially, gold. But within one generation, Africa’s stolen people became the greatest treasure of all. The slave trade was so lucrative that even the allure of gold was all but forgotten.
At first, Portuguese ships transported captives to Europe to be Christianized, but this practice was short-lived because it slowed the flourishing slave trade. Besides, the Portuguese reasoned, if their captives were not Christians, they were not human beings, so they didn’t need to feel guilty about selling them.
No other event in the history of the world would come close to causing the destruction that this dispersal of men, women, and children wrought. And nothing would rival the wealth and power that the trafficking of human flesh reaped for the merchants and slave owners.
Lee and I prepared for our visit to Lagos with a history book, a local map, and a travel guide. The paragraphs of the history book describing the arrival of the first African slaves in Lagos were highlighted yellow. A red line on the map marked our route from the resort. Sticky notes along the pages of the travel guide flagged descriptions of churches, the customs building, town hall, and other tourist sites. The single blue tag marked what was, for us, the most important destination: the stockades. The guidebook, which I had purchased in the remainders section of a bookstore, briefly described their massive iron posts, but I could not visualize them. I had to be there to see and touch the stakes to which thousands of slaves had been chained.
As we drove to Lagos, about ten miles west of our resort, I noticed Lee holding the steering wheel tighter and tighter, and, squinting at the dusty road unfolding before him, he seemed unaware of the passing scenery. In the heat, the map I had laid across my lap felt like a damp blanket, and I could feel tension building in my neck. We spoke in two- or three-word phrases, able to communicate only as driver and navigator.
The trip felt long, and there was little evidence that the landscape had changed since the first slaves set foot on Portuguese soil. To the north, the trees were thin and parched, the hills behind them barren. To the south, roadside boulders stood against the backdrop of the flat, still ocean.
“I think this is the turnoff,” I said at last, and Lee steered the car onto a narrow road. Time seemed to speed up. Suddenly we were in Lagos facing a row of larger-than-life bronze statues of Henry the Navigator and various other Portuguese aristocrats, all in formal regalia. Bronze conquerors armed with shields and swords stood among the nobles as if protecting the tree-lined harbor, the historic locus of Portugal’s wealth and power. We parked at the feet of a massive figure with a commanding posture and an expressionless face. The tightness in my neck spread to my shoulders.
The town was picturesque, tranquil, but as we walked along narrow cobblestoned streets, the old city—with its remnants of defense walls, its ancient buildings with crumbling cornices and rotting doors—seemed to close in on us. In the Praça da República, a tidy scene of grass, trees, flowers, and walkways, I tried to take a deep breath, but now my chest felt tight too.
Lee and I circled and crisscrossed the plaza looking for the iron posts of the stockades. The more we searched, the more I sensed the haunting presence of slaves—skeletal warriors slumped against the stockade, shackled mothers who would never see their sons and daughters again, and children curled up on the dirt, sobbing. It felt as though their ghosts followed us.
For almost an hour, we searched, referring to our travel book for the location of the stockades. At one corner of the plaza we found the stone Customs House, the site of the African slave market, but no trace of the iron posts. Finally, we stopped in the center of the plaza. An enormous red wagon with a garish yellow awning faced us. Bottles of soft drinks were lined up on the counter, and colorful bags of potato chips and pretzels dangled from wires. We estimated the distance from the harbor; Lee and I looked at each other, then checked our guidebook again.
We stared at the concession stand and the vendor wiping the counter, arranging bottles of soda by flavor, and clipping more bags of junk food to the wires. This was where the stockades had been.
The sunny town square suddenly felt sinister in its indifference, everyone around us complicit.
A young man in a colorful T-shirt and snug-fitting khakis sauntered by eating a thick roast beef sandwich, allowing bits of crust to fall onto the sidewalk.
In front of an Old World café near the concession stand, a slender gray-haired man in a stylish linen suit lounged back in a metal chair, smoke rising from his cigarette.
Across the plaza, a woman wearing a bright flower-print dress smiled as she watched her two sons run and jump, squealing with joy, through the four arches of the Customs House, where slaves had been bartered and sold.
I felt stupid and naive. I had attributed to the people living in Lagos an intimate understanding of the world-changing atrocities that had occurred in the city they called home. But the inhabitants seemed dismissive or oblivious.
“Damn it!” I shouted.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lee said, folding the map and shoving it inside the guidebook. Perhaps the Portuguese did not believe their ancestors’ participation in the slave trade important to remember. Or perhaps the truth was too painful to face. The residents of Lagos might not have realized that history could not be tidied up so easily.
We rushed to the car, passing the bronze nobles and soldiers on the way. I looked up at Prince Henry and his cohorts, men who had caused human suffering on a scale so massive, it was impossible to measure. These were t
he men Lagos memorialized as heroes. Not a single plaque acknowledged the slaves.
Lee and I could not speak for a long time, and when we reached the resort, it felt as though the colorful gardens, groomed hedges, and soft music drifting out from the lobby betrayed what had happened to thousands of slaves just ten miles away. Lee retreated to our room. I went for a walk, hoping that fresh air might relieve the ache in my neck and shoulders.
As I passed the large windows on the façade of the hotel, my own reflection startled me. I saw a middle-aged African-American woman wearing a white short-sleeved blouse neatly tucked into sharply creased navy-blue slacks. Her short, curly hair was stylish, her posture and movements casual. History had been kind to her.
I headed for the deserted beach. In the peacefulness of the approaching evening, the beauty and luxury of my surroundings, and the frivolity of the beach chairs and multicolored umbrellas, I felt guilty. The family directive had served me well. I enjoyed the social mobility and financial security that being a doctor afforded me, and my family was so very proud of me. I waltzed through life like the presidential descendant that I was, seldom giving a thought to what my enslaved ancestors and their children and grandchildren had done for me. I had taken freedom for granted. I, too, was complicit in ignoring the suffering of my African forebears.
Standing at water’s edge until nearly ten o’clock, I watched the sun set and the sky fold into layers of gold and fuchsia. On that clear evening, the ocean darkened, the edge of the horizon so sharp it seemed within reach. An engine-powered ship crept westward through the water, and in its wake, the sound of erupting waves shattered the stillness of dusk.
I watched the modern ship and envisioned in its place a slave ship, its sails ready to sweep the weather-beaten vessel toward the New World. The ancient boat hovered just beyond the beach, and massive stockades stretched from the nearby fifteenth-century Portuguese village of my imagination to the ocean, its horizon swallowed by dense fog. From among the stockades’ iron posts, the ghosts of thousands of stolen men, women, and children, including toddlers, emerged. The mist ebbed and flowed around them, but I could see their eyes, vacant, bewildered, tear-filled, enraged, hopeless, terrified, or defiant. I extended my hands toward them.
The Other Madisons Page 9