So Long Been Dreaming

by Nalo Hopkinson

  She separated herself from the tree trunk and wavered in the cool night air – flat, one-dimensional, compressed soil that slowly ballooned out until she was body and flesh. Her waist-length dreadlocks separated from the sap of the tree, and Essence coughed and stretched as she acclimated her system to the slave colony. Then she remembered what she always forgot: that the people of the world she was entering wore clothes, the unnecessary excessive fabric that hid the beauty and sensuality of their bodies. In Piliferous Layer they wore no clothes, had no need for such excess that impeded them from communicating with one another. Everything was through touch and taste; in fact, not to touch or lick another was an indication of animosity towards that person. That was why she knew Tuba was meant to be hers. He tasted like roasted sweet potato, but she had never told him this. Nor had he told her what her taste was. Essence put aside her reverie as she heard footsteps and squatted behind the tree, making sure she was out of sight of the voices. She had not yet mastered this human form that she hated; not because it was ugly, but because the enslaved world always infuriated her, with its control of human labour and restriction of their movements: “a complete degradation of the human spirit.”

  She identified two men, walking slowly, machetes slung across their shoulders, their voices loud and friendly. As they strode past, the shorter of the two craned his neck and glanced at the tree. Essence could feel his eyes scanning the tree and wondered how he knew she was there even though he could not see her. This had happened to Essence several times in the past when she visited the enslaved world. When she had mentioned these incidents to her father, he told her that even though some of the people were slaves, they were related to the Maroons, and could, if they really tapped into their ancestral memory, escape bondage by submerging below the surface of the earth to live freely as they once did. Essence suspected that this man was related to them and was either a subversive or his memory was damaged by the system of slavery. Still, it was not wise for her to call to him, because with his altered brain capacity, he might think that she was an apparition, or duppy. It was funny to Essence that some of these enslaved relatives of hers were unable to distinguish between the ancestors who had gone ahead and those who were still living in an evolved state among them.

  The men moved safely out of sight until their voices were a distant sound like crickets speaking another language. Essence scanned the landscape to ascertain where she might find nondescript clothes in order to move among them without attracting attention. She felt that this time was different than the last time she was here. The air was not as constricted, and she smelled another fragrance – even in the men who had just passed and the woman earlier – that she hadn’t smelled in them before. It was like thyme, but she did not know how to read that smell, or its meaning. It had been about five years since she had last visited this land they called Xaymaca. She and the other reconnoiterers had figured out that every one year of their life was equal to five years of their enslaved relatives. Her grandmother had known this from when she was prodded into a ship, pregnant with her first child. That was why in the dark and despair of the hold, rather than surrender to defeat, she had raised her voice, and called out to see who else was in training to be a priestess like she had been. Six other women had responded and despite the vomiting, tears, feces, and the sheer bewilderment that many succumbed to, they had plotted and planned how to transform themselves and escape their fate, paving a way for the life growing inside their wombs.

  Essence’s mother had told her the story many times about her maternal grandmother whom she had never met, and how the first inhabitants of the underground Maroon colony were all pregnant women, all former priestesses in training who had discovered that pregnant women had the capacity to survive underground and to train their unborn children to do likewise, that the source of their power was in their dreadlocked hair that were like roots that allowed them to breathe and receive all the nutrients that they required. That was why all the enslaved people, especially the men, were forced to have their hair cut short and even the women’s hair refused to grow to any significant length because it was being tamed by the enslavers’ comb. This was simply another way they were being trained to work for the benefit of others, and more importantly, they were also being trained to dislike and distrust their natural selves. But this was not the time to reminisce, she was on a mission, and if Essence wasn’t careful to adapt to her environment, she could end up like her maternal grandmother, head shaved and doomed to live the life of an enslaved captive. Quickly, she identified a house about two miles from the cotton tree, where she would find clothes and cloth with which to wrap her hair and protect her power. Putting her ears to the ground to make sure no one was walking around in the immediate vicinity, Essence easily jogged to the farm house and found a stack of clothes folded in a corner in a small room. She selected the simplest sack-like dress, then digging through a basket, found several pieces of cloth. Selecting a smooth, brown, cotton piece, she wound it around her head, completely covering her thick hair that when left free brushed against her bottom. She was ready to move about and learn how her earthly relatives were making out, and how she and her people might continue to help them regain their freedom.

  Morning found her in the market with the other women, as they were always the source of news.

  “Howdy!” they greeted each other, their full voices like hampers loaded with ground provisions, their gestures free and intimate as the breeze flirting under the leaves of trees. “Howdy!” Essence joined the women in greeting, quickly scanning their bodies to try and discern which of them still had active memory. Once again she smelled thyme among them and then she remembered. It was the same fragrance she had detected the night she had wandered into the rebellion that left three overseers dead and several acres of cane-field smoldering. Could it be that these women had acquired their freedom? But how could that be, since she did not detect the memory in any of them. Confused, Essence floundered. She did not know if she could trust herself. This always happened when she covered her hair and wound it tight in a bundle to keep from being easily recognized; she received mixed messages, and wasn’t quite sure if the information she was receiving was accurate. Desperate to regain balance, Essence pushed her way into the midst of a group of women and touched one on the arm. Very clearly she received the answer she sought: “Me neva gwane be anybody’s slave,” the woman’s skin proclaimed. Just as Essence was about to let go and move away, she felt the woman’s thumb and index finger circle her wrist.

  “Is who yu?” the woman declared, pulling Essence closer to her and jerking up her arm. Essence slowed her heartbeat to synchronize it with the turning of soil as a seed takes root. Instantly the woman dropped her hand, alarmed.

  “Do me know yu?” the woman asked, less self-assured now.

  Essence looked at the woman and recognized her from the evening before, when in her haste Essence had emerged from the side of the tree.

  “You belong to the Starch people, like me,” Essence said, spreading her moist calm over the woman. “If you search your memory bank, you will recognize me as a cousin,” Essence continued drawing strength from the woman, which allowed her to scan the woman’s body more fully. She realized the woman was growing dreadlocks hidden beneath her head-wrap. “Me see yu before,” the woman replied as her mind travelled back in time.

  “Me se yu before, but yu was different,” the woman ended, nodding her head as if to awaken her memory.

  “We survive through our ability to disguise and adapt,” Essence smiled, touching the woman’s hand and immediately drinking in her warmth, like soil being sprinkled with water. “Can we go where we can talk?” Essence asked, feeling other ears prick up at their conversation.

  The woman’s eyes bore into Essence, trying to read her in a more obvious way than Essence was trained to do. Then she smiled, satisfied with what she believed she saw and knew.

  “We guh afta me get a likkle piece a meat fi flavor de pot,” the woman sai
d, turning. Then she stopped and gazed once again on Essence. “Cousin,” she said with full meaning, “de people call me Walker because me feets does know where to travel any time day or night, but me other name be Carmen. Carmen de Walker be me preference.” She smiled broadly and began to move through the crowd of mostly women haggling over food and prices. Essence kept up, and with her mouth almost touching Carmen’s ear, said, “I’m known as Essence of the Starch People.”

  Carmen de Walker nodded acknowledgment as she weaved with ease through the crowd, occasionally greeting others with both a nod of her head and a salutation which often involved inquiring about other members of their family. After more than an hour of this ritual, Essence deduced that the market was merely a meeting place to exchange news; shopping was the guise. The women’s talk was about how sweet freedom was, even though the bacras still had their foot on their backs.

  “But we will find a way round dem white people and dem meanness,” said a woman selling carrots.

  “Me done tell de one me lease land from dat fi him keep touching me behind, ah go fall down pan him and squeeze him to death,” a rotund woman said with mirth.

  “It nah gwane tek much fah you fi squeeze de day-lights out of dat maga, red skin bacra,” said another, bearing a bunch of bananas of her head.

  The women all laughed good-naturedly and moved on. Essence tried to understand their tongue that was slightly different from the language she spoke, but even more, she was trying to comprehend how they could claim to be free, and in the same breath declare that someone had a foot on their back. She listened keenly, trying to sort out all the talk, but always making sure she was close to Carmen’s side. On more than two occasions, they were stopped, and once a woman who walked with a cane and whose face was filled with lines, searched Essence’s face and asked,

  “Is whe you from, girlie? Haven’t seen you before.”

  Essence quickly thought of what to say, trying to bring to her lips the name of other estates over the island that she had visited, but Carmen came quickly to her rescue.

  “Howdy Miss Tilda. Yu looking well, today. Dis here is me cousin Es. So what yu buyin’? Yu need any help, ma’am?”

  Essence was impressed with the Carmen’s swift and expert manner in deterring folks. As they moved on, Carmen remarked, “Miss Tilda okay. She mean well, but still one can neva be too careful. If anyone else ask, tell dem yu from Yarmouth Estate. Me ’ave people dere.”

  This confused Essence, although she did not say anything. If they were free, why did it matter where she was from? All was not what it seemed; there was a great deal more she had to learn before reporting back to Tuba and the Elder Council.

  At last Walker purchased a small piece of salt pork and they were on their way to her home, four miles from the market, which they walked in well under an hour. Walker’s name was appropriately suited, Essence decided as they made their way to her little round cottage, built with bamboo vines and covered with a thatched roof from coconut boughs and secluded in a grove.

  Before they were inside the one-room cottage, Carmen de Walker reached for Essence’s hand and said to her. “Yu nuh tell me eberyting. Yu know yu can trust me.”

  “Are you free or are you enslaved?”

  “We claim freedom two years now. Whe yu been hidin out? Yu is one of de Maroon dem?”

  So that was why she had smelled thyme. What had her mother told her about thyme again? “If you rub thyme into your joints, and behind your knees and under your arm-pits, it will make you invisible to the enslavers and the enslaved.” Her mother’s words seeped into her consciousness. Now she had to decide how much to tell Carmen the Walker.

  “Yesterday evening you saw me at the cotton tree,” Essence began, observing Carmen closely. “I was just coming up and had not filled my lungs with air yet.”

  “Yu is duppy?” There was alarm in Carmen’s voice.

  “I am still among the living,” Essence hastened to assure her. “But you are right about me being a Maroon. There is a whole group of us Maroons who live underground.” Before Carmen the Walker could interrupt, Essence pulled off her turban and shook her hair, which fell around her like tall, brown grass. “We breathe and survive through our hair. I am a reconnoiterer. I come up to learn how those who are enslaved are making out to gain their freedom. A few of us who came up were captured and enslaved when our hair, the source of our power and transformation, was cut off.”

  Carmen also pulled off her head-wrap, and her finger-length dreadlocks stuck up on her head. “We is indeed cousin, and me heard oonuh chatting plenty, but me moda tell me me a gu mad cause nu body kyan live inna ground like yam root.” Carmen clapped her hands and the balls of her feet tapped the ground. “Yu can neva know how it feel fi know me nuh mad,” she said, embracing Essence, who immediately licked her arms in joy. Carmen pulled away.

  “Mek yu lick me like puppy?” she asked.

  “That’s how we greet each other down there,” Essence apologized, remembering that this was not the way of the enslaved.

  Carmen took hold of Essence’s hand and pressed it to her stomach. Essence felt the child growing in Carmen’s stomach. Both laughed, then held each other and danced around the small room. Essence realized she was suddenly tired. She yawned.

  “Yu tired. Tek a likkle rest while me cook.”

  Grateful, and sensing she was safe, Essence stretched out on the small cot and pulled the colourful sheet, made from the scraps of many different cloths, up to her neck. Some of her hair, falling to the impacted dirt floor, instantly drank the nutrients. Her dreams connected her to her grandmother who was sitting on a hill looking down on a valley in which people, who appeared to be the size of ants, went about their daily chores. Her grey-roped locks were pulled over her shoulder almost to her ankles.

  As Essence approached her grandmother, the old woman caught hold of her hand and licked her fingers. Essence returned her grandmother’s greeting by licking her shoulder as both a sign of respect for her age as well as a symbol of deep affection. Essence sat beside the elder, who did not avert her eyes from the valley, but spoke as if she was merely continuing a story.

  “Your mother has told you how I, along with six others, came to find Piliferous Layer and how I came to lose my claim to it. It has taken more than ten years, fifty in the world of the enslaved, to grow back my hair. Now it almost brushes the ground; this way I am always connected to the soil that sustains us.

  “When I was on that slaver’s ship, cuffed and chained, bewildered and bereft of hope like all the others, I heard the voice of my great-grandmother saying to me over and over, ‘All is not lost, all is not lost.’ I was trying to shut out her voice when I raised my own to ask who else beside me was a priestess in training. Others replied, and they too were being sustained by their grandmother’s voices, telling them, just like my own who had already made her transition from our world, that all was not lost, and together we had the knowledge in our wombs to forge a new way to live.

  “I cannot tell you how we did it, except that once the ship docked and we were relieved from our chains, we each ran, and to keep from being detected we buried each other, and in our desperation to be quiet, to keep from being detected, our bodies transformed and we found ourselves being pulled more deeply into the earth, as if through quicksand, until we sank to a latitude that had a floor.

  “From there we learned what we had always been taught, that we could become whatever the occasion demanded, and the season of hostility and geographic realignment slated for our people required that some of us transmute and become one with the yams that had historically sustained us. We grew roots and dug more securely into the ground and gave birth, then one by one, rose to the surface to claim men and teach them to live like us.

  “Our numbers increased and we learned to slow down our aging process considerably because we surmised that this season would be a long one, and our role was not only to be way-makers, but to survive it, as we were the keepers of memory and purveyo
rs of tradition.

  “At first we didn’t think we would survive, partly because we were ambivalent. Our continent, that would become divided up and renamed Africa, was not perfect, but it was ours. Our needs were met. Like most people, we sometimes fought among ourselves, and often had to contend with kings who wanted to expand their territory, but it was home.

  “The tears I shed for that place and the people lost to me is in the ripple of each wave. But every time I wanted to give up, my grandmother’s voice would pound inside my head, ‘All is not lost, this is a great journey-way that you are making. Go on and make of it something new.’ And so I did with the help of Arrora, an Arawak woman, who did not die with the rest of her people, but stayed to help us who were coming. She was a mother to me; she had been a high-priestess of her people. She taught all of us how to breathe underground, how to become soil and use our hair like roots. She delivered our babies and showed us how to wriggle like worms to the surface of the earth. Mostly, she taught us the smell of the white man and how to stay safe from becoming one of his slaves. Arrora is your grandmother, too. You are a woman now, soon will be sleeping with a man. You must put water out for Arrora just like how you put water out for me.

  “You are as good a scout as I was, better in fact. Once again the wind has changed course, but there are still battles ahead. Always remember that you are a purveyor of memory and tradition. You must always be able to live and survive anywhere. That is our claim. We survived when others did not. I was fifty, the age of your mother now, when the enslavers captured me and cut off my hair. I had been visiting several estates over the years, speaking to the women, teasing out their memory, helping them to set fire to the fields, showing them which herbs to grow to strengthen their and their men’s bodies, which to use to weaken the bacras and make them worthless without killing them. I was doing well, but then I took up with a man on one of the estates. The woman I took him from got jealous and told the overseer that I was telling the cook how to kill him. I was too wrapped up in this man’s love to be vigilant. I was tight in his arms, our legs intertwined when they caught me, and right there before him, my hair was cut off and my head shaved clean. That was true bewilderment; that and the sting of the whip. Thirty lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails, but not a sound escaped my mouth or a tear watered my eyes. I knew my responsibility and kept my focus on the colony underground and on our people. I knew I would see them again.”