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| From www.nairaland.com |
When young Fancy came to Master’s Big Place, his birth momma, Emma, had him all hugged up in a buttercup yellow blanket. They glimpsed each other sometimes after that. Emma sometimes found a reason to come up to the Big House and rest her scratchy palm on his head, for a second.
Betsy, the cook, took daily care of
him. At night, she would tell him ‘jump on
up’ to the lumpy soft mattress behind the kitchen. Emma slept cross the yard in
the Quarters with the hands.
Due to Master’s whim, as he grew,
Fancy learned to eat when James, the Master’s son ate, at the low blue table,
near him. He had to be finished whenever
James was, so he had to eat quickly. After
lunch, they played hoops and with the red ball.
Soon he was allowed to practice on his own slate, while Tutor Foster
lectured and examined James in Master’s study or in the screened porch, if it
was very hot.
Once a year, Betsy
gave her bed to Emma on what she told Fancy was his birth day. Those nights, Emma came to tell him
stories. He was scared of her, at night. She had scar dots circling her face and long,
raised scars, every which way on her back.
The night he was three, she brought stories of vines like ropes and
leaves like shutters, and strange shapes of mouth-watering fruit. Past his bed crunched animals bigger than wagons,
slithered snakes more poisonous than Cottonmouth, slunk cats sharp as saw
blades. At his fourth birthday, she told
him of his Songhai relatives and some of their stories. Song-hai, he would say. When he was five, she gave him his name:
Mwalimu, Teacher, when he could be trusted to never let on; and if he did, the
story-visits would have to stop. He also
learned to say: kinywa, mouth; sikio,
ear; and mkono, hand.
During the
long night of turning five, she told him a monkey story and he laughed. Then, Timbuktu, of a thousand lights, spilled
like a lingering sunset onto the hills of his knees. Ten, thirty, fifty thousand cattle trekked
across his blankets to the markets of the Coast. He was of Benin and Mali. Songhai and SonniAli. What dreams that night!
When he became
six, Emma imagined him into being Brother in a cornfield across the big ocean,
scaring crows. He watched Sister,
washing clothes in the shady shallows.
He saw Mother, cooking at the hut fire; Father, sleeping after teaching. He was caught, scraped and dragged, cut and
rope-chafed, marched away from his village home, huts burning, head shaved,
stuffed into a boat. We will eat you, his captors said, weakening him, calling
on nightmares. Frantic eyes were the
lightning bugs, fireflies around his window.
Emma said, in
the morning: “You weren’t eaten, were
you?” He stared at her. “You couldn’t have been eaten; here you are.”
She stared into his eyes, while her scratchy hands cupped his cheeks.
“Around you here
is laundry Sister, cornfield Brother; cooking Mother and singing Father. They are here.” He got up and looked out of the window. He saw a light move from one room to the
next, in the Big House, in the dim dawn.
“You cannot tell
your story; like your name, it must be yours only, something to know forever.”
He should be proud.
He didn’t
understand. But he didn’t ask anyone. He had learned lots of things he didn’t
understand.
After he was
six, during Midday, he learned to sharpen the tools that Earnest, the tool
hand, made in the smithy. He watched
with admiration as Earnest changed a chunk of glowing iron into an axe head or
a hoe. That July, he gathered some of
the pretty orange nails off the anvil in a hurry while Earnest’s back was
turned. He was going to show Master
James. He screamed without stopping, until
Betsy put a poultice on his hand; his first experience with real pain.
The scars formed raised angry lines
across his right palm and fingers. When
they cracked open, it made it hard to write or hold the file or do
anything. Emma’s lines on her back were like
that, she said. Earnest had lines on his back from something called Lightin Out
that must have hurt, too. Fancy never wanted to do that. For a while, he couldn’t even play marbles
with James and the other youngsters, till he practiced with his left hand a
lot. It took a while for him to read his
own writing again on the learning slate.
Once in a while, he had free
time. One day, what started as
cartwheels with playmates in the long green melon-scented grass, turned into a
pair of them rolling down the smooth hill behind Big House spinning like whirligigs. They ran up to the top of the hill again and
held each other tight and rolled together whumpity whumpity down the long hill. When they stopped rolling and he sat up
straddle the girl, Litany, who was the tutor’s daughter, he saw she was glowing
like the forge coals.
Suddenly, Betsy snatched him up by
the armpits and hissed: “You go on, Miss
Litany, before yo’ daddy sees what you kids is playing at.”
To Fancy, she said: “Ain’t you learned nothin, ‘cept numbers and
names?”
He involuntarily thought: Homo Sapiens Negroides, as he’d been taught
with Master James. In front of a long
mirror, Tutor Foster had made him strip off his clothes alongside a detailed
drawing of a white boy. Master James
made scritching sounds on his slate, while the Tutor pointed out Fancy’s
dissimilarities: “Notice the
disproportionate bone length of the thigh,” he said. Fancy’s cheeks had burned while he shivered
in front of the mirror.
Then James held up his slate with a
scarecrow drawn on it and Fancy laughed explosively, since he had expected to
see himself, looking giraffe-legged and peanut-headed. The tutor caned him twice on the thighs in
question.
In September, Tutor judged them in
a poetry competition, which Master James won, whose entry the Tutor called
‘moving’ and ‘beyond his years.’ The
theme was: Zeus and his children, from a picture that Tutor showed them in a
book. They wrote poems about the picture
of a girl and a swan.
Master James wrote something that
included:
“gat upon the heaving hips,
and pecked her berried, jasmine lips.”
Fancy decided to ask his friend,
Long Jake, to tell him more about the gatting and the hips.
Fancy had written:
“Where Zeus sat by the brook, I told
him ‘look,’ and Leto floated by, whose life she took.”
Tutor had wiped Fancy’s slate off
in disgust and accused him of writing down anything that came into his mind and
calling it poetry, and some other things.
He should apply himself to his numbers.
Fancy had
learned a fair amount about gatting on the hips while he lived with Betsy, though
he was supposed to stay buried on the floor down below the bed in blankets when
Betsy had a man sleep with her instead of him.
Before Fancy
was born, Master had moved Earnest, the Smith, into Betsy’s bedroom; but when
no children came of it, Master moved him out and tried another buck. “Not right,” said Earnest. “Won’t do it.” Earnest had a wife somewhere. Unlike Earnest, other men weren’t of the
Book, so Betsy had had many roommates and several children.
By age seven, Fancy
could keep track and was sometimes given to Betsy in the kitchen. He also found himself going to town with Long
Jake for supplies. During the dusty
ride, he explained to Long Jake all about Zeus and rhyming and all the numbers
and negroids’ longer bones and smaller brains.
He got to
carry the shopping list through the doors of the Mercantile, past the big
barrel of pickles, the stacks of fence wire and tables of colored cloth. The list said: a packet of needles, a spool of pink thread
and a small bag of peppercorns. Long
Jake was waiting alongside the front door of the store, with the mule
cart. The total came to two-eighty.
Fancy handed
over the three Master Dollars, as though he was turning in a slate of numbers
to Tutor.
The shopkeeper
folded them into his apron pocket and held out his hand again. “Pay up now, boy.”
“I give you
three!” Fancy was outraged. For this counting, he didn’t need his
slate. “I give you ‘em all! Look on the floor, maybe! I give you three! NO!!”
The
shopkeeper’s hand crashed down across his face and Fancy fell onto a burlap of
potatoes. Long Jake’s strong hands
fastened around his ribs and hugged him up into his arms.
Long Jake
carried the purchases in paper in his pocket with a note for Master. Fancy, fuming and bruised, walked alongside
the rig. “I didn’t lose it; I give it to
‘im!” His head throbbed and his face
felt huge.
Jake
said: “Only one way outa this now. If you don’ member losin' them on the way
there, best member losin' them for we gets back. Those dollars is lost, but you ain’t, yet.”
Fancy looked
like he was choking on something.
“Take it easy,
boy. Some things is what they is.”
“He…” said
Fancy.
“Point is,”
said Long Jake, “that shopkeeper that way, right? Some things just is and needs to be
‘pproached they’s way. You ain’t gonna
change them. You gotta change how you
goes after them. Take it slow now. I mean, real slow. Let ‘em think you is dumb.”
“I ain’t
dumb.”
“No, I know
you ain’t dumb. Point is, if they think
you is dumb, you gonna be alright. And
slow and easy fit right into dumb.”
Master gave
Fancy a choice. Be whipped eight times
or choose another slave to take the whip for him. Or divide it up. He could think about it during the night.
Still furious
with the shopkeeper, at sundown Fancy decided he would take as many lashes as
he could, which in his brave, angry, seven year old mind was four or five or
seven, at least, and maybe all eight, if he could hold his breath and bite
something between his teeth. He could
ask Earnest to hold still for one or two lashes, if he needed to, since he was
strong and healthy and had done it before and probably already knew about
breath holding. He could even ask Emma
to do one lash, if he had to, since he knew she would forgive him.
As dawn lit up
the trees, fences, grass and white wash of the plantation and chickens clucked,
cicadas clicked and milk drilled into the buckets in the barn, Emma came to the
kitchen door. “Betsy, I need the boy,”
she said. Fancy had already built up the
fire, so the timing was fine.
In air thin
and crisp, Emma led the way past the store house, past the patch-planked
servants’ Quarters, where the hands and Earnest lived.
At the old
footbridge across the river, slick with moss and loose with rot, Emma
said: “You smart, but there ain’t enough
time to let you understand what being owned is about and what being sold
is. You’s been young and that’s one
thing. You ain’t ready, but they gonna
whip you. Whip my boy. When they whip you, being young gonna be over,
being Songhai gonna be over. You think
you is part Master and part Earnest and part everybody and you ain’t. You black and you Songhai, but whipped so
young, you gonna be just a slave. We
never did s’posed to even be here.”
And Emma
snatched him from behind, wrapped her legs around his. She pinned his arms and threw their bodies
into the water. Desperate, he wriggled
against her like a netted fish. She
looked thin as a frayed thread, but was strong as ropes.
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