I decided that when I found the little bitch, as no doubt I would, I would be forced to exact a harsh penalty to recover my self-esteem and standing in the community.
Let us not forget that punishment for a runaway is usually the loss of a limb or a tongue, or even death.
It is quite the done thing.
I immediately sent out news of her escape and soon enough was notified that she had been spotted down at Doklanda, in the company of a well-known debutante from one of those misguided liberal-lefty Qua Ka families.
I decided to head the hunt myself.
A
cluster of moths crashed into each other in a tiny, heart-shaped space.
I tried to see who was standing in the doorway of the ship’s cabin, obscured by lamplight.
I was so sure it was Bwana.
If he found me, he would torture me, and I would probably die.
Once upon a time I’d had the hope of a decent future. Then it was stolen from me, and Bwana had benefited from my free services for the whole of my adult life.
He owed me.
I felt the fighter spirit stir within me and sprang up ready to defend myself.
I knew what I was capable of.
I had done it before.
I could do it again.
But when a shriveled Ambossan woman stepped out from behind the lamp, I froze.
Thank God it wasn’t him.
She lowered the lamp, illuminating a face whose deep crevices fanned out from its center.
A black bombazine wrappa rustled as she walked.
“Don’t be startled,” she said, shaking her head, setting her pronounced chicken wattle quivering. “We going to get you home safely. The name’s Harrida and I’m on your side.”
I recognized the accent of the Amarikan South, which had vowels so drawn out they went to sleep before the end of a word.
“You been dead to the world, girl. You got a nasty shock passing out there on the docks. Poor Ezinwene had to drag you up the gangway with everybody most likely wondering what was going on.”
She beckoned me to sit down.
“Now get some of this soup down you. It’s got bushmeat and sweet potato in it. Bet that sounds good.”
“I was worried that she would betray me,” I blurted out.
“Ah no, she’s a good girl—young but trustworthy. She helped us once before, and we’ll use her again because who’d suspect the flirtatious debutante Ezinwene of such clever subterfuge? Praise be the gods!”
She handed me the soup.
I sat down and ate, savoring, thinking that surely we were on the open seas by now and far away from the danger of the docks.
The rhythm of the rolling boat beneath us reassured me, as did this kindly lady.
It turned out that Harrida had been born the only daughter of a wealthy cotton planter in the Lone Star Administrative District of Te Xasa in Amarika.
“Slavery never sat right with me,” she said. “Just me and my daddy lived in a great big old house with more rooms than I could count and forty domestic slaves working round the clock so’s we didn’ t have to lift a darned finger. Hundreds more were literally worked to death in the fields just so’s my daddy could make more money than he’d ever have reason to spend. There were so many half-breed girls who looked like me too, I lost count. Yet none of them was allowed to come talk or play with me, and most of them ended up getting their backsides whupped for one thing or another. My daddy said he’d kill anyone who ever laid a finger on me. Nope. It just didn’t sit right.”
As soon as she was old enough, she left, financing her independence by selling the jewels inherited from her dead mother. She began working for the Free Ferry Service, which sent missionaries to convert Europane natives to Voodoo.
Runaways were hidden in secret cabins. None had so far been captured.
“You will soon be free, my dear,” she said. “Free,” she repeated, letting the word take flight, like a solitary seagull speeding across a sparkling ocean on a glorious day.
Hallelujah!
In the morning we’d be at the mouth of the River Temz, then we’d enter the Ambossan Channel and eventually dip down toward the Atlantic and be on our way to Europa.
I had finished eating and drank from the gourd of water she offered.
She told me I could go on deck as it was almost dark, but I had to stay out of sight.
“Your life is in our hands and our lives are in your hands. Remember that.”
As I made my way out, she hunkered down, spread her shawl on the cabin floor and emptied the contents of a goatskin pouch onto it.
Out tumbled cat’s teeth, claws, bunches of coarse animal hair, the jaws of a rodent, a little bundle of herbs, a snuff box, a candle.
I hoped it was on my behalf.
ALONE ON THE EMPTY DECK I sat out of sight on a coil of rope and peeped over the railing. I was surprised to see we were still only passing through the outer reaches of Londolo—zones 8, 9 and 10. I recognized the prosperous town of Green Wi Che, known for its shipbuilding yards, several of which we passed. We soon skirted the wide riverside factories of the arsenal town of Wool Wi Che, famous for manufacturing the finest spears, shields, crossbows, poison darts, muskets and cannons in the world.
Grotesque hippos lay entwined on top of each other in the mudflats, their rubbery, slimy skins like those of giant slugs, their eyes and ears a putrid pink. Two open-mouthed alpha males were squaring up to each other, jaws stretched wide, teeth interlocked inside.
A herd of ugly water buffalo traipsed like disgruntled hunchbacked farmhands through the mangroves.
A Temz crocodile pretended to sleep on the riverbank, mouth casually open, waiting to snap down hard on its next gullible prey.
Glimpsed between trees a powerful young hunter with shiny black thighs and thin calfs was hot on the heels of a wild boar.
A flock of egrets passed overhead, an exquisite flurry of white wings set against the red-streaked sky.
Soon we came to grassy plains where a herd of giraffe was grazing, wobbly-legged calfs taking refuge between their mothers’ legs.
Farther downriver an ungainly herd of elephants approached the water, making every other animal run for cover.
Far away I could just make out the mountain ranges of the Essex Massif.
Now that I was leaving, it all seemed quite scenic.
AT A BEND IN the river a signpost announced:
WELCOME TO THE CITY OF DARTFOR, TWINNED WITH CASABLANCA.
Coned rondavels, whitewashed villas and mud huts with corrugated roofs rubbed shoulders with one another on the hills. Municipal mud tower blocks rose high above them, laundry hanging colorfully from windows.
As the ship sailed silently past, Ambossan voices ebbed and flowed as people walked along the promenade or sat in cafés, while their children played beach football with green coconuts beneath the advertisements for the Acoca-Aloca fizzy drink, the red-and-white squiggle of its logo emblazoned on riverside billboards.
Under the arches of a bridge, skateboarding teenage boys with wild Aphros, beaded corsets and leather jockstraps hurtled up its sweeping walls, turned, hovered midair, then skidded down again with a whoop and a flourish.
Crouched in the shallows was the after-dinner crowd, chatting and shooting the shit.
A row of young adults sat flirting on a low harbor wall. The girls wore their hair shaved with a bushy topknot just above the forehead, their faces painted a bright yellow with white chalk dots circling each cheek, and wearing kohl-black lipstick. The boys sported thin hennaed dreadlocks and had green lines streaked down the centers of their noses.
Tips of cigarettes rose and fell like fireflies.
Two ancient fishermen with wrinkled stomachs dined at the end of a pier, scooping up rice from a large green ravenala leaf.
As we left Dartfor City a harvest rave was in full swing in an outlying field. Groins banged hard against crotches. Buttocks slid up and down thrusting pelvises. Legs shimmied in between each other while heads rolled from side to side. Drummers sat on a stage banging out super-fast rhythms while dancers wearing grass skirts shook their cheeks to the beat, exposing themselves to the crowd.
The drums pounded on in my bones for miles afterward as the ship rolled deeper into the Ambossan wilderness.
IF I REACHED OUT, I could almost touch the forest ferns.
The skeleton of a disused train carriage became visible where the trees thinned out, a plume of smoke coming out of its chimney.
The shriek of a jackal made me start.
Lemur eyes stared out as luminous orange disks from the branches of trees.
I could hear howler monkeys creating havoc inside the rain forest.
Waterborne creatures rippled in the river.
Airborne creatures flapped around me.
The darkness wrapped me up.
The darkness held me.
The darkness carried me.
I AM WALKING DOWN the lane toward our cottage and see Pa returning from work with his two grandsons who are strapping lads—Robert and John. They’re Sharon’s two boys.
Mam is sitting on a love seat cradling her latest granddaughter who is called Doris. She’s the first child of Alice.
Mam has filled out now and is ruddy-cheeked and she never talks of dying anymore.
Madge is sewing the hem of the wedding dress for her niece Rebecca’s marriage to a turnip farmer who owns three hundred acres. Rebecca is Sharon’s too.
Madge has never married and never will.
Sharon married a stable hand whose bushy-bearded good looks were supposed to make up for the absence of a princely pedigree. But she’s still looking over at the hills yonder, just in case.
Alice, sadly, is in a mental asylum.
Ah no, just kidding. She sees me first, comes running down the lane to give me the sister of all hugs.
There are three other teenagers there too. Two girls and a boy.
The girls look the spitting of me and the boy is a dead cert for Frank.
They’re helping Frank secure the last door on a beautifully inlaid cabinet he’s making. They’re teasing each other and laughing and the door nearly falls off and Frank tells them to behave, but you can see he’s not at all angry because he doesn’t stop grinning at their antics.
He’s not changed a bit. (Not had another woman since, either.)
The look on his face when he sees me is—priceless.
I DIDN’T WANT to return to my cabin.
My first night of freedom would be nothing like my first night of incarceration.
I found a sheltered spot on the deck, piled with empty sacks, and lay down.
I spread my wrappa over me.
The clouds and ship sailed with ease in the same direction.
The stars were close enough to pluck and wear as jewelry.
A pair of star-diamond earrings.
Stars threaded onto a silver necklace.
I felt my muscles unclamp from my bones.
Released, my limbs sank into the improvised mattress of sacks.
My scalp let go of its tight grip on my brain.
My thoughts floated light as an air bubble toward the sky.
I was going home, oh Lord.
I was going home.
A
warm, light-fingered mist seduced me into morning.
The ship was swaying from side to side so we must have moored for the night.
The rain forest loomed in front of me, a high wall of vegetation.
My mattress had molded to the fetal curve of my shape.
I stretched out, wriggling my toes, raising my arms above my head, feeling the rocks of my vertebrae pull away from each other.
I rotated my head from side to side to ease away the cricks.
I yawned loudly, just for the pleasure of it.
I felt so lighthearted, so youthful, so full of hope.
Morning dew brought out the smell of fish, embedded in the sacks.
What was for breakfast, I wondered. Boiled yam? Boiled cassava?
Soon it would be porridge: large flakes, creamy milk, sweetened with honey.
Rolling over, I climbed to my feet and strolled to the river side of the ship, to breathe in the quietude, to bathe my face in the moisturizing mist, to overhear the unintelligible conversation of birds, to gaze upon the watercolor Temz, which now seemed so beautiful draped in its gauzy bridal veil.
Yellow-billed storks waded through the rushes.
A wadi fed into the river, a gaggle of white swans paddling down it.
That day the Temz would carry me downstream until it pulled me far away from Great Ambossa.
I was looking up toward the heavens, as the rising sun began to bleed a pastel pink through the nebulous gray, when a ship pulled up alongside ours, with all the stealth of a silent assassin.
And there he was, standing high on the gun deck.
Two hundred feet tall, three hundred feet wide.
An expensive black-and-gold striped wrappa was tied around his waist, one end flung over a shoulder.
I heard Harrida behind me, “Come inside! We will deal with this. Come inside, dear. Come inside!”
But she did not know the nature of this beast.
No way, Bwana. No way was I going down.
I dashed to the forest side of the ship.
I climbed over the railings and dropped into the river, not caring that its aquatic citizens might relish a slender white drumstick for breakfast. I dog-paddled my way through the river, gripped the roots of a fortress of trees and tried to lever myself onto their unyielding limbs.
My mind was more agile than my body. I kept slipping, but finally managed to clamber up onto the bank.
Just before I disappeared into the trees, I turned around.
Bwana was spewing orders. Men were running up and down the decks of both ships. Harrida was scurrying back down belowdeck, hands cupped over her mouth.