THE BOOK OF NEGROES (17 page)

I said I was relieved about that.

“Pockmarks on your face a good thing, chile.”

“Why?”

“You need something to ugly you up. You’re like a flower now, and that ain’t good.”

GEORGIA WAS RIGHT. I was well in time for the indigo harvest. The night before it began, Georgia and I lugged buckets from a storehouse and set them outside the other Negroes’ doors.

“What is that for?” I asked.

“Piss,” Georgia said.

That night, all fifty slaves on Appleby’s plantation stood or squatted over the buckets to urinate. And the next morning, Georgia and I hauled each stinking one down to the vats that I had scrubbed so carefully in the spring. By the time we were finished hauling, Mamed and all the others were assembled. Mamed gave orders, but everyone but Fomba and
I knew exactly what to do. Mamed set Fomba to chopping down the indigo plants close to the ground. Fomba couldn’t follow the instructions. Mamed pulled him to the side, put another man in his place, and then told me to bundle the indigo stems and leaves in my arms and put them in the vats.

“Not so fast,” Georgia said, panting to keep up with me. On the outskirts of our busy group, I saw Appleby. He had been gone for a few months, and I had stopped thinking about him.

“Master Apbee watching,” I whispered, “and Mamed said hurry.”

“Not that much. It too hot. You got to last all day. You got to do this nice and easy.”

The indigo scratched my arms badly. I was in a hurry to get it away from my skin, so I dumped it quickly into a vat. Mamed’s cane crashed across my leg. I was furious that Mamed had hit me again, especially after I had worked so hard to clean the vats earlier in the spring. In that moment, I wasn’t afraid of him. I was only angry.

Mamed grabbed my arm. “Smooth walking,” he said. “Hurry, but don’t run. The indigo is like a sleeping baby. Walk smooth, so it doesn’t wake.”

I tried to shake loose of his grip, but he held on to me.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the leaves in Georgia’s arms. “See that fine powder?” I saw the trace of dust on the leaves. “You shake the leaves, the dust falls off. We work for the dust. The dust is what we want. Smooth walking. Gentle with the plants.”

I looked fiercely at Mamed, but then I noticed Appleby watching carefully. The flies and mosquitoes buzzed around us, getting into my ears and hair. Two Negroes used the cedar boughs to fan Appleby, and four more fanned the vats to keep the insects from landing.

“Gentle,” I repeated. “Gentle.”

Mamed let go of my arm and I slid back into the flow of work, moving as he’d told me. An hour later, Appleby pulled me aside.

“You. Meena.”

I was surprised that he knew my name. I gazed down at my feet, as Georgia had taught me.

“You sensible nigger?”

“Yessir.”

“You learn fast,” he said.

“Just sensible, Master Apbee.”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve years,” I said.

“What can you do?”

Georgia had prepared me for this question. “Make soap and slop hogs,” I said.

“Is that all?”

“No, sir.”

“What else can you do?”

I saw Georgia watching. “Hoe fields,” I said. “Clean vats, catch babies.”

“How you learn that?”

“Done learn it from Georgia,” I told Appleby.

“Girl, what are these marks on your neck?”

“Dunno, Master.”

“Girl, you had the pox?”

“Dunno, Master.”

“Keep working and listen to Georgia,” he said.

“Yes, Master.”

Appleby turned away from me and back to Mamed. “She’ll turn out fine next season,” he said, and left for the big house.

Returning to work, I helped let the stinking liquid run into the second set of vats, to which were attached long, forked poles. At the end of each pole was a bucket with the bottom cut out. Georgia showed me how to use the pole to stir the liquid. I had to stir violently and consistently. I
stirred one vat, and right next to me Georgia stirred another. My arms burned with fatigue, but Georgia stirred on and on. When I had to rest, Georgia stirred her vat with one hand and my vat with the other. I slapped at the mosquitoes and resumed stirring. Eventually the liquid in the second set of vats began to foam. Mamed added oil from a separate leather bucket. When blue mud formed at the bottom of the vats, the water was drawn off into a third set of vats.

“This here is what we want,” Georgia said, pointing to the mud in the second vat.

While the mud dried, Georgia and I waved the cedar boughs to keep the flies away. Mamed and the men scooped the mud into heavy sacks and hung them up so the liquid could drip out. Then we used wide, flat paddles to spread out the mud in a drying shed. It was hard to keep from choking on the stink when we formed the mud into cakes and loaded it into wooden casks.

We worked from darkness in the morning until darkness at night. In the yard outside our home, Georgia and I kept a fire burning under a huge cauldron of water. Before we went to bed, no matter how late it was and no matter how much our arms ached, we scooped out buckets of water, carried them off to the woods, and washed ourselves clean under the stars.

“What they do with all that mud?” I asked.

“Turns the white man’s clothes blue,” Georgia said.

“That mud is for their clothes?”

“Last time he came by, Master Apbee was wearing a blue shirt. Ain’t you seen it?”

I told her I didn’t remember.

“Fifty niggers pull piss out of mud for Master Apbee’s shirt,” she said.

Georgia grumbled about all the hard work during the harvest, but she too was drawn to the indigo. Because Georgia tended to Mamed’s sores
and cuts, he let her take small quantities of indigo leaves and one or two pouches of mud. Georgia could make a paste from the leaves to ease the hemorrhoids that women developed while straining to push out their babies, but she also used the mud for her own experiments.

“Here I is, a grown woman messing with mud,” she said, snorting and laughing.

I sat on my haunches and watched as Georgia stirred water into indigo mud in a big gourd. “Can’t say why I like it so. When I was just knee high, I had a blind dog. He was a pretty dog, never bit a soul, and stone blind. Couldn’t see a thing. But I didn’t know any more than that dog. Stick in the mud was all I saw. I just loved to poke that stick in the mud.”

Georgia left some cloth to soak in the gourd. By the next morning, the cloth had turned a light shade of blue. When she pulled it from the gourd and held it up in the sun, the cloth looked like it had been cut out of the sky. While we worked, she set the cloth back in the liquid. When she stretched it out again it was darker, more purple, like my favourite flower in the woods—blue-eyed grass. Georgia shook her head and dunked it again. This time it turned the colour of a night sky with a full moon glowing.

“There,” Georgia said, and set it by the fire.

When Georgia’s hair was finally covered by the dried, dyed cloth, I paused to admire the shade of indigo above the wrinkles by her eyes and the corners of her mouth. It seemed that both the scarf and the face had soaked up the wisdom and the beauty of the world.

For weeks we harvested and processed indigo. On the last day of our work, I dropped a sack of indigo mud. It fell onto the ground and was completely spoiled. Mamed grabbed my arm fiercely, his fingers pushing into my tired muscle.

“
Allahu Akbar
,” I cried out without thinking. I feared Mamed would beat me for uttering a trace of the forbidden prayer, but he released my arm and stepped away.
“Allahu Akbar,”
he murmured so that only I could hear.

He motioned for me to follow him to the edge of the woods.

“How did you learn those words?” he whispered.

“From my father.”

“He spoke Arabic?”

“In prayer.” I watched his cane, which was still by his side. “Are you going to beat me again?”

“For what?”

“For saying the words. For saying I had a father.”

“No. I am not going to beat you.”

The tiny reassurance allowed the anger to come flooding out of me. “Stop grabbing me. It hurts. You leave marks on my arms.”

“The hard work ends today,” he said. “The harvest is over. This evening, after you have eaten, come see me.”

I could not forget the sensation of Mamed’s fingers digging into my skin. Perhaps, however, there was something to learn from the man who spoke the same words as my father. Georgia was teaching me how to survive in the land of the buckra, but maybe Mamed could teach me how to get out.

Mamed lived in the last of the slave huts. It was located at one of the far ends of our horseshoe-shaped arrangement of homes. Twice as big as the others, Mamed’s home had thick walls made out of lime, sand and oyster shells. Although Georgia and I had a mud floor, Mamed built his wooden floor off the ground. We had a door but no window, but he had both. Our space was just big enough for a bed and a stool and room to “get out the door,” as Georgia liked to say, but Mamed had room for two stools, a fireplace with a chimney, a little table and a shelf lined with books.

It was pitch dark outside, but Mamed had a candle burning. His bed was made with wood, raised well off the ground and covered with straw and cloth. He had extra blankets.

I looked around the cabin and inched closer to the door.

“I brought you here to talk,” he said, speaking in the style of Appleby. “Shall I teach you to speak like the buckra?”

“I dunno.”

“I could teach you. Do you understand it?”

“Some.”

“You are afraid I will hurt you,” he said.

I held my words. When Master Appleby looked at me, his eyes roamed all over my body. Mamed was staring at me, but straight into my eyes, as if he sought to evaluate and understand me. Mamed scooped up a stool and brought it over to me.

“Sit,” he said.

The seat, worn smooth, had been polished with oil. It rested on four solid legs, connected by crossbars fitting into grooves in the wood. It was simple, elegant, and made me think of home.

“Where did this come from?” I asked.

“I made it.”

“How?”

“From a cypress log.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“When you have time, you can make things of beauty. Even here, in the land of the buckra.”

“Is this your land?”

“Do you mean, am I an African or a Negro?”

I nodded. Mamed patted the stool and waited while I lowered myself slowly onto it. His father had been a buckra plantation owner from Coosaw Island, and his mother the daughter of a Fula chief, he said. Mamed’s mother had learned to read from her master. He had promised to free her, and Mamed too, one day. She remembered a few prayers from her homeland, and taught them to Mamed along with every single thing that the buckra taught her.

I liked hearing his story and I liked his melodious voice. He had nicks and cuts all over his arms, but now he didn’t seem like an overseer with a raised cane. He seemed like a different man—like a man who was willing to teach.

If Papa had lived and crossed the river with me, he would have been encouraging me to learn. But I dared not ask Mamed the thing I wanted. If he knew so much, I wondered, why was he still on Appleby’s plantation? He saw the question in my eyes.

“A horse fell on my leg when I was young, made me lame, and now I am also too old to run,” Mamed said.

“Where do Negroes run?” I asked.

Mamed studied me carefully, locking his fingers together. He said they hid among the Indians or they went south to live with the Spanish. But he didn’t want to hide with the Indians or live in Fort Musa with the Spanish. He liked sleeping in the same bed every night and having a garden to tend.

“You accept your life this way?” I said.

Mamed coughed uncomfortably. “I stay here and live well. This is the best that I can do. Nobody knows the indigo work better than me—and Master Appleby knows it.”

Mamed said he had made a deal with Appleby. If Mamed managed the plantation and kept producing good indigo mud, he could eat what he wanted, organize his home the way he wanted, and get extra supplies from Charles Town as well as books every year from Appleby. But he was to keep his home locked, and not to show the books to any person or to teach any Negro how to read.

I nodded again.

“I was not planning to teach reading to anyone. But I have seen the brightness of your eyes.”

So much had been taken from me that was mine by rights—my mother, my father, my land, my freedom. And now I was being offered something
I might never have received. I was afraid to reach out and take it, but even more afraid to let it go.

“I have wanted to read forever,” I said. “Since before I crossed the big river.”

“The buckra do not call it a river. They call it a sea. Or an ocean. They call it the Atlantic Ocean.”

“The Atlantic Ocean,” I repeated.

“You mustn’t tell anybody about the things I teach,” Mamed said.

I promise.

“No one must know,” he insisted.

I met his eyes and calmly nodded.

Our first lesson began with the pronunciation and spelling of my name. Mamed was the only person in South Carolina who ever asked for my whole name. He spoke it properly, and then he taught me how to write it. But on the plantation he would always call me Meena.

GEORGIA WAS WAITING when I climbed into bed.

“Did that man mess with you?” she said.

“No.”

“What he want?”

“Just talk.”

“Menfolk don’t just talk.”

“Just talk was all.”

Georgia let a moment pass. “When you were ‘just talking,’ Miss Meena, someone came for you.”

“Came for me?” I jumped out of bed. Already in this day, the impossible had become possible. “Someone came to take me home?”

“Sit down, girl,” Georgia said. “It was just a boy. Size of a little man, but he nothing but a boy.”

I climbed back into bed. “What boy?” I asked, quietly.

“He asked for you in that African name. He is called something just as funny. Something like—”

“Chekura?”

“That’s it. That’s his name.”

I jumped up again, shrieking.

“Shush up, girl, before you wake the dead or someone worse.”