Blonde Roots (20 page)

These silent otherworldly people, sizzling in the fuzz of heat, premature lines etched into each jaded face, transported me back to my own time on the islands so many years ago—so many light-years away from the coffeehouses and dance raves and high-rises and high society and all the glamour, garrulous-ness and gaudiness of the metropolis.

Here time passed so slowly—it didn’t, really.

In that moment the isolated bushmen encountered the urbanite I had become.

I could not reach them, nor they me.

They turned their attention back to the cane, and I remembered this much—that at harvest time their days would practically never stop and their nights would hardly begin.

As we trundled down the lane one of the women released a contralto that grew wings and soared above the cane:

It was so stirring that the song stayed with me long after it faded into the distance. Where had I heard it before?

Finally we came to a halt in the shadow of some low-lying thatched stone warehouses, which were slumped alongside a river like grumpy old men: straw hats pulled down low, mulling over old hurts, planning new vendettas. A sulky mulatto, covered in dust, loped out of a side door wearing a leather flap over his privates. His slim, tapered muscles had the perfect cut and carve of a twenty-year-old but his face had the enraged Why me? of slavery scrawled all over it like graffiti. Scratching his balls, he mumbled a greeting to King Shaka, registered me with a sharp tilt of his chin, sullenly off-loaded one sack at a time, initially doubling over with the weight of each one before attempting to straighten up.

He too seemed vaguely familiar, yet I could not explain why. KING SHAKA EXPLAINED THAT just behind us was the factory quarter: sugar mill, water mill, distillery and boiling house.

Way behind that was the Dong River Falls, which ran through the estate as the Dong River before passing out into open country.

Down in the south were the slaves’ quarters.

To the east lay a forest of pines—provider of timber and tinder.

KING SHAKA WALKED DOWN to the riverbank, picked up two gourds and dipped them in. Like most whytes on the islands he was so brown he could pass for mixed himself. The skin on his thick, square back sagged into folds underneath rounded shoulder blades. He wore a white loincloth, which showed off creased cheeks, and his stiff, thin, bandy legs rocked sideways when he walked.

He returned with a gourd swinging low from each hand.

Throwing back my head, I poured the cool mountain water into my mouth in huge, lip-smacking, greedy gulps, then watched as he unwrapped the green-and-white-spotted bandanna that had been tied around his forehead to gather sweat. Gray hair hung limply around the fringes of his peeling baldness. Squeezing liquid out of the cloth, he put it out to dry on the cart, smoothing it down, his movements meticulous.

He could control the little things in life.

Climbing down from the cart, I stretched and shook out my limbs, feeling the blood trying to circulate through the ruptured vessels in my back. Close up I could see that King Shaka was older than I had at first thought, perhaps in his seventies, quite an achievement in a society where few slaves survived beyond middle age.

His face was marinated in bitterness.

He perched himself on the cart and spoke to me in the language of the islands, which had evolved from the various tongues of the people who inhabited it. He told me that he had been born Arthur Ethelbert Reginald Williams, the fourth son of a humble fisherman who lived in a village called Margate in England. As a boy he’d been out picking cockles early one morning when he was kidnapped by men who had sailed in on a slave-raiding expedition.

He never got to say good-bye to his mum and dad.

Six decades later, he still thought of them every day.

Once he had arrived in New Ambossa, he was renamed King Shaka. It had long been popular on the islands for masters to give slaves the names of leading Aphrikans. Heading the lists of Most Popular Names for Slave Girls and Boys were: Muganzirwazza, Amina, Cetewayo, Sonni Ali, Cleopatra, Nehanda, Tipoo Tib, Nzingha, Tutankhamun and Yaa Asantewa. King Shaka had been in residence at Home Sweet Home since the days when Bwana was running the joint and had been promoted from cane-cutter to odd-job boy.

“Lissan,” he whispered with a cursory glance over his shoulder. “Don’t tri buk sistem becorze sistem bruk yu down furz. Massa Nonso? Him wurz dan him poopa. Yu betta beleev. Ah beg yu, don’t tri eskape becorze nowhere a-go, nowhere to hide and patrols goin ketch yu quick-quick an chop off yu fut.”

He waited cock-eared for a response, prompting a reassuring nod from yours truly. King Shaka would not go down for Spearheading the Revolution against our Aphrikan Oppressors, then.

I would have to watch him because, I suspected, he would be watching me.

Once we had both rehydrated, King Shaka took me behind the warehouses into the heart of the factory quarter to find Massa Rotimi, the estate manager. A formal introduction had to be made.

I knew then that I was being denied an audience with young Massa Nonso. Skilled slaves were a valued commodity on plantations, and as yours truly was a white-collar slave and not a manual laborer, I’d hoped Nonso would ignore his father’s orders and find desk work for me. The bosses were businessmen; they weren’t stupid. Why throw extensive office experience down the toilet? And hadn’t I suffered enough? One look at me, and this Massa Rotimi would surely see I was too weak to work out in the fields.

Our first port of call was the sugar mill, where cane juice had to be extracted within twenty-four hours of cutting or else it would start to rot. I found myself thrust into a large yard clogged up by a stream of carts delivering massive bundles of cane, which were off-loaded and carried into the mill. It was absolute chaos as slaves collided with one another trying to work faster than was sensible, under the bellowing orders of an overseer who stood on the back of a cart waving his arms about in a frenzy.

Conical smokestacks thirty feet high billowed smoke that darkened the sky, sending a smattering of black ash to rain down upon us. Gigantic blades rotated in the wind, powering the crushing rollers inside.

When the wooden door to the mill was flung open with such violence it nearly smashed into pieces, I knew it had to be the man in charge—Massa Rotimi. He strode out, bald, bullish, stabbing the ground with a carved wooden staff, barging into the crowd, shouting at the overseer to clear up the backlog of deliveries. Then he fixed his scowl on the newcomer hovering next to King Shaka, who, I noticed, shifted a little as if to create physical distance between us, as if he didn’t want my reputation to sully his. When Massa Rotimi looked me up and down with disdain, I had no doubt that he knew exactly who I was.

My job interview took place as he swept past, muttering out of the corner of his mouth that I’d been assigned to work in the mill and boiling house—immediately.

“Now get that damned hair cut or those rollers will scalp her!”

Well—nice to meet you too.

Before I knew what was happening, the dutiful King Shaka pushed me down by my shoulders so that I dropped to my knees. He whipped a penknife out of his pouch and began slashing away at my hair until only stubble remained.

Inside the mill, I encountered a beast with a vicious set of teeth being fed ripe cane stalks by a statuesque woman working at a speed I could not hope to match. She was introduced as Ye Memé, and she greeted her new coworker with a warm smile, my first proper welcome; although I noticed that her teeth were rotting, typical of plantation slaves for whom sucking the sweetness out of cane was an addiction. Yet even then, and even bareheaded, she was still a big-boned, sloe-eyed Viking beauty with proud sculptured cheekbones that held her skin smooth and taut.

Ye Memé showed me how to force-feed the herbivorous monster, but the syrupy stench of the cane set fire to my olfactory glands and whatever strength I possessed was quickly sapped. Before long I was crippled by new pains shooting across my back and ribs, yet when I dropped to the ground for a breather she gasped in horror, yanked me back up onto my feet and yelled over the rackety clunking of the mill’s machines that impromptu breaks weren’t allowed, and if I didn’t speed up I’d risk the lash of the bullwhip, and so would she. The factory overseer, she explained, liked to sneak in with the express purpose of catching slackers on whom he could vent his spleen.

I returned to work stuffing the Mouth, which masticated the stalks—grunting, spitting, dribbling, swallowing the sap-saliva down into its digestive system with burps and belches, until it was pissed out as gushing white foam, then sent on its way via a sluice to the boiling house. The crushed cane was pulled out the opposite end of the machine by another shaven-headed woman who threw the trash onto the floor. Children ran in and out to carry it to the boiling house, where it provided fuel.

Ye Memé told me that the jaws of this monster had ripped off more arms than she cared to remember: the rollers were fast, deadly, unstoppable.

“Be cyaful. Sloppiness mangel yu, or wurz—mek yu ded.”

As the mind-numbing, body-wrecking hours drew on, I summoned up all my mental resources not to succumb to my most desperate desire: to flop onto the stone floor and damn the consequences.

I had to survive, not just that afternoon, but the following days, months, years. Nonstop drudgery preceding an early death? I knew the stats—one in three slaves didn’t survive the first three years in the New World.

Bwana was right: “Thus will you know the difference.”

How I despised him.

When a tremor began in my legs, I tried to resist it.

When my whole body became racked by spasms, I collapsed on the ground.

Thank God for Ye Memé, who stopped work at great risk to herself, helped me back up, cradled me in the damp warmth of her soft-breasted, six-footer self while calming me down with a motherly, “Hush-now, furz few week bad-bad, den get betta.”

Had the overseer caught me “skiving” that day, and sliced my back open again, I know in my heart of hearts I would not have survived.

Ye Memé had saved my life.

AT SOME POINT OUR SHIFT was relieved. I crawled out into the yard that, under the hissing flames of torchlight, was still congested with carts delivering cane. Ye Memé took me to a spot underneath a date palm where other workers were resting on mats. She sat cross-legged, shared her meal of rice and black-eyed peas and fetched a gourd of brackish water for us to drink.

Appraising me in my state of stupor, she said, not without a hint of remonstration in her tone, “Feeld-wurk wurz. Yu luky, gyal. Yu luky!”

Assuming my day now over, assuming it was time for bed—wherever that was—the lead lids on my eyes slammed shut, only to fling themselves open when Ye Memé’s strong, sweaty hand gripped mine and yanked me up for the second time that day.

“Wurk! Iz wurk we hav to do. We nyot here to be happee. We nyot here to rest. We here to make plentee-plentee monee for Massa Nonso. Iz wurk what we do, gyal. Wurk! Wurk! Wurk! Now come!”

This was the point when I realized that the gap between myself and blue-collar slaves had well and truly closed.

Slick, sarcastic, sophisticated, opinionated, literate, numerate—no one gave a flying fuck here. I was now one of the anonymous masses on an island in the middle of nowhere where life was cheap and death came easy.

WHEN WE ENTERED THE BOILING HOUSE, it was so hot I wanted to pass out.

We joined other women who were hunched over kettles, boiling cane juice. Ye Memé taught me how to skim the scum off the top, then ladle the sap into ever smaller kettles until it started to harden. Dripping with sweat and steam, I looked around and saw my future: haggard, hunchbacked women whose arms were streaked with the darkened, congealed skin of old burns.

After hours spent bending over, I discovered that when I tried to straighten up to carry the kettles into the purgery, I couldn’t. My back had fossilized. Instead of walking, I shuffled. Instead of standing straight, I was bent double.

Then I had to pour the juice into coolers and vats and leave it to crystallise.

Ye Memé must have taken me to her hut at some point, and put me to sleep on a mat on the floor next to her children. I have no recollection except that some time later, while the night was still soaked in the pitch black of the moonless countryside, she splashed cold water onto my face to rouse me from the most impenetrable slumber, then massaged my legs to get them moving because they had become two heavy iron rods: no nerves, no muscles, no mobility.

My Viking friend hauled me back to the mill, as I tried to keep up with her strides.

“We must hurree. If we late, we git beet. Cyant be late.”

YE MEMÉ WAS a single working mother raising five children in a plantation society where most children grew up in broken homes. Prized for his sexual prowess and physical strength, one minute a male slave would be head of a household, the next he’d be sold off to a master on the other side of the island or abroad.

Motherhood was far from straightforward too, because managing to actually keep your children depended on your master’s whim. A canny master would let the family stay together. Happy workers were more productive, after all. However, should it make greater economic sense, or should his finances nosedive, or should he be simply coldhearted, malicious or just plain indifferent, they’d all be sold off.

Mother no more.

And in the absence of proper child-care provision? Well, there was Granny Doda, Granny Abir and Granny Makeda, the plantation ancients. Only when they were too weak to lift a machete and too decrepit to work in the factory quarter were they put out to pasture, subsisting on the goodwill of their neighbors, whose rumbustious toddlers they looked after.