Respectable Trade (23 page)

She followed them into the parlor and watched them sit in their usual places. She gave them a small smile. “Hello,” she said.

Their faces were smooth and unchanging, like ebony.

For once Frances and the slaves were virtually alone. Bates stood at the door holding the whip across him, but he was not listening nor watching. He was a bored sentinel, standing at his post. Miss Cole’s window seat was empty. Frances gazed at Mehuru, disregarding the others. She felt restless and lightheaded. “Mehuru,” she repeated. He looked at her but said nothing.

She glanced around the room, wondering what she could teach them. She went to the window, took a handful of the curtain material, and showed it to them. “Curtain,” Frances said.

She looked at Mehuru. “Curtain,” she said again. She nodded at him. “Curtain,” she said more firmly.

Mehuru suppressed a small, unhappy sigh. “Curt-dane.”

“That’s right!” Frances said brightly. “Curtain.”

She tapped on the window. “Window,” she told them.

“Win-dow.”

She took her seat at the head of the table and pointed to the back of her chair. “Chair,” she said. They repeated it dully. Then she slapped the table before her.

“What’s this?” she asked Mehuru. “What’s this?”

“Table,” he said easily.

She pointed to the curtain and the window and the chair. He repeated all the names. He had learned them instantly; he did not need a second reminder. He was learning nouns with the facility and speed of a linguist. He had always known a good deal of Portuguese; another European language was not difficult for him. He listened to the orders from John Bates, he eavesdropped while he waited in the kitchen. He was putting together words and meanings all the time. Frances was teaching him single words like a child, while he was stringing together
sentences and guessing at their meaning every time he was taken from the cellar.

Frances rose from her seat and went to the window. He watched her carefully, without seeming to watch her, as a man will watch an animal when he is not certain if it is tame or wild.

“Come here” she beckoned him. He rose and went carefully toward her, his bare feet silent on the boards and the rugs. She liked to command him. She liked the way he came silently to her side. In all her life, she had been powerless before men, and now here was a man who moved like a dancer, in complete obedience to her smallest gesture.

“Look,” she said. She pointed out the window. “See, a ship. A ship.”

Mehuru had not seen the view from the front of the house before. He had seen nothing beyond the backyard but a small patch of dirty sky. Looking down from the parlor window, he could see, lying on the mud of the harbor at low tide, the ship that had brought them on the long, long journey from home. She did not look so fearsome now, he thought. Beached and unloaded, she looked vulnerable, not like the smooth, devouring monster of his nightmare.

He could see the gratings in the deck, which had been his sky for those long months, lifted out and leaning on the railed side of the ship. He could see the hold, which had been his world, scoured clean and ready for reloading. The sails were stripped from the masts. They were being resewn and repaired in sail lofts on the top floors of the warehouses. There were sailors seated on the dockside retying the ropes and cables. Mehuru recognized the cycle of preparation and readiness. Soon the ship would sail again, he thought. Sail that long journey over those gray, dangerous seas and then wait off the coast of his homeland for people, his people, to be snatched in their twos and threes and gathered together in a dreadful poaching expedition and taken away to their death, or to a life so cruel that they would wish themselves dead many and many times.

“Ship.” Frances smiled. “Ship. You know that ship—that is the
Daisy,
which brought you here.”

Mehuru nodded. He knew that ship. He knew it better than any sailor could know it, for it was the blood from his back in the timbers of the hold, and his bare feet that had danced on deck, and his pride and his joy and his manhood that had drained down into the stinking bilges. He knew that ship.

“Ship,” he said coldly.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” John Bates said from the doorway. “But the little ones are crying again.”

The smallest child was hunched in his seat, rocking himself. Unstoppable tears poured down his face. The little boy next to him, only five years old, was holding the sleeve of the Fulani woman to his face. His shoulders were shaking as he sobbed. The two seven-year-old children, the girl and the boy, were dry-eyed but anxious; they looked ready to weep at any moment. Frances looked around at them.

“Now!” she said brightly, taking up a plate from the sideboard. “What is this?”

The lesson continued with the naming of things until Brown tapped on the parlor door and peeped in. “It’s the farrier, ma’am,” she said. “He’s brought the thing you ordered.”

“That will be the bridle,” Frances said. She glanced nervously at Mehuru. He listened carefully, trying to follow the inflections of her speech. He did not understand the words, but he saw her quick, guilty look.

“What?” Kbara tapped on the table urgently.

“Don’t know,” he tapped back.

“Perhaps you had better take them away,” Frances said to John Bates. “Put the bridle on her in the cellar.”

“I’ll do it when they’re chained,” he said. “That big one, the pagan, he might cause trouble.”

“Very well,” Frances agreed. She wanted nothing to do with it. She did not want to see the bridle being fitted. She did not want to hear of any struggle.

“I’ll take the lad down with me, and I’ll wear my pistols,” Bates told her. “If she struggles, I may have to whip her.”

Frances hesitated. She looked at the woman. She was lifeless; she had taken no part in the lesson, she had said nothing and made no sound. Her eyes were sunk in her head; she was blind with despair. She seemed to hear nothing and know nothing. “Very well,” Frances said, abandoning her. “Whatever you think best.”

Bates nodded and opened the door. He jerked the chain on the neck rings, and the slaves formed up into a line. There was a spatter of rain on the parlor windows. Mehuru shivered at the sound of it. At home there was a short season of rains and a long season of dry, hot weather. He could not understand a country where it rained chilly, damp rain every day. He thought he would never be warm again. Even if he were miraculously transported home, sprawled by the side of the river in the middle of the day, he thought he would still feel this deathly chill in his bones and smell this stink of decay.

He stumbled as he went down the steps into the cellar and jerked the chain on the neck ring of the smallest child who was following. The child did not even cry out against the pain. He seemed to be in a deep silence, too deep and too filled with despair for any protest. Mehuru put a hand down to him, but the child did not look up. He was still crying silently.

The lad secured them to the wall, running the chain from each collar through the rings fixed on the wall. Then Bates and the lad came and unfastened the chain for Died of Shame. She did not protest. She did not look to Mehuru for help. She went dully with them, not knowing what they wanted of her, no longer caring what they might do.

“We could have her, and no one would know,” the lad said. He giggled, an odd, lively sound in the quiet cave.

“Go on, then,” Bates said, uncaringly. “The gentlemen did, why not us?”

They laid the woman down on the floor, and she lay still and
turned her head away from them and closed her eyes. The lad took her first, quickly and fumblingly; then Bates followed him roughly. The woman said nothing except a grunt when Bates first thrust inside her. Mehuru, watching this tableau of cruelty as it was enacted before him at his very feet, felt himself dizzy with rage, dizzy with pain, dizzy at his own helplessness.

The men got to their feet, but Died of Shame lay still.

“Is she all right?” the lad asked.

Bates kicked her experimentally with the toe of his boot. She did not move.

“Sister,” Mehuru said. Slowly, slowly, she turned her face and looked at him. He saw that her eyes were glazed. She had gone to somewhere they could not reach her, and it would be cruelty to call her back.

“You are in the keeping of your fathers,” Mehuru said to her blank, unseeing face. “They love you still.”

“Let’s get on with it,” Bates said. “I don’t like him.” He jerked his head toward Mehuru. “He’s learning fast. It’s not natural. She shouldn’t be teaching them like this. It’s not right.”

He picked up the bridle from the ground. “You hold her down,” he ordered. “Stand on the chains of her wrist and neck and beat her with the butt end of the whip if she fights me.”

He knelt at the woman’s head and forced her face roughly inside the mask. It was a plate of metal with a triangular hole cut away for her nose. A broad band ran across her mouth. The whole device was fastened behind her head with thick leather straps and buckles. Bates fitted it on her face and then pushed her head to one side to tighten the straps. She said nothing, made no move to resist. Mehuru, watching them handle her as if she were a doll, wondered if she had fainted, her neck was so slack. But then they dropped her head back on the floor, and he saw, gleaming on either side of the metal band, her blank black eyes.

“Chain her up,” Bates said.

They had to drag her to her feet and prop her against the
wall so that they could pass the chain for the collar through the ring on the wall. It was long enough for all of the slaves to stand or lie as they wished.

“Now go and fetch their dinner pail,” Bates said.

“What about her? She won’t be able to get anything to eat.”

“She can do without tonight. She’ll be hungry tomorrow, and then she can eat. Teach her a lesson.”

The boy sped away and came back as Bates put a new candle in the lantern, lit it, and hung it on the high hook. Bates watched the lad put the food pail, thirteen plates, and the pitcher of water with the tin mugs within reach of the slaves. Then he went out, locking the door behind him.

T
HE CANDLE HAD GUTTERED
into darkness, and the smallest children had been asleep for some time. The women had gathered the crying babies into their arms for comfort and slept with them held close. Mehuru had been waiting and listening a long while for Snake, but he did not come. He leaned back against the cold wall of the cave, closed his eyes, and readied himself for sleep.

Something touched his foot. “Obalawa,” a muffled voice said.

It was the woman who called herself Died of Shame. She was sleepless, her face half hidden by the bridle they had put on her. It covered her mouth completely, and her nose was bleeding on either side where it poked through the sharp edges of the roughly made hole. She had to speak through clamped lips, her speech distorted by the plate over her mouth. “You are an obalawa, a powerful priest.”

“I have been trained,” Mehuru said carefully. “I have dedicated my life. But I am losing my vision, sister. This country is making me blind.” He could hardly make out her speech, but he knew what she would want.

“They have gagged me like a dog. They have shamed me, and now they starve me.”

“I know, sister,” Mehuru replied gently. “I grieve for you.”

“Wish me dead, Obalawa,” she said simply. “I must go to my fathers. They may forgive me.”

He paused. “They may not allow us to bury you rightly. With your things . . .” He broke off. She had no things here. No cooking pot, no piece of chalk, no beads for her hair, no bowl, no spoon, no sharp knife, no hoeing stick, no purse with coins or cowrie shells, no comb. No little pretty women’s things that a young wife should have laid in her grave beside her, none of these things could go with Died of Shame to the other world. And her son, her young son who should be the first to say farewell to her, who should wash her face in the funeral rites and kiss her good-bye—she had left him before he could say more than her name, before he could do more than call and call for her, and never hear an answer.

She nodded. “The fathers may forgive me.”

“It might get better,” Mehuru said. “We might be freed. We might find a way home. To choose death is often a mistake as well as a sin against the breast of the earth.”

In the darkness her eyes gleamed alongside the gleam of the metal plate. She looked like a masked dancer summoned to dance at a funeral; she looked eerie, mysterious. “What do you see, Obalawa?”

Mehuru fixed his eyes on the gleam of the metal bridle that gagged her mouth. He looked into its dull light as if he might picture some future for them in the leaden sheen. Then he shook his head. “I do not see us going home,” he admitted.

“And I could not go,” she said simply. “Look again. Look at me. Look into me.”

Mehuru leaned forward and took her in—the blank, strange shapes of her masked face, the hunched shoulders of a woman in deep pain, the shapeless clothes that hid her round, smooth breasts and the pure line of her hips, and then he leaned a little closer, sensing the start of new life. He sighed a small, hidden breath. He could see Sir Charles’s baby.