Four

We were pushed off the ship roughly just as we had entered it, and it was chaos.  As we got off the ship, we were hustled into a marketplace with great crowds of people with skin lighter than mine shouting and calling at us.  I was shoved with the women and girls up on a platform.

I couldn’t stand still as I watched the crowd of men looking at me.  The men called out and shouted, pointing at the others around me.  I didn’t understand what they were saying or what was happening. 

Finally, the crowd of women around me began to thin out, and most of the others around me had been older and were chosen already.  The ones looking at us had white skin, but all the ones around me reminded me of my mother and my father.  I hadn’t seen either one of them since we got on the boat. 

My bare legs were dusty, and my shoes were tattered.  I smiled to myself as I thought about my mother sewing the long brightly colored dress I was still wearing.  She had made it for me to wear to Uncle’s wedding.  I fidgeted and pulled at the hem where it was dark-stained and torn.  I hoped I could find some water soon to wash the dress.  I looked up to see the men leer at me.   I had seen that look on Uncle’s face when he whistled at the girls on the street.  I wasn’t quite sure what that look meant.  I couldn’t be as beautiful as my mother with her dark brown skin that shimmered in the sun.  My mother’s fingers were long and slim, and I remembered them gripping mine.

My gapped teeth chattered together as the sun went behind a cloud.  My brother used to call me rabbit because of my teeth, but then he had laughed and said no that wasn’t right, I was the tortoise, always reliable, slow and steady.  My brown legs were thin, and I didn’t have nearly as much muscle as he did.  He won the town races every year, but he didn’t outrun the strangers. 

I still didn’t know why the men were looking at me like that.  My knees were so dry and sticky.  I stood there for a long time, until finally one of the last white men standing in front pointed to me.

“I’d like that one,” he said, jabbing a fat finger at me.

He was short and round, and had a fat head with small eyes.  He smiled broadly with dry, cracked lips.  His teeth were like the beads on the necklace my father had given to my mother when he returned from one of his trips across the grasslands.  My mother had worn the necklace at Uncle’s wedding party.  Each bead was a different size and shape and some of the beads were pale yellow like the haze-covered sun over the grassy plains, but others shined brighter white.  His nose was bulbous and red and his cheeks were wide and flat.  The clothes he wore were cleaner than my dress, but he was shabbier and was not as well-dressed as the other men who called out before him.

He came closer and squinted dimly at me.  His sweet smell reminded me of the medicine man who visited my father bringing him wormword.  His breath was warm and sour as he grabbed my face and chin to push and pull on my teeth.  I rubbed my jaw with the back of my hand as he roughly took me by the elbow, pulled up my arm, and felt my breast. 

“She looks like one who will have a lot of children,” he said then, squeezing my belly flesh.  “I’ll take her.”