One

                I was just a girl when my family was put on a boat heading to the Americas.  Not long before that day, my brother came running over the hill into town.  He had been playing a game of stick ball with his friends.  And far behind him, sucking air through their mouths until the spaces between the ribs showed, puffed his friends.  Akin whistled a tune through his front teeth.  He bounced the ball on his knee, hit it with his head, passed it behind his back, and kicked it to hit me in the leg. 

 “Always working.  You’re so serious and never play,” Akin called to me.  He laughed at me as I tended the goats.  I raked the muck from under them and shooed the goats away from around my legs. 

“Your goats will be taken in the night,” said Akin.

            “Without my goats, we would have no milk to drink.  And who would take my goats?”  I called back to Akin, loud enough to be heard over the goats bleating.  “All the families have goats.”

             “The lions are roaming near the village again,” Akin said, close enough now that his boy sour wrinkled my nose.  “Uncle saw them again last night.”  He dropped his voice lower and jabbed me in the arm.  “You better lock your goats inside the fence tonight.  Or you will have nothing but bones in the morning.”  Akin’s mouth twisted and his eyebrows raised up.  His face reminded me of the time Uncle told a joke about an elephant trying to mount a rhinoceros.

We climbed a tree to see out to the grasslands of East Africa.  The waist-high grasses waved in the wind.  A herd of elephants roamed in the distance.  An elephant trumpeted, and I looked further past the herd to see a lion taking down the smallest elephant. 

After school, we all circled around two boys.  Akin spun them with their eyes closed until they were too dizzy to run straight.  One played the lion, the other was the goat.  We chanted the lion’s name, Mbube, Mbube, calling faster and faster as he got closer to catching the goat.  Akin spun them again, and we chanted slower now as the lion, too dizzy to catch the goat this time, fell at my feet.  We sang the song as we walked back across the hills to our houses.  As the sun went down behind the trees, I still sang Mbube softly to myself.  I led the goats into their pen and latched it shut.

In the morning, I awakened to listen for the bleating of my goats.  I looked out over the hilly grasslands at the sunrise and heard the bell on the littlest goat.  I opened the gate to let them out of the pen so they could forage over the hill together.  The lush grasses whooshed and clattered in the wind.  In the yard outside the house, I fed the chickens and swept the litter from the yard.

My mother stood at the doorsteps.  I kissed her goodbye and ran to catch my brother.  At school, Akin’s friend whispered that a lion had snatched an infant child.   The baby’s father had chased the lion away to the edge of the village, but it ran off with the child in his jaws.

The next day, we heard in the village that two lions had come in the dark of night and stolen a family with four children.  The young girl’s toy had been left, but the family could not be found.  Rumors of kidnappings continued to swirl around town.  We heard that the lions were aided by sleek long-necked giraffes who plucked boys right from the trees they climbed to escape.

Then Uncle told us a pack of lions came into the next town just over the hill and kidnapped a whole village of people in the dark of the night.  As children, we had always heard these stories from our parents to convince us to come inside from playing before night turned the town blacker than Uncle’s skin.  When he told his story now, Uncle’s eyes were bloodshot, and his face wrinkled and contorted in the way it did when he talked about the man who cheated him out of money.

School was cancelled in the morning because the teacher was missing.  We walked across the hilltops to the next town.  Nothing was there but a left-behind shoe, dusty and worn, ripped by an animal with sharp teeth. 

A few days later, the lions arrived in our village.  Akin picked me up and ran, but he was not as fast as the lions.  They outran him, beat him senseless, and threw him on a horse.  Akin’s arm jutted the wrong way, and air whistled past the rib bone poking through his chest wall.  My father, my mother, Uncle, the horse carrying Akin’s listless body, and I marched for two days with all the people from our village to the coast where a boat awaited us. 

*Photo courtesy of Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

Two

           We marched in a snaking line chained together by our arms and one leg.  The boy chained behind me was one of Akin’s friends from school, Farhani.  He was small and followed after Akin, chasing behind him to keep up.  Akin would tease him and say, “Here comes Last One.”  And there would be Farhani, far behind.  But Farhani didn’t seem to mind.  No one was faster than Akin.  There were other children he could have followed, other children who wouldn’t run past him on the way to school.  But Akin always let Farhani have the longest stick, and he paid attention to him.  Farhani always hung with Akin and with me.  Sometimes he was still there when we ate dinner after my father returned home from hunting when he brought back grasses or bone to make medicine for our people.  

“Do you think Akin’s gonna be alright?” Farhani asked.  “Oh, see there, he’s looking up.”  We were chained together and were being pulled by the faster walkers in front of us.  Farhani hopped along behind me.  He was also leading Akin’s horse.  The captor who had charge of the horse when we started had finally given up and Farhani had volunteered.  He didn’t complain.

“I see Akin’s hand moving,” Farhani said a bit later.

It looked to me like Akin’s hand moved when the horse bumped him up, but I said nothing.  The men had tried to leave Akin behind in our village, but I had lain on the ground beside him wailing until two men lifted him up and threw him over the horse.  My mother cried in my father’s arms.  My father’s face betrayed nothing.

Farhani and I walked for a long time in the line chained together with all the people in our village.  The women sang rhythmically, in pace with our steps.  After several hours of walking, our captors beat them with reeds and forced them to stop singing.   We didn’t stop for food or drink the first day until evening fell.  That night, we finally stopped so the men could give us a small cup of water and a bit of bread.  They took away the horse and left Akin with us.  I gave him a bit of my bread.  We sat, with our line curved back around itself.  Soon a rumble moved through the group that the men who captured us laid out their bedrolls and were lying down to sleep.  It looked like we were going to stay there and weren’t going to march anymore that night.  From where I sat, I could see my father and mother, now huddled together.  My father’s brow wrinkled and tears fell from my mother’s eyes.  My father eyed me and my brother wearily.  Akin had fallen asleep, and his chest whistled in and out.  Finally I leaned against Farhani to try to get some sleep.

In the morning, they awoke us with the sunrise to get moving again.  I nudged Akin awake. 

“Come on, get up,” I said to him. 

Akin grunted but didn’t speak.  He barely opened his eyes.  The coiled line of people in front of us was beginning to move, but I could see that Akin wasn’t strong enough to stand on his own. 

“My brother!” I shouted to one of the guards.  “He can’t walk!” 

The guard didn’t seem to take notice.  My father saw what was happening.

“Little one, you have to let him go now,” said my father.  The fold of line in front of him began to move away from me.

“But I can’t leave him here,” I said.  I began to wail.

Farhani shouted to another one of the guards as he walked by checking the chains on our arms and legs. 

“This boy can’t walk,” he said.  I continued to wail.  The guard called over another man and the two men conferred.

“If we try to leave him here, we’ll never get this line moving,” said the second man. 

The first guard got a horse and threw Akin over it.  Farhani took the horse’s lead.

The men marched us all the way to the sea where water lapped at the sides of a large boat I saw floating out in the water.   My skin felt gritty and wet, but there was no water on it.  I licked my arm, and it tasted salty.  I counted the waves as they foamed on the sand.  The water reflected pink and blue from the sky.  I had never seen anything like this place before. 

Three

We waited for several more days on the shore as people arrived from other villages, but suddenly they were in a hurry to get us all on the boat.  One line at a time was unchained, but too many men surrounded us for anyone to try to escape.  We were shoved onto the boat, and my mother and father and Farhani got pushed ahead of me.  I fell behind to stay with Akin.  We were thrown roughly against the wall, and I sat on the floor next to him and held his hand tightly.  I listened to the air whistle through his chest wall.   After several hours, the ship began to rock, and I fell asleep.  When I awakened, it was dark on the ship.  I felt around on the floor next to me.

“Akin,” I whispered. 

All around me, I heard the grunts and snorts of people nearby.  I listened closely for Akin next to me, but his whistling had stopped.  I found his cold arm in the dark and followed it up to his chest where it was still wet and sticky.  His chest was still and there was no warm breath at his mouth.  I held on to him tightly, but Akin was gone. 

Several days of sunrise and sunset passed, and I didn’t get up from the floor where I lay with Akin’s body.  After a few days at sea, the crewmen unchained us.  They came around on the boat to clear up the dead bodies and throw them overboard.  Before they came for Akin’s body, I took the bracelet made of animal bone my father had brought him.  I put it in the pocket of my dress.  I didn’t want to wear it myself since it had brought him bad luck. 

  The man who took my brother leered at me and watched as I kissed him one last time. 

“You can kiss me like that tonight after the sun goes down,” he said.  He glistened with sweat.  His eyes were blood shot.  The air around him smelled of rotting fish.  I didn’t know what to say.  He took Akin’s body away and threw it overboard.

When the sun rose again, I sat up to eat a bit of the bread they left for us.  I slept.  When I had to, I relieved myself right where I lay.  I slept again.  Each time I awoke in the half light, I forgot where I was.  The dank sea air was unfamiliar at first.  I waited for the rustle and whoosh of the grasses in the wind.  I listened for the bell on my littlest goat, but the sounds of living and dying were all I heard around me.  I looked around expecting Akin to jab me in the arm, but he didn’t.  I don’t know how many days passed.

One night in the ship’s inky blackness, a woman began to sing a song in a tongue I couldn’t understand.  The haunting melody reminded me of a song my mother sang during her mother’s burial ceremony.   I prayed to the gods for blessings for Akin in the afterlife.

A few nights later, Farhani shook me awake from a deep sleep.  My heart startled.  I thought at first it was Akin come back to me.  He took my wrists and helped me off the floor.  I saw women nestled with their children sleeping around us and wondered where my mother and father were.  Farhani brought me more bread and a bit of water.  I ate and drank hungrily.  He helped me to my feet.  I looked around for my mother and father, but they were gone.  Farhani and I sat together during the day, and he laid with me at night.  He was all I had in the world.

We all had long days where we had to amuse each other.  People from different villages spoke with different tongues, so communicating wasn’t always easy.  Farhani pointed at a fat crewman with a flat nose.  He was the one who usually barked orders to the other crewmen.  Farhani made a honking sound and rolled like a warthog in the mud.  It was a game, pointing at objects, miming scenes, and acting silly with each other.

I imitated a big lumbering animal.  Then I motioned to indicate its long trunk and brayed like the animal I had heard in pain.  I tried to show them that my tall Uncle had ridden one, but I don’t know if anyone understood that.  Farhani tried to show a story about a lion, and we could tell that he had been very frightened.  I think he was showing the lions in our village.

We got a few words together and talked about our families in broken conversation.  I showed them my dress and tried to describe Uncle’s wedding. We had been celebrating Uncle's wedding when the captors came to our village.  A few people around us understood the words I was saying.  Several women around us excitedly got up from the floor.  Some of them surrounded Farhani to act as his family.  One woman introduced his family to mine.  She spoke as if she was reading the letter to ask for my hand in marriage.  Then Farhani’s family laid down flat at my feet to beg for me to be his wife. 

As we danced the traditional wedding dances, all the people around us joined to dance together.  For a few minutes, I forgot all the stink and fish rot and the fear of what was ahead of us.  It was like a spirit possessed me and everyone around us.  Women and children joined together to kick and drum and chant and wave our arms.  The sound was louder than it had been since we had gotten on that ship.  The usual dull clangs of the chains at our ankles, the repetitive sound of the water hitting the sides of the ship, the high pitched whistle of the steam that we usually heard around us were there now.  A woman crooned, a boy drummed with pieces of wood right there on the floor of the ship, and the many feet tapped together in time to the rhythm of the beat of the music and the drumming.

Soon the crewmen were there to see what all the commotion was.  I thought they would stop us.  Others had certainly gotten beatings and worse, even thrown overboard for insubordination or talking back or less, but this time, they must have welcomed the entertaining diversion too.  Soon, all the crewmen were on our deck mesmerized by the dancing, cheering us on.  Farhani noticed that only the youngest crewmen were there.  The fat crewman with the flat nose who usually barked orders wasn’t there to watch.

The next morning, there was no gruel, no bread, no rotted fish to eat, only shallow dishes of water, barely enough for each woman and child to have some.  The crewmen’s eyes were bloodshot and they smelled even stronger of liquor than usual.  One of the younger crewmen came near me walking carefully, wincing, and holding his back.  I saw red welts across the backs of his arms. Farhani brought me a little of the water.

For several days afterwards, we had only water to drink, just enough to keep our mouths from parching completely.  Everyone around us was getting weaker.  Fights broke out all around us.  The kind people we sang with earlier now stole our little bit of water and gruel.  There were more dead bodies for the crew to throw overboard.  The next morning, there were more fresh fish swimming around the boat, attracted by the dead bodies.  The crew caught them with their nets.   

Farhani and I huddled closer together than usual.

“Where is your father, and mine?” I asked him.

“They were pushed another way when we got on the ship,” he said.  He had seen the men pushed to a lower deck in the boat.

 “Do you think they are asking about us?”  We decided our fathers must be sitting together talking. 

“What will happen to us?” I asked.

He looked at me with his deep brown eyes.

“I will hold your hand,” he said.  “We will stay together.”

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.” 

Five

We were sent to the fields to pull cotton day after day in the hot-beating sun.  Each day was the same.  We picked cotton from sun up until sundown with only a short break at noon.  We ate supper after night fell at a long table up by the house.  I fell asleep with the other children in the bunkhouse listening to the men and women outside finishing home chores until late.  

The long days and hard work kept my body tired and sore but did nothing to still my mind.  Some days the women sang or told stories.  As the days went on, I learned the important English words we needed to know like soil and rain and cotton and water.  We learned each other’s words and songs and stories too. 

When it was quiet, I thought about my goats foraging on their own and wondered who would feed my chickens.  By now the fire in my mother’s kitchen had died down with no one in the village to stoke it.  She kept the fire burning to warm the house during the cold nights.  Where were my mother and father?  How had I allowed us to be separated on the boat?  The elephant herd had probably moved up over the hill behind my house by now and trampled everything in our village.  The herd had stood by eating grass while the lion took the smallest one.  I listened for the wind whistling across the tall grasses, but the air here was silent.  I picked cotton.  Sweat beaded down my forehead, and I wiped it with the back of my arm.

We were all at Uncle’s wedding when the men came to capture the people in our village.  Uncle wasn’t really my father’s brother.  He was a close friend, but they had been friends so long he had no trouble calling my father for favors.  My father was powerful in our town and most everyone owed him favors.  Uncle’s wedding party was grand, and everyone in the town was invited.  We wore our finest clothes.  I wore the dress my mother made for me with yellow and red beading all the way around.

The goat had been slaughtered, and we were just about to begin the feast of cow, goat, and yams.  The kidnappers must have heard the music and festivities beginning that morning as they entered our village.  First, I thought they were friends of Uncle’s come to join the celebration.  They seized my Uncle and his new wife and killed them right in front of us all.  My father, the village’s powerful medicine man had been powerless to try to stop them.  They seized my father and mother and my aunts and cousins.  That’s when Akin threw me on his back and started running. 

Six

One day in the field, I saw my brother standing right next to me, his face cut and bruised purple, and the sharp edges of his rib boned through his chest.  I leaned over in the field and vomited brown bile.  My stomach turned over and over.  My head spun.  The sun beat hotly on the back of my neck.  I picked cotton until the ends of my fingers were numb.

My mother was near me in the field too.  She sang Mbube, Mbube, the song from the game we had played in the school yard just a short time before.  I heard her singing the song with her sweet, strong voice.  She chased after me, like the lion after the goats, right there in the field.  I worried the master would catch us being silly.  She hugged me goodbye in front of our house in Africa, and sent me off to school. 

“Be good,” she called after me.  “Listen, and do what they tell you.” 

Then I was running, far behind Akin and his friends, trying to catch up with the boys who were already halfway to the schoolyard.  Akin looked back and stuck his tongue out at me.  I was far behind him, and I couldn’t catch him.  It was the rainy season, and I was running in thick, wet mud, and my legs were so slow.  Then we were all dancing at Uncle’s wedding.  Loud music and drums played, and I danced in circles with my mother and father, Akin, and all my aunts and cousins.  I looked down at my dress, and it was covered in shit and muck. 

Something cool was on my forehead, and I was lying in the field back in Alabama.  My lips tasted salty.  The other field hands gathered around me, peering down at me lying on the ground.  I looked up and saw my father walking across the field towards us.  In his broad, strong arms he carried a bundle of grasses, leaves, and flowers he had brought back from his travel.  He had bones from a slaughtered animal in the pack on his back.  He had been gone only a few days on a short trip across the countryside.  He went into the house where would greet my mother and ask her to boil water so they could cut and pound the plants he brought and cook them down to make into herbal medicine.  

“Baba,” I called weakly after him and waved my arms to get his attention, but he didn’t answer back or turn around to look.  I squinted into the sun.  A shadow passed in front of my eyes and someone slapped my face.  I saw Momma had come down from the big house.  She had come to see me.

“She’s seeing things,” she told the others. 

She held my face, and opened my mouth to peer inside.  She held a cup of water for me to drink as she looked me up and down.  I tried to sit up, but my head spun.

Three strong men carried me up to the big house.  Inside it was cool and dark out of the bright sun.  Momma fixed me a bowl of grits and a cornmeal biscuit to eat.  I drank a big cup of water and still felt the dry scratch of my tongue inside my mouth and on my dry, caked lips. 

“She looks like she is with child,” said the old woman rocking in the corner, darning socks.

I looked down at my belly.  My dress had grown tighter around my middle since I had arrived in Alabama.  I had wondered what that fluttering feeling inside was.  It had grown stronger with each passing day.

Seven

Momma roughly shook me awake. 

“I need help with these children,” she said.  “They’re more than we can handle, and you’re too weak for the fields.”  She bustled back to the kitchen.

The smell of roasting meat wafted to me, and my stomach rumbled loudly.  I sneaked in the kitchen to see what she was doing.

                “The meat is for the master and mistress’s noon meal,” said Momma, slapping my hand away.      She gave me more mush and another biscuit.  “You need to eat though.”

I saw the granny rocking in the corner was holding a swaddled infant.  She was surrounded by at least a dozen other children, all different ages.  A girl younger than me held another infant in her arms, but the baby was throwing its head back, kicking and screaming.  Two boys wrestled on the floor, and a third lay on the floor watching them.  Two children sat up against the wall drawing with a stick on the dirt floor.  I looked around and saw four young girls whispering in the corner, each one with a stick doll wrapped in cloth.

I sat down on the floor with the 3 year olds and smiled at their dolls, but they turned their backs to me.  I only wanted a doll of my own, but the granny from the chair in the corner pressed the screaming infant into my arms.  The swaddled one she had held first was asleep on the floor.  Momma brought some more mush and a spoon.  She slapped my face when I started to take a bite. 

“Feed the baby,” she said.  “You’re going to have to learn to keep these children quiet.” 

After I fed the baby, I took a sock from the mending pile, filled it with dirt from the yard, and sewed the end together.  We all laughed as we watched the children hit the odd-shaped ball back and forth with sticks like Akin and his friends.

Eight

At noon time, the man with the yellow teeth walked into the house. 

“Where’s my dinner?” he asked, leering at me.  “This one is too old for the house.  She should be in the field.  It’s cotton-picking time. ”

The master walked out into the yard.  “Who did this?”  He grabbed the sock ball from one of the children and held it up overhead. 

Everyone else stepped away, leaving me standing alone with the master.  He held up his hand and slapped me in the face.  In one motion, he pulled off his belt with its metal buckle and swung it across my backside, hard enough to leave welts through my thin dress.  I stood there and took it because what else could I do?  He swung again, and I fell hard to the dirt.  He swung a third time and another until Momma caught the belt from him.

“She’s expecting a child,” she said, standing with me. 

She stood between me and the master, stopping him from coming at me again, this time with his fists.  I cowered in the dirt, too frightened even to cry.

“Dinner’s on the table,” Momma told him.  “She fainted this morning.  She’s too weak for the fields.  I need her help with the babies up here.”

The swaddled baby wailed on the floor inside, and I picked her up to bounce her.

“Then get me something to drink,” Master snapped at me.  “At least be useful.”

In the kitchen, Momma told me the baby’s mother was out in the fields but would be back soon to nurse the infant. 

“Her breasts will be heavy when she feels the baby crying.  She will feed the baby, and then you rock her until she sleeps.”  She handed me a drink to give to Master.

The afternoon sweltered, and wailing and screaming erupted again in the other room.  The boys wrestled, fighting over a crooked stick.

“Keep these children quiet, or I’ll send all of you to the fields,” Master shouted at me as he headed back outside to the fields.

Momma scraped the bones from Master’s plate into the pot boiling on the stove and ladled out small bowls for us and each of the children.  The thin oily broth had greens with red stems and fat dirt-colored beans floating in it.  The earthy soup smelled of my home.

Late that night after Master and his wife had supper and all the field hands and children were fed, we cleared up and got ready to start the next day’s meal.  The children were collected by their parents and put to bed up in the bunkhouses. 

That night in the kitchen, Momma showed me how to make hominy.  We worked late into the night by the firelight. She took the ashes from the fire and put them in a barrel with holes in the bottom.  I tipped up the barrel over a shallow pan, and lye dripped out the bottom when she poured water over the hot ashes.  She’d use some of the lye to make soap, but tonight she husked the corn from the harvest and put it in the lye to take the husks off.  She washed the corn in clean water until it was white.  Then tomorrow she would mix the boiled hominy with butter, salt, flour, and eggs and bake it to make hominy cakes.

Momma and I walked up the hill past the vegetable garden where I saw the greens from our soup were growing.  We hadn’t eaten yet, and my stomach tightened.  I felt the baby ball up inside me.  A fire blazed in front of the bunkhouses, and two men turned meat on a spit.

“Whadja hunt?” Momma called out.

“Caught a wild boar and a couple of coons,” answered the younger man. 

I looked at him closer in the dark.  His eyes were serious like a man’s, but in the firelight, I saw light hair on his cheeks.  He saw me and blinked. 

“I didn’t see you after we got off the boat,” Farhani said. “They call me Frank here.”

“And I am Lizzie. You were up with the men, and I was on the women’s side,” I said.

             “Do you two know each other?” Momma asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Nine

The next morning, I awakened with the first light through the glassless windows.  I had dreamt that a lion came and took away my child, tore him from my arms and carried him like a rag doll in his jaws.  The lion growled as he walked away, and then he turned back and smiled at me with Uncle’s crooked teeth.

As I let my eyes adjust to the morning light, I lay back on my sleeping blankets.  The house was quiet.  The air outside didn’t move and the tree branches didn’t rustle.  The birds were silent.  The baby inside me was still.

I got up from my bed and saw the dark stain.  I moved across the room and into the kitchen, avoiding the tangles of blankets where the other women laid.  My belly cramped and tightened, doubling me over.  I put water on to start the breakfast grits, and I boiled more water for coffee.

My child didn’t move from its ball in my stomach.  I had fallen hard last night, and my bedclothes were bloody.  I made grits for the fieldhands and started breakfast for the master and his family.  The fieldhands would be up soon from the bunkhouses and they would surely be hungry as late as they were up last night.

After the grits were eaten and the dishes from the dining room were washed, we started the washing in big buckets out front of the house.  I had the soapy bucket and the old granny had the clear water to rinse the wash.  All the kids were running in the yard before it got too hot outside.  Momma took the clothes from Granny and shook them to hang them out to dry.  I told Granny about the blood, and she told me just to wait.

When all the washing was hung out, I went back out to the yard to slaughter a chicken for Master’s lunch.  The sight of the chicken’s head on the ground brought sour bile into my mouth, and the pains in my belly came again, sharp and lower this time.  It was too early because my belly wasn’t as swollen as the ladies I had seen walking around town at home, but the pains began to come quickly together.  I worked quickly to finish pulling the feathers off the chicken.  A sharp pain felled me to the ground.  I threw the chicken aside and grabbed my belly.  The pain jolted me from my center and down both my legs.

I shouted for the women.  They helped me back inside, and I could see the heavy bleeding now. Then we could see the crown of the baby’s head.  When the baby boy was born, he looked sickly, and his swollen belly was tight and purple-skinned like a fat, round plum.  He didn’t cry or take a breath.  The afterbirth passed quickly.

I lay back on the bedclothes, tearless.  Then once more, I felt my belly tighten and more blood and fluid passed.  Cramps came quickly again, just as before when the baby boy passed.

“You have another baby,” said the wise old woman.

My belly tightened minute after minute, and soon the baby girl passed.  She was quiet, and her translucent blue skin stretched tight across her chest.  She fit into the palms of my two hands, and I felt her heart beat fast under my fingers.  I put my hand on my belly and felt its fleshy emptiness.  The infants were half the size of the swaddled infant I had fed the day before.

I laid there in the bedclothes and held the boy and girl in my arms.  My tears fell onto the babies.  The old woman cut free the cords that tied those babies to this miserable earth.  I held them both and cried until the girl took her last breath.  Momma took the babies from me, bathed them, and swaddled them up so they wouldn’t be cold in the grave. 

That night, I dreamt I was back on the ship, pitching endlessly in the everlasting dark.  Enveloped in sea air and rotted fish, I was sick to my stomach.  I held my mother’s hand tightly while she lay next to me mumbling incoherently.

When morning came, we dug a hole and buried my babies, those two souls created in bondage, out behind the house.  I rested in the house another day and then returned to my work in the cotton fields.

Ten

A few weeks later, Master came to me in the field just before the lunch break. 

“Momma told me you buried twins,” he said.  “Young girl like you gets started now, no telling, you could have ten or a dozen babies before long.”

He wanted to move me from my bunkhouse to bed with a man.  I don’t know how I was so bold, but I told Master about Frank.  I hoped Frank wouldn’t mind, but he had chosen me first.

“Was he their father?” Master asked.

I nodded.

“Well, then that’d be fine,” he said.

I moved my few possessions to Frank’s cabin that night.  I took Akin’s bracelet and my good dress from Uncle’s wedding, which I had cleaned the best I could down in the stream.  I saw Frank’s beard was dark now.  He was already father to two dead babies.

Frank was always particularly miserable in the night after he had worked a long day in the field, which was pretty much every night.  But I knew just how to make him laugh. 

“You should be the hare,” I said.

“What do you mean? How could the hare, just a little rabbit like him, plow the fields any faster than I can with all my strength?” retorted Frank, kissing me as we lay in the small bed curled together.

So I told him the story of the hare and how he tricked the other animals to help him get ready for his wedding.  If he had heard the story before, he didn’t stop me.  Hare was too lazy to do the work himself, so he went to Elephant and asked him to tug on a rope when he felt the rope tighten.  And then Hare went to Hippopotamus and told him the same thing.  Hare left the rope strung between Hippopotamus and Elephant and the two of them pulled the rope against each other with all their might.  The pulling was enough work to clear the land so that Hare could have his wedding.

“And that’s how you can plow the field for Master,” I said. 

Frank rolled closer to me in our bed.

“The others will hear,” I said.

But he wouldn’t listen. 

“I’m too busy to plow Master’s fields,” said Frank.  “He can plow them himself.  He probably doesn’t even know how.”

Eleven

My father was born enshrouded in a silvery, glistening caul.  The old women in our town knew that he would be able to talk out fire or stop bleeding by praying over it.  He also used root medicine and put a poultice of herbs on a child’s chest to bring up the sickness or gave her a tea to cure the fever.  He ground up animal bones to make a medicine used to treat ailments like lameness or blindness.  He would be called to visit and pray with the family whenever a child fell ill with a fever or cough.  My father always rose with the sun to hunt for roots and plants near our house and across the countryside, and sometimes he would let me go with him.    

One morning early, a knock came on the door while we were all still in bed.  I followed him outside and saw him disappear over the goat hill with a young girl from our school.  They went inside her house.  The door stayed open, and I saw her mother unclothed and lying on the bed, her broad, round belly quivering.  She screamed, throwing her head back.  I saw the fear in her eyes and couldn’t imagine seeing my own mother this way.  My friend wrinkled her nose and came back outside.  I crept inside the house where I saw a fire with a large, steaming pot of water.  The bedclothes were disheveled and soiled.  The woman thrashed about throwing the covers away.  My father laid his hands on her belly, and the mother relaxed.  Most of the time, women had their mother or sisters or aunties who helped to deliver a baby.  It was unusual for a family to call on my father to help.  Now he said nothing but moved her legs apart to feel inside her womb.  He wiped his hands on his trousers and opened his medicine bag.  I hadn’t even seen him carry the bag from the house, but I moved close enough to look inside to see the mortar and pestle he used to grind up herbs.  He took a green leafy herb and ground it up.  He turned around and saw me just then, and motioned for me to get a cup of water from the fire.  He stirred the ground herbs in the water and put it to the woman’s lips.

“What is it?” I said, breaking the silence in the room.

 “Just something to calm her so she can rest.”  My father looked up and smiled at me.

She sipped again and laid her head back to sleep. 

“Little one, now run along to school or you will be late.”  My father looked outside to see the sun.  “She will be fine.”

Outside the house, I blinked in the bright sunlight.  I saw Akin kicking a ball and ran to catch up with him.

Twelve

I already knew Frank, and it wasn’t long before my monthly bleeding stopped again.  Once I started seeing my father and mother and Akin in the cotton field with me again, I left and took myself up to see Momma and Granny in the big house.  The house was busy already.  Several new babies had recently been born and one of the women had to stay up from the field to nurse them.  I saw another girl I recognized from the field heavy with child herself.  She was helping Momma fix dinner for Master and Mistress in the kitchen.

“Do you think you have two this time?” Granny asked me from her rocker.  She held two babies in her lap.  One was swaddled tight and the other sat on her knee bouncing and giggling as she watched a girl with a stick doll playing on the floor.

“I don’t think so,” I said.  “I only feel one moving this time.”  My belly was bigger already than it was with the twins, and now I was sure of the movement I was feeling.

Granny put the swaddled infant down to sleep on the floor, and set the other baby down to play.  She took the stick doll from the child and tied it with a string.  She hung it over top of my belly and watched it swing freely.

“Oh, it’ll be a girl,” she proclaimed.  “I can tell by the way it swings.”

She patted my belly and held her hands there to feel the girl kicking.

“She’ll come out right way first too.  You’ll be fine.”

Her hands seemed certain and reassured me.  I wondered aloud how much time I would have to wait.

“Not long.  Maybe a few more weeks,” Granny said.

She sat down in the rocker once more and took another infant from the nursing mother, swaddled her and started patting her to sleep. 

Granny told me the nurse’s name was Zena.  I looked at all the babies, trying to figure out who was oldest.  When the babies were sleeping, they were laid on a thin mattress on the floor with blankets to keep off the draft.  Three of them were sleeping now, and the nurse fed the fourth who seemed to be the smallest.

Thirteen

Wild animals have little assistance when they deliver their young and rely only on each other for support.  They will find a comfortable spot where they will build themselves a nest of leaves or grass or whatever is at hand so as to have a safe soft area for the babies to be born.  Cheetahs or lions will change position depending on the position from which the baby is delivering, leaning up against a wall or reclining, turning and changing position in order to allow the head and body to descend naturally and to birth quickly.  Lions will go alone to a den and isolate themselves from the rest o f the pride to have their young.  They roar and grunt with a distinctive sound to keep away predators and males from the pride.

This is how it was for us.  There was little availability of doctors to assist with the birth of babies.  And if a doctor was needed, the lateness of his arrival would generally impend the death of the mother or the infant or both.  We were left to rely upon each other.
I am beginning to understand that the big house is the place where anyone who needs medical help will come to see Granny.  Very early this morning, when we were all sleeping, there came a heavy banging on the door.  Rain pelted the door open, and in came a man carrying a young girl up from the field.  She was shaking and sputtering with foam flying from her nose and mouth.  We laid her down on the floor.  One of the women tried to jam rags into her mouth so she wouldn’t bite her tongue.   She flailed her arms and legs and her whole body shook with tremors.  She didn’t answer when we called her name.
Finally, she stopped shaking but was still asleep.  We took her clothes off, and I could see she had a small swelling at the bottom of her belly.  She was bleeding and then from between her legs, we could see the head of the baby.  The girl baby passed easily.  She was quiet and blue, but she was still alive for a few minutes.  She fit into the palms of my two hands.  I put my hand over my belly and felt my own baby flutter and kick.
In a few more minutes, the young girl awakened.  She took her dead baby in her arms, crying out.  We helped her wash the baby, and we wrapped her up so she wouldn’t be cold in the grave.  This morning, one of the men dug a hole and we buried the baby in the ground behind the house.  We marked the grave site with a stone.  The mother will rest another day here in the house, and then she’ll go back to her work in the fields.

Fourteen

When he wasn’t travelling, my father often received visits from medicine men from distant places.  They walked together across the hillside where the elephants foraged to look at the scat.  They watched the clouds for signs of rains to come.  They traded gifts, stone bowls filled with powder or beaded bags which contained bone.  The medicine man always brought a large satchel filled with grasses and plants native to his own land.  My father would take him to forage for plants from our forest and the grasslands over the hillside.  My mother didn’t like it, but I usually tried to follow close behind to hang on every word. 

“Come back to the house,” she called to me. “Stay out of their way,” she scolded.  “Help me cook the yams for dinner.”

We boiled the yams and then pounded them in a big stone bowl, making them smooth, just the way my father liked them.  My mother stirred the meat stew for our dinner.  My father had treated many wealthy men’s ills and he was always able to get the family stew meat even when meat was hard to find.  One man, healed of his fevers, gave our family a buffalo he had killed in my father’s honor.  More often, we received a goat or chickens.

The men returned for dinner and we all sat around the fire eating the yams, talking about the danger that was coming.  The men had seen the future foretold in the elephant scat and the rain clouds.

“The elephants are herding closer to humans than usual,” said my father.  “They can sense the danger that is coming too.” 

As darkness overcame us, my father pointed up to the stars in the sky. 

“The story in the sky tells us what will happen.  The hunter points his arrow, and he is nearly ready to fight now.  It will be a terrible battle for our people,” he continued. 

The men drank.  My mother didn’t speak.

The next day my father took me with him on a long walk into the forest to gather plants and bark.  While we walked, the sun beat and formed sweat on the back on my father’s neck.  He told me then about my naming ceremony.  Many times, I had seen my father perform the ceremony on the seventh day after a child was born in our village.  The people gather in the morning to pray all day.  They pray for good luck for the community, rain, healthy herds, and for the newborn child’s long life and prosperity.  In the evening, the child is held up by the mother for the townspeople to see.  She hands the baby to my father, the town elder, and he puts water, honey, palm oil, kola nut, yams, pepper, salt, and wine in the baby’s mouth to protect the child and bring happiness.  After the ceremony, the people feast.

My father told me that traditionally it is the father who chooses the name for the child.  When he is asked by the elder what name has been chosen, the father whispers the name he has chosen in the mother’s ear.  She then announces the name to the townspeople.

“For you, I chose the name Adana,” he said.  “You were to be raised as my namesake. “  He and my mother had discussed it beforehand. 

“Your brother has no mind for all of this,” he said, pointing to the trees and the woods around us.  “You were to be the one to learn the medicines.”

When it came time to whisper the name in my mother’s ear, he whispered Adana.  Then as the elder, my father asked the question again. 

“What will the child’s name be?”

“Lulu,” my mother announced for all the townspeople to hear.  “She will be called Lulu, for she will be famous in war.  I have dreamt of a great war to be fought with our people, and Lulu will save us all.”

Fifteen

Up in the house, I discovered my own patience and calm in the quieter work away from the fields.  I had always helped my mother churn the cream from our goats to make butter and watched her making bread in the fire at home.  This kitchen was bigger and just as busy.  Momma started with the sun getting breakfast for everyone.  We worked late into the night to cook the meat for the next day’s meals.  She used the best parts of the slaughter for the Master and Mistress.  The children and the fieldhands ate soup made from the bits of meat and bones that were leftover after the Master’s meal. 

There are other young women living here and all of us will have a baby soon.  One woman had her baby last week.  I saw how she took the pain and finally saw for myself what it might be like.  I have been through it before, but because those babies were so small, this will be different.  They say some women take the pains, and suffer through it as if there were no pain at all, silent and withdrawn inside, suffering in silence.  Other women keen and gnash their teeth, rolling over and over on the bed, standing and wailing and pressing up against the wall or anything else they can lean on.  Some women say that the wailers deliver the baby much faster than the rest, for they get that pain outside of their body and by doing this they draw the baby outside into the cooler air.

In between feeding everyone, nursing the babies, and keeping the children occupied, Granny took me up the hill to the vegetable garden. 

“I’m not strong enough for this work anymore, and I won’t be here with you forever,” she told me.

“But Granny,” I said, “who will be the one who watches over the women when they have their children?”

“You will see,” she answered.  “Time will tell.” 

She pointed to the lettuce leaves and the shoots of the root vegetables and showed me which ones needed watering each day.  She taught me their names and showed me how to harvest the plants when they were ready.  We gathered the vegetables ready for harvest and carried them back up to the house in our aprons.  We talked about how Momma would prepare the vegetables in the kitchen.  

Some days before the hot afternoon sun blazed, we walked further up the hill past the bunkhouses into the woods where she showed me which barks and leaves were safe and which ones held poison.  Some of the plants were similar to ones my father used at home, but others were different.  Before we headed back to the house, we picked wild blackberries and gathered the blackberry leaves to bring back for making tea.

Granny never slept.  She was up early in the morning at the big house before the fieldhands were even up with the sunrise.  She was waiting in her rocking chair in the corner for the babies.  The babies slept with their mothers, but granny took care of them all day long. 

“Gets really busy with all the babies,” I said to Granny.

“You shoulda seen when we had the twins,” said Granny.  I didn’t have any idea which twins she was talking about.  Certainly not mine. 

“Those boys’re so bad, they had to string ‘em up and tie ‘em from their ankles to keep ‘em from runnin’ away.  And we had ‘nother twelve kids or so at the time, and none of ‘em could sit still either.”

Sixteen

Momma

       Momma was very round and not really very tall.  Sometimes she seemed much larger than she was because she could yell really loud.  When the children got into whatever she was cooking she would yell so loud, they didn’t know what to do.  She moved fast in the kitchen, but she was so fat, no one else could be in the kitchen at the same time as her.  She would move quickly from chopping up vegetables to mixing a soup on the stove top to getting something from the pantry.  If you got in her way or tried to stick a finger in her pot, she’d turn around and yell and beat you with her wooden spoon too.  You didn’t want to mess with Momma.

        But she had a softer side too.  If you thought that she was mad at you, she wouldn’t be mad for long.  You could always come to momma for advice or to ask her opinion on something. 

       Like this one time I remember she helped me.

       “Momma?” I said.

       “Yes, baby,” she said.

       “Do you think we should fix this hole in Master’s sock?” I asked.

       “Oh yes, I do,” she said.  “He does hate them socks to have holes in them.”

       Whatever it was, you knew she’d have an opinion too, and she wouldn’t be afraid to tell you exactly what she thought about it.  A few times, I made the mistake of telling her something about Frank, even when I was just trying to get my thoughts about what he had done the day before, and she had an opinion and wanted to give me advice on what I should do about him.  You know, she was usually right too, but I certainly didn’t always want to hear what she had to say. 

       Momma was also the one you went to when you had to get support when something was going wrong or if the master got after you or your child. When one of the children was beat by their dad for backtalk or when the master screamed at one of the field hands who laid in the bed a minute too long or forgot to do something he was asked to do, they went to Granny for the medicine, but they went to Momma for comfort.  And Momma always had a kind word to say.  She noticed things like when someone wore a new dress or had a new pair of shoes.  She was the one who kept things together and kept everyone in high spirits.  In turn, she was the one who said grace at the meals, she always kept a positive attitude and made sure that we all thanked God for the food he had given us in the harvest and for the food on the table at mealtimes.  Sometimes everyone forgot and started eating before Momma got to the table to say grace.  If someone forgot, the others next to him would kick him under the table until he looked up, eyes sheepish and put his fork down until Momma was ready to say grace.
       Momma was a powerful force all around the plantation, that’s for sure.  No one doubted how much influence she had with the Master and the Mistress too.  If someone needed something done for them and they needed to have help with something like getting the doctor or getting the preacher to come for a wedding ceremony or a funeral service, Momma would be the one they would go to first to ask her to speak with the Master.  Then the Master would think about what he might do to help you for a while before he would actually do anything.  Momma would have to work him a little bit sometimes, depending on what it was you wanted done.  She would make him a special thing for dinner or mix him a drink ready for him when he came in from the fields.  She would rub his shoulders a bit, and then he would say, real slow-like, “Now what was it that you wanted me to do?” and then Momma would tell him again, “Well, can you ask the preacher to come next week so that Frank and Lizzie can marry each other” or “You need to fetch the doctor to see what he can do about this sore on Zena’s leg.”  And then the Master would sometimes do the thing she asked him to do.  Sometimes he wouldn’t do it anyway, like the time she told Master that a leak in the roof in the corner of one of the sleeping quarters needed fixing, he didn’t fix it, and after a while, a big rainstorm came and the cabin leaked so much water.  We had to put a bucket underneath to catch the drips, and the bucket filled up and then overflowed so we had to empty it and it filled a second time in one night.  That drip kept me up all night, but the master didn’t fix it for two more weeks.  He would do things when he was good and ready to do them, but Momma was the only one who could convince him to do anything at all.  No matter what, the Master wasn’t gonna do anything he didn’t want to do.

Seventeen

Momma’s husband Tiny, the overseer

Tiny was the overseer on the plantation. He had charge of keeping sure that the field hands were doing everything they were told to do.  The master was really the one who made the orders, but it was the overseer who had to be there every minute to be sure the work was done correctly.  And it’s funny, but even if he was your friend, he would still take his job seriously.  If you weren’t doing what you were supposed to do, he would make sure it got done right.  Because if you didn’t do your job right, he would get hell for it himself, and he would risk getting a beating or hung or worse himself.  He would go up and down the rows watching you put your seeds down and telling you when you missed a weed or if you didn’t bend down low enough in the fields.  He was so particular he wanted to be sure everything was done correctly so he wouldn’t catch it for mistakes the field hands made.

And if you think Tiny’s job sounds easy because he just had to watch everyone else bending down and standing back up again all day long, well, then you would be wrong.  Tiny often had to redo things himself to be sure they were right if a line got crooked or something cause Master would surely have something to say about it.  It would be Tiny’s hide that would pay if something wasn’t done right.  Tiny was loyal, that’s one thing for sure, and he certainly wouldn’t tell Master who it was that messed up. He’d rather just get it right himself so no one had to pay hell.  But his job was double hard then because he had to watch, and he had to be up and down doing the work itself, making sure everything got done fast enough.  If it wasn’t done fast enough to Master’s liking, well there’d be hell to pay then too.  I don’t know what all Master got upset about sometimes he changed his mind what he wanted and they’d have to quick finish the job before it got too dark to see.  Once Master said he wanted to see the field plowed a certain direction, so we got the animals all hooked up and had to change it again.

Tiny took his job very seriously.  As much as Momma was the one you went to when you got in trouble for something or if you needed something, Tiny was just the opposite of that.  You did not mess with Tiny and you didn’t ask him to give you a break.  In fact, if you got in trouble with Tiny you went to Momma to help you feel better about it.  She would sneak you some rations or extra food or a cookie she kept in a pocket in her apron.  I wondered if she and Tiny talked about it later.  It was like they were our mother and father.  You got in trouble with Dad and then you went to Momma for reassurance that you were doing okay.