The Book of Negroes

  "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."

  I lowered my voice but I wouldn't let go of Georgia's hand. "How did he look?"

  "Like a layabout. A wastrel. I don't like the look in his eyes. Too African. That's what you made me drag up in the fishnet?"

  My excitement gave way to an ache. I felt crushed to have missed him.

  "He be back, honey chile. He just over on Lady's Island. Not far at all. He come for you again, just like a hungry dog."

  WE WENT THROUGH A SECONC CYCLE of indigo harvesting. The work was just as hard, but when our daily tasks were done we were free to cook, garden or mend clothes, and left alone without any buckra to disturb our days. Sometimes, when nobody was looking, I would climb high up a tree in the woods and practise reading the words that Mamed had written out for me. Once I could manage "cat," "dog," "lion," "water," "father" and the like, I moved on quickly to new challenges. Mamed knew how to keep my interest. He said he was doing it as his mother had done for him. One day it was "The dog ate the cat." Then it was: "The cat ran from the barking dog." And then it was: "The barking dog chased the cat up the tree and the birds flew out of the nest." The language came together like pieces of a secret, and I wanted more of it every day.

  When the reading lessons were done, sometimes Mamed would explain how things worked on Appleby's plantation, and at other times he asked me questions.

  Fomba had not uttered a sound since he came to St. Helena Island. His inability to follow instructions during the indigo harvest infuriated Mamed, who asked me about him one night.

  "What did he do in your village?"

  "Hunted, and we ate whatever he killed."

  "Good hunter?"

  "The best," I said. "He could kill a rabbit with one throw of a stone."

  Within a few days, Mamed had arranged for an experienced Negro to help Fomba build a canoe out of bamboo. They bound it tight with water reeds and cut down a long sapling to use as a pole. They also fashioned a paddle out of cypress wood. Fomba learned the ways of the boat just as if it were part of his body. Almost overnight, he was paddling or poling the boat along the waterways and creeks of the low-country islands, tossing down nets and pulling up shrimp, crabs and fish. Mamed released Fomba from all indigo jobs on the understanding that he would return every afternoon with whatever fish he had netted. Fomba did even better than that. He brought back squirrels, possums, wild turkeys and turtle eggs for Mamed and the rest of us. Everybody so enjoyed his additions to the cooking pots that they began to accept that Fomba would make himself useful if he was left to work alone.

  GEORGIA COMPLAINED ABOUT MY STUDYING but she liked having the cabin to herself in the evenings. When I walked toward Mamed's place, I would often pass Happy Jack as he walked to our cabin to see Georgia. He was the only man I knew who could walk, whistle and whittle a stick at the same time. He often brought her flowers picked from the woods, which he kept bunched up behind his ear to keep his hands free for the whittling.

  One night when I returned from studying, Georgia had news for me. "Happy Jack and I were rolling and heaving and hot and bothering, having ourselves a right good time, and in walks that big-mouthed African. Happy Jack jumps up and runs out. There goes my man. And I am left looking at this meatless African. He keeps saying your name. I could have slapped that boy three days into next week."

  "Where did he go?"

  "I don't know, but I hope it's far away. The way that boy run his mouth—"

  I raced into the woods behind our cabin and called his name. He was hiding behind a grove of trees. I flew into his arms. I hugged that boy until I felt him growing hard against me. I pulled back suddenly. The words came spilling out of me in Fulfulde. I had to know where he was living and where he had been and what he had seen and I wanted to know it all, at once.

  Georgia came up to us from behind and said she would be back at sunrise. No, Chekura said, not sunrise. I was struck to see that he did not speak the Negro English nearly as well as I. Georgia didn't care to stand around listening to translations, so I quickly explained that he had to be back where he belonged before sunrise. She shrugged and went off to find Happy Jack.

  Chekura let his eyes fall over me, and I stood proud before him. I learned that the buckra who ran the plantation on Lady's Island was gone for the sick season, so Chekura was free to wander at night. During this season, Chekura said, dozens of Negroes could be found at night, roaming and boating, trading poultry for rice, vegetables for gourds, rabbits for rum, exchanging news of brothers and sisters and wives and children, sinking the fishnet and pulling it back up. Chekura had found Africans all over the low-country islands: there were two Fulbe on Edisto, a Bamana on Coosaw, and three Eboes on Morgan.

  Chekura said he could not believe how quickly I had learned the Negro language. I whispered proudly that I was secretly learning to read.

  "I have something for you," he said. He pulled a cloth from his sleeve, folded it in a square and presented it to me as if it were a traditional gift of kola nuts in our homeland.

  It was a red-striped handkerchief. I clutched it, smelled it, rubbed it on my face and then tied it up around my hair.

  "You look beautiful in it," he said.

  I held his arm again. I wanted to feel him next to me and I craved finding him next to me when I woke up there in the morning. I tried to think of how to tell him that I wasn't ready for the thing he wanted, but he saw my hesitation and saved me from having to speak. He had to leave, he said, so he could slip back onto his plantation before his absence was noticed.

  CHEKURA WAS ONLY ABLE TO COME see me once a month or so. I longed for his face, and his voice, and the very smell of him that reminded me of home. It excited me to think that he knew me, and knew of my past, before this life in Carolina. We held each other longer each time he came to visit. Something stirred deep down in my belly and between my legs. But I didn't trust those feelings. I wanted to hold on to his voice and the sounds of my village in them. He seemed prepared to talk just as much as I needed. He did not press the other matter.

  THE MOONS CAME AND WENT, and in the colder season when there was no indigo to plant or harvest, Appleby was frequently with us. He returned to the plantation around the
time I had spent a full year on St. Helena Island, and opened up his big house. Several of the Negroes had to work night and day to get his house back in order, and to start cooking up meals for him and his wife. She only stayed for a while, then he took her back to Charles Town and returned alone.

  One morning in the cold season, Appleby came to our home.

  "Georgia. Get a move on. I've got a man waiting to take you to catch a baby on Lady's Island."

  Georgia swept up her bag with one hand and grabbed my arm with the other.

  "No," Appleby said to her. "This time it's just you."

  I gave Georgia a pleading look.

  "She goes with me," Georgia said.

  "Enough backtalk," Appleby said. "You've got to go now."

  AFTER GEORGIA WAS GONE, Appleby led me into the big house. I wanted to look at all the strange objects inside, to touch the books and to smell the foods cooking in the kitchen. But I had no time. And I knew that it would not be allowed. Still, I hoped any little distraction might give me a chance to think of a way to escape. The cook gave me a long look and left. A man who cleaned the floors of the big house watched me too for a moment, and left.

  "Think I'm stupid?" Appleby asked.

  "Master?" I said.

  Appleby pushed me down a hall and into a room, ripped off my wrapper, tore my red-striped handkerchief in half and flung me onto a bed.

  "Who's that boy sniffing after you?"

  "No boy, Master."

  He slapped me. "He ain't one of mine. Who is that boy?"

  "No boy, Master."

  He clamped one hand on my mouth, pinned me down with his chest and began unbuttoning his trousers with his other hand. His skin pressed down on mine. I could feel his wet skin, sweating. And he stank.

  "Who owns you?" he said.

  "Master."