Read Online THE BOOK OF NEGROES by Lawrence Hill - Free Book Online Page A

leading people. We were marched up a steep path and behind the building. I noticed that Chekura was still with us. Ahead lay two penned areas, side by side, bordered by sharpened stakes jutting out of the ground to the height of two men. The captors pushed open the gates and shoved the men into one pen, and the women and children into another. I looked back for Chekura, but he was gone. I couldn’t see Fanta either. Perhaps I could find Sanu, with her baby. There they were, twenty steps to my left. I wasn’t bound any more, so I ran over to be with them.
    Two toubabu with firesticks guarded my penned area, but men of my homeland also stood ready with clubs, knives and firesticks. Locked inside this pen, naked and sore and bleeding, we stood tight together in sandy soil that stank of urine and feces.
    We waited and watched as the sun edged across the sky. They brought us boiled millet and dumped it in a trough. Some of the women picked at it. I couldn’t bring myself to do so, but when we were passed calabashes of water, I did drink.
    Women from my own homeland washed us with cold water and rubbed palm oil on our skin, to make us look shiny and healthy. Inside our pen, homelander women who were clothed and cold-eyed dragged one female captive to a corner, where toubabu and homelander men stood waiting with a metal device heating over glowing embers. I looked away, but heard the woman screaming as if someone had torn off her arm.
    I vowed not to give them the pleasure of my pain. But when my turn came, I surrendered to their coarseness and their stink. They dragged me to the branding corner. Their wounding metal was curved like a giant insect. As they brought it toward me, I defecated. They aimed a finger’s length above my right nipple, and pressed it into my flesh. I could smell it burning. The pain ran through me like hot waves of lava. The people who had been pinning me down let me go. I could think only of heat, and of pain. I could not move. I opened my mouth, but no sound came. Finally, I heard a moan escape my lips. Arms around me. Another woman’s scream. And I was gone.
    When I awoke, I was unsure how far the sun had moved in the sky, or if it had moved at all. Then I slept again. I thought I dreamed that Chekura was touching my hand. Big men were grabbing him, pinning him as he cried out in protest. When I awoke again, my chest was still burning. The heat twirled and danced under the ugly, raised welt on my chest. All the other women had the same welt.
    I couldn’t sleep that night. When it began to rain, I stood. At least a good rainfall would clean me. I liked the cool water running down my face. It was good to see the mud sliding off my legs, but I cupped a hand over my raw wound to protect it. The rain felt soothing until the thunder rolled in and the lightning began lighting up the sky. Water fell on meas if it were being dropped from a hundred buckets, and the thunder boomed in the night, echoing over and over again in the mountains. The rain kept up with such fierceness that I prayed for it not to sweep us all into the big river below. In the women’s pen, some twenty of us huddled together in the storm. I held Fanta with one hand, Sanu with the other. The noise was such that it drowned out the crying of Sanu’s baby. When the explosion from the clouds ceased, we found ourselves in a field of mud up to our ankles. We spent the whole night standing.
    IN THE MORNING, MY WOUND STILL BURNED. Fog hung over our pen. As the sun rose, the thick vapours cleared and the day became bright. Homelander women in clothes and sandals dumped more boiled millet into the trough. Still and tired, we stared at the food. I imagined that we would be left to stand there until our hunger overcame our disgust.
    But the gate swung open. We were all hurried out of the pen and back down the path to the water. We were tied and tossed into the bottoms of the canoes, and rowed straight out into the widening water. A wave splashed up