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

against my canoe and smacked me in the face. I thought I would welcome the long drink, but I gagged and choked and then vomited the burning water. Salt. Each wave stung the cuts on my feet and the welt on my chest.
    I dreaded the big boat up ahead, growing larger with each oar stroke. In size, it dwarfed a twelve-man canoe, and it stank worse than the pen they had put us in on the island. The boat terrified me, but I was even more afraid of sinking deep into the salty water, with no possibility for my spirit to return to my ancestors. Let them do what they wanted with my body—on land. Then, at least, my spirit would travel, and I would return home to my ancestors, and I would no longer be alone.
    The oarsmen kept paddling us over the rolling waves. We slid upto the side of the toubabu’s boat. It was a huge and strange affair with poles towering like palm trees. On the deck above, faces stared down at us. Homelander faces and toubabu faces, all working together. Waves smacked against the giant sides of the boat, which rose and fell but seemed mysteriously pinned to one spot in the water.
    One of the captives screamed and rocked and struggled, but his feet and wrists were tightly bound with vines, and finally he was clubbed until he fell silent. Men and women shook and trembled. I grew quiet, and calmer.
“Fear no man, ”
father had said,
“and come to know him. ”
    Something bumped our canoe. It was another small boat, pulling up beside ours. Among the bound men and women, I saw Chekura. His face was bruised and his expression defeated. His head was slumped. What a stupid boy. He should have fled on land, near Bayo, where he knew the forests and the people. He should have fled long before they turned on him. I did not call out to him. I clenched my teeth and looked out over the water at all my people tied in canoes and being pushed, prodded and pulled up a long plank rising along the great wall of the ship. I turned back to see my homeland. There were mountains in the distance. One of them rose like an enormous lion. But all its power was trapped on the land. It could do nothing for any of us out on the water.

We glide over the unburied
    ONE DAY, IF I EVER GOT HOME, perhaps they would make an exception and allow me to become a
djeli
, or storyteller. At night, in the village, while the fire glowed and the elders drank sweetened tea, visitors would come from afar to hear my curious story. To become a djeli, you had to be born into a special family. I used to wish that I had been, for the honour of learning and retelling the stories of our village and our ancestors. Early in life, a child born into the
djeli
family would be taught the story of the crocodile who carried off five children, and of the man who was so rich that he had seventeen wives but so cruel that each one ran away, and of the first time that a man in our village returned from Timbuktu with the mysterious Qur’an in his hand. It was said that when a
djeli
passed away, the knowledge of one hundred men died with him.
    When I was carried up the ladder and dropped like a sack of meal on the deck of the toubabu’s ship, I sought comfort by imagining that I hadbeen made a
djeli
, and was required to see and remember everything. My purpose would be to witness, and to prepare to testify. Papa was not supposed to show his daughter how to read and write a few lines in Arabic. Why did he break the rules? Perhaps he knew that something was coming, and wanted me to be ready.
    On the ship and in all the years that have followed, I have thought of how much my parents planted in my mind in the short time we had together. They made sure that I learned how to cultivate a millet field. As a young child, I was just as quick and capable as an adult when it came time to seed. I knew how to dig with my right heel in the soil, drop seeds in the little hole, cover up the hole with the toes of my foot, move on a step and do it again. I knew how to pull weeds, and I understood