Africa Risen, page 25
All that visible muscle, lean from too little food. Abs that John would die for.
Mama mistress would lick the sweat off their skin before she tied them down and bid the others to leave after she made her choice.
“Where do you think your uncle’s light brown skin comes from?” the old man asked, laughing at my discomfort when he gave me the vision. “They bred us in shacks at the back of the property.”
Ms. Hennigan made a lot of claims about her old ways, but in the end, all the smoke and chanting just left a sour smell in the air that the ghosts complained about.
“Who she think she is?”
“Get that from here.”
The undead swirled about, furious at the interruption.
“Exorcism is a delicate thing,” Ms. Hannigan had told me, her bird-thin wrists clacking with wooden beads. “Best to walk away and leave them to be.”
I told her about the commission.
“Ay,” she said. “I would take that money and run, you know?”
I did.
* * *
Hands. I think about all those hands and feet. Buried in the ground around the mill, and the rest, eaten by the massive stone that grabbed anything near its raggedy lips to chew.
Balled up, intertwined, undulating, writhing in pain.
I sit up in the humid night, gasping, grabbing for my chest where I’d sworn hands had reached out from under the bed to grab me.
They can’t talk. They can’t howl. They can’t do anything other than skitter about the edges of my vision.
“Not just us ghosts here,” Queen Atarah says.
I pour warm water from a sweaty glass pitcher. We sit and watch the moon over the bay out the door.
“I miss my house,” I tell her.
Put everything I had into it, but the morning after the hurricane what did I have? Not a roof over my head. It blew off into the ocean. Nothing but the bathtub I’d cowered in as what sounded like a train thundered over my head.
The insurance company? Folded. Money sucked up into another shell company over that. All of it a game to extract money out of us.
Sell this mill, get into an apartment, see if I could start rebuilding.
Queen Atarah appeared that first night after the storm, as I hid here in this mill that I could never sell. She sucked her teeth in annoyance at my screaming and carrying on.
“Hold your head up like the king you are,” she hissed at me. “My blood in your veins. You are royalty. Do not run from it.”
I ran from it.
At first.
Now I’m sitting here chatting with the ghost of a woman whose father lost a war, was sold to Portuguese traders, and then packed into a hold off Sierra Leone. The daughter of the same man who sold Atarah into slavery was on the ship, and Atarah strangled her to death by the end of the week with the very chains that kept her shackled to a nearby post.
“I tried to kill the sailors,” she said to me once. She showed me horrible marks on her arms. “But they shot the men, and punished the rest of us. You know, though, I made their voyage far less profitable. I’m proud of that, at least.”
* * *
We watch TV together, the ghosts and me. They like shows with a diverse cast. But they don’t want things too serious. Comedies get the best reactions. The laughter of shades slips around the walls and fades through the air, carried away whenever the salt breeze kicks up.
When I try to watch dramas, or history, I get vetoes that come with wailing and moaning.
Talent shows get turnout. The room, empty in one way, but packed full of the dead if you turn your eyes just so, erupts in excitement when an old gospel choir breaks out into joyful song.
I feel the brush of a clean, Sunday-best dress against my back as a young girl twirls and twirls to voices raised in harmony.
“What a thing to see,” Queen Atarah says, her face twisting and faint in the blue glow. “What a thing.”
They all groan and warble with anger when the judges vote against the choir continuing on.
“Are you going to haunt those people when they move here?” I ask.
“Haunt them? They don’t have our blood. They won’t see us. Maybe we could make them feel unease. That’s it. You’re the one we hope will stop them. They see you. They don’t see us.”
I look around at the half-seen presences. Just barely island enough they could haunt me. But not Katelyn and John.
“I’m tired, Queenie,” I say, using the nickname the others use for her.
FEMA has a timeline for how people recover after disasters. Getting through the storm, that’s adrenaline and dealing with the disaster. People even feel better than normal after. The community comes together. People share food about to go bad, help clear driveways, check in on each other.
But then, there is cleaning up, rebuilding, and the scale of the work sets in.
It’s months after a disaster when the price starts getting paid.
I rub my face and turn off the TV to disappointed groans around me.
Bad enough on an island everyone knows you, and all your relatives are always up in your business. Now I have to negotiate with the distant ancestors complaining about what I watch as well.
“We’re all tired,” Queen Atarah says. “We’re all surviving, best we can.”
I feel ashamed, because I know my problems are inconsequential to her suffering. I pour rum so that this time I can sleep without hearing anything.
* * *
I meet them on the beach by the hotel, to sign the memorandum of understanding. Katelyn has an early-morning painkiller in a coconut, John wants a pure temple for a body, so he’s drinking something green. Grass-clippings green.
Deep, deep breath.
“You said you felt unease, you had a nightmare the other night?” I ask.
They glance at each other. “Yes.”
“I think…” I look off at the shimmering ocean and a medium-sized yacht bobbing by, someone on deck fumbling about, trying to get a sail up.
This bay used to be a quiet place when I was a kid. We’d come down and shatter the silence, scare off the seagulls and pelicans on the rocks with our wildness.
“You do know what the mill was?” I ask them gently.
“A sugar mill,” John says brightly.
“And, how was sugar made in this mill?” My voice is blunt now, my face no longer scrunched up in cheery sales mode.
We’re all tired.
“Is this about…” Katelyn starts off.
The way John lowers his voice, it sounds like we’re about to conduct a drug deal. He glances around, as if worried about being busted. “Those times?”
“Yes. Those times.” I lean forward. I can feel my stomach lurch.
“Will the locals try to stop us? Is there trouble?” Katelyn asks. She grips the table, eyes wide.
I set aside the way she says locals. I set aside the way it rankles me that they don’t see me as one of the locals, merely because I look like her and John. I set everything aside and let go of my driving need to get something, anything so I can start building my own house again on the hurricane-scoured land.
“You want to build a home there,” I say. “But the people enslaved and forced to work there, so many died there. So many lost limbs to the mill. Do you know what happened to a slave then, if they were injured at work?”
They didn’t go on disability. There was no social security.
“Are people angry … with us?” Katelyn asks, her lip trembling.
“Your living room on those plans, it would be right over where the gears ripped limb from body. Your carpet will be tossed over the bloody floor. If you have dinner there, it would be like having tea in an abattoir.”
Nibbling finger food where someone’s fingers had been yanked free …
Katelyn pales. That’s right. Animals. Of course animals would be the thing that shocks her most in that comparison.
Screw it. I’ll lean into that. If it’s animals that get her attention, I can work it. “How different would it be than eating dinner under swinging meat hooks, where cattle once screamed and panicked—”
“Stop.” She looks sickened.
“You’re building a house in a graveyard, and you’re asking me if people will be upset. The question isn’t will people be upset, the question is, why would you do this?”
* * *
I push my bike up the hill and pant. I lean it against the wall of the cabin and take my groceries inside. The bottle of champagne I take out with me to go sit on the “pirate” rock to watch the sun set.
“You’re drunk already, why you need that?” Queen Atarah asks.
“Because I’m celebrating,” I say.
They’re all out in the shadows, watching me. I can feel them.
“Celebrating what?” Her eyes narrow.
“Losing the biggest commission of my life.” I pop the cork and laugh as champagne mists the air around us all. I drink from the bottle. A rivulet of champagne misses my lips and trickles down the side of my neck.
“He’s a fresh one,” someone mutters from the hibiscus bush.
“Leave him be,” another shade says.
“All that money,” I say to Queen Atarah.
“For what?”
“I know. I know this place needs to be a museum. Or—”
“I meant, what would you do with that money?”
I stare out at the silvery waters of the bay. “Start my new house? Trip around the world? Fancy dinner? Maybe a boat? Just a small one.”
My ancestor, the queen, looks around. “They were focused on that. Money. Sugar made this island one of the richest, most productive places in the world. And those men who took us, they were fueled by it. The sugar powered all that money. They were more drunk on it than you right now.”
I don’t feel I can argue that. But … “I’m going to be sleeping in a tent after all this, you know that, right?”
“But you’re free,” Queen Atarah says. “And your conscience is light. The world is yours. We are so excited for you. Can’t you see that?”
I look over my shoulder. They’re all just outside of my ability to easily look directly at them, yet I can hear the happiness in the hum of the bush all around me. A different tone.
“We survived so you can thrive, yes, but you can’t look away or turn your back,” Queen Atarah tells me. “We won’t let you. Not for long.”
“Maybe we can convince someone to turn this into a museum,” I say. “A thoughtful, tasteful, but honest museum.”
Because what else could a plantation be? Who would turn a forced labor camp into a restaurant, or a set of villas? Queen Atarah had been stolen from her own land, but bled and died here, and now she is a part of it.
I’d been so focused on money, and development, and my own misery, that I’d lost perspective.
“What do you think of that, Queenie?” I ask, finishing the champagne off in a final swallow.
But there is no one around me. Just the rustle of the trade winds, the bleached bush, and the shadows of the old mill.
THE CARVING OF WAR
by Somto Ihezue Onyedikachi
Odili cupped the scream falling from her lips. It had been twenty years since last she saw it. There it was, in her bedroom, coiled under her child’s head. Walking, then running, then stumbling, she made for the kitchen. From behind the pot cabinet, she drew a cutlass, the one for splitting the coconuts. Darting back to the room, her breath steel in her chest, she inched towards her child’s cot. She reached into it, her fingers clattering against each other, and picked him up in one swoop. Setting him in his chair, far at the end of the room, she took the cutlass and hacked everything to pieces. The cot, the mattress, her árùsí—familiar; bright gold pyramids trailing down its body, she hacked at it all, wood, foam and skin scattering across the room. She did not stop, until her child began to cry.
The rest of the night met Odili awake. She kept turning in bed every time the crickets buried in the walls broke into their high-chirped songs. Checking on him for the fourth time, she found her child silent with opened eyes. In his little face, Odili saw her grandmama. She lifted him, pressing his temple to her lips and pulling away when she felt warm liquid seeping into her clothes.
“Naughty, naughty boy,” she sighed.
She nuzzled her nose on his and he smiled, his incisors, specks of white. Changing his urine-stained clothes and putting him back to sleep, she headed for the bathroom and met her mother at the door.
“Gods!” Odili cowered to the floor.
“Foolish child, what have you done?”
“Ma—Mama?”
Odili had not set eyes on her mother, not in years. With the markings of the old faith etched on her face, cowries from the Eke River clasped around her neck, her hair, silvered milk, her mother was starting to look very much like her grandmama.
“You took all I sowed in you, and you left it to the crows!”
On the floor, hands wrapped around her body, Odili sat noiseless. With her mother came the memories, the ones she locked behind walls. Now, the walls came tumbling down and the memories poured in, drowning her.
“Where is its body?” her mother asked, anger sewn into the wrinkles on her face.
Like a baby learning to walk, Odili drew herself off the floor, out the back door and into the bushes behind her house. Her mother followed, a shadow on an ill-lit street. Coming to a spot, Odili stepped aside and like an arrow, her mother’s cry pierced the night. Odili had never heard a thing like it, it was anguish given voice.
“Mother of my mothers, gouge out my eyes for I have seen the unseen,” she cried, collapsing to the ground, next to the lynched corpse of the familiar. Ash and dust was all that remained of it. “Insolent child!” She threw a glare at Odili and in her eyes, something built. “You will be the death of us.”
Odili just stood there as her mother resumed her wailing. She had never seen her cry, not once, not even when her grandmama died.
“How did you find me?”
“You have always been a slow one.” Her mother dried her eyes, turning to her. “Did you think you could just leave?” she continued, mockery stealing into her voice. “The path before you is set in stone.”
“I didn’t leave … I was taken. I thought you’d come for me.”
“The way back was ahead of you, you just chose not to see it.”
“I was a child. I was lost. I waited for you.” Odili caught the tear making its way down her face. “You abandoned me!”
“And when you became a woman, what held you from returning to your duty, to your mother!”
“Mother? You are dead to me.”
Her mother’s slap fell like a gush of cold breeze on her cheek. It would have stung more if she had been there in flesh, not projecting her spirit.
“I want you to leave,” Odili said, unfazed.
“You must come back to Obosi, you must atone for this atrocity.”
“I’d rather die a thousand deaths.”
“You think you have known suffering?” Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “Something is coming, something unlike anything you have ever seen.”
“Leave, please!”
In a blink, her mother vanished into the night.
* * *
Odili had been but a child when Nkeala, her grandmama, died. All she remembered of her were her braids, a tangle of clouds that reached for the floor. She remembered her eyes, how they swallowed her face. To look into them was to be lost in a vastness, it was to find eyes—owl eyes, bold eyes, brown eyes—staring back at you. Most of all, she remembered her kindness, an unending sea. Odili remembered everything.
Nkeala had been dìbìā—keeper, to Idemili; the roaring python, they who drowned oceans, mother of mothers. At the birth of time, Idemili, like beads dancing on a woman’s waist, had wound herself around the clans of Obosi. Out of her mouth, the Eke River poured, its brooks and streamlets giving sustenance to the corn in the farmlands, the antelopes of the wild and the Irokos that split the sky. Odili’s family was bound in perpetuity to Idemili. With her grandmama’s passing, the fanged staff fell to her mother, Adaugo. In the past, a few keepers had met their fate with defiance. Odili’s great-great-grandfather, Agbadike, had refused the staff when it passed to him. Setting the shrine of Idemili ablaze, he invoked the ritual of blood in a bid to sever the bond that tethered his life to her. Three days after, a breadfruit fell from a tree and split his skull in half.
Like moth to fire, Adaugo embraced the mantle of keeper. Before her twelfth birthday, she could already perform the passage rites of ancestors. Beneath the glow of a horned moon, she’d slay a ram, its body thrashing beneath her knee. Immersed in its blood, she’d wade into the Eke, bridging the fold between the living and the dead. Ancestors past would come walking through her, blessing and cursing the ones they left behind. When she was heavy with Odili, Adaugo ventured into Idemili’s mouth and emerged unscathed, spirit water coursing through her veins. One of the dwindling few, Adaugo knew the words to the eternal scripts and the anchors that held them. The clans of Obosi had revered Nkeala; Adaugo, they feared. She was power unbridled, her dedication to Idemili, undying. Like her mother and keepers before her, Adaugo stayed unwed.
“We are the rage of Idemili, unburdened by the constraints of love and companionship,” she’d remind Odili. “We are fire and water, we are rain and lightning, our bodies are nothing but vessels.”
Still, keepers were mandated to bear offspring, but only with those from the root of princes, thus, sustaining the purity of their line. Without a father, a mother who in all entirety was of another realm, Odili roamed the village unchecked, her python familiar slithering beside her. More than a companion, it had become a parent, regurgitating rabbits and bush rats for her to roast.
When the first missionaries came to their village, Odili was drawn in by their flaky bread and the trinkets that hung from their neck, how they shimmered in the light. At the rooster’s crow, she’d run into the village, into the shack that doubled as a chapel, to watch the priests bless communion, to watch Edward. Edward was a mass server and Edward was beautiful. With her eyes, she’d follow him and when he caught her stare, she’d hold it till he flushed red and looked away. He intrigued her, the sapphire of his eyes, his hair; the burning of dawn, the way he said her name, like a song lived in the walls of his lips. When first he kissed her—a gentle kiss, his nose brushing against hers—he had closed his eyes. Odili kept hers a door, ajar.
