THE BOOK OF NEGROES (23 page)

The library man carefully closed a book on his desk. “I’m sure nobody will object this one time, Mr. Lindo.”

“Good. We need some books by Voltaire, and your most recent maps of the world.”

The keeper led us to a table at the far end of the room, brought us two of Voltaire’s books and some rolled maps, and left us alone.

“Keep that fan going,” Lindo said.

“He’s not watching.”

“Use it anyway,” he said, “it’s hot in here.”

While I fanned him, Solomon Lindo untied a string around a large scroll.

“I have never seen so many books,” I said, looking around and wishing that women and Negroes were allowed in the library.

“They have a thousand books,” Mr. Lindo muttered, “and I paid for half of them.”

“Where are we?” I asked, pointing at the map.

“This is British North America,” he said, indicating a mass of land.

On the edge of the land, right up against a huge swath of blue named the Atlantic Ocean, Lindo put his finger by a dot, beside which was the name
Charles Town.

“And here,” he said, “is Africa.” Across the blue sea, I saw a strangely shaped mass, wider at the top, curving in at the middle and narrowing at the bottom.

“How do you know?”

“You can make out the letters if you look carefully. See here?
A-F-R-I-C-A.
”

“That is my land? Who says it has that strange shape?”

“The cartographers who make the maps. The traders who sail the worlds. The British and the French and the Dutch and the others who go to Africa, sailing up and down the coast, mapping the shape of the continent.”

On the map I paused over some squiggles in the form of baseless triangles. Lindo said they were meant to indicate mountains. I saw a lion and an elephant sketched in the middle of the land called Africa. I saw that it was mostly surrounded by seas. But the map told me nothing of where I came from. Nothing of Bayo, Segu, or the Joliba. Not a single thing that I recognized from my homeland.

“Here on this side of the water, in British North America,” I said, pointing, “it says Charles Town. I can see where we are. But there are no towns
written on Africa. Only these places along the water. Cape Verde. Cape Mesurado. Cape Palmas. How are we to know where the villages are?”

“The villages are unknown,” Lindo said.

“I have walked through them. There are people everywhere.”

“They are unknown to the people who made this map. Look here in the corner. It says
1690.
This is a copy of a map first made seventy-three years ago. They knew even less back then.”

I felt cheated. Now that I could read so well, I had been excited by the prospect of finding my own village on a map. But there were no villages—not mine or anybody else’s.

“Is there nothing more?” I asked.

Solomon Lindo looked at his watch, and said we had time for one more map.

Mapp of Africa
, the second one said,
Corrected with the latest and the best observations.
I checked the date.
1729.
Perhaps it would be better than the first. The map showed land in the shape of a mushroom with the stem shoved to the right. Near the top, I saw the words
Desert of Barbary or Zaara
, and below that,
Negroland
, and below that, along the winding, curving coasts, sections named
Slave Coast, Gold Coast, Ivory Coast
and
Grain Coast.
There were tiny words scribbled where the land met the water, but inland was mostly sketchings of elephants, lions and bare-breasted women. In one corner of the map, I saw a sketch of an African child lying beside a lion under a tree. I had never seen such a ridiculous thing. No child would be foolish enough to sleep with a lion. In another corner of the map, I studied a sketch of a man with a long-tailed animal sitting on his shoulder.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a monkey,” Lindo said.

This “Mapp of Africa” was not my homeland. It was a white man’s fantasy.

“There is some lack of detail,” Lindo said, “but now you see the shape of Africa.”

I said I had seen enough. After all the books I had read, and all that I had learned about the ways of the white people in South Carolina, I now felt, more than ever before, that these people didn’t know me at all. They knew how to bring ships to my land. They knew how to take me from it. But they had no idea at all what my land looked like or who lived there or how we lived.

As we walked home, I felt a sense of despair. Not only had I lost my son and husband, but it seemed that I would never find my way home. I did not want to take the route of runaway slaves, escaping to the Indians or the Spanish in the south. Hiding in swamps and forests would get me no closer to Africa. My only choice was to keep listening, learning and reading. Perhaps one day I would understand the world of the white man well enough to discover how to leave it.

YEARS WENT BY AND MY WORK as a self-hire midwife stayed the same, but the losses of my life kept piling up. I never got to see Georgia again after I was sold to the Lindos in Charles Town, and one day final sad news came through the fishnet: Georgia had died in her sleep one night of no known ailment. And my fellow villager Fomba had been killed by a night patroller. Fomba had been fishing in his skiff at night when the buckra called out for him to identify himself. Fomba had never recovered the ability to speak, and the patroller shot him in the head. Rather than learning to feel less disappointment, I found that one insult to my heart just seemed to make the next one worse.

In the fall of 1774, nearly thirteen years after I had come to live with the Lindos, a smallpox epidemic took the lives of Mrs. Lindo, Dolly, their sons and some two hundred other people in Charles Town. In our grief, Solomon Lindo and I barely spoke to each other. When he passed me
coming in and out of the house, usually accompanied as he was by a man from his synagogue, it was as if he didn’t see me.

Stumbling about in the fog of his sorrow, at least Solomon Lindo had friends to visit him and bring him food, but I had nobody to console me over my losses. Negroes were not allowed to come visiting in the backhouse, and most of the friends that I had made over the years were gone—they had left with owners who took them where they wanted, or they had died of fevers or the pox.

I could not stop thinking about Dolly and her son, who had been my most regular companions during the long years in Charles Town. She had fussed over me like a mother, cooking my meals and cleaning my clothes, and whenever I had given her some of the things that came from my work as a self-hire midwife—a miniature box made out of cherry wood, a small bottle of West Indian rum—her face had lit up like that of a child. She kept the bottle with her old buckled shoes, examining them from time to time as if she were checking in with old friends.

Dolly had been unbelievably proud to see me reading and writing. Sometimes while I read books in our backhouse at night, she had lain next to me and fallen asleep with her hand resting on my arm. She never opened a book, but liked to sit near and watch while I taught her son Samuel to read. As a result of our late-night lessons, he had become a good reader by the age of ten.

“You done give him the one thing I ain’t got to give,” Dolly had said.

Losing Mrs. Lindo was equally painful. She had never raised a hand against me in all my years of service. I had trusted her more than any other white person, and had come to care for her son David like a child of my own.

After Dolly, Samuel and David died, Mrs. Lindo herself had taken the fever. Pustules broke out all over her body, causing unspeakable pain on her heels and palms. I was left to care for her, and I knew by the way the
pustules all ran together, fusing on her face and neck and back, that she was not long for this world.

I had cried for a whole week after she died. I was not allowed to attend the shiva or speak to any of the people in the house about how much I had loved Mrs. Lindo, so my only way of saying goodbye was to dust and stroke each of the books she had given me over the years. Long ago, she had settled into a pattern of giving me a gift of one book a month, along with a bottle of whale oil to refill my lamp. I kept the books stacked in thirteen columns—one for each year of my service with her—in a corner of the backhouse. It was safe up there, because no white folks ever came into my sleeping quarters. I had built my own little library up in that backhouse, and sometimes read halfway through my long, lonely nights while Dolly and Sam slept.

Until the moment that I excused myself for the last time from Mrs. Lindo’s bedroom, I had never imagined that I could lament the death of a white person. I would never have thought it possible for my insides to bleed for one.

Solomon Lindo had people from his synagogue in the house every day for a week, and people continued to come by almost daily for a month. Women from his synagogue brought food of every kind, and his sister—a short, severe woman named Leah who seemed off ended by my very presence—often patrolled the house.

A few weeks after Mrs. Lindo died, Mr. Lindo and I found ourselves alone for a rare moment. “All these people around,” he said. “It’s suffocating.”

At least he had his own people, with whom he could break bread and cry. I had nobody at all.

THE PEOPLE OF CHARLES TOWN had fallen on hard times. Coins were harder than ever to find, and the British government had passed laws preventing the use of paper currency in South Carolina. People were so angry about the way the British were controlling the shipping and sale of tea that huge quantities of the stuff had been allowed to rot on the docks of Charles Town, and the whites were refusing to drink it in their homes. Lindo and his friends blamed their problems on the British and warned of war if things did not improve. Lindo had told me that Carolina indigo could barely fetch half the price of Guatemalan and French West Indian indigo, and that plantation owners were talking about switching to other crops. To make matters worse, fever, syphilis and smallpox kept people in a constant state of fear and agitation. Charlestonians were often afraid to shake hands or leave their houses. For a time, town officials tried to prevent the spread of disease by barring slave ships from arriving at Sullivan’s Island.

In January of 1775, some months after the smallpox epidemic swept through, Solomon Lindo told me that he would be leaving for a month to do business in New York City, where he hoped to convince British officials to protect the parliamentary bounty on Carolina indigo. He said the mud for dye was selling so poorly in international markets that production might grind to a halt in Carolina if the British subsidy were reduced or eliminated.

After Lindo left, his sister Leah moved into the house, but she took her meals alone and made no arrangements for mine.

“There is no food,” I told her the day after Lindo had sailed out of the harbour.

“Aren’t you on self-hire?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then you can get your own meals too. I’m not wasting time or money on you, and if I have anything to say about it, my brother won’t have anyone else doing it for you either.”

When I tried to enter the house to find some of the books that Mrs. Lindo had left behind, Lindo’s sister refused to unlock the door. With nothing to read and no meals to eat, I wandered the streets every day, scrounging for fruit, peanuts and bits of cooked meat from women I had come to know in the markets. At night, I sometimes bought grilled fish sold behind a tavern where white men went looking for mulatto women.

Coins were almost impossible to come by, and in the markets even small goods were exchanged by means of trade. I thought ruefully of the lessons about money that Lindo had taught me years earlier. As it turned out, I had been right. Chickens were more reliable than silver. I rarely had chickens to trade, but exchanged whatever goods I received from the Jews and the Anglicans who had me catch their babies or the babies of their slaves.

Some of the new mothers gave me small quantities of rum, but one rich woman gave me a box filled with fifty glass bottles. At first, I felt cheated. What good was a box of empty bottles? But when I reopened the box at home, I found the glass to be of extraordinary beauty, coloured with swirling lines of blue. The tiny bottles had room for two or so ounces of liquid, but each was shaped differently, some cylindrical, others bulbous, some cube-like and still others faintly spherical. I filled each with two ounces of rum and stopped it with a cork.

For months, I used the smooth, slender bottles with swirling blue lines to make purchases in the market. The Negro hucksters loved the rum and kept the bottles because they considered it good luck to blow into blue glass. They called me Blue Glass Gal when they saw me coming, and the bottles that I traded changed hands among other buyers and sellers.

I slept at night in the backhouse, and felt terribly lonely without Dolly and her son. It seemed to me a violation of human nature to be made to sleep alone. Sometimes I comforted myself with thoughts of my parents in Bayo, or of Georgia warm and snoring in the bed we had shared on the
Appleby plantation. When I couldn’t sleep, I would stay up late into the night, re-reading books and thinking of the people—Georgia, Chekura, Mamed, Dolly, and Mrs. Lindo—who had been in my life when I had first read them.

One night I heard footsteps downstairs. I jumped off the bed and covered myself with my cloth wrapper.

“Who is there?” I called out.

“Aminata?” It was a man’s voice, whispering. I stopped. When had someone last called me by my African name?

As Chekura reached the top step, I flew into his arms. When my hands pressed against his back and my toes rested above his, I felt my childhood in his flesh and my homeland in his voice. I clung to him for minutes, almost afraid to discover the man he had become. What if he was no longer the boy who had helped me stay alive in the long walk to the African coast, or the young man who had married me and given me a son?

His hair had fallen out, and he kept his bald head shining. He was still a slender man, barely heavier than I, and only a few inches taller. Half of the middle finger on his left hand was missing, but he still had the same smile he had worn almost everywhere in our homeland journey. I loved the light in his eyes and the way his lips turned up into a grin when he looked at me. We fell into conversation just as if we had been together the day before.

“How did you find me?”

“I asked for the home of Lindo the Jew,” he said.

“How did you get to Charles Town?”

“A man who is taking a mess of tobacco and rum into the low-country has come to the Charles Town market, and I’m here with him.”

“How long can you stay?”

“Just tonight. But I might be able to come back once or twice in a month or so.”

“You might return once or twice,” I said, letting go of his hand and sitting down on my bed.

He sat beside me and placed his hand on mine. I pushed it away. He took it again, but I shoved it away firmly.

“No,” I said, “you can’t do that. I’ve missed you more than you could ever know. But you can’t just climb into my bed with the promise that you might return ‘once or twice.’”

“Do you have any food?”

“I eat in town. There’s no eating here. Lindo is away.”

He slid his curled fingers along my cheek. “Then you can come away with me and he won’t know you’re missing.”

I turned my face away from him. “You want me to run into the low-country with you? And the man who owns you?”

“He might let me go for a day or two. I know places where we could be alone.”

“A day or two is not what I want with you,” I said.

“Sometimes a day or two is all we can get,” Chekura said.

For some time, neither of us spoke.

“I married the man I loved,” I said finally.

“And the man who loved you married you,” he said.

“Do you still want me?” I said.

“Always did and never stopped.”

“You didn’t even come to see me after they took Mamadu.”

Chekura stretched out on the bed, pulled me down beside him and whispered in my ear. “My master on Lady’s Island sent me down to Georgia for three years. I was sent away before Mamadu was even stolen.”

I pulled away to look into his eyes. He smiled at me and ran his fingers over my hair.

“My master and yours knew each other,” he said. “They sent me away so there wouldn’t be trouble.”

I took his hands into mine. “All that time,” I said, “I was sure that you blamed me.”

“For what?” he said.

“For losing our child.”

Chekura put his arms around me and brought me closer to his body. “What mother is to blame for losing her child?”

We were lying side by side and my hand was on his hip. “What did they make you do down in Georgia?” I asked.

“Plant rice,” he said. “Worse than indigo. Plenty worse, working in water all the time. If you didn’t work hard enough, they whipped you. And if you did work hard enough, you died. I made it through three seasons.”

Chekura brought my face to his chest and whispered, “When they sent me back to Lady’s Island, I knew you were in Charles Town. But there was no more travelling and trading allowed. They used sentries to stop Negroes from moving about at night. I got past the sentries but fell into a man-trap.”

I pulled away from his chest to look into his eyes. I took his hand and stroked it, and came across the half finger. “My punishment,” he said.

I kissed his nine good fingers and stayed much longer on his tenth, stroking and brushing my lips against the half that remained. I felt full of love for this man, but thought about how I would feel if he entered my body and then disappeared for another fourteen years.

“Your eyes are as round as acorns, and the moons on your face are beautiful,” he said.

I thought of how good I had looked through my twenties, when I was fending off the drunken and obnoxious advances of Charles Town men—white and black—and suffering the stares of Solomon Lindo and the few friends he brought into the house to feast their eyes on me. Now
I was thirty years old and had nothing to show for it. No son. No family. No homeland. And even my beauty would soon fade.

“Don’t be sad,” Chekura said, letting his fingers run up and down my arms. “No moons as beautiful as yours have crossed the Atlantic,” he said. “All these years, when I was missing you, I would wait for the thinnest sliver of the crescent moon to come out at night. On those nights, just once or twice a month if the skies were clear, I felt that you were with me.”

I burst into tears. Chekura took me in his arms and held me close, and as my sobbing ebbed to gentle weeping, I could feel his chest moving steadily in and out. I lay awake for a long time after Chekura began to snore, wondering if I would see him when the day broke. I was the first to awaken, and found him lying with his hand in mine. I pressed it to my breast. Once we had jumped the broom, once we had made a son, and once I had hoped that we would all stay together.