Caribbee

by Thomas Hoover

  *

  Serina was already awake before the drums started. Lis­tening intently to catch the soft cadence of the verses, she repeated them silently, knowing they meant the cowrie shells had been cast.

  It was madness.

  Benjamin Briggs sometimes called her to his room in the mornings, but she knew there would be no call today. He had ordered her from his bed just after midnight, drunk and curs­ing about a delay at the sugar mill.

  Who had cast the cowries? Was it the tall, strong one named Atiba? Could it be he was also a Yoruba babalawo?

  She had heard the verses for the cowries once before, years ago in Brazil. There were thousands, which her mother had recited for her all in one week, the entire canon. Even now she still remembered some of them, just a few. Her mother had never admitted to anybody else she knew the verses, since women weren't supposed to cast the cowries. The men of the Yoruba always claimed the powers of the cowries were too great for any save a true babalawo, and no woman would ever be permitted to be that. Women were only allowed to consult the gods by casting the four quarters of the kola nut, which only foretold daily matters. Important affairs of state were reserved for the cowries, and for men. But her mother had secretly learned the verses; she'd never said how. She'd even promised to explain them one day, but that day never came.

  When she was sure the drums had finished, she rose slowly from the sweltering pallet that served as her bed and searched the floor in the half-dark till she felt the smooth cotton of her shift. She slipped it on, then began brushing her long gleam­ing hair, proud even now that it had always been straight, like a Portuguese donna's.

  She slept alone in a small room next to the second-floor landing of the back stairway, the one by the kitchen that was used by servants. When she had finished with her hair and swirled it into a high bun, Portuguese style, she slowly pushed open the slatted jalousies to study the clutter of the com­pound. As always, she found herself comparing this haphaz­ard English house to the mansion she had known in Brazil, on the large plantation outside Pernambuco.

  Now it seemed a memory from another world, that daz­zling white room she had shared with her mother in the ser­vants' compound. The day the senhor de engenho, the master of the plantation, announced that she would go to the black-robed Jesuits' school, instead of being put to work in the fields like most of the other slave children, her mother had begun to cry. For years she had thought they were tears of joy. Then the next day her mother had started work on their room. She had whitewashed the walls, smeared a fresh layer of hard clay on the floor, then planted a small frangipani tree by the window. During the night its tiny red blossoms would flood their room with a sweet, almost cloying fragrance, so they woke every morning to a day bathed in perfume. Years later her mother had confessed the beautiful room and the perfume of the tree were intended to always make her want to return there from the foul rooms of the branco and their priests.

  She remembered those early years best. Her mother would rise before dawn, then wake the old, gnarled Ashanti slave who was the cook for the household, ordering the breakfast the senhor had specified the night before. Then she would walk quietly down to the slave quarters to waken the gang driver, who would rouse the rest of the plantation with his bell. Next she would return to their room and brush her beau­tiful mulata daughter's hair, to keep it always straight and shining, in preparation for the trip to the mission school the priests had built two miles down the road.

  Serina still recalled the barefoot walk down that long, tree-lined roadway, and her mother's command, repeated every morning, to never let the sun touch her light skin. Later she would wander slowly back through the searing midday heat, puzzling over the new language called Spanish she was learn­ing, and the strange teachings of the Christians. The priests had taught her to read from the catechism, and to write out the stories they told of the Catholic saints—stories her mother demanded she repeat to her each night. She would then de­clare them lies, and threaten her with a dose of the purgative physic-nut to expel their poisons.

  Her mother would sometimes stroke her soft skin and ex­plain that the Christians' false God must have been copied from Olorun, the Yoruba high god and deity of the cosmos. It was well known he was the universal spirit who had created the world, the only god who had never lived on earth. Per­haps the Christians had somehow heard of him and hoped to steal him for their own. He was so powerful that the other gods were all his children—Shango, Ogun, all the Yoruba deities of the earth and rivers and sky. The Yoruba priests had never been known to mention a white god called Jesu.

  But she had learned many things from Jesu's priests. The most important was that she was a slave. Owned by the sen­hor de engenho. She was his property, as much as his oxen and his fields of cane. That was the true lesson of the priests. A lesson she had never forgotten.

  These new saltwater Yoruba were fools. Their life and soul belonged to the branco now. And only the branco could give it back. You could never take it back yourself. There was nothing you could do to make your life your own again.

  She recalled a proverb of the Ashanti people. "A slave does not choose his master.''

  A slave chose nothing.

  She found herself thinking again of her mother. She was called Dara, the Yoruba name meaning "beautiful." And she was beautiful, beyond words, with soft eyes and delicate skin and high cheekbones. Her mother Dara had told her how she had been taken to the bed of her Portuguese owner after only a week in Brazil. He was the senhor de engenho, who had sired mulata bastards from the curing house to the kitchen. They were all still slaves, but her mother had thought her child would be different. She thought the light-skinned girl she bore the branco would be made free. And she had chosen a Yoruba name for her.

  The senhor de engenho had decided to name her Serina, one night while drunk.

  A slave chose nothing.

  Dara's mulata daughter also was not given her freedom. Instead that daughter was taken into the master's house: taught to play the lute and dance the galliards of Joao de Sousa

  Carvalho when she was ten, given an orange petticoat and a blue silk mantle when she was twelve, and taken to his bed the day she was fourteen. Her own father. He had used her as his property for eight years, then sold her to a stinking Englishman. She later learned it was for the princely sum of a hundred pounds.

  A slave chose nothing.

  Still, something in the Defiance of Atiba stirred her. He was bold. And handsome, even though a preto. She had watched his strong body with growing desire those two days they were together in the boiling house. She had begun to find herself wanting to touch him, to tame his wildness inside her. For a moment he had made her regret she had vowed long ago never to give herself to a preto. She was half white, and if ever she had a child, that child would be whiter still. To be white was to be powerful and free. She also would make certain her child was Christian. The Christian God was probably false, but in this world the Christians held every­thing. They owned the Yoruba. The Yoruba gods of her mother counted for nothing. Not here, not in the New World.

  She smiled resignedly and thought once more of Atiba. He would have to learn that too, for all his strength and his pride, just as she had. He could call on Ogun to tell him the future, but that god would be somewhere out of hearing if he tried to war against the branco. She had seen it all before in Brazil. There was no escape.

  A slave chose nothing.

  Could he be made to understand that? Or would that pow­erful body one day be hanged and quartered for leading a rebellion that could only fail?

  Unsure why she should bother, yet unable to stop herself, she turned from the window and quietly headed down the creaking, makeshift rear stair. Then she slipped past the kitchen door and onto the stone steps leading out into the back of the compound. It was still quiet, with only the oc­casional cackle of Irish laughter from the kitchen, whose chimney now threaded a line of wood smoke into the morn­ing air.

  The gate opened sil
ently and easily—the indenture left to guard it was snoring, still clasping an empty flask—and she was out onto the pathway leading down the hill to the new thatched huts of the slaves.

  The path was quiet and gray-dark. Green lizards scurried through the grass around her and frogs whistled among the palms, but there was no sign the indentures were awake yet. In the distance she could hear the low voice of Atiba, lectur­ing courage to his brave Yoruba warriors.

  The preto fools.

  She knew a woman would not be welcome, would be thought to "defile" their solemn council of war. Let them have their superstitions. This was the New World. Africa was finished for them. They weren't Yoruba warriors now. Here they were just more preto slaves, for all their posturing. Once more she was glad she had been raised a Portuguese, not a Yoruba woman bound to honor and revere whatever vain man she had been given to as wife.

  As she neared the first hut, she stopped to look and shake her head sadly. What would the slaves in Brazil think of these thatched hovels? She knew. They would laugh and ridicule the backwardness of these saltwater preto, who knew nothing of European ways.

  Then she noticed a new drum, a small one only just fin­ished, that had been left out for the sun to dry. She had heard once what these special drums were for. They were used in ceremonies, when the men and women danced and somehow were entered and possessed by the gods. But there were no Yoruba women on Briggs' plantation. He had not bothered to buy any yet, since men could cut cane faster. She wanted to smile when she realized the Yoruba men here had to cook their own food, a humiliation probably even greater than slav­ery, but the smile died on her lips when she realized the drum was just a sad relic of a people torn apart.

  She examined the drum, recalling the ones she had seen in Brazil. Its wood was reddish and the skins were tied taut with new white cords. She smoothed her hand against her shift, then picked it up and nestled it under her arm, feeling the coolness of the wood. She remembered the goat skin could be tuned by squeezing the cords along the side. Care­fully she picked up the curved wooden mallet used to play it and, gripping the drum tightly against her body, tapped it once, twice, to test the fluctuation in pitch as she pressed the cords.

  The sharp, almost human sound brought another rush of memories of Brazil, nights when she had slipped away to the slave quarters and sat at the feet of a powerful old babalawo, an ancient Yoruba priest who had come to be scorned by most of the newly baptized slaves. She was too young then to know that a mulata did not associate with black preto, that a mulata occupied a class apart. And above.

  She had listened breathlessly night after starry night as he spun out ancient Yoruba legends of the goddess Oshun—who he said was the favorite wife of Shango. Then he would show her how to repeat the story back to him using just the talking drum.

  She looked toward the gathering in the far hut, thinking again of the verses of the cowries. Holding the drum tightly, she began to play the curved stick across the skin. The words came easily.

  A se were lo nko

  You are learning to be a fool.

  O ko ko ogbon

  You do not learn wisdom.

  She laughed to herself as she watched the startled faces of the Yoruba men emerging from the thatched hut. After a mo­ment, she saw Atiba move out onto the pathway to stare in her direction. She set the drum onto the grass and stared back.

  He was approaching now, and the grace of his powerful stride again stirred something, a desire she had first felt those nights in the boiling house. What would it be like, she won­dered again, to receive a part of his power for her own?

  Though his face declared his outrage, she met his gaze with Defiance—a mulata need never be intimidated by a preto. She continued to watch calmly as he moved directly up the path to where she stood.

  Without a word he seized the drum, held it skyward for a moment, then dashed it against a tree stump. Several of the partly healed lash marks on his back opened from the vio­lence of the swing. He watched in satisfaction as the wood shattered, leaving a clutter of splinters, cords, and skin. Then he revolved toward her.

  "A branco woman does not touch a Yoruba drum."

  Branco. She had never heard herself referred to before as "white." But she had always wanted to. Always. Yet now . . . now he spat it out, almost as though it meant "un­clean."

  "A branco woman may do as she pleases." She glared back at him. "That's one of the first things you will have to learn on this island."

  "I have nothing to learn from you. Soon, perhaps, you may learn from me."

  "You've only begun to learn." She felt herself turning on him, bitterly. She could teach him more than he ever dreamed. But why? "You'll soon find out that you're a preto. Perhaps you still don't know what that means. The branco rule this island. They always will. And they own you."

  "You truly are a branco. You may speak our tongue, but there is nothing left of your Yoruba blood. It has long since drained away."

  "As yours will soon. To water the cane on this island, if you try to rise up against the branco. "

  "I can refuse to submit." The hardness in his eyes aroused her. Was it desperation? Or pride?

  "And you'll die for it."

  "Then I will die. If the branco kills me today, he cannot kill me again tomorrow. And I will die free." He fixed her with his dark gaze, and the three Yoruba clan marks on his cheek seemed etched in ebony. Then he turned back toward the hut and the waiting men. "Someday soon, perhaps, I will show you what freedom means."