by Vamba Sherif
The fieldworkers began to berate my mother. ‘You should not have intervened, woman. Now he will return and make us all pay,’ one of them said. ‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ another said. My mother turned around and headed for the cabins, limping like an old woman.
For the first time in more than a quarter of a century on that plantation, our master caved in to the demand of a slave. We resumed work as of old. But that year was catastrophic. The crops failed.
Our master soon returned to his old ways, driving us like a herd of animals. When that failed to lessen his desolation, he took to locking himself in his study, refusing to see anyone, not even Sarah. Sometimes we would see him strolling along the border of the fields, head dropped and taking long draughts of a strong drink. My stepfather took over running things until our master returned to his old self. Sarah, ever the devoted daughter, attended to him. He delved into the Bible, praying and asking for repentance. When the new season dawned, he brought the Bible with him to the fields and made us pray before work.
Only Sarah remained unaffected by it all, which further strained her tenuous relationship with her father. She went on teaching me, now less often, but with the same zeal. I made sure that my stepfather was not around when I went to see her. Perhaps because I was an able and willing student, or she wanted to feel worthwhile around the plantation, while the number of suitors who once courted her waned, or perhaps to get back at a father who did not return her love, Sarah was resolved, in spite of his objections, to go on teaching me.
We often met behind the great house in her father’s absence. Within a few years I had become familiar with some of the biblical stories, like that of Moses who fled with his people, just as my stepfather was planning to do with his people.
That Sarah, with her excessive love for her father, treated him as one incapable of caring for himself infuriated him. He regarded her constant fuss over him as an impediment to his ability to form a binding relationship with other women. Often, during his angry bouts, he would scream at her, saying: ‘Why are you still single? Is it because of those bony hands and face? Who would want to have such a lean and sickly woman as wife?’ For weeks he would not be on speaking terms with her, and he would lock himself up in his study where he had his dinner alone.
Tilling the fields or helping my mother with her children meant seeing Sarah less often than I wanted. Now a free woman, mother refused to move to the city and leave her husband and me.
Our lot changed when Benjamin Johnson, the head domestic died, and I was appointed head servant to the great house and could take better care of mother. More often than not I would be with Sarah who was now a woman long past her prime, and who treated me like a relation.
Life could have gone on uneventfully, I could have remained a servant till death or till I had acquired my freedom were it not for the fact that one morning we woke up to the news that my stepfather had escaped with eight others. They were quickly declared runaways. In his unyielding pursuit of freedom, my stepfather had succeeded in carrying out his plan. On a Christmas night when others were celebrating with drinks and our master and his daughters and their husbands were at the table exchanging reminiscences of youth and the old days, my stepfather and the others had taken flight under the cover of dark. His escape plan was so well executed that to succeed at it, he had not involved mother and me, perhaps because of my proximity to Sarah and our master.
Our master summoned us to the great house where we assembled before other planters, all armed to the teeth. Their dogs kept howling at us as if we were bait. We were questioned one by one. ‘Tell us their whereabouts and we will grant you your freedom,’ they promised.
The men hauled mother to the front and interrogated her. It was her husband who had escaped, wasn’t it? Then she should tell them which route he and the others had taken. My mother did not flinch. One of the planters cracked a whip at her, hitting her across her face. She began to bleed. I broke away from the group to protect her, but when I reached her, her burning gaze stopped me. It seemed to convey that my outburst went against everything she had taught me regarding restraint. Mother bore the subsequent flogging without breaking, which emboldened me to do the same. The beatings now felt routine, our bodies beyond pain.
The planters went around laying out the strategy of curbing what they called the slaves’ revolt and ridding us of any thought of future escapes. The first measure taken was to forbid us to gather in or around the cabins or to visit other plantations. Christmas would not be celebrated further and men were put on patrol to control our movements. Our master took to suddenly appearing in front of the cabins, counting the men, women and children, and looking sullen.
Not long after the escape, our master employed an overseer. ‘No slave of mine will ever escape again, Edward,’ he told me.
It was how Robert Curtis entered into our lives. Our master brought him one summer afternoon, both riding horses whose bodies glistened with sweat as a result of what must have been a long ride. Curtis was middle-aged, short and mean, and a tobacco addict to boot.
Our master literally flung him on Sarah. ‘Because you are incapable of finding a husband and no one is willing to ask for your hand, I’ve brought you a husband,’ he said. And Sarah was stupefied.
The new overseer seemed to make up for his deficiency in size by being cruel and spiteful. Within months of his arrival, he managed to turn our lives into a hell. His every word was followed by a cracked whip. He would work the men deep into the night and there were cases of some of them breaking down under the weight of work. He would force us to scrub the floors, to tend the garden, and to eat crusts instead of leftovers or a real meal. At midnight we would wake up to his footsteps and to his banging of doors, requesting all of us, the cabin dwellers and the servants alike, to present ourselves to him. We feared him so much that our behaviour became erratic. Curtis invented refined means of punishing us: he would flog a man and leave him to spend the night exposed to the elements. Not long after his arrival he did this to me.
One day I neglected to tell one of the servants to prepare his tea. As punishment, he stripped me naked and whipped me before the gaze of all the servants and field workers, and then he tied me like a bundle and left me out under the trees for the whole night. Whether our master was aware of our treatment, he feigned ignorance and paid little or no heed to our complaints. And the person who bore the brunt of this indifference besides us was Sarah, who took to confining herself to the house, hardly coming out of her room. Then, one day, Sarah vanished.
Her disappearance affected me deeply and I was resolved to never forgive that brute of an overseer. I decided to respond not passively as we were wont to do, bearing our burden and dreaming of a future when the chains around us would fall apart, but to carry on a silent rebellion. From the onset the other servants supported me; we decided to avoid taking the orders of a brutal and merciless master. We made up excuses so genuine that Curtis believed them. Seeing the success of our strategy, the fieldworkers joined us, forgetting their grudge against me. As a result, the plantation fell into decline. That year’s harvest was the worst ever. There were signs of dilapidation everywhere. Often, we would hear Curtis and our master arguing with each other.
I would sneak to my sanctuary to ponder on my relationship with Sarah. I missed her warm smile and gentle character and it pained me how much she had suffered the insults of her father and how she would sometimes burst into tears during our lesson.
Two years after her disappearance, while I was sitting on the steps of the verandah during a respite from Curtis’s incessant orders, I saw a slatternly looking figure with long, tangled hair. It was Sarah. I darted towards her and was about to hug her when, horrified at what I saw, I checked myself. Her dress was stained, her face bruised, her hands dirty, and she brought the strong odour of the bushes and fields with her. She wore a haughty look that erased the smile of relief on my face. A fleeting look of recognition lit up her face when she saw me, but that was a
ll, and then she climbed the steps to the verandah and sat on a bench, staring vacantly. I tried to strike up a meaningful conversation with her but to no avail.
That evening, her father returned from the city and went into the house without greeting her. A few days later, when all she did was sit outside and brood, Sarah began babbling to herself. She spoke in a language none of us could understand, because it was no language at all but a series of jabberings and howls that belonged to the animal kingdom that could be heard as far as the cabins. The whites of her eyes would be prominent then; she would roll them at invisible beings, her body shivering as though in the throes of a terrible fever or illness.
Her father realized that ignoring her was counterproductive and decided to plead with her to confide in him. Even Curtis was lenient towards us for a while, to please Sarah. I approached her one morning and held her hand, trying to get her to talk to me. She allowed me to hold her hand, which was as light as a feather, but she remained silent.
One day I went to the verandah only to see that her seat was vacant. There was no Sarah. I never saw her again.
Her disappearance awoke our master from his deep slumber of neglect. The first thing he did was dismiss Curtis. A few months later, he brought home a woman (accompanied by her son) with the severest expression I had ever seen on a face: a thin, hyperactive woman who communicated better with her look than with words. She was also a practising Christian. A year after her arrival, she built a chapel and told us that the plantation would be governed by the laws of the scriptures.
Her son, who listened to us, became the overseer. Now that he had a stepson as overseer, our master was often away and sometimes took me along with him. From then on, nothing that concerned our future escaped me. Not only did I note down conditions on other plantations and compared them with ours, but I became interested in the lives of freedmen elsewhere. I prided myself on the new opportunity offered me, for I was now in a better position to care for my mother. Every time I brought her news from other plantations, she would nod with satisfaction.
It was during one of the visits to a nearby plantation that I met a young woman who was waiting at a table. At one point we stood gazing at each other. She had a calm, almost languid expression on her face that compelled attention. I had the impression that she would break in my arms if I were to hold her. She was small, with delicate features, a smooth face, broad nose and raven-black hair that suggested an Indian and black ancestry. She had the habit of gazing at me as though she could read my thoughts. In the afternoon she displayed that gift. She revealed with accuracy my deepest fears and hopes, my fear of dying in slavery and my hope of leading a life with a house full of children.
Her name was Charlotte.
‘If we had met a few years ago, we would have had a chance of a future together. Now it’s not possible,’ she said, in that matter-of-fact voice I would come to associate with her. Charlotte told me that she was to wed a freeman of some standing. ‘So you see, you are too late, Edward.’
‘I know a place you must see,’ I said, undeterred by her words. No one had stirred me the way she did, not even Sarah. ‘If you agree to see it, I will let you be.’ I was convinced I wasn’t asking much.
She was silent for so long that I thought she would burst into laughter, but I would learn later that she was someone who perceived life not through a hazy mist but through the clear light of day.
‘I hope it’s worth it or it will be our last meeting,’ she said.
I returned to the plantation with the master almost in a daze. My head was filled with conflicting thoughts. How could I build a relationship that could eventually lead to marriage with someone who, like me, was not free? Was it possible to procure her freedom and mine? Where would we live? The future was strewn with uncertainties. I sought refuge in the Bible, in the words of the Lord when he implored us to knock at the door of salvation and we shall be received and to search and we shall find. I took consolation from these teachings as I retired to my bedroom.
‘I’ve met someone,’ I told my mother a few days later in her room in the great house, a small room that adjoined mine and which I could reach through a tiny door from my room.
Mother could hardly walk now. Her injuries which she had managed over the years had in old age resulted in swollen legs that limited her movements. I became her eyes around the plantation, the person through whom she saw and experienced the outside world. Sometimes, longing to see the children and when the urge to tell a story overwhelmed her, she would ask me to take her out to the cabins. She would lean on me, suppressing the pain, as I led her out of the house.
‘Describe her to me,’ she said.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Charlotte, a fragile young woman whose appearance beleid her strength, but most importantly, she had laid bare my deepest fears and longings, a rare trait which had made me appreciate her and loved her more. And I conveyed this image to my mother, leaving out the fact that she was intended for someone else. Never could I imagine those brown eyes staring with affection at a face other than mine. I was certain that given time I could win her and together we could raise a family.
‘May God make your union possible,’ she prayed.
Not long after I took Charlotte to my sanctuary, which I had prepared a day before the meeting, clearing the sand of leaves and branches. Under one of the trees I concealed a jug of water and some provisions. Afterwards the product of my labours looked much like the interior of a well-swept cabin, a place to be at ease. Here was a piece of property that belonged to me in a world with which I was constantly at odds, and I wanted Charlotte to share that sense of belonging with me.
She appeared in a white dress, her hair tied into a knot under a hat that concealed parts of her face, and when I looked into that face I saw it lacked the playfulness of our first encounter. Something was amiss. She was all seriousness, as if we had come to conduct a transaction and not to discuss matters concerning the heart.
This explained my hesitation to hug her, for I had not been trained in how to behave with a young woman when it came to such issues as the one that faced me. But at the same time, she was there, at my sanctuary, in my world, which meant there was still hope.
‘Edward, something has happened,’ she said.
Charlotte informed me that her master, an abolitionist and an active member of the American Colonization Society, had given her and her family, consisting of a brother and three sisters, freedom with the sole condition that they went to settle in Liberia and nowhere else.
‘I have no other choice but to migrate to Liberia,’ she said.
For a while I was silent, and all of a sudden I had a moment of enlightenment. It seemed far-fetched but it was not impossible.
‘What if I asked my master to grant me freedom, then we could leave for Liberia together,’ I said.
For the first time, her expression changed. I told her about my stepfather and about the African language he had taught me. I realised then that I had not mastered it enough to be able to teach Charlotte. Had my stepfather succeeded in leaving for Liberia and settling there? Had he achieved his dream of turning Liberia into a republic with an African language as its lingua franca?
I had gathered from talks around dining tables at the great houses and from my stepfather before his escape, some information about Liberia, but not in detail. The country was founded in 1822 by a group of determined freed slaves, as a result of the injustice towards black people in America. Many were of the opinion that the freedom desired by the slaves could be realised not in America but in Africa. Some expressed their misgivings about the mixture of the two peoples. Some prominent black leaders opposed such an enterprise, arguing that the blacks belonged to America because they had built it and that resettling them elsewhere implied they had no place in American society. Despite this objection, a group of abolitionists and wealthy whites went on to establish the American Colonization Society. This society, later followed by others, was founded after a series of consultati
ons with the government of the United States, which expressed its concerns regarding having a colony on another continent. The plan was to purchase a piece of land in Africa that would serve as a colony under the auspices of the Society and not the government. White agents were to accompany the freed slaves to Africa in search of a suitable place. The men were funded with enough means to purchase land for that purpose.
In April 1820, on a cold winter day, the ship Elizabeth set sail with more than eighty people on board heading for the African coast. That first journey, which was long and treacherous, ended in disaster when most of the men and women (including some white agents) succumbed to a mysterious fever. That incident delayed every attempt to settle there for a while.
But a few years later, I had been told, the first batch of freed men and women landed on the soil of what was to be called Providence Island. Life, as expected, was hard for the settlers, for they had many difficulties to contend with, especially the killer fever.
That was long before I was born, and Liberia was now a republic whose independence was declared in 1847. This was the country where Charlotte was to live. I was determined to join her.
‘I will build you the biggest house in Liberia,’ I said.
She drew closer to me.
‘Tell me about the house,’ she said.
‘It will have a huge verandah where we would sit at the end of the day. It will have a number of rooms corresponding to the many people we will have around us: your family, my mother and our children. The house will overlook a river, it has to be a river, and we will speak African languages to our children. We will learn to appreciate the natives.’
‘We will visit all the settlements, Edward, and forge a union between all the people. That will be our goal,’ she said.
I nodded, gazing at her face, at her hair which she had loosened, and at her slender hands, and I longed to touch them.
Once again, when I took those hands in mine, I marvelled at the delicate bones and at her capacity to have such a profound effect on me. This wonderment, ever-present as I held her hands, heightened my longing for her. While the birds and insects sang within the trees and bushes that shrouded us, I guided Charlotte to the sandy ground.
