DAY 8: Shades of the Prison-House

(Photo credit: Nina Amaho)

Somewhere in the darkness, a child began to sob.

I heard voices convoluted into weird and soul jarring sounds. The dialect was difficult to decipher like hieroglyphs gleaned off an ancient papyrus. Somehow, I grasped the import of the words, a surprise as well as a welcome privilege. I shouldn’t have understood the words under natural circumstances. But this wasn’t natural, neither did the events unfolding belong to this realm when you got right down to it.

I witnessed it all. The horror, the torture-the two-pronged torture. They were children. Every one of them. Their cries were like balloons sailing off into the distance, lost and unheeded.

What they said cut deep and tore at the core of my emotions and turned me into a witness of the worst form of human humiliation.

            “Where are our mothers?”

            “Where are we?”

“What do you want from us?”

And the most heart-wrenching of them all,

            “Who sold us to the white man? Who betrayed us into slavery?”

The kids were all chained to the walls of a medieval torture room-fastened with hooks like some dangerous beast or like criminally insane psychos. But they were kids from the first to the last among them. I had trammels on me, as well. I felt the rough edges of the bonds pierce my skin as it bit into my flesh and bled me. My situation was nothing compared to the children’s because I had something going for me. I wasn’t really in that place. Not really.

And there was something about the shackles on my wrists. I knew I didn’t belong in that place and I knew with a bit of arrogant certainty I could flip the chains off me and get gone out of that plaguehouse. Besides, nobody in that dungeon really saw me. Not the way I saw them.

I jerked the chains binding me and they produced music for the dead. I winced in embarrassment as some of the other kid’s shackles tightened when I twitched. I was a stranger from the future, visiting the past through a spectacular twist of fate. That single action-reaction with the chains taught me how a minor act in the present might trigger a wave of repercussions in our generational past. Funny, isn’t it? It ought to be the other way around but it isn’t always that way.

The idea really got me thinking, how many people believed the blood of these condemned slaves played a part in their daily lives? Did it give anyone pause when it dawned on them that the chains these child slaves wore on their necks are the marks which define us as a race of un/intelligent beings?

Somebody did observe that the earth, rid of the human element, would be a perfect place. Ah, well.

What I did instead, was will the crude irons which served as restraints off my body. They dropped to the floor with a clatter and I wondered how sweet it would have been if all those kids could imitate my gesture and then, head on back home. But where would that be for these lost souls? Did they really have a place by that name before they were captured? If they found a way of escape to their families would there be a love waiting there? Would they be received with open arms?

Some of the slaves were extremely dirty. I took these as either the heroes who had put up a struggle and earned a whooping or the ones who tripped and fell along the course of their journey and got dragged along like dead weights. The bruises on a few of those kids stood out like landmarks commemorating the degree of torture. Many looked ill and malnourished like they could croak the next minute. I didn’t expect any of those to make it to their port of call alive.

In the far south corner of the room, removed from the rest of the kids, a girl lay facedown. The first thing that caught my fancy and held was her head turned towards me. Something about her hair struck me as peculiar. I groped for it but came up empty.

Then, realization struck me below the belt. I felt the pang like a series of pebbles flung at me the next one heavier than the previous. The girl was going on fifteen by her looks and wore cornrow braids. A feeling was coming home. I felt a mutual association towards the girl so strong I uttered a feeble squeak. The girl with the cornrows yanked up her head and held me in her glare.

I didn’t want to believe she heard the sound escape my lungs. My eyes scanned the faces of the rest of the group in that place of despair. Nobody else seemed to notice the intruder. I switched position and went left and watched as her eyes followed my movement. Surprise, surprise, this one had eyes that saw.

Her eyes were cold stares. I almost believed she was in the last lap of some really nasty dying throes. None of the bodies in that place looked alive anyway, whatever picture such a word could conjure in the mind under the circumstance. The girl with the cornrow braids had eyes that . . . I had thought distance had worked its charm on me initially. But, her eyeballs were void of pupils. No pupils, no irises. Just the whites and still she saw me. Now, ain’t that a bummer?

All whites in those eyeballs of hers and yet she saw me as clearly as if I stood in the strobelight in that dark prison-house. I felt the heat of her hard stares penetrate my eyes and prick the back of my head. The girl started getting to her feet. She was like the other kids, lean and malnourished like she lived off a diet of crackers. Baked dirt clung to her body like a second skin. She probably won it struggling with her captors-you could tell by just looking at her she was a fighter.

A million thoughts raced through my mind. I tried to imagine what the girl with the cornrow, the girl to whom I now felt something close to blood relationship, would do if she could hold herself up on the two sticks she called legs. I wasn’t quite prepared for what happened. It took me by storm and almost knocked me over with invisible hands.

The girl sprang to her feet (she didn’t act in anyway like her condition demanded) and the chains came off her hands and feet and neck like discarded toys. Her deftness and agility were too amazing for a kid who had been the subject of such trauma. A girl who-let’s call a spade by its name okay?-has suffered the loss of a lifetime to slavery. Yeah, but you’d recall I said not every part of this bit was in the real world. The girl belonged here but at the same time for all practical purposes, she was there to point me to a vital aspect of my life. I was in the past.

She came at me like a predator running down a prey. I tried to duck cause I didn’t consider playing sitting duck a brilliant idea, and tripped on a litter of feet, and fell over. I doubled back up. Yet, I don’t know why I shied away from her. I wanted to know what happened to her; how she became a slave. How many kids were really in this place? But instead of drawing up to her, I fell away. One of life’s ironies, huh? I wasn’t repulsed by her wounds or the pus oozing out of her sores.

Fierceness resided within the whiteness of her eyes. Darkness lurked behind those eyeballs, darkness holding a tale. The tale of a thousand woes. The tale of death! Death! Death!

Don’t judge me cause I got scared off in the wake of her approach. There are secrets that would wound the heart and never heal it. The story in the girl’s eyes said it all. She scudded forward and took me completely by surprise. She had me hypnotized in a spot. Then, she stepped forward and placed her fingers on my neck; touched them to a muscle there like she’s checking for a pulse. (She’d grown taller in the space of a few seconds.) I was paralyzed from my head to my toes. Her fingers seemed to have been carved out of icicles. If she held her position a few moments longer I would have been transformed into a pillar of ice. I could move absolutely no bone in my body.

The girl/specter propped my head. She barely moved those fingers of hers. It was more like she willed it and my head obeyed rising till my eyes came to rest on . . .

The reality of what I saw shook me up, I trembled until I seemed to convulse. Her eyes, the whites became warp holes that seemed to suck my consciousness into yet another realm of existence. I felt my being emptying into the holes-felt the force of life flowing out like the process of childbirth.

Then, I stood in a world before the present day civilization. A time when West Africa was still the Whiteman’s Grave. The events I was about to partake of was one of the basest levels of human interaction. And I also knew I was seeing through the girl’s eyes-the girl with the cornrow braids’ eyes.

I stood before a path-a forest path. I didn’t know what to expect but then, I saw prints in the dirt. The child-slaves must have come through this part of the woods. From where? I wondered. What was the girl trying to show me? There was a separate set of footprints-they glowed like diamonds in a field of snow. These belonged to the girl. I just knew, don’t ask me how I knew. And they were beginning to fade as it progressed.  I had an idea she wanted me to follow the lead or get lost. (The prints were fading from my side of the woods.)

I fell in line and soon came upon a stream. The slaves probably crossed this. The prints were on the waters and stretched the width of the river reaching from shore to shore. When I tried to follow, I almost got carried off by the undertow. This gave me pause. How did the kids cross the river, chained together neck to neck like a human train? And while some bum followed behind breathing down their throats with a whip in his hands?

That was on the side. The girl with the cornrows wanted me to see a stranger specter. A evil as cruel and as ancient as the beginning of man. What was the evil?

There’s not much time left to do this now. But I’m thinking of putting in the rewrite how the girl’s family –I’m tinkering with the idea of making it like the girl’s father was a slave merchant and then an angry mob came and demolished his mansion and freed the slaves. Put the adults in the house to the sword and sold off the kids to slavery.

Then again, I think a story of betrayal-the brother/sister/cousin selling off the girl cause of some kind of family feud, maybe a battle for a guy’s affection, perhaps, hate or perhaps just plain old betrayal would sell the story better. Anyway, it’s meant to be a tale of woes.

On the other hand, the kid could have been sold off by this guy’s family-his ancestors. He’s done having his dream. He wakes up and someday in a faraway land, he falls in love with a girl who is almost a split image of the girl with the cornrow braids. The guy (who I’m yet to give a name) knows who the lady is but holding it back from her, at least for the time being.

He knows they both came from the past to right old wrongs but how will she take the news of her past. Getting married to one of the guys who made her life miserable howbeit in the past?

Dialogue. This story needs more dialogue.