House of Rougeaux(13)

Abeje and Adunbi kept away from the Foreman, and thankfully their paths did not cross often. Every once in a while though, Abeje felt a chill steal down her spine, and turning her head would see the foreman, at some distance, watching her.

Some months later, Abeje chanced to pass near the sugar works. Suddenly she saw the foreman atop a wagon loaded with hogsheads. He was bent over the ropes, securing the barrels, and his dogs were milling about the wagon on the ground. No one else was in sight. Abeje set her eyes straight on her path, but too late. A hundred needles pricked her scalp. She glanced back, saw him standing straight. Her eyesight was no longer clear enough to see his expression, but it was easy enough to guess.

The dogs tensed, alert as they were to any shift in the mood of their master. Suddenly Abeje saw herself as if from a distance, a woman alone, in open ground, the red dust over her dress, her wrapped head. The foreman gave a yell, commanding his dogs to kill. They lunged forward with a roar, and at once Abeje was back to herself. She could not outrun the dogs. There was no wall or tree she might scramble up to escape. She would not be able to fight them off, even with a stick in hand, they were too many. The clamor flooded her ears.

She had but one choice. She closed her eyes and quietened her breathing, pressing the rise of her fear down into her feet, down deep into the earth. She went as still as a tree, breathing as the trees did, as if there was no time, and no motion, no more than the turning of the whole earth.

When she opened her eyes again, the dogs were staggering around her in aimless circles, perplexed as if their prey had vanished into thin air. They whined and howled, did not see or hear or smell her at all. As fear was not present they had nothing to attack. Abeje then gathered her skirts and hurried on her way. She did not look back at the foreman. She knew he would not try that trick again.

That evening when she was tending her cooking fire Berthe and her grown daughter Lydia approached and stood silently, watching her. Adunbi had not yet returned from the barns.

“What is it?” Abeje asked.

“Is it true,” asked Berthe, “that you charmed the foreman’s dogs today?”

“He has said so,” Lydia said, pointing to another figure standing farther off, the young boy Nathaniel. When Abeje had passed the sugar works that day Nathaniel had been starting down a nearby hillside, carrying a load of kindling sticks. He recognized Abeje by her dress and saw the dogs charge, sure that they would kill her.

Looking from Nathaniel back to Berthe and Lydia, Abeje now saw that a dozen or so others were drawing near the fire, all with a wondering look on their faces.

“Tell what you saw, boy!” said one of the men to Nathaniel, who obliged him, stuttering over his words. When Abeje did not deny it the crowd set to murmuring.

“Praise the Holy One,” said a woman.

“Bless me too,” said another.

One by one they pressed Abeje’s hand. They asked Nathaniel again just what it was he had witnessed. This was a story that would travel far.



* * *



A year or so passed before Adunbi got permission to go to Auxier. Monsieur wrote a paper, a pass for him to travel alone, allowing him to be gone on a Sunday. This meant he had to leave on the night before, walk all the night there and then walk all the next night back. He decided to go near the full moon so that he would have light enough to travel by. Groom told him to look for a woman called Phoebe, as the baby was given to her.

A woman in the Quarters named Leola had made a rag doll for her daughter, and he traded her a gourd of molasses for the favor of making another that he could bring to his own child on Auxier. He was very much excited at the idea of seeing his daughter, his Ayo, though beside himself with anxiety that she might not be well or even still living. Adunbi left the next Saturday night when the moon was bright. He set out with a bundle of provisions that Abeje had helped him prepare, the rag doll tucked away inside, his pass and a walking cane. Abeje told him to kiss the child for her.

Abeje slept fitfully, and spent a fretful day wondering what her brother would find at Auxier. She desperately hoped that he would find the baby well and plump, and that he would be able to hold her and look upon her face. But before dawn on Monday she heard him enter the hut, and she knew at once something was not right.

“Adu,” she said, “what happened?”

“Not there, Beje. Gone.” After a long moment he told her that they sold Phoebe and the child to a slave trader over in Saint-Pierre, last New Year’s. There was no way to know where they might be, they could easily have been sold off the Island. Abeje was silent a long time, her heart crushed under a heavy weight. But then, as if from under that weight, a thread of hope gleamed. Mother Baobab and her brother’s own spiky palm tree would not let her hope die.



* * *



Adunbi and Abeje were past their forty years when Monsieur brought in two new bondsmen, young men meant for the cane fields. They purchased one of these men, called Luc, from the Island of Guadeloupe. Luc was unlike anyone Abeje and Adunbi had ever known. He had many stories to tell, from his time on other islands, and all had but one meaning: freedom.

Young Luc spoke of a great Obeah queen on the Island of Jamaica called Queen Nanny, a saltwater slave from the Old Land, who long ago escaped bondage. She established her own country in the mountains, where the British soldiers could not get her. Her villages grew by hundreds of Maroons. They became warriors and lived in the Old Ways. And not only that. It was true that on the Island of Saint-Domingue the people had risen up, thrown off their chains and banished the soldiers of the French King. Luc told them of two great warriors on the Island of Barbados, when he himself was a child: a saltwater slave called Bussa, and a woman called Nanny Grigg. Luc told them that these two together led a rebellion, with many followers who gave their lives for freedom.