Philippa Gregory - A Respectable Trade

‘How dare you!’ he cried. At once two of the African slavers seized him from behind and held him in an unrelenting grip.

‘Let me go!’ Mehuru shouted. He bit off his panic and spoke clearly in Portuguese. ‘You are making a serious mistake,’ he said urgently. ‘I am an envoy for the Yoruba federation.’

The white man nodded to the guard to hold him firmly, leaned down and pulled aside Mehuru’s loincloth. He pulled back the foreskin of his penis to see if he were infected, and then nodded at the guard to make him bend over, to see if the flux had left blood on his anus.

Mehuru’s outraged shout was stifled in his throat. When he felt the dirty hands on him he choked with shame. Siko was watching him, his eyes wide with horror. ‘It’s all right,’ Mehuru called in hollow reassurance. ‘We will get to their leaders and explain.’

It was bravado, not courage. That night when Siko had wept himself to sleep and was lying with his limbs twitching with dreams of freedom, Mehuru sat quietly, dry-eyed and horrified. The fingerprints of the white men burned on his skin, the recollection of their washed-out stares scorched his memory. They had looked at him with their pale eyes as if he were nothing, as if he were a piece of meat, a piece of Trade. They looked at him as if he were a nobody, and Mehuru thought that in their horrible transparent eyes he had seen the death of his individuality. He thought that if he lost his sense of who he was, of his culture, of his religion, of his magic power, then he would be a slave indeed.

Only the god, Snake, was with him in that long desolate night. Mehuru called on him to save him from the men who were as white as ghosts, and the Snake god laughed quietly in his long throat and said, ‘ All men are dead men, all men are ghosts .’ Mehuru did not sleep that night, though he was weary through to his very bones.

The next day the chosen hundred were herded into canoes and taken down the river. Mehuru no longer depended on his powerful status as a representative of the Alafin of Yoruba. He kept a sharp lookout instead for a chance to escape and run, run like a slave, for freedom.

But even that could not be done. Not on the river journey, not when they were unloaded on the beach at the coast. The slavers had done this too often. Mehuru saw that they were practised in the handling of many angry, frightened people. They never came within reach, they whipped them into line with long whips from a distance. Mehuru kept watching for a chance to order the whole line of them to run – run in a great line towards the market place of the town – and in the confusion find hammers to shear the chains, and spears to kill and then scatter. But there were too many too lame to run fast enough, and too many little children crying for their mothers, chained in the line.

He waited, pretending obedience and waiting for his chance. They were herded through the little village at the mouth of the river and down to the wide white-sand beach where boats, white men’s boats, were drawn up with the waves washing around their keels.

When he saw the ship, the great ship, bobbing at anchor beyond the white breakers, his heart sank. It was the ship of his dreams come for him at last. The hot humid wind which blew steadily on shore brought the smell of death as clearly as if he could already hear the widows crying. Mehuru stared at the water around the ship and saw the swift movement of a shark’s fin – just as he had seen it in his dream. He looked at the prow which he had dreamed slicing so easily through the water and knew that it would cut through miles of seas. Even the rope of his dream was stretched out tight, as the ship bobbed on her mooring. It was all as he had known it.

Mehuru embraced despair then. The ship had been coming for him for months, he had seen it set sail, he had seen it arrive off his own coast, and now here it was at last, waiting for him. He closed his eyes as a man will close his eyes in death and let them herd him, like a sacrificial goat, on board.

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