Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

Jama’s work could not have been simpler. He had to shovel piles of coal into the giant furnace in the boiler room, while a trimmer wheelbarrowed the coal in from the bunker and deposited it at Jama’s feet. Four hours of work, eight hours of rest, and by the time they had reached Haifa in Palestine, Jama had fallen easily into the rhythm his life would run by for the next fifty years. In his leisure hours, Jama observed the construction of a cage on deck. A small lavatory block had been built inside the cage, but that was the only sign it was being made for human habitation. Haifa port was a battleground when they docked. Five hundred gunners of the British marines stood alongside tanks, trucks, military jeeps, their guns aimed at a broken-down steamship renamed Exodus 1947 and the unruly Jews on board it. Four thousand refugees were trying to force open the British quota into Palestine and were in sight of the Promised Land. The Exodus had been rammed by three British ships, including a navy destroyer, and it now lay motionless like a gutted whale, with Jewish refugees peering out of its bowels. The refugees from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka were once again separated from their belongings and marched into shacks where they were sprayed with DDT and pushed onto the waiting prison ships. The hard young men and women on board the Exodus had to be forced from the wreckage with batons and gunfire, and three corpses were bundled by the British into waiting ambulances. Jama watched in amazement as thousands of bedraggled people trudged toward the Runnymede Park , toward his pristine ship, old men hobbling along as best they could, while children with lost eyes stifled tears. They looked nothing like the turbaned Jews of Yemen, these pale, haggard people. They looked over their shoulders, at the black jute sacks of clothing, food, jewelry, and mementos that the British had pried from them and dumped haphazardly on the dockside. A desperate cry rang out when part of the pile collapsed into the water and sank to the bottom of the sea. Two other prison ships, the Ocean Vigour and Empire Rival , were also waiting to collect the refugees, and Jama waved to the Somali sailors he could see distantly on their decks. Eighty Royal Marines boarded the Runnymede Park along with the refugees, the glossy young men with tanned skin and golden hair squashed under red berets seeming like a different species of human to the thin, angry Eastern Europeans they were pushing into the hold. After the Haganah zealots who had organized the Exodus revolt had been identified and placed under guard, women, children, and the elderly were allowed on deck. Some refugees had squeezed themselves into all the clothes they had rather than put them in the jute sacks, and now they peeled them off, clothes from their past lives, from the death camps, from the DP camps, their history folded into a few items beside them. Unlike the marines who only had eyes for the bewitching Hungarian girls with the sorceress green eyes and wide feline faces, Jama’s attention was caught by a woman sitting boulderlike by the railings away from the other refugees. She was heavyset but made larger by the woolen coat she continued to wear in the heat, and an infant slept at her breast; something about her gave Jama a powerful sensation of Ambaro. It was as if his mother had been transplanted onto the ship. For a long time Jama watched her stare into the sea, unconcerned with the hustle and bustle around her. She adjusted her headscarf and cast a weary look over the potato sacks that contained her worldly goods.

“Oi, Sambo! Stop mooning at the white women and get back to your cabin,” yelled the donkeyman at Jama, beckoning with his thumb to the hot cabins below. Jama, only understanding the tone and hand gesture, turned away toward his cabin.

“Leave him, Bren, he ain’t hurting anyone,” called down the engineer, Sidney, who had observed the exchange. Jama loitered by the metal steps to try and decipher what the Ferengis were saying about him.

“Poor fella, yer true to yer title, Bren, you ride those Mohammeds as if they were donkeys. Me ’eart goes out to ’em. Poor, puzzled buggers never complain,” said Sidney.

“I’ve got to, matey, they might be quiet but they’re conniving bastards, they’ll have our jobs and our birds as soon as we turn our backs,” replied Brendan, the donkeyman.

“Good luck to ’em, if I owned these ships I’d employ ’em too, they’re like fucking barnacles, however bad it gets they hang on. Don’t see ’em bellyaching like you paddies, live off a stick of incense a week or a whiff of an oily rag. Ain’t surprised the bosses wanna keep ’em on. As for our women,” teased Sidney, “you know you ain’t that scrupulous in your dealings with colored girls when we dock in Bongo-Bongo Land either.”

The cabin rocked Jama gently to sleep, the distant roar of the engines and sea becoming part of his dream life. He had one of the top bunks and his dreams often made him leap from it, to wake up suddenly on the floor with a sore hip or elbow. It was usually hyenas that pursued him, frothing at the mouth as they pounced, or Italian gunmen kicking in the door and opening fire with machine guns.

Small muscles had formed on the top of Jama’s arms and his cheeks had filled out with the regular meals. Good dreams consisted of feedings that never ended, dish after dish served on the plastic trays he had grown to love. The white steward would smile and proffer the strange canned beef, the sweet corn, sardines, mashed potato. The hot, noisy inferno of the engine room never appeared in his dreams but dominated his waking life, every twelve hours he went down to feed the glowing fire, communicating over the scrape of shovel and coal with hand signals and lip reading. The ship was a world propelled forward by Jama and the other Somali firemen, an ark with more than two of each, English, Irish, Scottish, Somali, Polish, Hungarian, German, Palestinian: the Runnymede Park carried them all on her back away from the Promised Land to an unknown shore. The Jewish refugees had been told that they were being taken to a camp in Cyprus, but that was a lie, Cyprus lay far behind them and they were heading for Europe to be made an example of. The eighty marines kept a close watch on the young men and women, fearing the Haganah militants among them. At night a huge lamp was shone into the cage and over the Mediterranean, casting a ghostly eye over the bundled families and mysterious sea. The refugees were separated, with the most virile and threatening held under guard in the hold. Women, children, the elderly, and the sick were allowed on deck to visit the hospital, to prepare their meals of five-year-old army rations, and for the elderly to teach Hebrew to the children. There was little interaction between the crew and the refugees, but one day a determined-looking man made a beeline for Jama and presented a navy sports jacket with gold buttons. “You buy!” he declared.

Jama tried the jacket on. “One pound.” Jama held up one finger, and through hand gestures the Jew and the Somali haggled hard, until they agreed on an acceptable price and shook hands.

That was the only time the refugees acknowledged Jama, usually they looked through him with a baleful expression of suspended animation, of people caught between life and death. Even the children had suspicious adult gazes, demanding chocolate without childish gaiety but with a bullying tone learned in the camps. The woman who had reminded Jama of Ambaro was forever on deck, her overcoat folded underneath her large bottom. She had two daughters around six and eight years old as well as an infant son, and her girls were the happiest on the ship. Jama gave them the Bourneville chocolates he bought in the ship’s store. The mother never noticed when they ran up to Jama and pleaded for the red-and-gold-wrapped chocolates that he hid up his sleeve or behind his ear, neither did she help the women prepare the rations during the day. Instead she sat with her face upturned to the sunlight and ignored everyone.