Zakes Mda - Cion

Even as she sat in the porch she was idly paging through the journal. She raised her head and smiled at the boys as they stood uneasily in front of her. She asked Nicodemus if he enjoyed his newly assigned duties, and he hesitated to answer, thinking that he would be deemed a lascivious little bastard if he openly expressed joy at being a stud. The lady, however, egged him on, and told him that he must not be ashamed of his wonderful job with all the opportunities and perks it provided, including a special diet on mating days. But he must enjoy it while it lasted because if ever he decided to cross her for any reason whatsoever, he would not be a stud anymore but would find himself being the object of furious bidding at some auction in a faraway state where he would never again see his friends, the boy he regarded as his brother and the woman he believed was his mother. It was therefore wise to keep his mouth shut about things that had nothing to do with him.

And then she turned to Abednego and complimented him on his good looks and on the fact that he now had a girlfriend. The young man couldn’t imagine how Madame Fairfield knew about the girlfriend and was visibly shaken. The lady of the house giggled naughtily and assured the boys that she knew everything that happened on her plantation. She had eyes everywhere, she said, and no one could hide from her. Another thing that she knew, she said boastfully, was that Abednego was supposed to be auctioned with the last stock that The Owner had taken to Charleston, but she intervened and asked her husband to sell other stock instead. She had that kind of power, she said, to decide on the fate of everyone on the plantation. It was important for Abednego to always bear that in mind in whatever he did or said. If ever he got tempted to talk about things that were none of his business it would do him a load of good first to recall what she was telling him at that time.

“Know where your girl is?” she asked.

“Don’t know, ma’am, haven’t seen her for a while.”

“Know why?”

“Don’t know, ma’am.”

She had been rented out to a bordello in Charleston. A sudden rage flashed across his eyes, but he was wise enough to contain it. The lady of the house was looking at him very closely, with a playful smile on her thin lips and in her tired eyes. The boys knew that this was not a game at all. The Owner had started a new venture of renting out his white slaves to bordellos in the neighboring cities. It was usually those girls whose wombs were stubborn and defiant despite many attempts at mating them with the best of studs. If they could not produce future stock for the markets they were good only for the bordellos, which was a way of earning more money for the plantation.

Slave breeding was a long-term investment. It required patience before one could reap the benefits. It took many years for the stock to mature and be ready for the market. Unlike cotton or tobacco or even cattle and hogs. The Owner had reached a stage where he now had a steady annual flow of stock and was enjoying good profits. But he could not be expected to absorb the losses caused by white women he had bought so expensively, yet who were proving to be unable to bear children. He even suspected that some of the barrenness was self-inflicted. The women had to earn their keep and the bordellos were a sure-fire way.

After observing the squirming and fidgeting boys for a while she daintily sipped her tea, gave them each a piece of cake and sent them on their way. Although this was the best currant and cornmeal cake they had ever seen, it tasted like dust and Abednego couldn’t bring himself to swallow his. He felt angry and powerless when he imagined what was happening at that very moment to his girl in Charleston.

That night it snowed quite seriously and the Abyssinian Queen sat on a stool in her cabin waiting for the boys. The sewing matriarchs, now blind with age, had long gone to bed. But she would not sleep before she allocated the boys dreams for the night. It had been her practice since they were little to give each one a dream to dream every night before she herself sank into a dreamless sleep. So it was that she waited and waited and waited.

About midnight she began to suspect that something was wrong. The boys never stayed out that late. When they had plans to sneak away and visit friends or to play outside in the moonlight they always came to the house first for the evening meal and then for the allocation of dreams because they knew that their mother liked to sleep early.

She worried that something had happened to them, but she never suspected that they had carried out a daring escape. They would have said goodbye to her before the flight, wouldn’t they? They would not be so foolish as to escape in the middle of such a viciously cold winter. Dreading what she would find, or perhaps not find, she went out and searched the hollow of the ghost tree. The quilt bundles were gone. The boys would not be coming back. Something must have happened to hasten their escape and they obviously did not confide in her because they knew that she would persuade them to postpone the flight for a better season. She wept softly and prayed for their safety.

It was the season that worried her more than the escape itself. She feared the boys would not get too far. They would be forced back by the weather or by the slave chasers. It was indeed difficult even for the sciolist to come to terms with a winter escape. For instance, what would the boys eat when the dried fruit ran out? If the sciolist had made the boys escape in summer or at least in fall they would trap all sorts of wildlife that was plentiful in the region. They would also eat the cherries and blackberries that grew wild on the mountainside and were ripe in the late summer and early fall. In the late fall deer breed and become stupid. They fall prey to mediocre hunters. The boys would feast on venison. They would survive on the acorns from the red oaks and the pecan-tasting nuts from the giant hickory trees — all of which were good to eat for both squirrels and humans. They would even devour the squirrels themselves.

But in winter, what is there to eat? This was not the boys’ immediate concern as they trudged in the deep snow, with the sciolist as the Spirit that must guide them to safety now that he has acquiesced to a winter escape. Their steps were slow and labored because of the bundles they carried; and the oversized boots and three pairs of old stockings each boy wore; and the rags they had wrapped on their hands and around their legs under their britches; and the balaclava-like hats crocheted by their mother the previous summer; and the women’s corduroy coats they wore — handed down to their mother by the lady of the house years ago when the Abyssinian Queen was still a much favored occupant of the big house.

At first the boys walked in a southerly direction for they had no knowledge of the world beyond the plantation. The map that their mother had stitched on Abednego’s quilt was not helping that much since its cardinal points were rather confusing. Nicodemus had the feeling that they had misread the map and they argued about it. After failing to come to any agreement they decided that the map would not be of any use to them. The quilt would only be good for keeping them warm and also as a keepsake in memory of their mother — not only because it was a gift from her, lovingly made especially for this occasion, but it also retained her peculiar life-affirming scent even though it had spent months in the heart of the ghost tree. The sampler too: it continued to exude her odor, despite the fact that not so long ago she had washed it with lye soap after it had become dirty from staying in the heart of the ghost tree for too long. It was like their mother was with them throughout the journey.