Blonde Roots Read Free Page B

through and then being surprised when we complained we didn’ t have a clue what she was going on about.
    She’d sit there twisting her hair into pigtails mixed with clay, rubbing ocher into her skin to darken its pigment in the hope that she might be spotted by one of Bwana’ s nicer, younger, more handsome business associates and be whisked away to a new life as a favored mistress. With substantial curves either side of a naturally tiny waist, it was just possible.
    Yomisi tried to dampen Sitembile’ s enthusiasm with her oft-declared dictum that dreams and disappointment were inseparable bedfellows.
    I helped rub ocher into Sitembile’s smooth, undamaged back, countering that dreams kept our spirits buoyant.
    We three women had slipped into one another’s lives and found a way to be together.
    Now I was slipping out.
    Without saying a word.
     
    OUR SHACK WAS CONSTRUCTED out of corrugated iron that was boiling on summer nights. Not for us the fancy, cool, whitewashed wattle-and-daub residences spread out at the top end of the compound with palm-thatched roofs and mangrove posts and windows and wraparound verandas. No, we either roasted or we froze in our grubby tin boxes, and our neighbor next door was a twelve-foot-high termite mound, which we daren’t disturb as it would most likely rebuild itself inside our dwelling.
    As I entered our hut, I knew that the others would be occupied elsewhere in the compound because we never stopped working. Even when it seemed that every job was completed, Madama Blessing, Bwana’s imperious Number One wife, kept everyone busy. The story goes that she was once the sweetest young virgin in town, but that after years of marriage to Bwana, and his accumulation of more and more wives for her to control, the power had gone to her head and she had turned into the gargoyle we all knew and hated.
    That day she had been wearing a chunky gold chain, which hung from the folds of her neck, with a ruby-and-diamond-studded Akua’ ba fertility doll as pendant. It was quite ridiculous when she was obviously postmenopausal. A gold ring in the shape of a snarling lion’s head leaped from her manicured hands, so that even when she was trying to be nice, you were reminded that she wasn’ t. A beautiful glared ‘ivory bone shot through her nose, and a lip plug pierced through her bottom lip showed she was a woman with a husband (like anyone needed reminding).
    On this most festive of days, she had woken up in one of her charming early-morning moods and ordered every available slave to get down on their hands and knees and scrub the immeasurable lengths of her cherished beige flagstone floors—with soap and a nailbrush. To get deep into the grooves, she explained, sweeping her eyes at the assembled bare feet of her staff before propelling her bulk from the hips and shoulders down the hallway with all the grace of a three-legged, half-blind, three-thousand-pound hippo.
    As the eyes are the window of the soul, if she had bothered to look into ours, she would have seen an ax murderer in each and every one of them.
    Madama Blessing herself had large startled eyes that dominated her face, and when they swooped and swerved, you prayed they would not rest on you, because if they did it would be with shocked outrage at a crime for which you had to be punished, even though you had not committed it yet. At the same time she had bucket-loads of self-pity, which was often the case with our masters— they were the injured ones, not us. She wore her favorite outfit made out of Adinkra cloth. It was stamped with the design known as Atamfo Atwameho, which means “Enemies Surround Me.”
    I gathered up a bundle of my clothing and threw it into a basket, grabbed a wrappa and whipped it over my shoulders. It would hide the nice personalized tattoos that ran across my shoulders. As was the fashion with slave society, the name of my first mistress, Panyin Ige Ghika—PIG—was inscribed.
    I was once the companion of