Guerrillas Read Free

birthright, and men must claim their portion of the earth in brotherhood and harmony
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In this spirit we came an intrepid band to virgin forest, it is the life style and philosophy of Thrushcross Grange
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    That was how the communiqué began. But Jane, reading on, found that it soon became what Roche had said: a fairy story, a school composition, ungrammatical and confused, about life in the forest, about the anxieties, dangers, and needs of isolated men, about the absence of water, electricity, and transportation. And then it was full of complaints, about people and firms who had made promises they hadn’t then kept, about gift equipment that had turned out to be defective.
    Jane, looking up from the duplicated sheets, caught the eyes of one of the boys. On the wall above his bed she saw a poster: a pen drawing of Jimmy Ahmed that made him all hair, eyes and mustache, and more Negroid than he was, with roughly lettered words below:
I’m Nobody’s Slave or Stallion, I’m a Warrior and Torch Bearer—Haji James Ahmed
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    The oblong windows showed a colorless sky. But Jane had a sense now of more than heat; she had a sense of desolation. Later, on the Ridge, in London, this visit to Thrushcross Grange might be a story. But now, in that hut, with the junked office equipment on the table, the posters and black pinups from newspapers on the walls, with the boys on the metal beds, with the light and the emptiness outside and the encircling forest, she felt she had entered another, complete world.
    She heard a hiss. It was one of the street noises she had grown to recognize on the island. It was how a man called to someone far away: this hiss could penetrate the sound of traffic on a busy road. The hiss came from a boy on one of the beds. She knew it was meant for her, but she paid no attention and tried to go on reading.
    “Sister.”
    She didn’t look up.
    “White lady.”
    She looked up. She took a step toward the beds. Then, made bold by this movement, she walked between the beds, looking for the boy who had spoken.
    Only Mannie was sitting up; all the other boys were lyingdown. One boy seemed to stare through her as she passed his bed. But then she heard him say softly, as though he was speaking to himself, “So you know your name.” And the boy on the next bed said more loudly, and in an abrupt tone, not looking at her, his shining face resting on one side on his thin pillow, his close-set bloodshot eyes fixed on the back doorway: “Give me a dollar.”
    His face was oddly narrow, and twisted on one side, as though he had been damaged at birth. The eye on the twisted side was half-closed; the bumps on his forehead and his cheekbones were prominent and shining. His hair was done in little pigtails: a Medusa’s head.
    She took out a purse from her shoulder bag and offered a red dollar note, folded in four. Raising his arm, but not changing his position on the bed, still not looking at her, he took the note, let his hand fall on the bed, and said, “Thank you, white lady.” And then there was nothing more to do or say. She walked back past the beds, feeling the silence behind her, and went out into the sunlight, stepping from the concrete floor of the hut onto red, hot clay.
    She considered the forest palms, their straight trunks hazy with black needles, their living, rotting hearts bandaged, it seemed, with tattered sacking. The land was shaved and bare and bright all the way down to the road and up to the forest wall. But the land at the back of the long hut already seemed derelict and half abandoned. She saw empty chicken-coops, roughly knocked together with old boards and with sagging walls of soft wire netting, like the chicken-coops in the open yards of the redevelopment project in the city, so that already, in the midst of bush, the effect was of urban slum. She saw piles of old scantlings and corrugated-iron sheets, rolls of old wire, drums: back yard junk. She saw a pit of some sort: dried-up mounds of clay, a