you are and try not to die. That is all you can do.”
“What is your name?” I asked him.
But before he could answer, the white man with the stick came towards us calling, “Jaquito! Jaquito!”
The boy bared his teeth at me, a smile that was not a smile.
“That is what they call me,” he said, and turned away and played a summons on his drum.
And then we stood in our chains and watched the whippings. We mourned and groaned because we had never seen such a thing done to men. Each one was tied to a rack like the ones we dried our nets on, back in the real life. Each one screamed and prayed when the first lashes struck him and then fell silent because – I thought – he had died. Blood ran down to the ground, and the skin on each back peeled away like the bark of the coloba tree.
I WAS ONE of six men bought by Colonel d’Oliviera that day. One of the others was called Abela and he was also from the great river, although not from my village. We were taken to a yard with iron bars over the windows, where we slept. The next morning a white man came. His hair was greased tight to his skull and tied at the back with a cord made of skin. His nose was long and red and hooked, like a fish hawk’s beak. His eyes worried me. They looked like he had been weeping tears of blood. And I had seen him before. The day before. He had stood at the front of the crowd when we were sold.
The black man who had watched over us in the night jumped up when he saw the white man and stood straight as a spear, so I thought that this was the colonel who owned me. It was not. It was Captain Morro. The overseer. A word I did not know then, but one I grew to know very well, and hate. He came close and looked at us. He had a smell that was sweet but also rotten. I knew this smell from the death ship. Rum.
Ah, the pleasure I had, killing him. The richness of the smell in the forest, after the rains. The birds celebrating the new weather. How the life came out of him in thick slow bubbles as I kneeled on his shoulders to drown him in the brown water. And then I poured the rum on him and put the bottle in his hand.
This was years later. But for me time is folded, like cloth.
We were given clothes. Breeches and a shirt. It was stiff, the shirt, and harsh on my body until my sweat softened it. Then we walked in chains through the baking crowded streets of stone back to the edge of the cliff. Climbing down was worse than the climbing up had been. Abela went first. I tried to look only at his back because I was afraid the fainting sickness would take me. But halfway down I saw that at the foot of the cliff there was a great quarrel of the black birds. They fought and lifted and fell again, too many to count. And when at last we got to the bottom of the road I saw the reason for their business. A body, one of ours, lay burst in a gully and they were tearing at it. The eyes had gone and the face was a red mash. I felt a coldness in my blood, which frightened me. Later this coldness would be my power, but I did not know it then.
Again we were put on a boat. It was difficult, because they would not release us from the chains and we had to climb down an iron ladder with our faces to the wall. The boat was not much longer than a war canoe, but wider. It had a small sail, bundled on the mast like the white funeral clothes on a thin old woman. Four black men, two on each side, holding oars. At the front a white man with black fur on his face sat watching us, a gun across his folded legs and another one beside him. With his arms he told us to sit.
We waited a long time while things we did not understand happened. Then Morro climbed down the iron ladder, shouting up at people who stood above us. Sacks and bundles were handed down with a great amount of fuss and argument. The boat rocked and banged against the wall. Morro at last sat himself in a shelter made of cloth at the back of the boat. He had a glass bottle in his hand, half full of golden