I clenched and unclenched my sweaty palms as I took another step forward, my husband in tow. Each step took us closer to our redemption or annihilation, depending on the deformity tests. My ragged clothes soaked with sweat stuck to my skin in uncomfortable places. The shawl that draped my shoulder had more holes than a net, but it was all I had for warmth. My aching legs felt like rods beneath my torso and my feet were as dusty as an old library. I picked up some stones with my toes just to assure myself that my dirt-ridden phalanges still worked. My hair, bundled in an old scarf that never came off, housed every farm insect I could think of. Despite my destitute composure, I was neater than the ton. 

To my left was a woman with Zebra skin, the white lines exposing her relationship with Pomade. Her clothes had mud cakes patched to different areas as if she had rolled in the dirt, and unlike me, she didn’t have the shame to cover her thick mass of frizzled nest for lice. She was rocking a quiet child wrapped in a dirty bundle and stepping rhythmically. One of the baby’s hands dangled unnaturally from the side of the blanket, but she didn’t seem to bother. She stared straight ahead, her lifeless eyes zeroed on nothing, her back rod-stiff and her baby dead. The other slaves scrunched their nostrils and gave the dancing woman all but disgusted looks and distance.

I sniffed intermittently until my chest hurt, trying to get a whiff, but the familiarity of raw fish wafted into my nostrils. For five years, I had hated the malodour of raw fish my husband exuded, an unwanted perk of his job. But today, I blessed Amadioha for the stench, as the alternative would be the decaying flesh of a baby. I could pick up another familiar scent I had grown accustomed to over the years – fear. The room reeked of it.

The queue got shorter as more slaves who hadn’t passed the deformity test found new homes in the cart jail. Nobody knew what happened to slaves who didn’t pass. There were rumours of their gruesome deaths that painted horrid pictures and tormented one’s soul, but none of them ever came back to clarify. Some of them tried to escape the cart jail but they never made it past the clearing before they were either gunned down or devoured by mad pit bulls. I began to wonder if the rumours were true. Some slaves told tales of other slaves who had escaped through the ocean – the same ocean that stood a few meters away from me. I pictured myself and my husband gipping the waves, soaked to our skins, and hoping for dry land. Shaking my head vigorously, I rejected the muo ojoo, the evil spirit tempting me to go back. I silently chose death over returning to the fields or getting arrested. 

The room was crowded, stuffy and smelly, blood and pus oozing from different body parts. At one end of the room was a panel of soldiers and doctors, testing every slave to see if they were as deformed and useless as they claimed to be. There was a long table on which papers were scattered in different directions. There were six doctors, all old and ugly, lab coats hanging off their shoulders as they looked at each slave in disgust. The black boots on the other hand were as many as the slaves. As each slave approached the table waiting for their verdict, the soldiers pinned them down with murderous looks as if daring them to run.  

Our lives were dependent on their verdict. ‘Fit’ meant the slave, though deformed was still eligible for a few more years of labour. ‘Unfit’ meant that the slave was ineligible and free to go home, wherever that was. No matter the verdict, the sentence was death. We lined up in three rows in front of the panel – the lines stretching to the other end of the room. The room was at an equilibrium – slaves returning or dying as fast as they came. 

The man to my right started muttering the tormenting prayer we were taught as the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. I clenched my teeth as he hallowed the father who lived in heaven for the third time. Perhaps fear of returning to the fields had made him mad. If the god in heaven was really a father, he wasn’t the father of slaves. This counterbalanced our expectations of each other. I didn’t expect any salvation from him as the white man preached, nor should he expect any devotion from me. 

When we heard that some slaves could return home on the charge of deformity, my husband and I decided to tag along with the crowd of slaves who sustained injuries over the years of brutal work. The white man had used us to build their homes and grow their stores – our bones, cement and our blood, fuel. The only problem was that apart from the missing finger on my left hand and my husband’s missing tooth, we were in perfect shape and eligible for any type of work our master needed. But we couldn’t let the hundred-to-one shot at returning home after thirty back-breaking years elude us. We chose to maim ourselves. I chose to lose an arm, my right arm for extra measure while my husband chose to go blind – a cheap price for freedom as far as we were concerned. Eight months later, we were qualified to join the queue of deformed slaves.  

Somebody squealed at the front of the line. He had passed the deformity examination, declared ‘Unfit’ and was free to dream of returning home.  I stood on my toes to get a clearer view and saw the man crawling on his belly, his legs missing. There was no debating his inability to do any relevant work. My heart pounded at the sudden realization. If the crawling man qualified as deformed, then my husband and I were indeed very healthy.  I took another step forward, rejecting that spirit again. 

As if on cue, my amputated arm began to throb. A nauseating phantom reminded me of my loss, whispering despair and trepidation in my ears. I longed to cut off the cauterized part again, to severe the pain from the rest of my body. But that was an ordeal I couldn’t bring myself to go through again. My husband had dosed me with an unhealthy amount of alcohol which he had stolen from our master on the night we maimed ourselves. I was barely conscious when he axed my arm off. By the time I came to, the next morning, I felt painfully incomplete with my appendage buried six feet deep on our master’s farm. My husband’s once bright brown eyes, replaced by a white misty and empty screen burnt by bleach, lacked the warmth that I always found in them. When the black boots saw that we couldn’t work with our ‘accident’, they locked us up until we healed. 

I trembled as I struggled to rub my throbbing arm while holding my shawl in place. Odili’s hand found rest on my shoulder, giving me a light reassuring squeeze. I leaned into him to convince myself that he was truly there.  

“It’s ok. We will cross safely. I won’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered. I could hear his teeth rattling as much as the hand on my shoulder. His cloudy eyes brimmed with mist, but I was sure he wasn’t crying. 

I let out a shaky and bitter laugh at my husband’s weak attempt to comfort me. A hot dam of hot tears seeped through my lashes causing my eyes to sting. Suddenly I couldn’t stop, and neither could the tears. My cackle rang true all over the room, gradually evolving into heart-wrenching sobs. My lips stretched thin over my teeth like old leather, and my stomach hurt as the muscles knotted in protest.  Even to my ears, my laughter sounded strange, it was nothing musical nor hilarious. 

“Kam kam! Stop it! What has gotten into you?”

His frantic whisper only deepened my sobs and soon I was wailing uncontrollably. Through the globe in my eyes, I saw the black boots pointing towards us. I slapped my mouth with my hands trying to stifle the bitterness, but my eyes protested, releasing more tears. My heart-wrenching sobs weakened my knees and my buttocks landed on the ground with a sickening thud. The pain was intense, shooting through my knees and waist. Squatting behind me, my husband cradled my head in his hands and shushed me. He wasn’t shaking anymore but I could hear his heart racing so loud that I feared his chest would burst any second. 

“What is going on here?” 

The voice was deep, intimidating and painfully loud. I recognized the voice as one that I had heard so many times. That baritone that snipped at my heart every day on the farm. That baritone ended my dreams of rescue every night. The same baritone that had killed all hope of ever returning home. Even before I could see it, I heard it. The intimidating thumping, the calculated strides, always ten paces away from each slave. From under my husband’s arm, I watched as the black boots came into view, fifteen paces this time around. They shimmered even in the dim room – polished by the blood and shined by the spittle of a thousand slaves. I gripped my husband’s arm and buried my face deeper into his chest. I couldn’t tell whose heart was going to win the race anymore; mine or his. 

“I’m sorry sir, my wife is exhausted, she is just catching her breath. Sorry for the disturbance.” 

His tone, although levelled, had a rigid undertone as if he wasn’t saying exactly what he wanted to say. He didn’t stutter, his words just rolled off his tongue. Thinking that my husband had found courage at the direst time, almost made me laugh all over again. But then I remembered that it was his courage and not the fact that we were the only ones left from Uburu Ekwe, that made me agree to marry him. 

I had come of age in my master’s house and his wife was getting worried. It must have been surprising to her that we the black skins who she barely fed, grew more voluptuous than them, the white skins. She always stared at my backside in that sickening way that secreted self-conscious sweat under my armpit.  One night she asked me if my master had ever touched me to which I negatively responded. It may have been the fact that I didn’t prove her right or the fact that I recoiled at the thought of her husband touching me but the next thing I knew, the black boots were thrashing me in the barn. 

Odili at that time was working in the mill, but when he heard of my thrashing, he came to my rescue by walking up to my master and asking for my hand in marriage. Marrying Odili meant that I had to be transferred to his master, Master Alfred Cook who dipped his hand in any honey pot that could give him money. For some reason, he decided that our marriage would distract us, so he sent Odili to join the fishermen on the seas so that we wouldn’t spend much time together. 

The black boot hovered over Odili and me as if our situation wasn’t surreal enough.

 “Whom do you belong to?” the black boot boomed, coming closer. 

“Master Alfred Cook Sir. We have been good Sir, I swear. But we have suffered great injuries and we are hoping to gain passage.” my husband placated.  

There was a deafening silence in the room – so loud that I didn’t hear the soldier’s next words. 

“Get up” was the order. “Sergeant! Take these filthy liars to Cell 87” was the verdict, and blood drained from my head. 

* * * * * *

*Call: Abu m nwata n’ulo nne m 
Response: Inine
Call: A bu m nwata n’ulo nne m  
Response: Inine
Call: M buru ite jee I chu mmiri      
Response: Inine
Call: Aka m ato n’ite okweghi nweputa       
Response: Inine
Call: Ukwu m ato n’ite okweghi nweputa                      
Response: Inine
Call: Inine okoko, inine okoko, inine okoko                    
Response: Inine

With missing teeth, dirty hands, and no shame, we clapped our hands and cheered as we sang in the cool of the day. There was no disguise among seven naked children whose pants bore semblance with the soil. Apart from the length of our hair, separating the bare-chested boys from the bare-chested girls was difficult. We all danced and sang our hearty folk song without a care in the world. 

My mother was preparing dinner in her mud kitchen at the far end of the compound while my father sat outside the main hut on his crane chair that had a reclined backrest, sniffing his tobacco occasionally and watching us play. His wrapper hung loosely around his waist, bulging under his navel. I was only five years old and Odili was ten years old. We had grown up together because our fathers were friends. My compound was usually the meeting point because my mother was the sweetest woman in the entire village – in her eyes, we were never wrong. 

“Kamharida! Bia bia bia,” Odili called to me, his pant in between his buttocks as we ran to hide from the catcher. I remembered breathing in the dust from his back as we hid behind my mother’s enormous Ikwe, the mortar she often donated to the umu ada whenever there was a big ceremony. We continued to fold ourselves in our covert spot – we wanted to be caught so we could play catcher as well. 

Odili panted excitedly, peeping above the mortar from time to time to see if Ocha was coming. Ocha was our friend from a neighbouring village. He was treated like an osu, an outcast because of his skin pigmentation – a pale yellow hue, garnished with red sand and brown hair that reflected the sun. As if the gods had not been harsh enough, Ocha was almost blind – always squinting under the sunlight or looking through the corner of his face as if his eyes were wrongly placed. But to us, Ocha was a marvel. I remember wishing my skin was as pale as his, but I wasn’t so fortunate. I inherited an ebony black pigmentation from my mother, beautiful she always said, but Ocha was my definition of beauty. He looked like food. In comparison to Ocha, I was the dark cloud of the night while he was the radiant sun. My mother was kind to Ocha and encouraged other mothers to allow their children to play with him. So Ocha found a home in my house. 

I remember how I hung on Odili’s back, giggling excitedly and asking “O na bia?” repeatedly. Odili shook his head continuously in response, but I wasn’t satisfied so I peeped above the rim of the mortar to see for myself if Ocha was coming, and ducked back a second before it all began.  

First Odili stopped breathing. I could hear his heart beating at an alarming rate as his body went stiff and sweat broke out on his dusty back. I was still covering my eyes with my hands as if that would make me invincible when I heard the screams. There was a loud bang, followed by a horrified scream before I heard their march. It was like pounding yam in a thousand mortars at the same time.  Odili’s back was getting too slippery with sweat, so I slid down and squatted on the floor, my eyes hurt as I watched his head follow a movement. A shadow blocked the sun, and a strong hand grabbed my arm pulling me from behind the mortar. 

Before I could understand why the ground had replaced the sky and the trees, I was thrown into a mass of wailing children. I had gone dizzy from the force with which my head hit the ground but by the time I came to, my parents were lying on the ground in contorted positions, their blood drenching the earth. I couldn’t make sense of anything. Some men who were whiter than Ocha were marching around my father’s compound – their shiny boots leaving a trail of prints on the ground. Their red clothes with golden buttons were darker than my mother’s uhie. They looked like masquerades with their white skins and stiff clothes hanging off their bodies.

I looked around and found Odili among the other children, most of whom I recognized. His face was scrunched, tears rained from the corners of his eyes, mucus flowed like a river from his nostrils, and there was an ugly gash at the corner of his head, spurting blood in different directions. He looked more wounded than my parents who were lying so still. I started crying because Odili was crying, and not because I understood what was happening. Over the years I had wished that we weren’t playing in my house that day. My parents wouldn’t have had to fight for us and ended up dead. We never heard of the fates of other parents and my friends all harboured hope that their parents were still alive and waiting for them, but I grew up with a certainty that my parents were dead and gone. 

The journey to the white man’s land was an agonising expedition. I watched my friends die one after the other, mostly out of grief and hunger. Odili spent most days unconscious. The wound on his head was killing him but no matter how hard I cried and begged, the black boots would not treat him. One of the cooks on the ship noticed what was going on and began dosing his meagre meals with medicine and slipping clean clothes to me which I used to clean his wound. I skipped five years of my age in the six months we spent on the ship. By the time we docked, I was six years older than my actual age. Odili would tell me after many years that he stayed alive because he couldn’t leave me in the hands of the white men. 

* * * * * * *

The dark and smelly cell reminded me of the cells on the ship, the only difference being the steady ground that did not throw me to my face each time I stood up. For the first time since we maimed ourselves, I envied Odili for not being able to see the sorry state we were in. He couldn’t see the darkness that kissed our skins or the filth that surrounded us. His head faced the roof as he tried to sense our surroundings. 

This was the infamous cell that drained the life out of men and made women run mad. There was a rumour among slaves that no slave had ever survived in Cell 87. One sweep around the room and I could see why. The cell was a suicide room with an array of sharp and terrifying objects littered all over the room. I searched for anything that could light my hope for escape, but the weapons were designed to seduce a man to death. There were iron rods, blades, ropes, and a bucket of surprisingly clean water. The bucket of water which was supposed to hold life for the prisoners was surrounded by a surprising mass of skulls and bones. I bent my neck trying to understand the irony and then it became clear to me. 

The worst thing about the cell was not the dirty walls that recorded deep and creative suicide notes. It wasn’t the gory art of death, dying and eternal damnation. It wasn’t its claustrophobic design that maddened its prisoners forcing them to look for an escape outside life. It wasn’t the smell of decaying flesh and rotten bones of past prisoners. It was the finality that the metal bars offered, once in never to come out. The cell was a grave slowly eating the flesh of its prisoners. Forever sealing the fate and future of its captors. Even Odili who couldn’t see, could sense the finality of our situation. 

“Kam Kam.” 

“Odi.” 

There was silence as we both searched for words. I was scared of giving voice to the turbulent emotions that welled up inside me. The room was dark, but I could sense his melancholy, his last shred of hope slipping away. I didn’t know how it happened or when, all I knew was that I was in his arms and my eyes were releasing tears like a dam again. He cried too – a deep wail filled with anguish. Odili had been my rock, my strength for the past thirty years. He was the reason I didn’t poison the food of the master or bury his children alive. Odili was my preacher, filling me with the hope that we would one day return home. I lived on his oath that he would protect me and get me home. 

But as we cried our eyes out, we knew that all hope was lost. We knew that Onwu, the spirit of death was hovering over us, seducing us to release ourselves to him. But I didn’t want him to take me on his terms. I didn’t want to die, I wanted to leave like I was given a choice. An understanding transpired between Odili and me; there was no need to put to words the knowledge we acquired when we surrendered to our situation. It was a dance of dominance, and we were the submissives yearning to do the master’s bidding. Despair instructed us, showing us a way out of our predicament, and we obeyed. 

Pictures of my father’s compound floated through my mind. In my mind, the trees were greener than ever, and the soil was black – rich with nutrients. I picked up an Udala fruit from the ground and ate it without washing it. I heard my mother scolding me for eating fruit without washing. My giggles filled the air as I hid behind my father’s crane chair. I could hear him sniffing and grunting continuously as he adjusted his wrapper several times. Odili tapped me on my shoulder, grabbed my hand and we ran to the stream to wash some more Udala fruits that he picked up. We heard Ocha’s footsteps behind us and ran to hide so that he wouldn’t catch us. 

A smile crept to my face as I guided Odili to the bucket of water. I took his hand and dipped it into the bucket. He hesitated. 

“Kam Kam.”

“Odi.”

There were still no words. He sighed heavily, and I understood. We scooped the water simultaneously and drank from the cup of our hands. The water was sour, slapping our cheeks and tingling our throats. Odili coughed and I slapped his back as if he was choking on soup. I dipped my hand to take another scoop when I felt it. My insides burst and my intestines loosened, burning me from the inside out. The pain was excruciating, and trepidation was building. Odili was passing through the same ordeal as he clenched his stomach and grunted deeply. My knees couldn’t support me anymore and I found my face on the ground. I reached out to Odili but he didn’t reach back. Darkness was coming, the pain was easing, and my feet got cold. A light breeze ruffled my clothes from an open door, and I looked up to see that I was home. 

*(A traditional Igbo Children’s Rhyme compiled by Aham e fula)

About the Author:

Munachim Yvonne Frank-Dobi is a Nigerian writer who lives in Lagos. She juggles her full-time job with her passion – Readers Boon, a budding fellowship of readers and writers. Her works have appeared in The Kalahari Review and elsewhere. When she is not working, she can be found drafting short stories or reading something interesting. 

*Feature image by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash