Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [74]
I came and stood behind Mr Blue. The air inside his room was heavy, it stuck to the roof of my mouth, caught in my throat and muffled the sounds from outside. The rain began to come down. Needles of sound bounced off the tin roof. The windows vibrated. Mr Blue stood, hidden by the darkness, staring at the men outside who stood in ragged rows behind the man with the mark on his lip. A firm man would have gone out to talk to him, but Mr Blue was not that man. Water streamed down the glass, distorting the faces and bodies of the men beyond. Light seeped out of the day. Mr Blue and I stood and watched, until the figures merged with the darkness.
Much later I watched Mr Blue leave his room, quietly but not quiet enough. Down to the perimeter fence, where I saw him lay a trail of white powder on the inside, like a line of ash to ward off soldier ants.
The light came back and the men were there. As though they had never gone, but stood like sentinels through the night.
Mr Blue asked us to bring all the empty bottles and cans we could find. He sat on the floor filling them up with powder and nails and pieces of metal. In the afternoon he took to his camp bed with a fresh cold, rolling his aching head around on his pillow, coughing into a handkerchief. While he was asleep Small Boy slipped away and came back.
Mr Blue was a prisoner, although none of us behaved as though we knew this. Small Boy said the men were angry because now they had learned the value of the gold they were digging out of the river and up from the former rice fields. Some of the men had been panning for themselves, trading with the Syrian traders. But this was not allowed.
On top of that, across the land the tax had jumped up to twenty-five shillings. And now the authorities wanted to tax even more people. They wanted to tax the young men without wives or even homes, who already owed their labour to the chiefs, building their houses and working on their farms.
Small Boy told me the railwaymen were the ones who started with this kind of trouble. The very first time was right after the first war when the men who fought in Senegal came back to find a cup of rice that used to cost one penny now cost five pence. And bread was sixpence, but their wages were the same. That was the first time the railway stopped. Small Boy, who had then barely grown into his name let alone grown out of it, remembered the great, silent locomotives. How he followed his brothers, clambering over the roofs of the carriages, like birds on a basking hippopotamus.
In the city people accused the Syrians of hoarding food and looted the Syrian stores. By then the Syrians owned all the stores.
The next time the railways stopped it was because the black railwaymen were made to take tests but not the white ones. Governor Slater called it a ‘fight to the death’ and called in the troops, who came with guns. And when the railwaymen went back to work some had lost their pensions, and others their jobs, and some their lives. And everyone earned even less than before. The Railway Workers’ Union was banned. But the anger didn’t die. Instead it changed shape and wore a new face, with an ingratiating smile. The railway workers said: ‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Missus,’ and doffed their caps and punched holes in the first-class tickets of the administrators and their wives with a pointed pinkie nail.
So when the cost of a cup of rice doubled again because all the farmers turned their backs on their fields and headed east with their hoes to dig up diamonds instead of yams, the leaders of the new Artisans and Allied Workers’ Union and the Transport and General Workers’ Union asked for one shilling and sixpence more pay a day. The bosses offered them four pence. In the city they stoned the houses of the new African ministers, who should have supported them but