Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [47]
Among her people she was named Balekimito. When she was blessed with the blood, her clanswomen and friends celebrated Balekimito’s first menstrual period in the elima ceremony. They built a house from supple branches and broad leaves, and the women and pubescent girls moved in. The elder women taught the girls how to keep embers alive so that they could revive the fire in their next camp. They taught them the adult women’s songs and sang about the responsibilities of womanhood and motherhood. Boys congregated around the yard of the elima house and sang to the girls, hoping that one would choose him to be allowed inside. The days in the elima house were the happiest time of Balekimito’s life.
Three moons later, Portuguese slavers captured her and her mother. They raped them, then made them walk to a village where they were thrown into a shack and roped to other captives for two nights. The group was made to trudge over many days through the forest to the sea. There they put the women in airless rooms separated from the men, who couldn’t protect them when the hairy white men assaulted them. When the rooms were filled with so many people that it was impossible to sit or lie down, the jailers took them from the cells and threw the people into the moaning, damp hold of a ship. It was there that Balekimito birthed her first child, born dead and flung over the side. When she sang to usher his soul back to the forest, the other chained men and women hummed softly, because none of them were Mbuti and couldn’t speak her language, but they all knew her grief. Balekimito’s mother, who began shivering the moment they were stuffed into the hold of the ship, stopped trembling after the baby died and she, too, was flung overboard, and again Balekimito sang and the others hummed and cried with her.
The slaver disembarked Balekimito and the others on a long, wide dock. Along the shore, a platform rose steps from the sand. The black men, women, and children who survived the crossing were auctioned off to a throng of white men wearing much fabric around their bodies so that very little of their pale skins showed. Balekimito, who grew up wearing only beads, grass, and body paint, was given a sack to wear. In spite of the hot sun overhead and the itchy fabric covering her body down to her ankles, Balekimito shivered as uncontrollably as her mother had, and was sure she, too, would die from terror.
A man pushed her up to the platform and lifted her chin so that the blancos on the ground could get a look at her. Far beyond the roofs along the shore, Balekimito saw the deep green of trees and plants. She thanked mother forest for bringing her to solid ground. The next moment, she was pushed off the platform and a tall, fat blanco grabbed her by the arm and pulled her along upon the rocky earth through paths lined with high buildings made from stone.
She lived in a room with solid walls and cried for the dwellings her people built from supple twigs and rippling leaves. She missed singing to the trees and vines, to the sky and clouds, to the rivers and lakes, to birds and snakes and monkeys, to leaves. In the house with the rigid walls, Balekimito was forced by Mistress to clean pots and dishes and tables and the staircase and Master’s boots and the rock-hard floors. A man wearing black robes wet her head and made strange signs around her forehead and lips and said her name was now Flora.
She was not allowed out of the house. The windows faced the street or other houses and paved courtyards, so Flora couldn’t touch bare earth. Everything she touched was hard, including Master. He climbed on top of her and pushed himself into her, pressing his heavy body until she felt that her backbone would crack against the tile floor. When Mistress realized that Flora was pregnant,