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There, in the middle of the great Gambia River, stood a very tall boat, the tallest ship Massamba had ever seen. He recalled the stories the wise men told him of his mother, and why she named him, saying, “I name him Autumn-Leaves because our summertime is about to rest.” Her face was beautiful to him, in his memory, white teeth beneath ink-black skin.
“Your mother was the wisest woman in all our land,” they said. “The king claimed them as his people, but they knew her; she was their people by wisdom. She did not punish them or kill them when they disobeyed her. She loved them all the more.”
Before she died, she said to Massamba, “You will grow into a tree of shade, but you will die without fruit of your own.”
“We regarded her as a prophet,” they said. “And your name, Autumn-Leaves, is her finest prophecy; you are her finest prophecy. We knew Autumn-Leaves only from tales collected from the faraway islands. Now we know by you what she meant by Autumn-Leaves.”
Massamba flexed his muscles against the iron bonds before him, staring at the ship. He was confronted by a dominating coat-of-arms, one from a faraway island: a sign of two African chiefs guarding a golden shield, upon which trod a blue elephant. He shuddered and felt weak.
“When the king killed your mother, the people say she cursed the land. We do not recall hearing the curse from her lips, but a curse followed her killing. We swept you up, as a broom sweeps up a viper, and we guarded you, that you might strike against the curse in season, but winter is coming. It is coming from Europe, and Europe brings a cold unlike we have ever known. The viper curls and waits.”
Smiling black faces, but with cruel white teeth bared, armed with European iron, subdued and bound all the men, all the women, and all the children. Massamba remembered the red. The bamboo was red, the soil was red, the pottery was red, the ashes—red. The blood of the mighty cried out, “Mama!” But she was dead, and she could not answer.
Massamba lifted up his eyes to weep to heaven, but in so lifting, he saw a whip crack over the back of a man. He was astonished: there in the swampy bamboo grove were white men, backs bent, some slumped, and they were bleeding. He heard cries of terror and running, the laughter of overseers, and the crack of the whips. Vipers were pursuing the white slaves, and the white slaves were dying. They were cut, these poor white men, cut by the brambles in the swamp, and they were bitten by snakes, and they were slumped, unmoving. Their overseers laughed all the more. They were roaring with glee, making music for themselves with whips, the rhythm of the outcry of white slaves.
And now, Massamba felt the first sting of the same whip. He winced and cried out, trying to reach to rub the wounded skin, but his bonds would not let him comfort himself. He felt his blood trickle red down his back, even as so much blood of his kindred poured out as an offering for his mother’s murder. A loud command came from the one who whipped, and even though he could not understand the words, he understood the command, and he boarded a smaller boat which was pointing toward the big ship, the largest ship he had ever seen.
Those two African chiefs leered at him, as dead men do while they rot in the open, and the blue elephant welcomed him to a lifetime of death. He thought he heard it trumpet a fanfare of evil.
As it was, his hands were bound in front of him. He held his head down in sorrow, grieving for himself and for his land. The sting of the whip-wound drove more tears, and it drove them out as hot as the heat of the sun. A sudden breeze sprang up from the ocean, from almost a hundred miles away. It blew with purpose, driving west against the river current, a portent of things about to happen far away, and a portent of things which would not happen for many, many years. The sails of the ship, though furled, luffed a bit, opening from below, as the wind coursed, from the surface of the water and up its masts, as great sheets on a clothesline are lifted up, and they popped in the breeze. From their folds flew sparkles of life, flying high into the heavens.
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Down, down, down, spun golden—what were they? Little packages of pure, organic, gold. Samaras, of the elm, of an elm from Europe, spinning and frolicking in the freshening breeze, making their way from heaven to earth. One samara in particular struck Massamba in the face, and there it stayed, itself bound to his face by Massamba’s tears of anger.
He reached up to his face with both hands to remove it, but a whip came down on his back at that very moment. A cry escaped from his lips, joining the song of all those under the whip of their laughing overseers. Another crack, and now he had three bleeding stripes. More tears fed the samara, and Massamba braved the joys of the overseer to pull it off his face. When his fingers touched it, he heard a voice.
Was it, indeed, the voice of his mother? No, but he saw the face of his mother, sweetness of milk, and kindness of fire, while the voice spoke from deep within the soil of the earth, even from beneath the river.
The voice said, “Do not be afraid to suffer.”
It was the wisdom of his mother, or it was the same source as whatever was speaking to his mother, through his mother. “You will grow into a tree of shade, but you will die without fruit of your own. Do not be afraid to suffer.” Of what sort was this wisdom? It was foreboding, dark, and fertilized by blood.
Shouting of the joys of overseeing overcame the shrill calls of so many birds gathered to feed upon the wastes of the gigantic sea ship. They were the joys of commanding the powerless, the joys of overcoming with the power of iron and will, the joys of counting gold. The golden shield upon the coat-of-arms was only a foretaste of the visual feast of gold. Gold was changing hands before his very eyes, black skin stretched into chieftain smiles over white evil, white skin scowling over books and ink and piles and piles of gold. The sun blinded his downcast eyes for all the gold, even below his gaze.
A white man clad in gilded waistcloth and gilded hat and gilded shoes, and everything threaded with golden thread, that man, the golden-est of them all, looked up and caught his eyes. He averted his eyes to a lieutenant and began to shout joyous commands. Massamba saw his teeth glisten white as he heard the whip strike his skin. Anger was hotter than the whip-wound, but he still felt both.
In his hand, however, in his right hand lay his mother’s wisdom given to him by the great, deep voice. His hand therefore did not tighten, but protected, held, secured the precious, golden, elm samara. “I will keep it,” he heard himself say. “I will guard it until…”
He did not know, but he knew that he would know when his guardianship would end.
The golden white man ceased giving his orders. Massamba willed himself not to gaze upon this shining flesh-and-blood idol, but his will was overcome by the brightness of the dazzling apparition. “This is the curse,” he said. “My mother would never utter such a thing, but it is the curse against us all the same. God, be he of the Apostles or of Mohammed—it is God who has consigned us beneath the bootheel of this cold winter-man.
“Even so, let this curse grow and consume. Let it grow so that its overthrow will be more glorious than this golden man.”
And so he resolved not to be afraid to suffer under the curse of murder and beatings and slavery.
Just then, as he set his will within, even though the curse caused him to gaze upon the golden white man, a trickle of blood flowed from his shoulder to his chest, and down his torso, joining the sweat of anxiety and the tears of anger. Massamba then opened his hand and gathered it all unto the samara, the seed of the elm tree from Europe. “Now the curse has its foe.”
Nevertheless, he quailed as the whip drove him into the hold below. All the heat of Africa was in that hold, where he and a hundred other of his kindred were being stowed.
“When shall I see the sun again?” he thought to himself. “Not without the golden man’s reflection, not ever again. But I shall see the sun again, after I have seen my seed without which I shall die.”
He tried to sing a song, but he choked on the heat. His bonds were broken for use on another slave yet to be captured by the white smiles and the golden scowls, but the door of the hold was bound and sealed by a beaten white man, who howled like a tickled demon.
Massamba then understood his first European words: “Royal African Company.”
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