Birth of a Dark Nation (22 page)

Perhaps that was how it was meant to be.
Perhaps Mama Abeo was wrong. Maybe the Razadi were not being
punished by becoming infertile. Maybe there was just no place else
to go in the gene pool. We had reached the top and there was no
more reason to reproduce the way we had known.

Instead, we were made into the living seeds
of the culture, spread across the world like seeds from a
dandelion, spread from the puff of air that was the will of Mama
Abeo herself.

And rather than being planted to grow in the
next fertile ground, we were made into property, conquered by the
only beings on this earth that could possibly beat us. Those
terrible creatures who couldn't even face us under the light of the
sun, who'd made some insidious agreement with common, weak white
men who'd never have been able to take us without the treachery of
the Oyo, the assent of mercenary vampires, and the gunpowder of
European muskets.

This conspiracy was so twisted that it seemed
like fate itself had plotted to steal us from our homeland and
plant us in the western hemisphere. It was the perfect crime.

The only comfort any of us had was that we
had not died—not yet—and so long as we lived, there would be a time
for redemption and a time for revenge.

Horrifying, humiliating, and demoralizing.
Those are the weakest words in your language that can be used to
describe the torturous middle passage. But I experienced it, just
as the hundred or so surviving men in my tribe did, and as the
millions of other Africans taken from the continent had, whether
they were sold as prisoners of war or taken by entrepreneurial
private kidnappers, as we'd been.

We feared for our lives. The sticks, which
had sent invisible spears through the bodies of our kinsmen,
terrified us. Indeed, they were the only things that kept us
subservient. We could survive the lash or the cat-o-nine tails. But
this great instrument of instant death, this "gun"-this was the
thing we knew we could not surmount. There was no defense against
it. There was just survival.

The slave ship was not large. It was on the
small side, as was the space inside it. Small and dark and made of
wood. It was too short to stand up inside. We could only lie down
or scoot up to sitting position if the chains were loose enough.
There were no pillows or blankets or anything to make it
comfortable. It was just hard wood and our own bodies.

The darkness of the cargo hold of the ship
was like nothing I'd experienced before. It was pure black. Nothing
in Africa was this black, not even the backs of my eyelids. I was
scared, but there was no time to turn away, nowhere to run, no
possibility of fighting.

The first day at sea was bad. Several of us
had been in canoes before, but the vast majority had not known what
it felt like to float in deep water. The up and down motion of the
ship made us violently ill. Many of us became sick to our stomachs
and vomited. If we had known, we might have tried to focus and
center ourselves to manage our health better, for the vomit that
came out of us wasn't draining anywhere, nor was anyone going to
come by and clean it up.

There were no private corners to excuse
ourselves to when we had to urinate or defecate. We held it for as
long as we could that first day, but when we had to go, we went. We
tried our best to pull down our pants if our chains allowed us the
freedom, and we aimed ourselves away from our brethren if it was
possible. But it usually wasn't. We soiled ourselves and each other
in the process of handling our natural bodily functions.

Every other day or so, the hatch to the
holding cell would open and men with the guns would peer in. I
couldn't understand it at the time, but there was one word they
kept saying over and over until I came to understand it was what
they were calling us:

Négro.

No, I am not
Négro
. I am Razadi.

Négro.

No, I don't know what that is, but it's not
my name.

Négro.

No. No. We are Razadi. We will never answer
to a name other than that one.

We had to share a jug of water to drink and
pots of a disgusting, lumpy porridge to eat. That was it. The
slavers considered us to be quite dangerous, so our meals were
delivered to us by a contraption that was raised and lowered down
to us. Only those closest to the contraption could reach it due to
the chains. They passed the food and water to the people behind
them. We soon determined that we'd eat only twice a day and in
small quantities.

The floor soon became slick with our
excrement. It was a sludge that wouldn't soon leave the cell. The
hatch closed and we baked in the heat and humidity.

Sweat.

Tears.

Piss.

Shit.

Vomit.

The stench.

The wails.

We lived in hell, tossed to and fro in the
ocean for weeks, called a word we had never heard before but that
we knew must mean the lowest of the low.

I wanted to die. I wanted my life to end. If
there had been a way for me to kill myself, I would have. We all
wasted away, constantly sick from the stench and filth, unable to
clean ourselves. My body itched and ached. My head was in constant
pain.

Babarinde tried his hardest to comfort us. He
was the ranking member of our group, as Ogundiya the elder was on
the other ship. We sang sometimes. We chanted sometimes. And we
prayed. We prayed fervently and often, sometimes so long and hard
that we lost our voices.

But I knew that Babarinde was just as scared
and lost as the rest of us. This wasn't what he'd signed up for.
This hell on the ocean wasn't what any of us had signed up for.

Many weeks into the ordeal, on one of those
nights we were convinced we'd just float forever, the ship tossed
violently, worse than it ever had before. We could hear the wind
whipping around the ship while thunder exploded around us.

"Oya!" Babarinde shouted above the din. "She
has come!"

Not that it made a difference in the
blackness of the hold, but we closed our eyes and prayed that Oya
would liberate us. We whispered. We shouted. We tried to speak to
her as one body, one mind.

Upstairs, chaos. The slavers shouted in their
native language to one another in panicked tones. If they were
scared, I knew we would be alright somehow.

The hatch door flapped open against the wind
and we could hear the white men ever clearer. They kept saying
"
La Tête! La Tête!"
which we knew was the name of the other
ship. It was night, but I could see no stars, only black sky
tainted gray with the storm clouds overhead and the surreal streaks
of lightning slicing through the air like a spider's web.

The ship tilted suddenly to the left and one
of the unarmed crew members tumbled down into our space. He
screamed on the way down. His back hit the bottom with a terrible
plop and he struggled to stand in the scum.

Even amid the howls of the wind, he must have
heard the fifty or so sets of fangs elongate with a pop at the same
time.

"
Mon dieu
…" he whispered.

The two Razadi closest to him reached out and
grabbed his arms.

"Non!"
he shouted.

My brothers dug their emaciated hands deep
into the white man's arms and each tried to drag him toward their
side of the ship. The man screamed over and over again, but my
brothers were unrelenting. He would become our meal. His screams
would have curdled the blood of ordinary beings.

Suddenly, each of his arms was torn out of
their sockets. While my brothers quickly took each arm and drank
from them like a gourd, the hysterical white man flailed his torso
about as his blood sprayed over us. Some landed in my mouth and
slid down my throat easily.

I came back to life and knew that I could
defeat my captors.

"Don't let him waste any more of that blood!"
Babarinde shouted. "You! Pass those arms back! Give some to your
brothers. And use your strength to break these chains! Oya sent us
this meal. The rest is up to us!"

The two Razadi passed the pale and bloodied
arms behind them and obeyed Babarinde's order to try to break
through the chains. Each of them chanted and pulled as hard as they
could. They'd never be able to break the chains, but perhaps they
could pull the chains from out of the iron loops built into the
ship.

They pulled. The wood began to creak against
their efforts.

They struggled. The creaking got louder as
the wood buckled.

They prayed. As the wood began to splinter,
we screamed with excitement, drowning out the sound of the wood
disintegrating into kindling.

Success!

"We did it!"

"We are free!"

"We're not free yet," Babarinde said. "Help
us! Break these chains. And give me that white man's body!"

Immediately, one man hoisted the now
unconscious white man on his shoulders, even as blood continued to
ooze out of him. The other quickly broke through the chains of more
Razadi.

The white man had little life left in his
body.

"We normally don't torture people before we
feed on them," Babarinde said to the white man. "Nor do we eat to
kill. But what you swine have done to my people deserves no mercy
whatsoever. I drink you to hell, white man."

Babarinde buried his fangs into the white
man's neck and drank as much as he could. More freed Razadi bit
other portions of the man's body and drank as much as they could. I
was passed the man's arm and sucked the open portion that had once
been his shoulder. I was growing stronger by the minute.

The raging storm continued, and though we
weren't nearly as strong as we had been when we went in, we knew we
would not lose this battle.

"My brothers!" Babarinde yelled out. "We go
up! And eat every pale faced pig that you see!"

Enraptured by the emotion of our impending
freedom, we leaped straight up through the hole in the ceiling of
our prison like a swarm of bees leaving a hive.

Lightning lit the sky in terrible fireworks,
the likes of which we had never seen. The handful of white men on
the deck of the ship gazed upon us in horror as the ship tossed
back and forth. There were less than a dozen men on the ship;
hardly enough to provide a true feast, but they'd have to do.
Eşusanya, Ogundiya, Aborişade, and I reassembled on the deck and
grabbed the nearest white man we could find. He screamed and
Ogundiya snapped his neck, killing him instantly.

"Drink up," Aborişade ordered. We each found
an artery and inserted our already elongated canines. The chaos on
the deck around us subsided as the white men were overpowered, too
fast even for them to pick up their guns, to try to do to us what
they did to our brothers on the continent.

I stood up from my meal and made room for one
of my fellow brothers who had not yet eaten. The lightning still
lit the night sky an eerie electric blue. I turned around in a
complete circle and saw nothing but ocean around me. Land could
have been a million miles away for all I knew.

In the distance, I saw our sister ship.
Something was wrong.

"Babarinde!" I shouted. I pointed toward our
sister ship in horror. He hurried toward me and then looked out at
the other ship. Each man stopped and joined us on the side of the
ship.

"No. No. No." Babarinde fell to his
knees.

La Tête
was sinking into the ocean
like a child's toy. The wind whipping around us subsided to an
eerie calm and the lightning bolts faded away. Our ship stopped
rocking and we all fell silent as
La Tête
disappeared into
the sea.

Not a single soul jumped off to swim toward
us. No rescue boat or canoe emerged from the darkness. Our brothers
and their captors were all dead. We were alone.

Babarinde, for the first and only time in my
life, broke down in uncontrollable sobs. Many of us did.

But I did not. I comforted Baba and all of my
other brothers who were in shock. Then I immediately began to
assess the crew's quarters, the galley, and the cargo holds aside
from our own. Two of our scrolls and a cask of our gold were here.
We had four scrolls in total, and I knew we'd lost one to theft and
the other to the ocean. Two were better than none, but it was
devastating to know our knowledge was lost.

There was not enough room for all of us in
the cabins. We'd have to take turns sleeping, a day shift and a
night shift, until we reached our destination. But we would be
comfortable. And we would remain full from the blood of our captors
for a while.

The sea was calm. My head spun from the
stress, from the shock, and from the blood intoxication I felt. But
I had to carry on.

"Baba," I said. "Baba, get up."

I pulled him up by his arm. His face was
still wet with tears. His chest heaved with sobs.

"Come. Rest."

He leaned on me and I carried him to the
captain's quarters. He lay down on the slim bed and was asleep in
no time.

I emerged from the quarters and saw dozens of
my brothers still weeping on the deck of the ship. I gestured to
Ogundiya, Eşusanya, and Aborişade. They came to me.

"There aren't enough places for everyone to
sleep, so we'll have to double up. Eşusanya, divide the group in
half. Take the ones who need rest down below. Leave Babarinde's
quarters be, but double everyone else up. Two to a bed. Put
blankets on the floors. Whatever will get everyone comfortable.
Aborişade, give everyone else something to do. Shutter the hatch
down to the slave holding cell. I don't want to see or smell that
pit ever again. Figure out how those weapons work. Search the ship
for other useful things. And Ogundiya, stay with me, here by the
wheel. We'll figure out how to steer this ship until we find
land."