Birth of a Dark Nation (29 page)

"Ready or not, here we come," she said,
bounding down the stairs of our porch.

"Baba!" I called out. I ran to our staircase
and yelled his name again.

"What?" he called back. He emerged from the
hallway, bare-chested and sleepy.

"The others…they…they killed Gilbert
Andre!"

"Dear God," he said. "Where are they
now?"

"Outside our house getting ready to march on
Orleans!"

"Shit," he said. He and I ran through the
house assembling dozens of our men and arming them with every
weapon we had. In minutes, we were on the side of the road.

"This is very stupid, Charles!" he shouted to
Charles.

"We're ready, Bernard! A new day has begun!"
Charles bared his fangs for the first time.

"No, Charles. You're not ready. There is much
to learn. This is not how you win a war."

"We are not stoppable, don't you see that?
Hundreds of Africans have been made like you. We thirst for the
blood of the white men and we will get it. To Orleans!"

We began our march to the city.

"This is wrong, Babarinde," Aborişade said.
He had a look of dread on his face.

"It may be wrong," Baba replied. "But we're
here. And we can't let our fellow Africans down. We will fight
until we can't fight anymore."

And fight we did, all night long, liberating
black people from each plantation along the German Coast, inching
closer and closer toward Orleans. Charles and Rebekah Deslondes led
the way, their sandy faces twisted in rage and vengeance as they
flung wide the gates of the plantations, giving the blacks inside
the choice to either join us and fight or stay behind and die with
their masters. Whether out of fear, jubilance, or even rudimentary
hypnosis, not a single slave stayed behind. Men, women, and
children joined our bloody band.

For a day and a half, we marched toward the
city, camping at various plantations that had been deserted by the
whites at the very rumor of an insurrection. We ended up at the
Bernoudy estate, a vast sugar cane plantation with some of the only
hills in all of the German Coast. We marched up one hill to survey
our destruction and attempt to see Orleans in the distance.

To our surprise, we found that militiamen
surrounded us on all sides.

"Can we hypnotize them?" Ariori whispered to
Babarinde.

"Can't get close enough to see their eyes,"
he whispered back.

Mercredi, standing on the front lines next to
Charles, began to retch.

"What the hell is wrong with him?" Eşusanya
said.

Suddenly, others were retching and vomiting
blood all around us.

"What's happening?" Ariori asked.

"Something's wrong," Babarinde said.

People were collapsing all around us. None
were Razadi. All were slaves.

A calm, silent whiteness fell over us like a
fog. It was as though we had all been bathed in coconut milk.
Through the silence, we heard a soft, but powerful voice in our own
tongue:

This is not your fight.

"Obatala!" several of us shouted at once, in
spiritual ecstasy.

The whiteness around us dissipated and the
militia still encroached upon us.

"Run!" Babarinde said to us. We headed toward
the swamps behind us as the bullets whizzed by us.

Rebekah laid on the ground beside me, doubled
over in pain. She grabbed at my leg.

"Please…help," she pleaded.

I looked at her in pity and tried to speak,
but the words were caught in my throat.

I ran, leaving her and the others behind,
disappearing into the words, praying that Olódùmarè would somehow
protect our stricken friends.

Over the next few days, we were visited
several times by angry men, demanding to know our role in the slave
uprising. We told them, each time, that we had nothing to do with
it; that we didn't know anything about it and that we were just
peaceful cotton farmers with a thriving textile business.

The power of hypnosis helped immensely during
this period. I am certain that had we been ordinary men, we would
have all been lynched. Although we'd lost the battle, at least we
would stay alive through the power of suggestion and the stealth of
our existence.

A cloud seemed to hang over our house for
weeks after the strange events at the Bernoudy estate. Babarinde
hushed us each time we tried to bring it up, saying only that it
wasn't our fight.

In March, as we worked in the fields, we
noticed a lone figure on horseback trotting his way to our
plantation. We stopped our work and waited to see if this was yet
another white slave owner looking to harass us about his losses in
the German Coast uprising.

As the horse came closer toward us, I could
tell its rider was black like us. As it came even closer, I could
see who it was:

Rebekah Deslondes.

We abandoned our work and came to the front
of the house to receive our visitor. We guided the horse to a post
and tied it down. I stretched my hand out to help Rebekah off the
animal, but she ignored me, instead using one hand to steady
herself as she jumped down. Her cloak fell open and to the ground,
exposing what remained of her left arm.

I gasped.

"I suppose you've never seen a woman with one
arm before," she barked at me. The words got caught in my throat
and I remained silent.

"Fetch Babarinde," she snarled.

"I'm here," he said from the porch. I picked
up her cloak and handed it back to her.

"I didn't know there were any survivors," he
said.

"If you can call this survival," she
retorted.

"What happened?" he asked.

She walked toward him with a slight limp.

"You mean, what happened after you all ran
away like cowards?"

Babarinde remained silent.

"Why don't you come in, get some water. Rest
for a while."

"I don't want or need anything from you,
Bernard. Other than the next five minutes of your life."

"I'm listening," he said, folding his
arms.

"After you all left us at Bernoudy, the white
men slaughtered us. It was bad enough that our bodies began
rejecting your blood, your precious gift that was supposed to turn
us into beings like you. We were left quivering on the ground with
no one to help us but ourselves, and we were too ill to do
anything.

"The men? All dead. Mercredi, Amos, everyone.
Shot dead. Executed there on the spot. The women? Stripped of their
children and forced to watch as they were thrown into the swamp.
Some of the infants were kicked around like playthings until they
were black and blue.

"They saved the worst for me and Charles.
They took me—dozens of times. They beat me relentlessly. They tried
to draw and quarter me to finish me off, but the first horse took
off too soon. Rather than put me out of my misery, they let me
wander off. I was so confused, so much in a fog, that they thought
it would be a fun game to predict where I would walk off to and
die. They didn't notice that I was slowly but surely healing. I
suppose the last of your blood still flowed in me, allowing me to
regenerate enough to stop the bleeding. Obviously, I couldn't grow
my arm back. Nowadays, I wonder what would happen if the same
happened to any of you. Whether I can pluck one of your limbs and
have them grow back in complete order, better than before. That
ever happen to you? Hmm? Didn't think so.

"Charles wasn't so lucky. In front of all of
the surviving women, his hands were chopped off, one right after
the other. Then they shot him in his thighs. He couldn't walk. He
couldn't even crawl. Then they shot him in the chest. But before he
died, they stuffed him in a sack of straw and threw him into the
fire.

"Do you know he never even screamed?"

"Rebekah…I'm sorry."

"Shut up."

She shuffled back to her horse and shooed us
away as we tried to hoist her up.

"I hope you enjoy your days on this
plantation."

"Rebekah, I'm sorry, from the bottom of my
heart," Babarinde began. "We've never tried to make one of our own
before. We should have had more time to see if it would really
work. Time to train you. Time to initiate you into—"

"You left us! You saw that we were ill and
outnumbered and you left us! You were more powerful than everyone
out there, and you still left! I will never forget this Bernard!
Not for as long as I live. You and your people will never be
brothers to me. Ever. One day, we'll be free. No thanks to
you."

She whipped the side of the horse lightly and
he galloped off toward the horizon. We never saw her again and we
were forbidden to speak of it.

~

I cradled Justin in my arms as he gasped and
came back to reality. His eyes were wide open, searching for some
sort of connection to the modern world.

"It's okay," I said, wiping the sweat from
his face with one of the napkins from his lunch bag. "You're back.
You're in DC. You're in your own time."

"Why didn't I die?" he breathed in between
gasps.

"What?"

"Why didn't I die?! I was supposed to die,
but you saved me, just like you tried to save the slaves. They got
sick. They died. Why didn't I die?"

"I don't know, Justin."

"The hell you mean you don't know? You mean I
still might reject this blood? I could just suddenly keel over and
die? Why hasn't that happened to me?"

"Because you're special," I said.

Justin clutched my arm tighter, but turned
away from me.

"I don't want to be special."

"Too late," I said. I kissed him on his
forehead as he closed his eyes and tried to rest.

Back at the parkour gym, Justin was sweating
once again. It was the end of a long day of running and martial
arts. He stood panting before me.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"I want you to run this whole thing in less
than 30 seconds," I said.

"The whole thing?" he repeated.

"Yup. I've got a surprise for you if you can
do it."

"Aight then," he said. He squared up next to
me on a painted line near the door.

"Ready…go!"

He zoomed off to the right, darting between
steel barrels like a football star, his calf muscles tightening
under his brown skin. His old workout clothes had begun falling off
his body, so a steel gray compression top and black compression
tights were his new uniform. This was his combine.

He leapt up twelve feet into the air and
grabbed onto the bottom of iron chains suspended from the ceiling.
He swung to the far wall, where he easily climbed the bricks to the
ceiling, then swung from pipe to pipe until he was over a pit of
cardboard boxes and rubber blocks. He fell gracefully into the pile
and almost immediately popped up, running toward piles of wooden
boxes. He hopped on one stack, then a higher one, then the highest,
landing on the far edge of the wall with less than ten inches to
walk on. He kept his balance—on his tiptoes, no less—and jumped
down onto the floor. He ran at full speed at that point, flipping
his way over more barrels until he landed inches from my face.

I looked down at my watch.

"Twenty-five seconds," I said.

"Let me do it again, I can get it down to
twenty."

"You don't need to," I smiled. "Want your
surprise?"

He nodded and smiled.

"Christiana? You can come out now."

A tall, brown girl with thin braids halfway
down her back emerged from the shadows behind me.

"Who are you?" Justin asked as he wiped the
sweat from his brow with a towel he had nearby.

"This is Christiana. She's a new initiate of
Iota Theta Beta. She's in a trance. She won't remember meeting
you."

Justin approached the tall, young, dark brown
coed. If I didn't know him better, I'd think he was attracted to
her.

"I didn't know Iota took black girls," he
said.

"They all bleed red," I said. "Now…do you
remember the words?"

He nodded vigorously.

"Well…spit 'em."

"I greet thee in the spirit of Dominique
Bellanger," he said.

"I welcome thee in the spirit of Dominique
Bellanger," Christiana replied.

"I have traveled across burning sands and
dangerous savannahs to be here today," Justin continued.

"And I have waited patiently for you."

"I have survived the middle passage and
decades of danger."

"Yet I never doubted that you would return to
me."

"I am your protector, forever and ever."

"And I offer myself to you, the living legacy
of Dominique Bellanger. I present myself to you: one body, one
flesh. Iota Theta Beta: in the blood."

Christiana lifted her chin and turned away
from Justin, exposing her neck to him. He bared his fangs and
buried his face deep into the girl's neck, careful not to spill a
drop. His hands gripped her slim waist and she held him in
return.

"She's a meal. Not a date."

He moved his hands to her back, in a far less
sexy area. I laughed.

"You're doing well," I said as I watched him
drink. "You know, I guess I should tell you now…this whole series
of events…you know, teaching you how to fight. Getting you in
shape. Showing you how we garden. All of that? That's not just to
protect you against nightwalkers. And it's not just necessary for
your survival. I mean, sure, you need all of this training. But
it's leading up to a fight. The fight of your life."

He ignored me as he drank.

"You hear me?" I asked. "I said you're going
to have to fight. It's your initiation. You don't just become a
Razadi. You have to earn it. You earn it by fighting when you're
ready. And you're ready."

Justin suddenly stopped drinking and he
pushed Christiana away. His knees buckled and he stumbled to the
ground. I went to Christiana and whispered instructions in her ear
as I pricked my finger and healed her puncture wounds with my
blood.