MALEDICTION (11)
"I can understand your annoyance." Gil felt weird, his head was spinning, his mouth was dry and his eyes were burning. A feeling he knew well. Long ago, in a time he had chosen to forget, he remembers being hung from the branch of an old willow tree. Many of them, many of the children had been hung on that tree. The pastor's used that to teach children a lesson on disobedience.
WHACK!
For an entire evening no matter where you were in the fields you would always hear the cracking of whips in the distance. Skin torn from their backs by the leather wips that left bruises of red and bleed profusely. He remembers the anger he felt back then, it boiled his blood to the point of evaporation.
Even the nights that followed, their screams echoed through the clear air like songs. Even the bats came to watch as they hung upside down on the top most branches, they came to drink the blood they had smelt from their caves. And the white men would leave them their for the entire night. No explanation of what they might have done wrong. More beating would follow if questions came out as well.
What had they done? Why were they even here?
EASTER LOLIWE ISLANDS
9 YEARS AGO
The fields were filled with whistles of a joyful tunes. The ladies sang songs of hope and encouragement to the men who dug out weeds and tended to the crops. Wiping drops of sweat that accumulated on their skin, their shirts thrown to the side exposing themselves to the cool summer breeze.
In the distance, white men with guns sat and watched them. If anyone refused to do their half of the work, shots would be fired with no hesitation.
"In this heat who's going to stand there and wip 'em, I'd rather shoot and question later." one of them would complain
"I hear ya." The other encouraged.
The fields were big stretching over 8 acres, each acre had its own specific type of crop. In this region of the island, coffee, tea and pyrethrum grew the best as it was located on a higher plane of elevation compared to other parts. Plus the climate was hot and wet which favored the growth of these crops.
But these white men didn't know that. Why would they? At the end of the day it wasn't them who tended to these crops, rather it was the men born in the dark. Sowing the seeds, tilling the land, fertilizing the soil, it was the black men who did it. All the white men were responsible for was hording all the money they got from exporting them.
The children born were raised in the fields, the stronger boys would help the men till, while the weaker ones worked with the girls and women to sow the seeds and harvest the leaves when the time came. As you might guess, Gil was among those weak children.
Eight-year-old Gil was small and malnourished, with patches of hair on some parts of his head. His eyes were pale white with a brown iris at their centers. His skin was lighter than others, especially on the more exposed parts, like his face and legs.
There was this blue shirt with holes in it that he loved to wear, paired with some brown cargo pants that were obviously a bit too big for him, but of course he didn't mind them, they were the only gift he got from his mother.
That morning, armed with a basket and drive, he made his way to the field from the mud house the women slept in. He actually didn't need to walk too far, since the house was in the middle on the field, the pyrethrum field to be more specific.
There were tons of mosquitoes here, so the medicine the women made from the pyrethrum would help to some extent. Although the deaths brought about by emergence of sickle cell anemia were much more than the ones brought about by malaria, in any case all that isn't really important now. Gil made his way to the coffee fields, his bear feet getting scrapped by the bare earth.
"Gil, umefika?" The girls were nice to him, all of them were nice. Even the women treated him like one of their daughters, feed him, bathe him and let him sleep in one of their beds.
"Yeshh!" It was so embarrassing how bad his English was back then.
The girls chuckled, "Unajaribu kuwa mzungu Gil? (You're trying to be white Gil?)" One of them asked, "Nitakusaidia (I'll help you). Pleashh cume without me." She announced with a smile.
"Haujui chenye unasema (You have no idea what you're saying)." Another girl commented on her bad imitation of the white men.
"You should cume withie meeee." She announced, "Hivyo, umelewa (Like that, did you get it)?"
Gil and the other girl nodded in agreement. "Puw ni mwerevu sana (Puw is very smart)." Gil said.
"Yeah."
The three then began their days work of gathering coffee leaves. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that day. Things went as smooth as you'd expect from a normal day's work. And at the end of the day everyone finished up their work and the women returned the baskets filled with leaves back to the white men.
As the moon took over the night, Gil slept soundly on a mat subconsciously raising his arms to beat whatever it was in the air that made that buzzing sound.
'Engrave it into me!'
He had been hearing something in the distance, the voice of a man screaming at a nest of people, 'Engrave it into our fields.'
In truth he had wanted to ignore it, however, the constant screaming was enough to catch the attention of the deaf. He shot up and looked around him, everything was dark. He reached and felt around, there was nobody there, the girls who had been sleeping soundly next to him had disappeared.
He got up and walked over to the wooden door of the mud house yawning as he stepped outside to pee.
He dozed in and out of sleep as tried to listen for the man's voice.
He could've sworn he heard it in the distance. The man's breathing, as though it was getting closer. As he was in the process of peeing he heard someone breathing down his neck.
"Gilly."
WAA!
Gil jolted back in surprise his pee flowing everywhere as he tried to recollect his thoughts.
"Gil, tis meme, Puwpuw."
"Puw, unafanya nini inje sahii? (Puw what are you doing outside right now?)" Gil asked putting his 'pee' away.
"Shh!" She shushed him and took his hand, "Kuja na mimi (Come with me)." She said smiling mischievously. Puw was no stranger to trouble, it always did seem to follow her where ever she went. There was nothing wrong with them being awake at night, in all honesty even the white men weren't awake at this time so they wouldn't even care. But it was what they did at that time.
Puw took his hand and the two moved through the green foliage in the middle of the night, cutting through pyrethrum stocks as they went along.
She dragged him all the way to the barn where he saw one of the men standing in a piece of wood that raised him above the others, he clutched he straws of grass in his hands as he yelled.
"OUR TOMORROW IS BETTER THAN TODAY."
"Ooour tumorow is butter then twoday." Puw shouted.
"Tommorrow?"
THE NEXT DAY, THE BEATING BEGAN!
TO BE CONTINUED