Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo Read Free Book Online Page B

THE RETURN OF THE SCRAWNY
    BLONDE SLAVE WOMAN
    OMORENOMWARA
    • PREFERABLY MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE ‘ •
    ----
    To the Ambossans we “scrawny blondes” all looked alike. It would be in my favor for once.
    We were moving deep into the bowels of the earth, slowly. No one above would detect a tremor or sound. I leaned against the rusty pole. I needed to conserve my energy. During my lengthy sojourn at Bwana’s, life had become so predictable my senses had gone into a coma. Now the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, my ears were pinned back, my spine arched.
    Hours passed. I had no way of telling other than that my stomach pangs felt like the sharp kicks of an unborn child and a heaviness swept down from my crown to my toes like molten lead. But every time my head flopped over and my eyes closed, I jolted myself upright again. Adrenaline had got me thus far. My guide had told me to trust no one.
    As the train crawled through the black underground tunnel, its chugging rhythms began to lull.
    I slid down to the floor and curled my body around the pole.
    Maybe I would wake up back in Mayfah as if this night had never happened.
     
     
    I HAD LIVED WITH FEAR ever since the man from the Border Lands had grabbed me when I was playing hide-and-seek in the potato fields behind our cottage with my sisters.
    Madge. Sharon. Alice.
    Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.
    Slave or dead? Slave or dead? Dead or slave?
    Not knowing their fate put my sleep on the torture rack for years.
     
     
    ALICE WAS THE YOUNGEST and prettiest-COming two years after me, that wasn’ t funny. She didn’ t say a word until she was seven, which made her just so adorable, as did her spider eyelashes and blonde ringlets. (She was the only one of us to inherit Pa’ curls.) He once told her at dinner that she was such a pretty little thing she need never open her mouth to speak. Unfortunately she didn’t take his advice. During her mute years she learned how to get what she wanted through a branch of sign language known as lash-fluttering.
    When we were alone I’d mimic her: grunt like an imbecile, roll my eyes into the back of my head, throw myself onto the floor and dribble. She’d fling her surprisingly mighty little monkey-self onto me, sink her teeth into whichever part of my anatomy was within easy reach, then screech her head off for everyone to hear. Guess who always got it in the neck, and “should have known better,” even though I had her teeth marks as evidence?
    Because we were closest in age, we were supposed to pair up, but even when she could speak, I refused to. I played with my dolls alone, except when the older two let me partake of their friendship.
    Sharon was two years above me and was thick as thieves with Madge. You couldn’t split them up or wedge yourself in between, no matter how hard you tried: backstabbing, sucking up to one and not the other, planting stolen objects, innuendo.
    Sharon was like a mini-Mam, thinner than the rest of us, although we were all thin enough to snap in two at the waist like gingerbread men. We all had dark blue eyes, but Sharon insisted hers were azure. She imitated Mam’s elegant movements perfectly in the hope that people would comment (which they did), her arms dancing midair even when she was doing something as down-to-earth as picking apples off a tree in Percy’s orchard or combing her hair.
    Sharon hated what she called menial tasks, which was a pity because her fingernails got as crusty and jagged as mine when we had to help Pa in the fields or dig ditches up to our waists, and as raw as mine what with scrubbing the laundry on the big stone down by the stream, and bleaching the linen with a mixture of lye and stinking human urine that had been collected in a tub specially for the purpose.
    In the summer Sharon wore a garland of buttercups as a crown on her head and in winter, snowdrops. It was the princess look, apparently. One time she changed her name to Sabine but had to drop it when we