Cion by Zakes Mda Read Free Book Online Page A

stock. From those who had been bred to procreate and feed the insatiable markets. Men and women did not abjure what came naturally even though they knew that the unions they formed would be fragile. They continued to manufacture babies despite the ever-threatening dangers of loving them.
    David Fairfield was The Owner. He had a better remedy for love…much more effective than the wizened one’s. He was a compassionate man, so he devised a strategy of saving the women from the pain of loving their children. The midwives were given strict instructions that the birthing mothers should never be allowed to see their newborns, let alone touch them. As soon as the babies came out of the passage of life they were whisked away to a communal nursery. At feeding time mothers were not given their own babies to breastfeed. Mothers therefore never got to know which babies were theirs, in the same way that they never got to know who the fathers were. The Owner made certain that there was a rotation of studs—the well-bred young men whose most important function was to impregnate the women to populate the plantation with the future generations that would meet the demands of the auction block.
    Nicodemus and Abednego were children who could not be loved.
    First came Abednego. They called his mother the Abyssinian Queen, even though none of her forebears ever set foot in Abyssinia. The first of them in the new world had been captured from the mouth of the Kongo more than a century before. She did not know that. The Kongo man’s family tree was chopped down successfully after a generation or two and no one knew anything anymore.
    She was the Abyssinian Queen—black like a moonless night with dark clouds hiding the stars. Yet her big white teeth beamed sunrays into people’s hearts, leaving them melting.
    Her face was round and smooth. So was her belly. It radiated life: there is nothing as beautiful as a pregnant stomach. The fullness of the moon. Gleaming stretch marks like moonscape rivers. In the folk tales that were told when work was done and fires were roaring the sun was king and the moon was queen. Perhaps that is why they called the woman a queen, for the sobriquet started only when she was sashaying in voluminous dresses, with Abednego kicking in her body.
    In her case the father of the child was known, for he never allowed any rotation to take place on top of the Abyssinian Queen. She was his and his alone. Of course he never acknowledged the child. It was an age when some children were destined never to be acknowledged by those fathers who prided themselves on being pillars of the community.
    The Abyssinian Queen cleaned the big house and took care of the acknowledged children. She provided friendship and companionship to the lady of the house. When work was done she took care of the needs of The Owner, providing him with alternative warmth during those long winter nights. To facilitate this last task of the day she was allocated a comfortable room adjoining the big house, and did not consort with those who lived in the cabins and toiled in the fields. Her duties were to the family and the hawk-eyed Owner.
    The Owner had to be vigilant because he knew the kind of shenanigans property was capable of getting up to behind the master’s back. He had seen it all when he was growing up at his father’s plantation in Fredericksburg, Virginia, decades before.
    Charles Fairfield, David’s father, had determined quite early on that slave children were a more profitable crop than tobacco or cotton or corn, especially after the 1808 abolition of the foreign slave trade. Since the Fairfields—then famous in all the South as slave traders of repute—could no longer import slaves from Africa and the West Indies, they decided to start their own slave breeding farm to meet the growing needs of labor in the thriving plantations of the South.
    The Fairfield operation in Fredericksburg was quite rudimentary. The breeding process was not