Free The Book Of Negroes by Lawrence Hill Page A

orange. The hair fell straight down from the sides of his head. On top, he was bald. He had blue eyes. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing, before I saw it. The same blue as river water on a sunny day. The toubab’s helper looked neither dark-skinned nor light, neither toubab nor homelander but a blend of the two. This helper had yellow-brown colouring, and a scar running in a raised ridge of flesh from one eye all the way to his mouth. It wasn’t a mark of beauty. It was a knife mark.
    When they reached me in the line, the helper pinched my arms. He grabbed my cheeks roughly to force my mouth open. The orange-haired toubab stopped him, and stepped forward. He signalled for me to open my mouth, and reached inside with a hairy index finger. I gagged. He ran his hands along my neck and shoulders, touched my back and made me move my elbows and knees. While the toubab inspector worked on me, the helper smacked Fomba in the face. Fomba’s mouth hung half open, lips unmoving, eyes as wide as mangoes. The helper smacked him again and mumbled something in a language vaguely like Bamanankan. Something about bending his head down. Fomba said nothing. He did nothing. The helper cocked his arm back again.
    “Fomba,” I called out. “Bend your head.”
    Fomba looked to me, and bent his head.
    The helper and the inspector turned to face me. “You speak Maninka?” the helper said.
    “Bamanankan,” I answered.
    “And you speak his language too?”
    “Fulfulde,” I said.
    The helper and the inspector conferred in the toubab’s language. I looked again at the toubab inspector. He had a firestick attached to one hip, a sword attached to the other and pinched nostrils. I listened to the strange words flying between them. Then the helper switched to Maninka and, to my surprise, the inspector understood.
    Using baby words so that the man would understand, the helper said, “She speaks his language, and she speaks Maninka.”
    The inspector gestured for another toubab and pointed at my chains. The other toubab ran up, bent down, jammed a piece of metal into the iron loop around my ankle, and released me. The helper pulled me over to Fomba.
    “Tell him to open his mouth and not to bite,” the helper told me.
    I told Fomba what to do. The toubab inspector stuck his finger in Fomba’s mouth, tested the teeth and seemed to find them solid.
    “Tell him not to move,” the helper said. The inspector tapped his ribs and saw Fomba wince.
    “Broken?” the helper said.
    “Fomba, look at me again. Do your ribs hurt?” Fomba mumbled an almost inaudible “yes,” but instinctively I changed his answer when I translated it for the assistant. It seemed safer to lie. “He says he is fine, and that the ribs don’t hurt too badly.”
    The orange-haired toubab looked in Fomba’s ears and inspected every other part of him—even his penis, which he picked up and tugged. Fomba’s mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. The inspector spoke to the other toubab, who stood beside me and used a quill toscratch symbols on thin parchment. The hand moved the wrong way across the parchment, leaving nothing but senseless symbols. They were done with Fomba. Two homelanders pulled up a heavy door lying flat in the floor. It grew wide like a crocodile’s mouth and kept widening, until it was lifted straight up. The stench of human waste rose from it in thick clouds, and with it the cries of grown men. Fomba and the man chained to him were shoved down the hatch and out of sight. The door was slammed shut. The toubab inspector turned to me. He spoke, but I couldn’t understand.
    Pointing at Sanu and her baby, the assistant said to me, “Toubab asks if you are the one.”
    “Say again?”
    “Are you the one who caught that woman’s baby?”
    I wondered how they knew. I wondered what else they knew about me. I nodded.
    The inspector asked me a question. I didn’t understand. He asked again. I picked out the word
rains
in Maninka.
    “Eleven,” I