Free Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo Page B

the city keeping themselves apart. He was an immigrant, then, like myself.
    “Come,” he said in that soft desert voice of theirs that requires little reverberation to blow across miles of uninterrupted sands. I scrambled to my feet, forgot the basket and followed the Tuareg and the lantern off the train.
    The platform was coated in a sleepy blur as I struggled to keep up with his loping strides.
    We mounted a few steps to a landing where I could see a shimmer of light through a slit in the wall. I soon discovered it was a door because when he unbolted it a vicious blast of midday sun and noise exploded upon us like the roar of a furnace flame. I recoiled as if burned, ready to scamper back into the safety of the tunnel, but he turned around to face me, his willowy outline silhouetted against the bright daylight.
    “Wait,” he said and left.
    I never saw him again. He had said all of two words to me.
    Before I had time to bolt the door and panic, my next helper arrived bearing a package of food in banana leaves.
    “Hi,” she said cheerily, popping her head around the door as if I were an old friend she was just dropping by to visit. “You can call me Ezinwene!”
    I recognized the smell of Ylang Ylang perfume, from the fragrant isle of Madagascar. It came in a bottle shaped like a voluptuous woman, and it was Madama Comfort’s favorite. Whiffs of her sickly sweet scent usually turned a corner long before she did, giving us time to walk double-quick in the opposite direction.
    I must have looked wild and famished because the young woman immediately handed the package over and watched with bemused fascination as my eyes watered and my hands tore into a dish of chicken in coconut sauce on a pile of tepid semolina.
    When I finished I licked my fingers dry, one by one.
    Ezinwene was young and came from a family of means; that much was obvious from the two gold crowns on her front teeth. (A rich Ambossan made damned sure everyone knew it.) Her lips were huge and soft and stained ruby from tobacco flowers. Her cinnamon skin glowed with the combination of a healthy diet and expensive moisturizers like cocoa butter and shea oil. Her teeth were fashionably sharpened to a point. Her intricately plaited hairdo rose up in swirling interlocking arcs, revealing she was unmarried. Wooden pendants were sewn into them to ward off evil spirits. Her perfect, naked, cone-shaped breasts were draped with dangling ostrich shell necklaces and her brown nipples were raised flirtatiously to the sky. Gold armlets ran up her arms like coiling snakes. The round platform of her well-fed hips, wrapped in shimmering green silk stenciled with orange flamingos, would secure her a good marriage.
    Ezinwene exuded the kind of exuberant confidence peculiar to those whom the gods favored.
    To be honest I hated to come face to face with such wholesome Aphrikan youth, beauty and wealth.
    She made me feel like the back end of a geriatric warthog.
    Worse, she reminded me of Little Miracle.
    She chattered nonstop, but I didn’t mind. After so many hours alone, I was hungry for conversation. The Ambossans didn’t believe in solitude, and neither did I anymore. Did I really spend time back home happily playing alone with my rag doll? They said that the Europane need for solitude was further proof of our inferior culture, our inability to share. Privacy was a foreign concept to all Aphrikans. Life was communal and for us slaves, by necessity, intimate.
    “I am so happy to have found my calling,” she prattled on. “I am here to help those less fortunate than myself. I am of the belief that although we are all created equal, some have lives that are made easy and some will have to endure the greatest tribulations. Oh, look at me and my long words! That means bad luck, you understand. Life can seem so deeply unfair, can’t it? Take me, for example, I only need click my fingers and the hired help comes running to obey my every command. But even for myself, life