Free Cion by Zakes Mda

from the old continent, whereas Divided was a creature with the head and torso of a man and the body of a lion. She paused. She stared into the eyes that were almost popping out with expectation.
    The children screamed in unison: “And then what happened?”
    She pretended she had forgotten what happened after the giraffe and Divided came onto the scene and challenged the children to complete the story themselves. They came with their various versions of how the giraffe and Divided conspired to spoil the peace of the Children of the Tear, and how later the giraffe and Divided fell out between themselves and then fell into a crevice that The Sun had opened on the earth to save the Children of the Tear.
    But one of The Owner’s sons would not buy the very beginning of the story.
    “You say there was nothing in the world…only The Sun?” he asked.
    And when all the children shouted that it was indeed so, the world was empty except for The Sun, the boy asked: “What about Jesus? Where was Jesus when all this was happening?”
    “It was before there was nobody,” the Abyssinian Queen explained. “Not even Jesus. Not even trees and rivers.”
    “Not even chickpeas,” his little sister piped. He loved chickpeas and at lunchtime they had fought over some that she had spilled on the floor by mistake.
    The next day the Abyssinian Queen was surprised to see the shadow of the lady of the house looming at the cabin door. She immediately put her sewing on a bench and rushed to welcome her. The lady of the house was, however, not in any mood for pleasantries. She told the Abyssinian Queen that she was greatly offended that she was teaching her children voodoo stories, telling them that there was a time when there was no Jesus. Jesus has always been there.
    “It’s only a story, ma’am,” the Abyssinian Queen said. “Maybe you gotta stop them kids from coming. It will break their li’l hearts though.”
    “I ain’t gonna stop them from nothing,” said the lady of the house with finality. “This is their plantation, you know, so they gonna go where they wanna go. All you gotta do is stop the voodoo stories and tell Bible stories instead.”
    Of course the Abyssinian Queen continued unabated with her “voodoo” stories and the children, including The Owner’s, continued to gather in the evenings. They even learned to sing along and to join in the choruses and in call-and-response chants.
    The Owner never suspected anything subversive about the storytelling sessions, even when the lady of the house complained that they accorded too much mixing of the children, who would normally be segregated and quartered according to their breed and pedigree. The Owner was indeed becoming too soft with age. For instance, the white children who came for the stories were not only the freeborn from the big house—the lady’s own kids, that is. There were also the white girls who had been sold to Fairfield Farms by their indigent parents, and those who were said to be illegitimate and were then given to African women to bring up. All these would be reduced to slavery when they grew up, and would be used for the breeding of the much valued mulatto slaves. In the meantime The Owner turned a blind eye as these children mixed and filled their lives with the magic of foxes and buzzards and rabbits and wolves and scallywags of all types that all tried to outdo one another in knavery.
    But stories of how Nat Turner, a preacherman, led more than fifty fellow slaves to take the armory in Southampton County, Virginia, and was hanged after being captured, were told in whispers, when the white children had gone back to the big house and to their various quarters. The pain of this particular story was still very fresh in the community because it happened only three or four years before. Stories of how Denmark Vesey, a respected carpenter and minister of religion, himself a former house slave, led a rebellion against slave owners in Charleston—not