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Monthly Exclusives May, 2010 |
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March, 2010 Daughters of the Stone—List of Characters Oshun—West African goddess of fertility, sexuality, represents the feminine
The Women
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~ DAHLMA'S JOURNEY ~ DAUGHTERS OF THE STONE ~ MONTHLY EXCLUSIVES ~ BOOK REVIEWS ~ SHARE YOUR STORY ~ NEWS AND EVENTS ~ JUST FOR EDUCATORS ~ MY BOOKSHELF ~ CONTACT DAHLMA |
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May, 2010 Holding Pens As the week went by, Fela's hope of rescue dulled to a dim glimmer. Each evening she endured the selection process when the beasts helped themselves to woman after woman. On the second day, Fela's heart had frozen in terror when the man inspecting the women jerked her out of the group and dragged her towards the bushes. She fought him, biting and kicking until his fist smashed into the side of her head. Her vision blurred and she was unable to stand upright. She felt his hands grab for her and she knew her fate would be that of the other women that had been dragged into the bushes. The stone! How could she protect it? Where could she hide it? She was terrified. She felt the rough hands ripping at her cloth but before he could drag her to her feet, a shot filled the air. Another guard had set off his weapon. Suddenly, the white ones stopped what they were doing and listened. As one of them ran into the trail and jabbered excitedly, Fela took the opportunity to reach down and remove the stone. She quickly pushed it into the matted bush of her hair. Now that the stone was safe, Fela focused on her surroundings again. For the first time since they had attacked the village the white men looked scared. One of them, one of the ones who had helped himself to a woman, staggered out of the bushes, head bashed, a spear wound deep in his chest. The woman he had been tormenting was nowhere to be seen. Within seconds several of the white ones paired up and ran after her, weapons in hand. For her part, Fela was relieved. She had been saved from the attack that surely would have followed. She knew that sooner or later, the assault would come. She braced herself against it as much as she could within her own mind. Terrified as she was of these men, she was even more afraid of losing the stone. She had done all she could to protect it and for now, at least, it was out of danger. The last thing Imo had entrusted to her... Imo! Their men must have come for them! The women held on to each other, feeding on the hope. The men left to guard them, secured the chains and stood alert, circling the women, focusing out from the group, weapons pointed nervously at the dense wall of trees. Only Cane kept his eyes on the women, a guard dog for his masters. There were more explosions and then silence. It seemed it took forever before the bushes near the trail moved and the white men returned. Two of them were missing and the ones who returned were covered in blood. They gathered together and talked their talk, making large gestures and little heated arguments in low voices. When they went back to the women, they continued the march but now the column of women was crowded in the trail as the white men guarded them even more closely. Their eyes darted here and there and their heads often swung back to make sure they were not being followed. There was no more going into the bushes. There was very little talk among them. The walking pace was picked up. Fela could smell their fear that night as she fell asleep. There was still hope. * * * But the hope vanished eight days later when they arrived at the compound late one afternoon. The whole way, Fela had been on hyper alert, waiting for their men to strike. But there were no further attacks. On the eighth day, she gave ups hope. One moment they had been surrounded by the bush and suddenly there it was; a large clearing surrounded by a high wall. Inside the wall ground had been beaten to a hard flat surface. The area was full of people, men, women and children all standing naked in the late afternoon sun. Each group was bound by leg irons or manacles. Some of the larger men wore heavy metal collars with spikes stabbing into their necks at the slightest tug. There were no babies here. Fela's eyes flew everywhere looking for a familiar face. She searched for their men everywhere but found nothing to tell of their presence. The men here had strange scarring and unfamiliar hairstyles. They were black men yes, but their features were totally different than those she had seen her whole life. There was no noise so she couldn’t even tell if they spoke her own language. But she doubted it. Still, she took in the scene until she stopped short at the spectacle to the right of the clearing. It was the area where they were led to first so that all the captives entering the compound would see it immediately. There in the dying sunlight stood a circle of a dozen or so shorter poles surrounding one larger pole in the center. A heavy chain was suspended between each shorter pole and the larger center one. And in the middle of each chain, there hung a spiked collar with the spikes built into the center of the ring so that anything encircled by the collar would be pricked continuously. Most of the chains hung empty now but three of them held black men who were at different stages of death. One man who apparently could no longer stand in the hot sun, had given up and his own weight had driven the spikes into his neck. His body hung lifeless. The blood that had run down his torso had now caked into dry rivulets attracting a cloud of large flies and assorted insects, which crawled up his lifeless legs. The other two men clung to life, trying to hold themselves up and knowing the hopelessness of their situation. One man groaned and licked his dry lips, asking something in a language Fela could not understand. The other, an older man stood, focusing on some unknown point in space, not bothering to protest his condition, bearing his pain in silence, apparently having vacated his body of his own volition. His legs were giving out. Fela turned away not wanting to witness the end of his days. The guards walked about, indifferent to their plight. Animals are put out of their misery after the hunt. They are given the dignity of a quick end. Bu these men wouldn’t even have that small act of humanity. She knew Imo wasn’t among the chained men in the lines but she prayed that he wasn’t among these others, the ones who had become less than animals to these white men. She had hoped for rescue and then, selfishly wished for him to be there, not far from her. But now, she didn't want him to go through this. She ached for her husband, for his reassurance, for his strength. She turned her face away, closed herself to hope and became one with her pain and her loss. * * * At the very end of the compound stood a structure such as Fela had never seen before. The two-level building sat quietly in the heat, its pink walls strangely lit by the afternoon sun, stood in sharp contrast to the greenery around it. A graceful staircase rose in the center of the facade, its two great wings curving out towards the center and meeting again on the second floor landing, creating a womblike entry into its inner world. Carved wood covered the four doorways on the second level and there were several tall windows at either side of the doorways, letting air and light into the rooms. By contrast the lower level doorways stood empty and dark. The pink and white color of the upper building had dulled and faded on the lower walls and no one had bothered to clean the brown stains that spotted the walls here and there. There was a wide entrance at the center of the lower level, just under the central staircase led to a darkness which was interrupted by a small patch of light that appeared to be at the furthest extreme of the building, giving the impression that one was looking through a long, dark tunnel at a rectangle of pure white. There were no windows on this first level. At one line, a man grabbed a young woman, pulled at her breasts and plunged his hand between her legs. The girl spat at him and clawed at his face. He slapped her to the ground and motioned one of the other men to take her away. Fela could she her face clearly. N'Gone! She was taken up to a second story room, which stood to the right of the stairway. Still fighting off the guard who gripped her by the arm, N’Gone was thrown into the room, the door slammed and locked behind her. Fela, bound in her own chains, watched helplessly as her friend was taken away. As her eyes pulled away from that upper doorway, they fell on a white haired man who stood out in the sea of dark heads and her breathing stopped. The welts on his back left no doubt that he had resisted capture yet he stood tall as he waited with the other men. She tried desperately to think of a way of letting him know she was there without alerting the guards. She knew that he would soon be moved away, into the building. What could she do? At that moment he turned to face the setting sun and Fela's eyes burned into his face. It was a beautiful face, full of dignity and strength, but it was not Imo. The shock left her paralyzed. There was a coldness that had crept over her and there was no room in her world for anything else. * * * She stood with her back against a cold wall surrounded by other women, so many other women that there was no room for sitting or lying down. The women’s suffering was beyond words. Their moans were magnified by the close quarters. The cries of the younger women bounced from wall to wall and back again like wild birds who could find no place to land. The cries grew and grew until Fela could feel them pushing against the walls, pushing her back, back, back to that other place, that other time. And then there was Imo, the healer, before her, reminding her, giving her what he could to help. "Use the knowledge of the ancients. We are not helpless. They have taken only our bodies. We know our true selves and this knowledge cannot be taken from us." She remembered the little music and the swaying. It came to her from long ago and she knew what she must do. A young woman who stood by her with silent tears rolling down her cheeks. Fela took her into her arms and began to make the shhhh noises, rhythmic little explosions pushing little pockets of air out of her mouth as she stroked her back, comforting her like a small child. At first, no one paid her any attention. Fela continued the shh/shh/shhhing song and the young woman's cries began to die down. The soothing began to spread. She was joined by some women from her village who began shifting from one foot to the other, scraping at the ground and creating a counter melody to the sounds coming from Fela's mouth. Many of the women from other villages did not understand what was happening at first. They had never seen this type of healing but they understood about the power of the music and dance. And so they too added their feet and mouths to the healing. Together, they made a mass of tiny movements and whispered sounds that overtook the pain that kept it a little further away for a little time. As Fela continued this healing, the image of her father came to her; her father, the grillo, the storyteller, the keeper of history for his people. She saw him by the fire, in times of danger, holding the village together with his words and his songs. She heard him in the night, weaving the spoken threads that held them to the past like golden spider webs of words. Without thinking or planning she began in a very soft voice. "In the old days, the days of the Ancients, our people were weighed down by another enemy. And this is the story of how we found the light..." She told the stories of the old times. The tales of the ones who came before and made cushions of words for the ones who would come later. The stories came from her mouth like perfect, iridescent globes that floated out over the women and spilled benediction upon their heads. And the women, the ones from her village and the ones she had never seen before; the tall, bone-thin ones and the short, fat ones with ample breasts; the ones she had shared her chores with as a child and the ones who could not speak her tongue; the young frightened virgins and the weary mothers. They all listened alike and they all stood in awe and gratitude for her gift. They might not know her words but they understood her intent. Fela spoke for a long time and her words did much to ease the suffering but they could not block out the screams of the other women, the ones who had been taken upstairs, the ones that didn't have the luxury of communal grief, the ones who had become playthings for these savages. Not even Fela's stories could drown out the screams or keep the terrors of anticipation at bay. |
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Home | © 2009 Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa | Created by SmartAuthorSites.com ... Websites for Authors Orlando Gonzalez, painter, homepage image | Richard Stokes, photograper, book jacket | Dudley Vacianna, painter, book cover art |
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