Strong wasn’t a word anyone had ever used to describe her. Loyal, maybe. Reserved, definitely. Strong was a word she’d heard applied to her twin sister’s fearlessness, and for her mother, who bore everything that came her way while keeping headstrong. And yet she’d always suspected that she was strong. Maybe a different kind of strong. After all, when evil horsemen had separated her and Hassana after they had been travelling together in a human caravan, she didn’t cry. It had felt as if the shade had been taken away and Husseina had found herself under the sun on an especially hot day. And yet, as the days wore on, and as the image of her sister grew smaller and smaller, she began to accept what life had thrown her way. This, she decided, was a chance for her to bloom. So, she went where her captors told her to go, burying the horrors she and her family had suffered into her mind’s reaches, and telling herself to try not to cry. And she didn’t cry when she ended up in the Salaga market and when Baba Kaseko pointed to her and five others and took them down a fast-flowing river, where sometimes water elephants swam close to their boat. And when they had to walk for days upon days, carrying baskets filled with kola nuts. Nor when she arrived, disorientated and feet cracked, in the town of Lagos, where Baba Kaseko had built his large home. Lagos was to be her final destination. He had sold most of his other slaves as he had his kola nuts. She was the last one. She was to be Baba Kaseko’s slave. She woke up every day, found her voice to sing, and forced herself to learn the language of Baba Kaseko and his family, forced herself to do everything asked of her, even when Baba Kaseko welted her body with his lashes.
Realizing where she was, she got up and fled to Baba Kaseko’s house before anyone noticed she hadn’t been sent on an errand and was missing.
Once again, she was filled with the music of the drums. Three moons had gone by since the first time it had happened and she avoided walking by the house any time she heard the first thump of a drum.
What she didn’t know was that her song hadn’t played in all that time.
She was deep in the bowels of Baba Kaseko’s house, cleaning the room where baths were taken, acrid with the stench of urine, when the drums once again called out to her. She floated to the drums, and woke up again surrounded by white.
“Yemanjá’s child has come back,” said the grandmother-like lady. She pulled back from the hug and stared deep into Husseina’s eyes. “Yemanjá sent you back to me. Poor child, you have to stay with that joke of an Egba man. I’m Yaya Silvina. You like Baba Kaseko? Do you want to come and stay with me? You will be free here.”
Husseina wanted to shake her head no to the first question, and yes to the second, but she wasn’t sure how it would look—they might think she was saying no if she shook her head first, so she just threw her body against the old lady and let the woman fold her in another hug.
The old lady winced, peeled her knees off the floor, and got up using another woman’s body as support. She stretched her fingers for Husseina, and they went out of the house, Husseina seeing details she’d missed when the music had lulled her in. The entryway was lined with many pots of plants, and the compound’s ground was not sandy like in Baba Kaseko’s, but hard and green and laid in shapes that made Husseina feel like jumping from one to the next. They stepped out of the doorway and turned left. Husseina was pleased that Yaya Silvina wasn’t wasting time. It was impossible not to compare Yaya’s house with Baba Kaseko’s. Yaya’s ile petesi looked like two houses had been stacked on each other and stood tall and proud next to Baba Kaseko’s one-storey house. His door was falling apart, and where Yaya’s had been painted bright white, Baba Kaseko’s had never seen a brush of paint. Husseina used to think Baba Kaseko’s house was big. Not any more.
Yaya clapped her hands loudly, to announce her presence.
Baba Kaseko’s eldest daughter came out, holding a metal basin of tomatoes, and on seeing Yaya, lowered the basin to the ground and curtsied.
Husseina hid behind Yaya, her heart racing.
“Call your father,” said Yaya.
Not a minute had gone by and Baba Kaseko shuffled out of his room, tightening the string of his off-white shokoto below his flat belly, and wiping the crust of sleep from his eyes. That man loved to sleep! He could sleep three times a day. He was at least two heads taller than Yaya, who was barely keeping Husseina covered.
“The girl stays with me now,” said Yaya.
Baba Kaseko locked eyes with Husseina. The veins in his eyes seemed to multiply, but he said nothing. The longer they stood there, the more Husseina grew worried the man would get his whip and set it on both Yaya and herself.
“This one, she’s a person, not a kola nut,” said Yaya.
“What?”
“Lawyer Forsythe is my good friend. He doesn’t lose cases and the girl is ready to speak out against you. She will take you to slave court.”
The man turned around and left without saying a word. Husseina was shocked. She’d expected a slanging match, the way people went at it in the market. She’d expected Baba Kaseko to drag her in and tell Yaya Silvina to get out of his sight. Why had it been so easy?
Or so Husseina and Yaya had thought.
But before the trouble with Baba Kaseko started, Yaya had plenty to do with Husseina. Before people could question who Husseina was, Yaya got her baptized in the stone church down Bamgbose Street. She was going to be called Vitória. Yaya said the faster Husseina learnt a trade, the faster she could learn how to be free. Yaya said it wasn’t an easy thing to do after having someone tell you when to eat, sleep and breathe. Yaya knew this because she had also been enslaved, in a land called Bahia.
Husseina started learning how to sew like Yaya and learning a new religion, Candomblé, and its new Gods, orixás. She was a daughter of the house, a house full of novelties. The big table, wide enough to seat about ten people around it and with chairs that supported the back, was new to Husseina. In Botu, and even in Baba Kaseko’s house, everyone sat on stools or on the floor and around a large bowl to eat in the courtyard. In Yaya’s house, the first time she’d had to eat from her own bowl, she hadn’t known how to begin. Yaya’s adopted daughter, Tereza, was about to tuck into her bowl of eba and egusi stew, and held in her fingers a tool that reminded her of an egg. She wondered why they didn’t use their hands like everybody else, and as if Tereza could see Husseina’s struggle, she said, “Make as if you are going to dig the earth to plant seeds.” Husseina learnt fast, and soon relished that she didn’t have to soil her hands when she ate.
The space of the rooms was new. There was the small, plant-filled courtyard, when one walked in through the front door, which seemed merely decorative as most of the living was done inside. Husseina was used to living outside and only going inside to sleep. Downstairs, across from the room in which they ate, was the big hall where ceremonies were held. Yaya held a ceremony almost every week, on Saturdays. Husseina cleaned the room before and after ceremonies, and was learning the ceremonial songs—at least to hum them. She had to empty plates that had been left in various corners for the different orixás, a task she didn’t quite enjoy, because she worried about doing something wrong or to offend them. There was a small room next to the ceremony room that Husseina wasn’t allowed into. It was where the orixás’ clothes were kept. She loved that moment in the ceremony when people who had received an orixá went away to get dressed and came out and danced as the orixá. She wondered what it would feel like to be chosen by the Gods.