I ain't boasting. Gran told that story about me and Da to help keep me rooted. Us black folk been sent, summoned, and scattered about the world, disallowed to grow roots. Ain't I been took all over this country—from V'ginia to Alabama to Missouri, on up to Wisconsin Territory and all the way down to the Texas border—without no choice about the going? But each time I get yanked up, I recollect Gran's dream, and each time I know how Gran is my root, and I's her branch.
That's what it means to have kin, and even iffen I never got as good as Gran at storytelling, I got a bit of the griot in me. I got the stories, upriver and downriver, of them trader men what roamed where they liked. And I got the blood and bone of them warrior women, too, what stood strong against hunters on two feet and four. That's right: womenfolk amongst my kin was warriors.
Often as a boy I'd pester Gran for them tales. "Come up to my hug," she'd say, and I'd curl up betwixt her lap and her hug, resting my head on her breast, feeling the stories come outten her, with her soft cinnamon smell wrapped round me. I must've asked Gran for one in particular more'n a hundred times: tell me, Gran, tell about Nyota's rising up. Not always would she tell that story, but in telling it she wagged her finger in my face: "Mind you listen good, Dred. Listen inside. Our kin be talking to us."
My kin was Fon people, come from a place called Dahomey, back there along the River Mono, back where they was free. They lived where the womenfolk trained to fight as soldiers to protect the village. Wearing horns on they heads, they carried machetes, slingshots, and bows with poisoned arrows. They carved pictures of big old bull elephants on they shields, signifying they would trample the enemy. They had spies, too, and most times learned iffen another village was stretching eyes at them. They'd go and attack first, beating the breath outten everybody they found. Even the men of other villages feared to face them.
Gran's gran was such a soldier. Nyota, which means warrior, was knowed for her killing aim with the slingshot. Along with her two sisters she fought many battles, fought deadly. She had a pink-moon scar under her chin where the enemy one time tried to take her head off, 'cept Nyota got the enemy's head off first.
'Course, by the time Gran knowed her, Nyota's a grandmother and not out in the jungle no more. She's still mighty, but mostly she stays in the village as a guard. Till one day Nyota and her village was attacked when they wasn't expecting it, overrun by the Oyo people, and all my kin what was there that day was made slaves: old Nyota and her daughter, Njeri, and Njeri's daughter, Sanjo, which was Gran's name when she was a gal.
Gran was only about five then, and she didn't know she was a Oyo slave. The worst of it was how she missed her father, spent every hour watching for him to appear and take her home. Other than that her days was much the same, working alongside her mother. Only they wasn't tending they own house now. She and Njeri was put to work for some white missionaries and traders. Mostly they tended the house and garden of a priest, a white man what learned Gran Bible stories. She liked them Bible stories 'cause it put a light on why the white people acted how they did.
By the time Gran was hardly ten, though, she and the rest of my kin got sold again, this time to slave traders. They was led with hundreds of other Africans to a prison fort on the coast. Marched for weeks. Once there, in crowd and filth and hunger, they waited. Likely they never knowed what they was waiting for, nor what was waiting for them. Still, Nyota knowed these changes meant trouble. A warrior to the end, she tried to free everybody. She led a escape, and it were so smart. Stripped of slingshot, stripped of poisoned spear, stripped of machete, she armed them people with all they had left: theyselves.
The slave fort was a stone-block, medieval structure with turrets and thick wooden gates secured by an iron beam that locked in place. An infernal clamor echoed along its chambers and walls, but the noise wasn't from the hundreds of slaves—they huddled scared and silent in dungeon chambers. The racket came from the regiments of guards who drilled, caroused drunkenly, shouted orders, and cursed the sun and the slaves.
A bored guard slouched at his post with another sentry, monitoring a long tunnel of cells. Beneath the din of regular slave business, they heard a cushioned, heavy vibration, a single thump. Chasing down the noise one said, "Sounds like a body hurled across a cell," then immediately realized there was no room in any of the pens to throw a body. The slave ships were over due, the fort was packed beyond capacity. After inspecting several stalls that showed no sign of disturbance, they paused outside Nyota's cage, surprised by the peculiar arrangement of the slaves inside. In parade formation, the slaves stood shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, ten rows deep. These were mostly women, the so-called Amazons. The sentries had been warned to take special precautions with them.
Nyota stood alone, facing her brigade, her back to the guards and the metal bars. She was a rhinoceros of a woman: a hulking, muscular torso, stubby limbs, a wrestler's neck and shoulders. The guards shouted at her, she didn't turn. One poked a musket muzzle into her back, and she yodeled a single ululation, not in pain or in protest but in command. Her troop roared and stomped their feet.
A tremor ran up from the packed-earth floor, and the guards readied their rifles. Nyota whipped around, gracefully pivoting on one foot, and with another command a hundred grimacing grotesques confronted the captors. Each slave's face contorted into bizarre leers and snarls; tongues slithered out from between bared teeth. The guards fumbled backwards. Then, as if faced with nothing more than a child's prank, they returned to their post, laughing half-heartedly. They continued to ignore subsequent protests, believing the thumps and grunts were just slave antics. Not even the officers suspected the true nature of those military exercises, even when slaves in other cages began adopting the ritual, even when it expanded to include the chanting: a monotonous, dull, low chorus answering the simple, contrapuntal rhythm of Nyota's calls, while the stomps beat furiously underneath the cyclic phrase.
For a week the feverish rite infected more and more slaves, but the symptoms of this strange frenzy were suffered by the guards. Many grew irritable, haunted by headaches and nightmares, yet they lived with it because nothing deterred the bizarre behavior. Not a dousing, that left the slaves to shiver through the night. Not withheld rations. Not beatings—though they were loath to give beatings; they understood the risk of a battle with such a mob.
Finally, one night when the temperature had dropped and the air was still, when the waters of the Endless Lake lay calm and the owl's cry carried for miles, in the midnight lull when the prison hubbub subsided, Nyota led the revolt. Thousands of captives within the prison began humming, following the rhythm she set with her hands. They punctuated the drone with stomps, and throughout the small hours their whomps and howls intensified.
Guards felt their blood seethe; sight flickered; ears popped. The earth began to tremble and roll. Dust cascaded from beams into chinks that blossomed in the hard, mud floor. Cups on tables and whips on the wall skittered and swayed. Mortar cracked and wood creaked. Insects and lizards scurried from crevices. Rats decamped and even some of the patrol deserted as the violence of the tremors rose with the volume of the chants.
Too late, an officer understood the noise was a weapon. He alerted the Major the entire prison could crumble if they didn't stop the infernal bawling and bumping. The Major scoffed, until a door to a pen finally burst at the hinge from the buzzing pressure. He gave the command to use muskets, lashes, and ropes to sub due the rush of loosed slaves.
Nyota's call to rise up might've become a victory song iffen the chanting and stomping done lasted longer. That whole prison might've crumbled like a sugar cube in her fist. But it weren't to be. After a few of the cage doors loosed, slaves begun running and shouting, breaking the vibration and so giving up the only weapon they had.
You ever think of your voice as a weapon? Not many people do. I think of it, often. Like each time I went up to that courthouse, I went to sign my mark on another piece of paper holding my words, words that maybe was gonna get me freedom.
Sometimes, though, I would see them slave auctions on the courthouse steps. Nnn, nnn, nnn! The same place what can tell me I's free is the same place what rips apart family after family. I seed the chained coffles being drug from the courthouse to the docks. Seed the fathers' shoulders humped in shame. Seed how fear and unknowing whittled the faces of the young'ns into death-masks. I felt something animal-like scramble up my throat when I thought of my own two gals being sold away. I ain't a fighting man, but I think it's the blood of my warrior kin, pumping to the rhythm of Nyota's rebellion.
Black Ivory, 2003 21 x 27 inches, limited edition archival print Andrew Neighbour©, artist