I’m a String and He’s a Wall

A BIG FAT GREEN FLY—the kind that likes rotten smells—was buzzing near my nose. I shooed it away with my hand and pressed my face to the hole in the hollowed-out clay wall so that I wouldn’t miss anything. It wasn’t the same fly that had been buzzing a little while earlier. I’d already killed that one. There were lots of flies here, and they hovered around you for no reason.

Of course, the fact that we were right next to Lallahum’s privy was reason enough. There was nothing separating us from it but a sack that hung over its entranceway. The sack was so short and high off the ground, you could see the feet of whoever was using it when she squatted over the raised hole in the dirt floor to relieve herself.

A group of women sat chatting in the courtyard of the old Arab-style house. As we waited our turn to go in and see Lallahum, they were too busy talking about this and that to pay attention to the young girls they’d brought with them. So was Aunt Sabriya, which was all right with me.

Ever so slowly, I scooted over to the mud-brick wall of the old woman’s room and peeked through the little hole in it. A bit of dim light came through the hole, along with a slight cool draft that relieved the dryness in my throat and took the edge off my thirst. It’s easy to bore little peepholes in walls like those. The eyes of nameless onlookers compromised people’s personal spaces with their unannounced, nosy presence. But nobody bothered to close up the holes as long as they didn’t notice that their privacy was being violated.

The peephole had smooth edges, and although it was so small that you could hardly see it, it had been skillfully bored from the outside in such a way that it provided a view of the entire room. The old woman was sure not to have noticed it, since if she had, she would have rushed to plug it with thick mud, or stuffed it with a rag or piece of paper. Even though Rabiha was a tall girl, I could see her from head to toe as she jumped off the solemn wooden tick-tock chest—so-called because the rattling of the key in its lock sounded like the ticking of a clock—and swallowed the fifth of the seven dates required to close her up. She had two more dates waiting for her on the wicker plate next to the old woman and, once they were gone, the operation would be over.

Like the girl before her, Rabiha had gotten flustered and made a mistake as she repeated the magic formula. But the old woman didn’t notice, since otherwise she would have stuck her fingers in the girl’s thighs, and she would have looked smaller through the hole as she shrank in pain.

The wooden chest Rabiha was standing on was locked seven times, once for every time she jumped off it. Every time she jumped she had to say, “I’m a wall and he’s a string” as the old woman spanked her behind with her wrinkled hand. The reason she used her hand was that Rabiha hadn’t brought one of her father’s shoes for this purpose. She didn’t have a single one, much less a complete pair. From the day he was born till the day he left this world for the Great Beyond, his feet had never known the companionship of a pair of shoes or sandals.

When her little womb had been duly locked, Rabiha smothered the old woman’s hand with kisses. The girl’s mother had instructed her to thank Lallahum and seek her approval, and she’d done everything she was told. She was thrilled at the thought of something that would cause her to be viewed as a “little woman” among women. Her locking ceremony was over now, and the women who had witnessed it would advertise her as an eligible bride when the time came. The big transition in her life was complete, and from the moment she presented her bottom to be smacked she’d felt the joyful anticipation of being able to look for a husband.

For a long time the bony old woman, who spoke an odd mix of the local eastern dialect and that of the western region, had been locking the wombs of young girls and unlocking those of new brides for their rightful husbands. Lallahum, who did what she did in keeping with the prevailing customs, provided protection for growing wombs against a danger faced by males and females alike—the danger posed by their sexual urges. Males tended to view these urges as a point of pride, whereas females would live the rest of their lives in shame if they answered Satan’s call to satisfy them beyond the bounds of the licit.

The purpose of the locking ceremony was to ward off Satan’s temptations before marriage. As for his temptations after marriage, they can’t be detected, which is why married women who give in to them aren’t in danger of being recognized and harassed. They waged war on Satan’s whispers, or the pull of instinctual desires, by thwarting them before they’d been translated into action.

Sex is forbidden to women outside of marriage, whereas it’s permitted to men whether they’re married or not. Tradition makes an exception for girls and women of unknown parentage, who can be enslaved and exploited for others’ sexual amusement and entertainment, whereas this can’t be done to free women.

The locking ceremony is a kind of magic spell that prevents a fornicating or adulterous man from having an erection and deprives the fornicating or adulterous women of sexual pleasure. It places an invisible “something” between the penis and the vagina, keeping them apart and frustrating any attempt at union or enjoyment unsanctioned by matrimony.

So when they resorted to these spells, what was it that they hid in these little girls’ wombs? Actually, the spell consisted of nothing but some mysterious words, a key in a lock, and seven dates. Lallahum would feed dates from Mecca and Medina to prepubescent girls and hit their bottoms as they jumped off the tick-tock chest, which she locked and reopened seven times for each girl in turn.

Girls who were orphans, who had poor lineages, or whose fathers were unknown were left to the last, while priority was given to girls whose families were well-placed materially and socially. In other words, a man’s social status would influence how his daughter was classified. Daughters of notables, merchants, policemen, and military officers would be given the operation first, before Lallahum began getting tired and bored, while girls of lesser status had to wait until she had turned into a surly old hag who had no compunctions about vilifying a girl’s reputation, insulting her family, verbally abusing those within ear range, and complaining about how her cruel lot in life had landed her in what she referred to as a nasty, miserable profession.

An important part of the locking ceremony involved spanking a girl whose father was dead or absent. It was thought of as a way of bringing blessing, and of completing the blessing if it wasn’t complete already. The girl had to be spanked barehanded if her father had had no shoes. Some girls reported that the old woman’s hand, which was as wrinkled as her face, came down hot and hard. They were sure that the shoes and sandals other girls’ fathers had worn across barren desert expanses would have been gentle and kind by comparison with that wizened extremity of hers. When a shoe was used, only a small part of it would actually make contact with a young girl’s soft little behind, whereas Lallahum’s hand was notorious for the stinging smacks it could deliver.

Aunt Sabriya held onto me as we stood at the end of the line of girls waiting their turn to go in. I was getting restless as the scorching noonday sun came closer and closer to our heads, threatening to strike us down if we and the others waiting with us didn’t go away. I fidgeted terribly until, even though she knew how uncomfortable I was, my aunt signaled for me to stop it and not press my luck. She even pinched my thigh a couple of times to make me sit still. But when I whispered to her that I wanted to “go” somewhere other than Lallahum’s privy—which was full of poop, pee, and flies—she was kind and understanding. I thought at first that our jaunt outside the courtyard would take us back to the Slave Yards, and that Lallahum would give us an appointment on some other day. Then again, by the time the other appointment rolled around, I might have reached puberty or been touched by someone.

After a lull in the chatter—though so many conversations were going on at the same time that I didn’t know which one the lull belonged to—my aunt asked, “Do you need to pee or poop?”

“I think I just need to pee,” I said, pressing on my front part with my palm.

Adjusting her shawl over her head, she took me by the hand and asked a gaunt-looking Negro woman to hold our place for us. The woman agreed, and we left Lallahum’s courtyard for the open area outside it. My aunt looked around in search of a private spot where I could take care of business. We didn’t see anybody coming our way. There was actually nothing in that wide expanse that would have drawn people, apart from the service Lallahum offered in her house, and that was only for women and girls.

We moved our feet slightly out of the way. Then my aunt held out her shawl to hide me, and told me to make it quick. So I peed as fast as I could, but I was in such a hurry that I got the edges of my underpants wet. Observing me from over the top of the shawl she’d walled me in with, she said, “Pull your caftan up high and spread your legs wide.”

My aunt guarded me from one side with her shawl. However, I was so nervous thinking my bare bottom might show from the other side and that somebody might come from that direction, I wet my caftan and my trousers. To my relief, I knew the wind would erase the effects of the accident, since it was the hottest, driest part of the summer, and nothing wet could hold out against Mother Nature’s fans. The fact was, the precautions we’d taken hadn’t been necessary in that untrodden region, since there wasn’t a soul for miles around.

As I looked up from watching the urine soak into the ground, my aunt said, “Finish up now. Our turn’s coming up, and we don’t want to miss it.”

“Okay,” I said in a raspy voice that came from deep inside. Then, my voice clearer than before, I asked her, “Why do some of the women go in before us even though they got here after we did? We’ve been sitting out here roasting all day long!”

She huffed irritably, the way she did when she was bothered by the heat. Then she looked this way and that, saying, “Those women are free. They’re not like us, and we’re not like them.”

All my mind could take in was that free people had white skin. They weren’t like us even when they were like us. I wasn’t bitter toward them for being different from us in their color, what they ate, what they wore, where they lived, the way they made their living, and their overall fortunes in life. In fact, my admiration for their nice clean clothes, their pretty houses, and the charity they gave us made me want to do everything I could to be like them. At the same time, I couldn’t figure out why they were the masters and we were the servants, why they were raised a degree higher, and we were several degrees lower.

It wasn’t blackness that stood between us, but whiteness. I could see that without anybody explaining it to me. White people’s light skin couldn’t come close to us and cancel out the distance. In fact, it was a basic part of the distance.

As I was trying to get rid of the effects of my accident, my aunt took a little bundle out from under her clothes. It contained four eggs, a small bunch of mint, and an almond-shaped stick for painting your lips. She’d brought them to give the old woman in return for “locking” my uterus against men’s lusts. Like all good mothers, sponsors, and caregivers, my aunt wanted to predetermine my uterus’s attitude toward any attempt to lead it astray. Otherwise, why would she have brought me out on that sweltering, desert-dry day to wait from the early morning hours?

My aunt set the bundle aside. Maybe she’d been bothered by it; maybe she was afraid it would come untied while she was holding her shawl around me. She’d collected the four eggs over a period of time so that she’d have enough to pay for this or that. However, even four eggs wouldn’t have been enough if they weren’t accompanied by the requisite half-piaster. Maybe she’d hidden it in the special handkerchief she kept under one of her breasts and was going to get it out when it was needed. It was no easy matter for a Negro to announce that he or she had money beyond what they’d been paid for their labor. It had cost a lot of Negroes their lives. But there were a number of chores a slave woman might have performed in order to have a half-piaster in her possession: she might have sifted wheat for a whole day at Al Funduq Al Baladi marketplace, washed woolen bags or bundles of clothes, chopped a lot of firewood, worked a long stint in the salt mountains, delivered several pots of drinking water to people’s houses, shoveled manure out of the cattle pens, peddled boiled broad beans and chickpeas in the market, or spent the day getting prostitutes ready for their customers.

Half a piaster was what Aunt Sabriya would get paid for carrying four huge clay jugs of water on her head from the shayshama—which is what we called the public spigot—to a Benghazi household some distance away. From her I learned how to work hard for what I earned, hoping that someone would reward my effort with some charity on top of my wages. When I first started out, I had to go four times to the shayshama in the Shabi District to supply a household with water, and ten times to the sweet spring in Zurayri‘iya, on the outskirts of Benghazi, to fill a giant jug sitting on a nearby wagon. It was obvious from the fact that my clothes were constantly wet and that my hair was falling out at the spot where the water jug rubbed up against my head that I’d earned my few piasters by the sweat of my black brow.

After I’d relieved myself, I pulled my trousers back up to the sound of my aunt’s sighs. She brought her shawl over her head and let it fall loosely over her back without gathering it in front. Then, taking me by the hand, she led me back to Lallahum’s house. When we walked in, we were met by a huge commotion. Not knowing what was going on, we stood aside at first, but it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. A woman by the name of Akhwira had brought her daughter, Maghliya, for the locking ceremony, but she’d given Lallahum a shoe belonging to a man who wasn’t Maghliya’s real father. When Lallahum discovered what the woman had done, she’d thrown her out for cheating. After being shamed in front of all the other women, Akhwira and her daughter had left in disgrace.

I felt horrible for poor Maghliya. I knew what had just happened would haunt her for the rest of her life.

A number of men had passed in succession through Akhwira’s bedchamber, and any of them could conceivably have laid claim to this girl’s paternity. The mother vehemently denied this, and attributed Maghliya to her most recent husband. An older man with standing and prestige in the community, he’d been swept off his feet by the gorgeous, youthful Akhwira. However, by the time he had relations with her, she was already pregnant with Maghliya. This was the man whose shoe Lallahum had summarily rejected, and no matter how many piasters Maghliya’s mother slipped into the old woman’s hand, she refused to perform the locking ceremony for the girl. Lallahum would have had no objection to taking the piasters, of course. However, she was a close acquaintance of the man whose shoe had been brought to her and, wanting to get back at him for a festering grievance, she sent Akhwira away in tears, knowing this would be hard for him to take.

Standing in the doorway to her room, Lallahum delivered a homily of sorts to the women and young girls gathered around her. She said that cheating wouldn’t get this woman anywhere. She added that she’d known Akhwira’s husband, Yadam, since he was a young man, and that he was a womanizer who’d never been able to have any children. So how, she asked, could he have fathered this girl, especially so late in his life?

Lallahum’s sermon was met with approval by some of the women. But others started whispering among themselves about the woman and the girl. As for Aunt Sabriya, she didn’t say a word. She showed no interest in the controversy, as if her senses weren’t taking in what was happening, or as if none of it made any difference to her.

I overheard a couple of women talking in hushed tones about Lallahum’s connection to the scandal.

“God knows, sister,” one of them whispered. “But word has it that when Lallahum was young, she was his lover. Otherwise, how would she know he’s barren?”

The other woman widened the neck opening to her caftan and spat into it. Then, smacking herself gently on the rear several times, she exclaimed, “Say it, sister!”

Not long afterward, the gathering was hailed by a stout woman whose twin daughters had lost their father some years before. She’d kept one of her late husband’s shoes in a special chest so that, when her girls were about to reach puberty, she’d have something to bring Lallahum for the locking ceremony. The women seemed impressed with the shoe, if not with the person who’d brought it. But then one of them raised a question—namely, whether a shoe that hadn’t been used for so long, and had been hidden away among people’s clothes for the whole eight years since its owner died, could perform the magical function that such shoes were expected to perform in the locking ceremony.

“Besides,” the woman remarked, “the odor and body heat from the owner’s foot would have faded after all this time. So what sort of magical power would the shoe have left?”

The crafty woman who had posed the question was backed up by an even craftier one, who took the inquiry a step further, saying, “So where does the power lie: in the shoe itself, or in the scent of the man who wore it?”

However, what Lallahum accepted or rejected, what she would and wouldn’t use in her rituals, was nobody’s business but hers. She had the final word when it came to deciding whether something was effective or not.

There was a lot of talk among the mothers sitting in Lallahum’s waiting room that day about the merits of the locking ceremony, with only a few reserved comments from women who said it had let people down. For the most part, opinion favored the rattle of the key in the lock, which announced that the door to a girl’s womb had now been closed to the dark forces of human beings and spirits alike.

Rabiha, a tall, hyperactive white girl, came out of Lallahum’s inner room with a story to tell. Smacking her lips as she recalled the taste of the dates, she started telling other girls proudly about what had happened to her behind Lallahum’s closed doors. Before long, ten young girls had gathered around her, dying to hear what else she had to say, and watching her mouth in rapt fascination. I was the only dark-skinned girl there. Consequently, several girls shoved me out of the circle so that I ended up at the back of the group. I’d been looking forward to seeing Rabiha and hearing her talk about the room, the old lady, and the things she’d seen. I craned my neck, trying to get a look at her. Finally, by standing on the tips of my dirty, urine-spattered toes, I managed a glimpse of long-legged Rabiha’s chatterbox mouth as she sowed her story like seeds in a field.

One girl had been terrified that when the old woman spanked her, she would hit a swollen boil on her behind. Trying to keep her fears in check, she’d gotten in line, her thoughts scattered every which way. When she got in the room, she was still mixed up and instead of saying, “I’m a wall and he’s a string,” she stammered, “I’m a string and he’s a wall.”

Later on, after men’s desires had been kept at bay for some time thanks to the effects of heavy tick-tock chests of aromatic kumari wood, she got pregnant, even though her husband, Najib ad-Dallal, was infertile. When he discovered she was pregnant, he began to think maybe he wasn’t infertile after all, or that she was just exceptionally fertile herself. In any case, they ended up with a chubby, fair-skinned baby boy who, as time went by, looked more and more like a peddler who came around on donkey back to sell his wares to the neighborhood women.

Nobody knew exactly how the white Maltese sperm had managed to penetrate the barrier that had been set up by the tick-tock chest. However, the penetration had been torrential, daring, and successful. It shattered the myth of the seven magical turns of the key and gave Najib ad-Dallal a beautiful, fair-skinned son behind the back of the tick-tock chest, and behind Najib ad-Dallal’s back too. The same thing had also happened to other husbands, whose wives might have recited the protective formulas incorrectly when they were little girls because of some flawed connection between their uvulas, tongues, and teeth. Or maybe the ritual hadn’t worked because of the bad dates!

Rabiha related what she’d heard about the incident in the “locking” room. Wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her caftan, she continued, “The tall shushana who serves Lallahum, the one with big boobs and scratches on her face . . .”¹

“Yeah, we know who you’re talking about. Go on . . .”

“She’s the one who opened up Mar‘i Sharwi’s bride on their wedding night. Mar‘i’s wife had been ‘locked,’ and he couldn’t do anything!”

The girls burst into giggles, clapping their hands over their mouths to keep the women from hearing them.

According to Rabiha, there would have been a scandal if that particular shushana hadn’t been a tambourine player at the wedding. When the uproar started, she stepped in to solve the problem, and nobody tried to stop her. She examined the bride and discovered that she really had been “locked.”

“That’s right,” Rabiha added. “She’d been locked just the way I was a little while ago!”

The bride’s mother had had her daughter locked before they moved from Bani Walid to Benghazi. Then the mother died suddenly during a bed beating from her drunkard husband. Nobody bothered to ask her if she’d gone through the ceremony until, one day while she was out playing in the street, her relatives decided to marry her off. They took her away from her playmates, brought her inside, and rushed to get her washed up. Then they dressed her in a white caftan that made her look older than she was and combed her hair down around her face. The women of the family told her to be quiet, so she didn’t say a word. Given how young she was, and the rift between her father’s and mother’s sides of the family, she’d forgotten to tell her maternal aunts about the locking ceremony. She didn’t even completely understand that she was getting married, and her maternal aunts didn’t attend her wedding because of what her father had done to her mother. When she finally realized what was happening, the little bride struck herself on the face, begging the women gathered around her for mercy. But instead of listening to her, they lit into her with cruel words: blaming her, ripping her reputation to shreds, and cursing her wedding night, saying that it was as black as she was.

“I’ve been locked!” she cried. “My mother, God rest her soul, had it done to me in Zliten.”

But those vicious, busy-body old ladies were convinced that she was lying to them the way a lot of girls do when they can’t prove they’re virgins on their promised night.

“God damn your mother!” they hissed. “Black women are liars, and they’re hot in bed! Isn’t that right? That’s the plain truth about slave women!”

Even with all her begging and pleading, nobody believed her. After all, it was a strange thing for a Negro girl to have been locked.

But Lallahum’s shushana, who was there at the wedding to play the tambourine and the darabukka, did believe her, and she delivered her from a death sentence that would have been carried out by a rifle the minute the door opened. Intervening without anybody asking her to, the darabukka player made her way through the crowd of women, pushed the door open, and slammed it shut behind her. The bouri had a grip on her, that was for sure. Once inside the room, she shoved the bride onto the bed without giving her a chance to do a thing or even say a word. Then she spread the girl’s legs and fixed her gaze on her crotch. Embarrassed and terrified, the girl screamed and covered the spot with her hands. The woman would have none of it. She struck the girl on her hands and forced them away from the spot. By this time the poor thing was in shock, shaking like a leaf.

That shushana must have had a good heart, though. Otherwise, why would she have gotten herself mixed up in the situation? Without a word, she shattered the dresser mirror with her bare fist and tore the bride’s clothes off as if the matter was her personal concern. She had a steely confidence that she’d find proof of the bride’s virginity. But not once did she look the girl in the eye, even when she’d uncovered her private parts.

“Stand over the piece of mirror and open your legs wide. Then look at the cat’s head in the mirror,” she commanded.

Confused, the girl asked her what she meant by “the cat’s head,” and where to find it.

The girl’s question spiked the level of bouri in the shushana’s veins, and her blood boiled hotter than ever. She grabbed the girl by the crotch and squeezed. The girl moaned. She knew now what the “cat’s head” was.

“This is it. You get me now?”

The girl stood there petrified, covering her chest with one hand and her crotch with the other. The darabukka player said to her, “Take a good look at it. Take your hand away and look at it in the mirror.”

Hesitant, the weeping girl looked where the older woman had directed her. “Do you see it?” she asked her.

“Yes, yes,” she replied, brightening.

“Did you take a good look at it?” she asked again.

“Yes, yes.”

She then instructed the girl to put on her bridal tunic without the underpants, and to sit calmly on the edge of the bed without imagining the rifle. She went and opened the door to the men and women gathered outside. Then, shoving the rifle-bearer out of the way, she called the groom to come in and prove his virility, assuring him that his bride had been chaste. There must have been some good-hearted men there too, since otherwise they wouldn’t have sent the groom in, and the poor girl would have been a goner.

Escorted by a number of his brothers and angry male relatives, the groom came up looking shell-shocked, cap in hand. The shushana didn’t make eye contact with the other men. In fact, she acted as though she hadn’t even noticed them.

“Are you the sultan?” she asked the groom.

“I was,” he replied.

“Well, you still are,” she assured him confidently. “Go in to your bride. She’s a virgin.”

The other men didn’t believe her. They thought she was playing a trick on them. Grabbing the poor groom by the collar with her powerful fist, the shushana said imperiously, “Put on your cap, and take what’s been given you in trust. Be a man!”

With no chance to think and no choice but to do as he’d been told, the young man walked timorously into the bridal chamber. It wasn’t long before he reemerged, holding the good news in a white handkerchief. He came out a man vindicated, his index finger red with the blood of the little hymen. The men and women alike scrutinized his forefinger to verify that he hadn’t cut himself to patch up the situation. Yes, it really was her blood. One of his cousins told him not to wash it off till the next day. Too overjoyed and relieved for words, the groom received people’s congratulations on his wife’s blood. If it hadn’t been for that good-hearted, level-headed darabukka player—who also happened to be the shushana now standing next to Lallahum—the wedding might well have turned into a funeral.

As Rabiha finished telling the story she’d heard in the inner room with the mud-brick walls and the peephole, I could feel my heart sinking into my stomach. I was so scared, and my feet hurt from having had to stand on tiptoe the whole time she was talking. Staring in the direction of the room, I thought about that slave woman and the brave thing she had done. I felt as though she was sharing her strength and patient endurance with me, even though she still bore the marks of her slavery. For all I knew, she might have lost her virginity in some barbaric way, like so many young Negro girls did. But in spite of it all, she fed dates to young white girls to prolong their virginity, and filled the palm leaf tray again whenever they ran out. She brought the old woman tea, water, and snuff, and didn’t grumble or complain about having to stand for long stretches. The women who came to see Lallahum brought her all sorts of things in return for the locking ceremony, and this servant woman would collect them in a big sack without coveting any of them for herself, content with whatever her mistress saw fit to give her.

I squatted on the ground and started talking with a girl whose mother had brought her to be locked. After a while the women waiting nearby asked the girl and me to go play. They didn’t want us to hear what they were saying. So we went wandering around among the circles of little girls. Sometimes we’d play, sometimes we’d talk, and sometimes we’d get into fistfights. Then we’d get a tanning from the slave woman who worked in Lallahum’s kitchen. She came out at us with her blackened bread paddle—which she used to resolve most of the contentions that arose in our little-girl world—and smacked whichever of us she could reach with it. This was followed by a temporary lull in the racket.

After Rabiha left, the crowd thinned and the fearsome kitchen worker disappeared. To my amazement, I found myself standing in the old woman’s room, where the fragrance of a cherry tree helped slightly to cover up the smell of dried urine coming from me. When I started to approach Lallahum, she said something to Aunt Sabriya in an angry tone of voice while I stood halfway between them.

“Who told you a servant girl could be locked??” she demanded.

Aunt Sabriya furrowed her brow, then softened it again. “But her father’s known,” she objected.

“Who’s her master? And who are you?” Lallahum asked sharply. “You’re going to make problems for me if the masters find out I’m locking their servant girls.”

Sounding fearful, Aunt Sabriya said, “She doesn’t have a master. She’s free.”

“What?” the old woman scoffed angrily, tugging on the urine-stained edge of my caftan. “That’s ridiculous! A servant girl who’s free? Since when has that been possible?”

I looked back and forth between the two women, not knowing which of them was telling the truth. The old woman refused to lock me because I was a slave, a servant—in other words, a Negro. My aunt told her that my father was a free man from Misrata, where they’re “as red and white as the Germans.”

“You all say the same thing!” the old woman retorted. “You’ll have to provide a guarantee from a known individual if her father is dead, or not around, or refuses to acknowledge her.”

“Please,” my aunt pleaded. “She has a birth certificate. Her father is a free man from Misrata, and her mother was a relative of mine.”

The old woman said nothing, her thoughts busy with a theory she was forming. Then, as if she had no choice in the matter, she asked, “Who’s your master?”

“My master . . . my master,” my aunt replied uneasily, “my master is Imuhammad Bin Shatwan.”

“How long have you been with him?”

“Since I was a child.”

“And the girl, who’s her father?”

“Master Imuhammad Bin Shatwan’s son, Muhammad.”

“In that case, go now and get me a certificate from him to prove it.”

So we left the clay room with the wooden ceiling. I was being haunted by my dark skin, which was shunned by the nonblacks of Benghazi. Even people who were darker than they were light were entitled to reject our blackness, which was alien to the white seacoast. What the old woman had said about my skin color made my body feel darker than ever, so dark that I was lightless outside and in. Then the blackness continued its journey until it filled my milky little heart and settled there as a gloomy feeling over something I hadn’t done to myself and which I wasn’t the cause for at all, at all.

Now empty, the old Arab house’s spacious courtyard was calm, and the voices that had filled it until shortly before the noun prayer had died away. Even lanky Rabiha’s raucous, gleeful voice had stopped relating stories she’d picked up in this room or that. As for our story, it had come from some other place, and it was one that no Rabiha would be telling.

Aunt Sabriya and I were both speechless, our hearts heavy. I turned to look at her, and saw her gathering her skirts in preparation to leave. In her agitation, she stumbled and fell on her way out. She’d tripped on the raised doorstep. Weak as I was, I tried to help her. But then I saw her collapse, weeping, in Lallahum’s courtyard. I was terrified by her tears, which poured like rain down her black cheeks. It seemed like the first time I’d realized that her face had been black ever since it had come into the world, and that it had never been any other color. I was so traumatized, I started crying along with her. She reached out to me, her hands parched and cracked from gathering salt, shelling peanuts, washing clothes, attending women and animals in labor, and everything, everything. She hung on my neck and sobbed.

My tender-hearted, compassionate, strong aunt—the one who found a solution to every problem in our lives, who was tight-lipped even with women who were colored like her, who always kept her feelings to herself and came to other people’s rescue—was crying her heart out like a motherless child in the Slave Yards. Whatever it was that had brought this on, it had to be something so huge that she couldn’t push it away, a wound so deep it couldn’t be treated.

“Come here, you two.”

Standing with one foot outside the old woman’s room and one foot inside, Lallahum’s servant woman was calling out to us. She was a Negro like us, and the face that peered out from atop her ponderous black frame had seen many a day on Earth. But it recognized us and understood us even if we didn’t speak. And why should we speak when we could see that her complexion understood our complexion, and felt what we felt? She might have come from Abuja, Darfur, Wadi ad-Dum, or some other place. She’d either been given out of hunger and deprivation—as so many young children had been—to the chief of their tribe so that he could sell her to feed his children and his wives, or stolen by Libyan caravans, sold in Kafra, Waddai, or Fezzan, and raped by her abductors as their “rightful possession.” Or maybe her family had fled from famines and tribal wars to countries whose people offered no resistance to invaders, where slaves converted to Islam and were treated in accordance with Islamic practices, whereby Negro women and girls were turned into concubines and “rightful possessions” who lived in the shadows until they died. Maybe she’d been born to a white Libyan master who’d refused to give her his name so that she wouldn’t be able to inherit from him along with his free children. Maybe she’d been taken captive in her home country by a hostile tribe that had sold her to a Libyan caravan that took Negro children and placed them in military camps to make them into slaves, eunuchs, “gifts,” and fighters, knowing they could make a fortune off them as they multiplied.

Whatever the story’s particulars, it had happened long before, so long as to have been forgotten. Many were the slaves who had forgotten the story of their enslavement and had integrated gladly into the life of those owned by Muslim masters. As for those who married other members of their own race and, in some cases, won emancipation, they were delivered from hunger to hunger, and from poverty to poverty. Apart from a few details here and there, we were like her, and she was like us.

I was the first one to hear the woman calling as Aunt Sabriya lay curled up in her cloak.

“Come here, you two,” the woman called again. As she spoke, she pointed to me with her large, knotty hand. I thought I saw a silver ring gleaming in her pug nose as she looked back and forth between us and the elderly woman inside the room. She was still standing in the doorway.

With one hand my aunt took hold of me and, with the other, steadied herself against the ground to get up. As she rose, her shawl slipped off her head and she grabbed it quickly. Then we headed back to the room together. For some reason or other, the servant had taken an interest in us, and Lallahum had taken pity on my aunt or me.

When we came back into the room, Lallahum was leaning on her right arm, yawning, and wiping the remains of some snuff off her nose. Without looking either of us in the eye, she said, “For Asgawa’s sake, I’ll lock the girl. This is the first time I’ve locked a servant in all my life.”

“God bless you and protect you, both you and Asgawa!” my aunt said gratefully. “The girl is an orphan, and you’ll be rewarded for helping her!”

My aunt covered Lallahum’s hand and head wrap with kisses.

Lallahum made no comment. However, letting her hand glide easily over to my aunt’s full lips, she said to the ponderous Asgawa, “Bring some dates if we have any left.”

Then, with her eye on my aunt, she cautioned. “You make sure nobody hears about this now! The masters will punish me if they find out I’ve been performing the locking ritual for servants.”

Lallahum’s servant whispered something to my aunt. I gathered it was supposed to be kept a secret from her mistress.

But all I picked up was: “Don’t you dare tell anybody.”

“Don’t worry. Nobody will hear a word about it,” my aunt assured her. As we were being sworn to secrecy, my aunt slipped the bundle out from under her clothes. Lallahum pretended not to see the present until it had been placed beside her. Then she ran her hands over it and called out, “Asgawa! Tell Mabrouka to make us shakshouka for lunch!”

The shushana shuffled heavily back and forth over the mat. Lallahum told me to come closer, and I inched toward her. My aunt slipped her hand under one of her breasts in search of a hard-earned half-piaster.

Handing me a date, Lallahum set me on top of a chest that sat perched on the mat in the dimly lit room. After turning the key in the chest’s lock, she told me to repeat after her: “I’m a wall and he’s a string.”

“I’m a wall and he’s a string,” I intoned.

I had no idea, of course, who it was that Aunt Sabriya was trying to keep away from me, and who was going to be turned into a string at the hands of this half-blind old woman. Nor did I know on whose account Lallahum had rejected us, and who had made my aunt and me cry before the servant Asgawa intervened on our behalf. Who was suspected of threatening my virginity, and on whose account was I held suspect until I’d married? Once you were married, nobody cared about protecting or repairing your honor.

My aunt drew her hand out from under one breast and thrust it under the other. She was dripping with sweat, her upper lip trembling. Lallahum pinched my upper thigh. I stifled a scream. Maybe the old woman had heard me recite her magic formula full of strings and walls in the wrong order. Or maybe she’d pinched me as a way of scaring me so that I wouldn’t mix things up. In any case, she called me a dirty name and told me to correct myself, while the kind-hearted shushana standing nearby told her I’d said it right.

“Come on now, that’s a good girl,” she murmured encouragingly.

As for my aunt, she was ecstatic. It was as if she’d already forgotten all about what had happened a little earlier. Either that, or she considered it a small price to pay for what she now saw happening before her very eyes. The dates, some wormy ones included, made their way in succession to my mouth, while the walls and strings between me and the world of urges and desires grew successively louder and longer. As I swallowed wormy dates, I pictured Mjawir, who’d gone after me and fondled my bottom even though I was his youngest daughter’s age. He loomed before me with his white teeth, his coal black skin, and his fleshy lips trying to come between me and the towering walls. As I repeated after the old woman, I was dealing Mjawir the death blow with my lips. He surged before me like the waves of the sea beside the Slave Yards, and the tempestuous blackness that had shattered my childhood and blasted my innocent illusion that grown men aren’t interested in girls who are young enough to be their daughters imprinted itself inside me.

“I’m a wall and he’s a string.”

A wormy date.

Click, click in a rusty lock.

“I’m a wall and he’s a string.”

A wormy date.

Click, click, click, click.

Rust and worms . . . walls . . . strings . . . clicks . . . dates . . . slaps on the bottom . . .

Seven times I was stalked by Mjawir’s face. The fifth, sixth and seventh times, his black, inflated beast—the one he’d flashed at me at the well one hot afternoon at Zurayri‘iya—chased me like mad. I jumped off the chest, fleeing from his face the way I’d jumped away from the swollen thing dangling from between his legs that afternoon. I wore out the chest and the key and the lock, and I emptied Lallahum’s containers of their rotten dates. My bottom had nearly turned into a drum from all the times it was beaten that day. But I didn’t mind. It was all right with me for Lallahum’s faithful servant, companion, and confidante to be rewarded at my behind’s expense. Thanks to this reward, my cat’s head would escape from Mjawir’s black beast, and from other men’s beasts as well, the way it had escaped that sweltering afternoon thanks to another Negro man who’d shown up all of a sudden and starting pooping in the garbage. Mjawir was so scared when he saw the guy, he’d taken off running to the seashore.

Two black figures—Lallahum’s shushana and the man who’d crapped in the garbage—framed Mjawir’s face and his dangling black organ in my imagination, and drove him away. And as I’d panted that day in the field near the Slave Yards, I panted today in Lallahum’s house on the tick-tock chest.

My aunt finally came across the half-piaster hidden under her fleshy breast. She handed it, still moist with her perspiration, to Lallahum, who grabbed it and thrust it hurriedly into her brassiere, whereupon it set out on a new journey with a new breast, waiting to team up with its other half to make a whole piaster.

Her footsteps heavy and loud on the mat, Lallahum’s shushana went over and dragged out the sack of gifts for Lallahum to look through. At this point, the two women seemed to forget we even existed. I’ll never forget that old woman’s face as she rummaged through her sack that day. My cat’s head will never forget it either. It was a thin, wizened face whose sole functioning eye had been assigned the task of protecting our tiny, vulnerable wombs. This eye was anxious to dump the bag’s contents on the floor and sift through them with childish delight. As for the other, it was lifeless and still, its gaze frozen in a state of shock.

As we left, Lallahum was holding the gifts up to her real eye to get a good look at them. She did this with everything except the eggs, which she recognized by how they felt to the touch.

1. The term shushana (masculine, shushan) refers to a slave who had been born to slave parents.