Descended from Diggers of Underground Canals

AUNT AIDA left early one morning to cook for a wedding in the city, taking her two oldest girls with her to help. That way they could learn a skill that would earn them a living. Baraka and I finished drawing water from the well and filling Mjawir’s jugs. Mjawir was always on the lookout for a chance to pinch me when we were at the well alone. But whenever he was about to do it, I’d edge away from him and stand right behind Baraka.

On our way back to the Slave Yards, we ran into Yousef. We were walking as fast as we could to keep the hot sand from blistering our feet, and shading ourselves from the blazing sun with the water tins on our heads. My hair was a mess and I was dirty. In fact, I hadn’t washed for a couple of days. Most of the water in my tin had spilled on my head and my dress.

“How long has it been since you washed last?” he asked as he took the tin from me.

“Since Aunt Sabriya left the Yards,” I replied.

“Come on,” he urged. “Let’s all go wash up in the sea.”

Baraka said he wanted to bring their dog, Khilafo, to wash the ticks off of him. Yousef went to his hut and got a tin for washing and a piece of old esparto rope, which he unraveled to make it into a homemade loofah. As we were walking to the beach, I saw him closing his right fist over something so that Baraka couldn’t see it. When I asked him what it was, he said, “It’s a piece of soap.” It was smooth and white, with a nice smell, and it was chipped on one end. So, this was the soap I’d heard about but had never seen before!

He assured me he hadn’t stolen it from anybody. “Nobody in the Yards would have any soap to begin with,” he said. It had been given to him, along with some dried rations, by a Sicilian sailor named Francesco. Francesco had wanted to explore the Yards and had asked Yousef to escort him. Besides interpreting for him, Yousef had protected Francesco from thieves. He also protected him from the Bedouin boys who had fled to the Yards from famine and tribal wars over pasture land, and who would stalk foreigners and hound them for money. Yousef was a good interpreter and explained to Francesco whatever he wanted to know about, especially the conditions of the people fleeing to the Yards from places in Barqa where fighting was going on.

“Here,” he said, handing me the soap. “It’s yours. But don’t show it to anybody. And only use well water with it. It won’t work with saltwater.”

It was the custom for the residents of the Yards to go to the sea to relieve themselves, bathe, and wash their utensils and clothes. The dogs would come along with them, and there were always chickens roaming up and down the shore, picking up crumbs and looking for whatever else there was to eat.

One day, some women from the Yards who were doing laundry and bathing asked me why Aunt Sabriya wasn’t with me. Yousef told them she was serving some people who didn’t want black children to come along. Yousef was quick on his feet, and managed to extinguish their curiosity before I’d said a word. Maybe he was good at talking to people because he was so much older than I was. He was poor, but mild-tempered and gentle, and he didn’t have a dirty mind like the other boys and girls around. He told me he had friends who served in the Italian church, but that he didn’t go to them to beg the way most of the homeless children did. Instead, he told me, he would sell them broad beans and chickpeas and sometimes sifiniz from Miftah’s bakery, and that in return he got to learn how to read and write. He told me his friends from the church liked him so much that they’d started reading him the letters they received from their families and friends. With a shy laugh, he told me he wanted to become a translator like some other black men had done. Either that, or he wanted to work with the police, so that he could help other Negroes who were needy.

The water that day was as warm as Yousef’s words and presence. I took off my dirty dress and left my pants on, then got into the water with the esparto loofah Yousef had made. Yousef sat on the shore and scrubbed my threadbare dress for me with sand and sea spume. Then he wrung it out and spread it on a boulder to dry, pulling it taut and holding it in place with small rocks. I washed myself with gusto, and he watched over me the way he would have done for a little sister. I was puny and weak, and I didn’t know how to stand up for myself when mean kids hit me or shoved me away from the well, then dumped the water out of my tin to make fun of me.

That’s how I met Durma, in fact. One morning we were standing in line at the well when a couple of girls pushed me from behind after I’d finished filling my tin. I fell on the tin and it split my forehead open, and all the water spilled out of it. Durma, who was thirteen years old and tall for her age, had been standing behind me with her tin. When she saw what had happened, she came up and slugged both girls. Then she drenched them with the tin that belonged to the boy who’d taken his turn right before us. One of the girls ran away, but the other one stood her ground. Durma stuffed dirt into the mouth of the one that hadn’t run away and threatened to pee on the other one’s head when she got hold of her. Durma was crazy, and if she had a fit of bouri you were best advised to watch out! That was the last time any of the other kids harassed me at the well. From then on, nobody would have dared hit me for fear of getting a mouthful of dirt and a head covered with pee.

Durma was several years older than me, and I loved her like a big sister. The same thing was happening now with Yousef. I was always the puny little underdog who needed somebody older to stick up for me and take care of me, except that the only brothers and sisters I had were my brothers and sisters in God—namely, Miftah, Durma, Yousef, Aida’s kids, and the other kids in the Yards who hadn’t turned into bullies.

After washing up, I sat on the rocks while my body and clothes dried out. That was nothing unusual in the Yards, and boys and girls did it all the time. What was unusual was for somebody to take his shirt off to give it to somebody else. That’s what Yousef did for me.

As we talked, Yousef started looking at my hair. He commented that it didn’t look like other Negro girls’ hair. Mine was shiny and flowing, with a hint of chestnut in it. Like my eyes, my hair didn’t quite seem to belong. It still had plenty of lice in it, though! Going through it strand by strand, he pulled out a big louse and showed it to me. I told him I’d gotten lice from Aunt Aida’s kids, and that Aunt Sabriya always picked them out for me. He promised to bring some kerosene and wash my head with it. He said he’d ask Francesco to put a little for him in a bottle. Kerosene would get rid of the lice for good, he said, so there wouldn’t be any more need to sit around picking them out one by one the way the women in the Yards were always doing. Yousef told me he could treat me with kerosene when he got hold of some, and I consented with a nod of my bug-infested head.

Yousef told me things I’d never heard before. His ancestors, who had been enslaved a hundred years earlier, had been skilled at locating water in the desert.

He said, “After leaving the Sudan they settled in what came to be known as the Kingdom of Fezzan, where they were enslaved. Their masters kept them in slavery so that they would reproduce in captivity, especially given how useful they were in digging and maintaining underground canals called fijarat.”

“What were they like?” I asked.

He picked a stick up off the ground and dug a little depression with it. Then he used it to draw a sketch, saying, “The fijarat were subterranean canals in sloped areas or foothills that brought water to the surface through tunnels that were slightly curved. It would take more than a hundred slaves to dig just one of them, and some of those slaves were my ancestors. Maintaining a single canal required that hundreds of thousands of buckets of sand and other debris be removed from it every year.”

“How did your ancestors know how to find water in the desert?”

“They used a type of limestone known as travertine. The presence of this stone meant that there was water nearby.”

“Is that why you always keep a piece of limestone with you?” I asked.

Bending his right leg with his hand, he looked into the distance and said, “It’s my own special amulet.”

“And is that why you’re always clean?”

He chuckled and said I was a smart girl who ought to learn how to read and write and knit like the nuns on Santa Barbara Street and Via Torino.

“So,” I asked, my curiosity piqued, “what do you know about the Christian nuns?”

“I’ll take you to see them someday,” he said as he helped me put my dress back on. “But first you’ve got to meet Bouga.”

Here was another mysterious part of the Slave Yards that I’d never known about even though I’d lived there all my life. How could my world have been confined to nothing but fetching water, hovering around Aunt Sabriya, and hiding behind Baraka?

With Yousef I was always finding out new things and learning to see the world in different ways: watching the stars sink into the sea at night and trying to swim out and catch them as they fell; taking in the moment when the moon was half-immersed in the water; fishing in the dark. But the strangest thing of all had to do with a Negro soothsayer who used to come out to the sea in the middle of the night with an elderly white woman. He would carry her on his back from a long way away to help her recover a granddaughter of hers who had drowned in the sea. When the moon was aligned with other heavenly bodies, he would look up in the sky, recite incantations, and perform some mysterious calculation. He would do this in the presence of the old woman, who was convinced that a beautiful, innocent child should never have died such a senseless death.

She clung to the belief that her granddaughter had actually survived and that she was living in the depths of the sea with other innocent creatures, but wouldn’t be able to return to the terrestrial world without supernatural assistance. Just as, according to Muslim belief, Jesus Christ didn’t really die on the cross but was taken up alive to Heaven, where he lives to this day, this woman believed her granddaughter had been taken alive to the bottom of the sea.

Nobody tried to stop them from engaging in these rituals of theirs. Instead, they would think about the story of Isaila, a beautiful girl who’d been kidnapped and taken away to Italy, then miraculously rescued and brought back to Libya by Sidi Abdussalam Al Asmar.

So people knew what the soothsayer and the old woman were doing but they paid no attention. Maybe they understood that he was giving her a hope she couldn’t live without. Both he and she knew she didn’t have many more years to live. But how much more merciful it would be for her to die still hoping to find her granddaughter alive under the sea than for her life to be cut short by grief and despair!

One night Yousef and I sneaked down to the beach and hid behind a sand dune to watch the rituals it was hoped would bring the girl back. We saw black birds soaring about in the dark as the old woman, facing the sea, knelt in a lengthy prayer. As she prayed, the ponderous soothsayer burned sticks of sweet-smelling incense and beat rhythmically on a frame drum, calling the names of strange entities in the other world who were known to no one but him.

His long rosary dangled from his fingers and sometimes he would strike the back of the drum with it, altering the sound it made as the strange nocturnal birds circled around him.

“What’s he saying?” I whispered to Yousef.

“He’s calling the names of certain jinn kings. He’s summoning them to help,” he whispered back.

“Will they come?” I asked, more curious than ever.

He told me to keep quiet, saying that if the jinns knew people were watching and listening in, they wouldn’t show up.

The old soothsayer was performing the rites necessary to summon the jinns to our world, but for some reason they were slow to appear. I fell asleep on the sand dune that night as I waited for a glimpse of the drowned child being resurrected from the sea.

When the first rays of the next morning’s sun woke me to my actual world, I wondered why I’d been so captivated by that girl’s story that I’d been willing to spend the night waiting for her to come back with the same anticipation as her bereaved grandmother, if not more. Oh place, wherever you are, oh sea, oh sky, oh time, she and I both call out to you! One of us has been sleeping for years in the water, the other on land. One of us is white, the other is black. One drowned, though her grandmother never believed she’d died; the other had a grandmother who would have liked to bury her alive and be rid of her forever!