16

One night as I lay back on my mat, I realized a month had passed since I’d arrived here. It was a sad thing to be proud of, but I had to congratulate myself for surviving and for coming to some kind of acceptance of this unthinkable life, especially after my panicked initiation.

But I thought too of the price I was paying. My whole body ached as I stretched out, and my muscles burned in places I’d never even known I had them. My back was bruised where the master had beat me with the paddle for coming up without untangling a net. My arms and legs had grown skinnier, wirier than ever before, but my stomach was rounding out and bloating, like Baby Joe’s and some of the other boys’. I tapped at my ears. Strange things were happening to them, especially when I dived. Sometimes when we were on the boat and the engine cut off, the world would be blanketed in total silence for a few seconds, and then a ringing would start up inside my ears. I couldn’t hear properly anymore, and I couldn’t get the air or water or whatever it was out of them. I felt like I didn’t even know my own body anymore.

My skin was sensitive, cracked and peeling from constant exposure to the sun’s glare. It broke easily when I scratched the bites I got from insects and from fish. There was no getting away from insects in this place, and the worst bites were from tsetse flies, which were common on the island. Some had turned into sores, swollen and painful with pus inside, but they couldn’t heal properly because they were never dry long enough. My hair was lightening in color, and my hands were callused and bleeding from handling fish with spiny fins and scales. It didn’t help that I couldn’t stop biting my nails.

The master never sent us to the hospital, not even when we got hurt or sick. Seth’s cough had become worse, and after an afternoon smoking fish he’d started to wheeze and spit out green phlegm, but the master did nothing about it. It felt like even death could go unnoticed in this place.

As sleep began to claim me, I wondered what the point of life was. I felt guilty toward Ma, whom I could hardly bear to think of in this place, but I wished I’d never been born. I felt guilty when I thought of Togbe too, but the truth was I could no longer even recall the serenity of fishing in the creek. The water would be at its highest now, but I didn’t even long for it. Nor could I imagine the boy by the river and the joy of Togbe’s childhood anymore, because I hated the water, hated fishing and everything that went with it. Trapped in my bond in this wretched life, I felt like the river prawn we’d found that day. When I’d asked Togbe why it didn’t escape, he’d said, They never even try! Once they’re in, they’re in.

That’s us, I thought. So terrified of the master, so imprisoned by the poverty that drove us here that we never even try. I thought of the sparks of longing I sometimes caught in the other kids’ eyes, to reach out, be seen, heard, make friends, laugh together—always quickly extinguished for fear of detection. And I thought how some of them imitated the master. They were the ones who were most at home here, like Yao and Gideon. I wondered if I could ever become like that one day and enjoy the suffering of others. If I stayed long enough, who knew? The idea was more frightening than the years still ahead of me.

Since my first day, the thought of escape had been more conscious to me than the act of breathing. But there was nothing to be gained by running away. Our master didn’t even need to guard us, that was why he sent us out on the lake alone. It was into our bonds that we were locked. We stood to lose far more than he if we broke them, and he knew it. But fighting the unrelenting urge to flee drained my energy and spirits more than my work did. Even now, dropping off to sleep, I felt it, and fought it. I would complete my bond and get my money no matter what I had to go through! All I needed was to numb myself to my surroundings and get on with my work.

Dawn found me helping Abu and Seth disentangle nets in a stretch full of submerged trees. They were huge, and so many that I knew this must once have been a forest, and I couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like then—a grand, leafy canopy with leopards prowling below, elephants lumbering between tree trunks, monkeys leaping above, butterflies flitting, and birds nesting and singing from the treetops. It blew my mind to think that air had once flowed through these branches instead of water.

But now it was eerie, the tranquil lake with these skeletons that had once towered proudly over forests and villages, standing in their watery wasteland. What had they been when their colossal canopies had reached for the sky? Mahogany? Silk cotton? Odum? They reminded me of us, the enslaved fisher children, stripped of our history to shells of our former selves, together but alone, abandoned by the rest of the world to live out a bleak existence on the water.

I was grateful when light began to pierce through and gradually isolate the dark shapes from the water so we could stop doing things by feel. The weak flashlight beams didn’t penetrate far below the surface, and they sometimes died altogether when their batteries ran out or the boys in the boat fell asleep.

We were almost done with our work when Abu prodded me hard and pointed to Seth. He had passed out and was floating slowly onto his back. Abu grabbed one of his hands, I grabbed the other, and we headed up, Abu doing most of the hauling. We broke the surface at a distance from the boat, and Abu told me to go back down and finish the job while he got Seth on board. I took a deep breath and dived back down.

As I reached for the net, I felt a sharp tug. Far below, something large was trapped inside it! The sun was only just peeping above the horizon, so it was still gloomy down there, and my first thought was Crocodile! In a panic I dropped the net rope and struck back for the surface, thrashing my limbs as fast as I could. The boat was still at a distance, and I could make out movement—Abu and the other boys getting Seth on board. I took deep breaths and tried to calm myself.

That thing couldn’t be a crocodile. Its shape was completely different—more like a fish, and huge—bigger than me! But there was something about the way it moved that wasn’t fishlike at all! I was terrified and dying of curiosity at the same time, but I couldn’t just flee without finishing the job. Abu was relying on me. He’d get in trouble if I didn’t do it. We both would.

Waiting here and hoping the thing would free itself was out of the question. I had to hurry so we could get Seth back to dry land. My heart thumped in my chest. Whatever it was, there was nothing for it, I had to go back and face it! I filled my lungs with as much air as they could take and dived back down, hoping I’d imagined the whole thing and would find the net empty as we’d left it.

But the bulky shape was still there! It was straining to find its way out, moving its head and neck in a way that was much more like a land creature than a fish. Praying and calling on Togbe and Grandma Edem for protection, I swam around it, peeling back the net, and it nudged me gently as though it knew exactly what I was doing, then swam slowly away.

I kicked back to the surface, lungs bursting. Abu was swimming toward me.

“Are you done?” he called urgently.

“No!” I gasped.

“What’s taking you so long?”

“Sorry! It’s because”—something stopped me from telling him what I’d seen—“because of all the branches down there!” Abu looked exasperated, probably thinking this was what he got for working with the new boy. “Let’s just leave it and go!” I panted.

“And lose the master’s net?”

“But we have to get Seth back!”

“Seth is okay,” he said. “He’s conscious now.”

“Thank God!”

“Quick, let’s get this done so we can go!”

We dived down together. There was no sign of the creature this time, and I was relieved. We finished the job quickly. I was quiet in the boat all the way back. Was it a whale, I wondered. I’d heard and read about them. But whales didn’t live in lakes, I was pretty sure, no matter how large. And it definitely wasn’t a fish. It just wasn’t like anything I could think of! Seth’s wheeze broke into my reverie. He sat shivering with his arms wrapped around his body, and I wished I had a blanket or anything at all dry to offer him.

That night I found myself back in the water. I was trying to swim but I couldn’t move. My limbs felt like lead, as though some force I couldn’t fight was pinning them to my body. Help! I tried to shout, but I couldn’t utter a word, either. I started to sink in silent horror, and then, through the moonlight I saw someone moving toward me, effortlessly, as though riding through the water. Togbe? No, it was… Great-Great-Grandpa Nutifafa!

He was not alone; he was on the back of that creature—the one I’d seen! They kept coming, and seemed to go right through me, and then I realized he was gone, and I was now on the creature’s back, rising tranquilly through the water as it glinted around us.

My body jerked back to life, and I lay panting, flooded with relief that I could move again. I heard a wheezing sound. Was it the creature? My eyes flew open. Where was I? There was that noise again—Seth.

I was not in the water; I was in the sleeping hut. But it had been so real! I’d seen my great-great-grandfather! And that… indefinable creature. And it had all seemed like the most natural thing in the world. But… I thought back to Togbe’s stories… then that must be the same creature that had carried Great-Great-Grandpa Nutifafa to his final rest. That must be… Mami Wata!

I had to suspend my wonder as Seth’s cough woke Yao and he began barking orders for us to get up and start work. We left Seth wheezing on the mat, his sleeping cloth pulled tight around him, teeth chattering. The master gave him a day off work, and when we got back from the lake, he sent Yao to buy medicine from a drug peddler. He came back with a tiny plastic sachet of orange-and-yellow capsules—the kind people called abombelt because their two halves looked as if they had a belt in between. Seth took them and resumed work the next day, his cough slightly improved.

A week later I had still not told anyone what I’d seen on the lake bed. I had no idea why, but whatever that creature was, I couldn’t bear the thought of it coming to any harm, and besides, people might think I was crazy if I tried to describe it. It was hard to wrap my head around the notion of it being the same Mami Wata revered by people, including my own ancestors, as a deity. But whatever the case, thinking about it seemed to bring a glimmer of light into my gloomy world. It was good to have been able to help a living being in this place where friendship was forbidden, and even better to have freed a trapped creature. And if it really was Mami Wata, then I was glad to have repaid in some small measure the kindness she had shown to generations of my family.

Seth’s cough grew worse as soon as he started working again. I was worried about him diving because it made him short of breath even on land. He was small in build and didn’t look much beyond primary school age, and it filled me with pity to see him doubled over, hacking like an old man.

That afternoon we went out with the master to another stretch of the lake with submerged trees. I was hoping to get the chance to work with Seth, just to keep an eye on him, but the master ordered him to work with Gideon. We dived down, disentangled nets from tree stumps, pulled in the catch, and climbed back into the canoe, one by one. The long-necked waterbirds swam and flapped around us, trying to snatch fish from the net, and the master shooed them away impatiently. When he reached for the motor, Yao said,

“Wait. Where’s Seth?”

“He’ll come just now,” said Gideon.

I looked into the water, alarmed. Gideon had probably left him struggling to fix a net. That would be just like him. He always took advantage of the master’s divisive culture to be anything but a team player.

“Mtch,” went the master impatiently.

I tried to quell the mild nausea I still got when the boat was anchored and bobbing on the water, but this time it was mingled with a deep anxiety. I distracted myself by focusing on the birds that had perched on the tree stumps, one holding its wings fully outstretched as if to dry its feathers in the breeze. I told myself not to worry. Seth was bound to pop his head out of the water any moment.

“I’ll go get him!” Abu got up without asking permission, but at that moment the birds took flight as something broke the surface a couple of meters away—a body, small and lifeless, on top of the water. Seth.

Abu fell backward into the boat while I turned away, horror-struck, feeling I had seen something I should not see; something no one should see.

The master stared at the body. “Foolish boy!” he sneered, sparking the engine and steering the boat sharply away.

The silence on board was a chorus of agony in our heads. Shock and fear rendered us speechless, but I knew I wasn’t the only one cursing the master as we headed to shore. Seth must have had trouble disentangling a net and run out of air coming up, probably drowning in a fit of coughing. We were all terrified to come up when we couldn’t fix nets. After beatings would follow a tirade lasting all the way to shore on how useless we all were, how many other boats were out on the lake in case we hadn’t noticed, and how the Chinese trawlers wouldn’t leave a single fish for us if we continued joking around.

I thought of the two years Seth had worked, of his life and labor lost. But the master had lost nothing. He had gained two years of free labor. All night I lay awake thinking of Seth drifting out there, alone on the dark lake. No one slept, but no one spoke, either. We tossed and turned in our own silent spaces, dreading going out on the water again.

There was no funeral, no service, no mention of Seth ever again. I wondered if his people would ever find out what had happened to him.