How I wished I could of told those stories in our secret queen language that we spoke when there were no whites about. Iyaiya and Mama and me could paint curlicues, do backward flips, and run across rainbows in that limber tongue.
Though I missed the musical way the words loppity-lopped like a creek tumbling over smooth stones when the tales were told in Fon, I stumbled along, hobbled by having to speak American and said, “My grandmother, my Iyaiya, wasn’t but a knobby-kneed girl when a scout arrived in her village. He had been sent by King Ghezo who was the greatest of the twelve kings of Dahomey and the one that freed his kingdom from the rule of his brother Andandozan. Old Andandozan, who was crazy as a peach orchard boar, was partial to feeding his prisoners of war, alive and hollering to hallelujah, to the pet hyenas he kept special just for that purpose.
“But it’s King Ghezo we’re talking about now and it was one of his scouts who came to my grandmother’s village and put all the young virgins to a test. After picking out the six fastest girls, he made them charge through a wall of acacia thorns.”
“Acacia?” he asked.
“I don’t mean the kind we have here. I’m talking Africa acacia where they sprout needles three, four inches long that can slice you up clean as a straight-edge razor.”
The soldier sighed, settling in like a child being told a bedtime story, and I picked up my tale. “Only one girl went at that barbed barricade not once, not twice, but three times, and that was my grandma. So the scouts took her to the capital of Dahomey, Ouidah, to see if she had the grit to be N’Nonmiton.”
“N’Nonmiton,” he repeated, enjoying the feel of the word.
“When my Iyaiyah first came upon the city of Ouidah, she was struck dumb by its magnificence. A mud wall, near thirty feet high and two and a half mile long, wrapped around the whole city. On top of the gates set a dozen enemy heads shriveled black in the sun, each one with its own bib of dried blood. Off in a special area were a hundred acres of royal residences, tombs, and memorial shrines all shaded by thick palm trees. King Ghezo and his six thousand virgin queens lived in a palace at the very heart of the capital. But what really impressed Grandma was that King Ghezo had him a low, wooden throne setting on the skulls of four enemy kings that his warrior-wives had laid on the cooling board for him in battle. Iyaiya wanted nothing more than to live with the king in Ouidah and be one of his wives.”
The soldier gave a throat rumble of interest, encouraging me to go on.
“For the next few months, hundreds of the strongest, fleetest girls from all over the kingdom of Dahomey were brought to Ouidah to be trained and tested. They ran barefoot over burning sand, shot flintlock muskets with flowers scrolled into the silver trigger plates, wrestled each other, and stormed more of those acacia-thorn barriers. The same time they were getting deadened to body pain, trainers were working on deadening their mind pain.”
The soldier nodded like he approved of this toughening and I went on. “This they did by having the new recruits climb up a sixteen-foot platform. At the top the girls found three dozen prisoners of war, gagged and trussed up like shoats going to market. In the large central gathering place below, a mob howled for the blood of their enemies. Each new girl had to heave a prisoner off the platform so the howling mob could air them out with the sticks they had sharpened for exactly that purpose and then tear the ventilated carcasses into little souvenir chunks.
“Any girl who hesitated or whimpered or let the water run from her eye was sold to the Portugee for a miserable sum, because who wanted a girl in the first place? And a coward to boot? My Iyaiya hurled captives off the platform easy as chunking rocks into the river. And sang while she was doing it.”
The soldier’s forehead furrowed and I realized that I’d gone too far and shut up. He was too American for Iyaiya’s story.
A moment passed before he asked, “Well? Was she chosen?”
“Of course.”
He murmured in an interested way and I went on.
“After my Iyaiya was taken on as one of the king’s wife-warriors, she was given all the tobacco she could smoke and all the palm wine and millet beer she could drink. And when she set foot outside her royal quarters, one servant stood waiting to shade her head from the sun with a parasol and another ran ahead ringing a bell to warn the men to lower their eyes and not to look upon one of the king’s virgin wives.
“But what I remember best,” I said, “was her describing how she wore a blue tunic and carried a saber that gleamed like the sun. And how, when she stood, shoulder to shoulder, with the bravest, strongest girls in all the kingdom, the line they formed was as straight as a bar of iron. And dignitaries from around the world came to marvel and call them les Amazones.”
Just like Iyaiya, my voice swelled with pride. But it all drained away when I reached the sad ending of her tale of glory.
“My Iyaiya used to say that the only regret she had about being an Amazon was that she hadn’t ripped the veins out of the neck of the Yoruba warrior who captured her while she was out hunting a rogue elephant with a dozen other warrior-wives. The Yorubas did to her exactly what Iyaiya’s people would have done to any enemy they captured: they sold her off to the Portugee.”
I hated that part of the story. It was like dreaming of running and waking up to find the manacles still around your ankles. So I quickly added, “Iyaiya never thought of herself as a slave, though. She was a captive. And that’s what she raised Mama knowing and what Mama raised me knowing: we were captives. Prisoners of war. Never slaves. Captives.”
“Captive,” he whispered, seeming to like the sound of the word. Then a long, low breath whistled out of him and he said, “I wish I wasn’t going to die. You are fit to be the wife who would bear me the children not broken as we are.”
Wife? Children?
I could not speak.
“Dying has made me bold,” he gasped out. “Made me greedy for what I will never have.” He took hold of my hand, and for the first time in my life, I understood what shy meant. Though I wanted more than anything to show off, to be someone for him, I couldn’t of spoken if Jesus had been taking orders for salvation.
In the silence, the pain came back on him hard and I saw that he was one of those, like Daddy, who had such a big, busy brain that it actually hurt for it to lie fallow. That the ideas and stories in his head meant more to him than the world outside it.
I saw I had to come up with another story to occupy his mind and was grasping for one good enough when he asked, “Your parents? How did they raise you so strong?”