She Would Be King

by Wayétu Moore

She became the forest’s child; her curiosity, her otherness, her obscurity matched those of even the most different of the agile creatures of the wood.

What was Famatta’s curse but the mastery of life? And now they shunned her for mastering death. Cursed the in-between.

whose bravery is not provoked by darkness?

We have nothing but we have God. We have nothing but we have each other,

Punishment, especially the kind given by those who have nothing, can be a big and addictive thing. Cruel as it is, that small taste of power is juicy. It lasts long.

“Hell, when I die, bury me the way I came. Want to be ready to show God my scars and ask why.”

I felt this.

Was I the only one who could not tell the difference between a life in bondage and death?

Strong, he was. Strong, and a good man. Yet even he was not strong enough to shatter what bound him—the suggestion that being good meant letting what you loved slip through your fingers to appease a man who questions your humanity. The suggestion that joy meant serving. The suggestion that, though misplaced, he was home. The suggestion that being good meant that he was to protect what was in this oppressor’s interest, but allow his own flesh to meander about life until they were all an infinity of broken men. Strong then, yes. But not a good man. He would not be that.

June Dey remembered the stories Darlene once told him of the boys who killed giants, defeated lions for their people; the story of his namesake, who led slaves through water with mere words; the story of the man who found himself in the stomach of a beast, and still survived and fulfilled his destiny; the story of Dey the slave, who came and went from Emerson without ever saying a word, but left his legacy on all of their lips—the possibility of rebellion and true freedom in all their hearts. All were mere men. All were powerless but died with raised fists.

Those woods were just as much his as anyone else’s—his home, his protector, his mask in the night.

The bullets came toward him. He had done nothing wrong and the bullets sought to touch his skin.

“I believe the people have been given their freedom and land. What danger could come from such generosity?”

How can you be so stupid you call something a gift when it's really a right? White people are incredible.

Callum rushed through the woods, spitting out leaves and stray bugs that entered his mouth as tree branches slapped his face.

Whereas nature embraced Gbessa, June Dey, and now Nanni, it's downright hostile to this white buffoon

Nanni would close her eyes and listen to the marriage of wind and water from a nearby stream, the rumored mountain boas in the distance as they glided on their bellies across deeply rooted trunks. Creek water cuckooing through isolated pebbles. And at once she was with her earth, and at once she became it.

“Maroons get spirit plenty. Spirit what save we, bring us up mountain. But we here now no use for it, so it go. But it stay with some. Like your Ma. Like you.”

Their spirits were alive. And most men I knew before, in that place, laid their spirits to rest the first time the cat-o’-nine-tails flew into their backs. And without a spirit, you cannot feel. You react, but the longer you exist in a world without your spirit, the less you feel. And feeling, no matter how low the emotion, is a gift. But in that place we stopped feeling when our spirits were killed. Laughter was a reaction. Tears were a reaction. Those screams were a reaction. But the source of them—the mother of joy, of sadness, or terror—was a ghost like me.

They told us we had no history but darkness, so they kept the books away for fear we might understand the truth better, and thus find those lost selves.

EXACTLY.

“Tell me all you can about this place. This colony,” June Dey said. “They either finally got to feeling bad for what they done, or they got too many of us and want to send some back,” the man said.

I guarantee you it’s the latter and not the former.

Plus, I tell ’em white folks in the free colony, too, making sure everything go right and they say, ‘If it’s free, why white folks got to be there?’”

“But Africa need us,” he murmured to himself as he carried her. “Remember your gift.”

“She all right when she feel safe. She’ll fight if she don’t.”

Me and everyone woman I know can relate.

Alike spirits separated at great distances will always be bound to meet, even if only once; kindred souls will always collide; and strings of coincidences are never what they appear to be on the surface, but instead are the mask of God.

The ship anchored in Key West in 1845, long after 1808, when slave trading had been outlawed in America.

The ACS decided that the Africans would be divided among the settlers to be civilized and Christianized, to work on farms and add to the overall economy and diversity of the free colony.

How can you claim to free a people then dictate their every mood and direct their behavior? White people are something else.

She had become friends with this new life; she knew all of it and remained only an arm’s length away.

How could this place, this place that had managed to free their gifts, a refuge for so many, also manifest the darkest cavities of man? Of greed? Of his unrelenting wickedness?

“Go!” June Dey yelled and the men surged toward the tents, not with steel but with fists, with tears, in rage, in thirst—wanting to break faces, shake the hatred out of these strange men who had stolen their civilization, disrupted their lives for no explained reason, wanting them to bleed until all of their children were reborn, revived, returned. No steel. Just heart. No slavers lived under that moon. No more Africans died.

“We are where we were always meant to be—seasoned now by adversity, we can lead our fellow African brethren in a sound democracy under Christian principles. Thank God for the deliverance of Africa for Africans.”

Made it all the way back to Africa to perpetuate be same things they ran from. This is sad.

Gerald admitted to Henry that even in Sinou, where the younger and more liberal settlers had chosen to live, there was a shared understanding of both superiority and responsibility when it came to the natives. Instead of seeking out tribesmen to work on farms as an indulgence of luxury or convenience, like many families in Monrovia did, the Sinou settlers felt it was their responsibility to provide economic opportunity and access to civilization to indigenous people. If local tribesmen ever denied their reaching out, Sinou settlers were just as surprised and offended as a Monrovian settler would be that “these poor, uncivilized” would deny their good graces.

“My husband take four families from our old village when I was girl. We settle here and learn new God. Learn English. God come into our house and we welcome him and love him like he love us. But the house God come into still ancestor house. You leave your house when visitor come?”

It had not been a color that he fought, but a spirit. Greed. Perhaps the warriors he fought with in previous weeks had foresight enough to reject this spirit, which extinguishes as much as it enriches, never one without the other. It was greed—that soulless, bottomless thing that killed mothers. Killed would-be lovers. Would not let him be.

Fatigued by her denial of herself, of him, he sat down. He would have wept for her if there had been tears left, for nothing was so tragic as this.

“I am not better. I am not worse. I am changed. I am a different woman. I forgot myself. And I am sorry.”

Her voice broke, yet it was then that she finally found it.

You were born free. But until you found your gift, you did not know your freedom. But now that you know your power, what will you do with it?”

Love swallowed her fear