Once a Slave, Always a Slave

Once a Slave, Always a Slave

By Alex Zhang

My elderly torn hands planted a seed into the sterile field as the once brilliant sky darkened. The tobacco fields were jet black, sweet jasmine aromas lingered in the air, and my feet were bare, walking into the chilled soil. Crickets chirped as if it were the last time they were going to chirp, as if they were going to die; die in misery. I wondered if I were ever to see light. Looking up visualizes a barren field, frozen with snow, with miles of field standing there, in front of me, that didn’t move. As a small little rodent hurried its way across the dead vegetation as a hungry vulture swooped down from where the brilliant teal-blue sky hit the valley, catching its prey. I looked to the valleys as a blurry image of a ramshackle village entered my eyes which wondered what brilliance was like. A few out of focused figures of thin unnourished men walked out of their villages. The sun rose out of the vast valleys that housed the soothing Tagus Tajo river, following into the Atlantic Ocean. A rooster called out to the sunrise. I needed the sun’s great nourishment or I would perish in a few weeks. Beside the impoverished fields laid the cotton pickers’ field. The old field filled with creatures like me standing lonely in the burdensome grass. Every step I took, soil crumbled beneath me and with every blink I conducted, a sweatdrop would penetrate my beaten white tank top. I gasped in awe at a scent, what could it be? Due to our immense hunger for every scent we smelt, we rushed towards it closely followed by a crowd. Was it Saturday? Or had I lost track of time? Every Saturday, starving slaves rushed to the farmland, holding out their cracked bowls for food. My mind jumped back to the scent. Like a hounddog, I traced back to its source. In the distance, I saw a ranch-style house with a wide covered screened porch with a yard with cows and goats grazing in the fenced pasture. In the sky of the fields, flies and bees buzzed in rejoice to the freshly harvested sugar, as they circled above it. All of a sudden, a distinctive figure walked out of the cabin, it was the landowner; my owner. I had no rights on this land, I could get shot or wipped anytime he wanted. I had completely lost hope. The farmland wasn’t the only place the slaves worked at, there was also the deep dark shafts filled with fear. Full-time slaves down in the shaft wondered always if they were to seek light in their life. Life was miserable down there, usually you would never come back out if you went down there; it was either death (they were very usual from stone collapses) or you were just stuck there. Nowhere in this grim and appalling land holds a paradise for us, it was all just a desert waiting for us to be killed in the midst of the sun beaming down on our faces. As the sun rose, I started to worry about the scenarios where I would get whipped. Pessimistically, I dropped my head in chronic fear; fear that one day I would get killed in an instant. Many things could have killed me in an instant in my condition: Smallpox, a huge virus that wiped out millions of slaves with no hygiene, getting tortured to death, getting shot for misbehaving, or starving to death, as we were fed very little from food that was rationed a lot. I accepted defeat, or did defeat accept me.

It was the year 1605, we were in Madrid, Spain, the center of the Western African Slave Trade. Millions of innocent African men were taken from their lands and placed into Spanish cities. Spain had a sense of what was “humane” and what should be alienated. Traditional names were stripped away from us, and they attached us with labels. My birth name was Tishala Gbadamosi, but they named me Pietro in short. Other labels were slapped on us; they called us “negros” (meaning black in Spanish) and all other sorts of Spanish words that my unearthly mind couldn’t seize of.

This morning was a “different” day, I was working in the farms when one of the other slaves, Mhina Onwuatuegwu (Sanchez) approached me. He was a very unfortunate soul as he was born by two slaves in Spain. He had no life story, only heavy labor, which was my future. Dragging his nearly dead feet, he tells me about a matter that is a distant view to reality. His Spanish is dreadful and so we spoke in simple English.

“Ey’ Pietro, th’er is esk-ape pla’n out of this pwrison.” he quietly mumbled a couple of the few English words he knew.

My face tightened up and eyes narrowed; my lips found a tongue licking it, my head tilted and shook itself; as I cleared my throat, my arms crossed; and I walked away.

“Timelines are set and ours are already set like this; Sanchez, there is no escape. We are stuck here”

“Talk tom’orrow, we v’ill have meeting at cotto’n field”

He is so hopeless, Sanchez will get himself killed. I thought. There is no opportunity to escape these fearful lands of Madrid, Spain. I will always be a slave.’

I had always thought Sanchez was wrong for his very distant ideologies about slavery. Wrongful, he was. Or was he?

Walking back into the nourishment of the morning rise brought back memories of the African plains; my family, in the huts made of fresh grass, straw and mud. Memories of me, playing in the mud with my brothers and sisters. At utmost, it brought back one more memory. Freedom.

My father was a farmer, a historical legend, as he was the leader of the Fulani tribe. We lived in Nigeria, Africa on the Western peninsula of the Northern Atlantic Ocean. I still visualize the stories my father tells me about my mother who died while giving birth to me. In the stories, my mother had a charming oval face with long beautiful midnight black hair. Her favorite clothing was a black and navy blue dress that was passed down for many generations and was weaved by a legend as she formed the Fulani traditions. Sorrowful memories were lingering in my uneducated mind, my father disappeared when I was 18 and my mother died giving birth to me. My brother was enslaved when I was very young, he was sent to France. I still remembered the yearly Fulani festival that my father would bring me to when I turned 18 (male adolescents) in the dry seasons. Bravery and strength was a big part of our strong religion when males turned into adults. To prove our strength, we were flogged with wooden sticks to prove our endurace. Instead of doing it for endurance we were hit here for public enjoyment, we had no rights. I had the most marks from the Sharo which proved that I was the brawny individual there; although I was the most muscular person there, there was nothing to prove now, I am stuck here in Madrid. There is no where to go other than here. We splashed white paint on our hungry faces and danced with unmarried beautiful women in a circle. Looking down from that time you would see bare-chested hungry men with white paint on their faces cheering with drum beats in the background, contending for the most appealing individual. The ceremony suddenly paused and a thunderstorm came, clouds thundered in the sky, the sun was blocked and the sky turned pitch black. It felt like the day the Spanish landed on our once loved paradise. Now it is empty, filled with wildlife.

Suddenly, a blurry physique, of what made up of a male, was running towards my valueless body. It was not specifically an old neutered male from its skinny unearthly physique. It was Sanchez, the man who thinks we can escape from this prison.

“PIETRO PIETRO, ITS AN OPENING, WE HAVE A CHANCE, FOLLOW ME!” his frantic voice called out.

I ran towards him with a face in shock.

“No, No, No. Sanchez, we don’t have an opportunity”

No words came out of his unorthodox mouth, all he did was he grabbed me with his twig-like arms and pulled me into the forests beside the ranch. With his hand on my tank top, he jerked my collar and pulled me towards his face. Words started spraying out of his mouth in annoyance.

“Follow me, trust me, please,” he screamed.

“Be quiet, the landowner might hear you, please be quiet,” I whispered quietly.

“There is a man at the bottom of the western valley, we must meet him exactly when the sunsets tomorrow”

“But why choose me out of everyone?”

“Pietro, I am your father. Right when you got here I remembered that smooth and beautiful face of yours. I could never forget. I have been

In shock, tears started dripping down my face, my body stopped tensing, and I felt like I was at home, with my beloved father. The memories of the campfires and the singing become the most prominent in my mind. No instincts came to mind, so I just hugged him with all my might. But, it was still way too dangerous to travel to the valleys without the guards finding out.

“Father, it is way too dangerous to travel to the Northern Valleys without the guards knowing”

“Trust me, please Pietro, we have no future here”

“This is our future, Father, but I will try, if anything goes wrong we will run back, no matter what the cost was”

“Meet me here tomorrow for the sun sets”

I rushed back to the sugar fields and started harvesting and maintaining the sugar so there wasn’t any suspicion that anything was going on. My father limped to the kitchen. Sunset was near and so I walked back to the broken down cabin made out of Scotch wood that was built by one of us. Filled with rocks, the pathway to the cabin hurt our feet as we walked towards it. We didn’t have any slippers or shoes to protect our feet. Our feet were covered in bruises, the same goes for our arms. Dirt and blood were always covering our naked feet. The cabin had no light and was very freezing in the winter and was scorching hot in the hot summers. Laying down I slept; there were around fifty slaves sleeping in one small cabin. No one could sleep as it was very difficult as there was always some kind of noise going on. It was either a man who never has gotten sleep in their life snoring or creaking noises. It was impossible to keep approximately fifty men quiet all at once. Without a decent rest in a few months, my head fell onto the wooden plank. It was like I fainted, tomorrow would be a big day. The day of our escape.

Waking up in the dawn of the morning, I walked into the barren fields of sugar, warming up for the stunt we would pull off in the evening. In the distance I saw a man running for his life, it couldn’t have been my father due to his unearthly physique. As he was running a guard nearby pulled out his gun. Two bullets sounded in the air as a murder of crows flew out of the trees into the distant air. This might have been us if we made one wrong step. My anxiety and pessimism peaked because I still had so much more life to me. I didn’t want to be shot, I didn’t want to die. A rooster called out to the sunset. The slaves woke up to the landowner, opening the door and shouting “WAKE UP” in Spanish. My father walked out of the dilapidated cabin and started his service. During the day when the landowner took a walk to the fields to see us in action, I snuck into his cabin. It was huge, inside housed multiple rooms filled with items my small brain couldn’t comprehend. In front of me was a huge self portrait of our muscular landowner in his soldier-like outfit. Looking towards my left I found myself staring at a kitchen with pots to boil food under the campfires. To my right were multiple rooms that consisted of a sitting room, a water closet and a mysterious room that turned out to be his bedroom. Searching around in his bedroom, I found a closet full of explorer outfits that would allow me to match in with the crew members. Grabbing the clothing I headed back into the cabin to hide it under the wooden planks. After millions of hours of being enslaved, day turned into night and it was time to leave. I could already taste the freedom I was about to have, just as soon as…

“Ey! Negro! The HELL you doin’!?” the landowner shouted.

Fear washed all over me. How could he still see me? For sure, my skin would’ve been camouflaged with the darkness of the night. Ignoring his repeated calls, I continued forward. Every step I took brought me closer to the light at the end of this dark tunnel, filled with years of sorrow, pain, abuse.

“Eh, must’ve been some animal or summ…”

Hearing the landowner’s footsteps gradually becoming further and further relieved the mounting anxiety inside me. My father and I hurried to where the valley met the river, the famous Tagus river. A fantasy river. As we rushed towards the river an image of a ship came into view.

The ship seemed as though it came out straight fantasy. Carrying multiple whitewashed sails, an old boat mold made out of luxurious Scotch wood carved exotically by one of our kind, and a sky-high crest that could see continents across the ocean. It was the boat of Hernans Cortes, the famous Spanish explorer to found Mexico. I have heard all about him from many landowners here in Madrid. A pipe started playing a marching sound and an explorer marched onto the ship with many of the crew. It was time for us to sneak in. Stripping down and changing we quickly snuck into the line they were forming. With the vague amount of Spanish we knew, if we established ourselves as the shy background characters of this massive ship, we wouldn’t be touched. As we entered the ship, the captain was shaking everyone’s hand and congratulating them for being part of his crew. We were screwed. I thought. I should've listened to my father, he could tell that I was black from the hand shaking. We would be tortured if we were caught. It is game over. It is game over.

Sweating was the only thing that happened to me. I wasn’t breathing, due to the sound it produces. A killer wasp buzzed around me, swatting it, it seemed agitated. Its wings were brownish and the body resembled a yellowjacket. It looked fearsome. Landing on my arm, it stung me. AHHHHHHH, I screamed.

“Ey’ Jose, did you hear that sound near yer trees”

One by one, the captain picked us out and shook our hands, and one by one my destiny became closer to me, the destiny of death. The captain eventually reached our hopeless selves. Closing my eyes, I knew death was upon me.

“Ey, tanks man, for helpn’ me in this journey’”

He raised out his bruised and rigid hands filled with dead skin. Subconsciously, I raised out my hand. My black hand touched the captain’s clear white skin. At that moment, I knew I had messed up.

“HEES THE ESCAPED SLAVE, CA​PTURE HIM”

Many white muscular men started chasing me, with their heads up they looked like lions hunting for their prey; me. With my bare feet and unnourished body, it was clear defeat would be accepted at any moment's time. Running through a forest, there were twigs, fallen trees and basically anything to trip Father and I to our deaths. Intensity grew as my stamina fell, I turned my dreaded head to my right and there was Father running for his life. It looked as though the pain, anguish and suffering had given him redemption in life. But then I thought twice, if we were to run away, there would be no escape out of Spain. This WAS our only chance of survival, of ever making back across the Atlantic to where my hometown was. And we totally bombed it. With the darkness of our skin, the further we ran, the harder it was to visualize our unnatural physiques. With a slight advantage and odds, I had just about to think we had redeemed ourselves with a win until…

CREAK, SNAP, BOOM. Our bodies fell onto the grounds filled with dirt, the dirt in which we would be shot and killed.

“We got’en you, there ‘s no where to run slaves”

Every step they took, a second of my destined life shortened. In the midst of the twilight in the chilling night, a fast blow of the brisk wind shivered my whole body into a state of paralyzation. I was shocked. I am dead. Father looked miserable, due to his age, he couldn’t run much.

“Get yo’ dirty body off the ground’s and follow me,” the captain shouted with all the superiority he had above me.

He grabbed me and Father’s arm, pushing me towards the village.

“Yo’ll be torture’d forever. Try escape, you guys die”

Instead of having a quick painless death in the midnight’s dark sky. Father and I would be tortured for our entire lives, it sounded much worse from getting shot. At least we had our lives left. We haven’t died. Yet.

Walking towards the moon I found myself near the village, where the captain left us and the guards took over. They were violent and fierce, as every wrong step we took left into a whipping. Bruises and scars were scattered all over my body from these guards. My head leaned towards Father.

“Ey’ ther is no…” I tried to whisper.

“EY’ NO TALKING, I SAID NO TALKING,” the guard screamed at the top of his colossal lungs.

We walked for an hour until we reached the fields, he led us into the master’s basement. Near the basement was a staircase that was definitely not maintained. Cobwebs scrambled everywhere I looked, creaking happened nonstop and the old basement door named Room 101 that looked like some fantasy. Opening it I saw the horrors inside. There it was, a pole in the middle of the darkened room with two old ropes. One for Father and I, looking to the right I saw a bucket of water and a towel (Waterboarding, I thought) with a worn down table holding a whip. It was a torture chamber, just like I predicted. Looking up there was a hole in the ceiling showing us the day and night. There was no bed, no nothing; just a malady brown room with an unnourished pole standing in the middle of a “desert.” I looked at his pocket and there dangled a knife, I knew that this would be a part of my plan. There he tied us down, grabbing the cloth and water near the side of this ghastly basement. Experiences in the past have led me to believe that it is the most terrible way of torture. He grabbed a cloth, covering it over my whole worried face. The more water he poured, the harder breathing was. If one knew what drowning felt like, it most definitely felt like that. The guard carried a musket, a long muzzle gun, in which he could pick up anytime and end our lives. The pessimism that I started with remained with me, including the pain and anguish. When we were blending in with the sailors back at the ship, I had thought I had succeeded my life goal ever since I had gotten here; which was to escape. Now, we were back at square one, Father and I. He tied us to a pole and shut the door, as he did I heard a bang sound. It was most probable that he blocked the door off so we were stuck here. A crack in the ceiling told us the guard’s traditions and the time of day it was. The brighter the rooms were, the earlier the day was.

For the next few weeks, all the time we had to go outside were a few hours every week just to do some slave work and enter back into our hell. Fed only a few days, our brains were unnurtured and we started becoming dizzy and delusional. Ghosts and visions started to appear during our only few minutes of good sleep we ever got. Now my everlasting satisfactory dreams on our Fulani traditions and tribes turned into nightmares, nightmares of me in a field out of nowhere lying down with blood gushing out of my chest, as a bullet has pierced my figure. Another scenario passed by my mind where my head was placed on a rack with a blade flying off of the ropes through my head as it landed onto the ground. I had already had enough past trauma. Why haunt me with more? Has Allah cursed Father and I? Why are we the victims of such pain and suffering? Has our karma been bad? It might have been because my mother died from my birth or because I stole from others in the past. We needed to escape this horrendous place, to escape the nightmares and the torturous guards who whip us until we were unconscious. My once pessimistic youthful mind was gone, now a new self has formed. One with hope.

Every time I noticed the banging sound appeared, it was not of him placing a heavy item in front of the door, it was him slamming it with all his might. I wondered, if we could untie ourselves and sneak out when the guards were out sleeping or taking breaks, we might have ourselves a chance. I noticed that the guards had a certain time schedule for each day, as Father and I have been stuck in this horrendous room for weeks.

“Ey’ Father, we gotta get outta er’, during the night tomorrow at twilight, the guard vill’ go to sleep, then is our chance,” I remarked determinedly.

With the new ego, with the new hope, I will find a way to get out of here; we will. It was almost night as the sun setted into the distant sky that felt far from us, distant. The sky was orange which turned dark fast. Tomorrow was the last chance we could escape. The only.

Waking up to the rise of fresh footsteps down the squeaky stairs of the basement, the guard opened the door. To our misery, he was holding a “cat-of-nine tails,” it was a rope with nine ends to it, filled with different pieces of material such as broken glass or nails or just a knot in the end. In the other scarred hand held a bucket of water and a towel. Out of his smelly mouth we smelt from across the room, blubbered out some words…

“Ey’ slaves, choos’ one waterboard or whip,” he shouted out.

“Neither, you sblood,” I screamed out of my mouth.

“I guess you both do both,” laughing hysterically like a villain.

He pulled out the cloth, covering my face, not allowing me to breathe very well, and with the water bucket, it became nearly impossible to breathe. After my turn, my dilapidated Father was next. Coming out of misery, he started choking. Blood started spilling as he coughed. Scared for him, I ran towards his physique. The guard shoved me to the ground and laughed as my Father suffered.

“GET ‘IM HELP,” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

All he did was chuckle at my Father who was at the corner of the broken down basement, coughing. The more I tried to help, the more the guard beat me. I could do nothing. Father might have been dead…

Luckily, he survived that sudden attack. Due to this, the guard left as he wanted us to live longer so we could get tortured and harvest the barren sugar fields that stretched for miles in the burning red hot sun. I wondered what life was like outside, if the vegetation had been wiped out. I felt like a miner, in the dark, wondering if one would ever see the light of the sun. As the guard left, I sneakily tripped him. Thinking that he tripped himself, he casually got up and left. He didn’t think twice about what happened and what was going to happen. A knife was on the ground, and using all my might to stretch my poor body to get the knife. My feet reached it and slid it towards us. Grabbing it I cut myself loose as quiet as possible without letting anyone realize. Then I cut Father loose, and it seemed as though our plan was going on track. Then I realized, stepping out of the basement meant that there would be prominent squeaking sounds. To my surprise, gunshots started to sound. BOOM, BOOM. This was our moment. We swiftly hopped to the top and reached for the door. My heart stopped, I hope it wasn’t blocked off. CLICK. As the door opened, my heart started pounding my bones that felt like it would’ve been broken by the immense beating. There I saw the familiar details I noticed when we entered the landowner’s house to steal some clothes. Sneaking out of the front door, I found ourselves between the landowner’s house and the forest, our planned escape finish line. We had the chance, we had the opportunity, now we just had to seize it.

As we were running for the beautiful forests beside the completely opposite devastated fields, a guard, who had shot the earlier slaves that allowed us to run out of the basement, caught our thin anatomies. Sprinting towards us faster than a cheetah, I reconsidered my life choices. The only way of escaping was just to… RUN!

Like a ravenous lion chasing for its beatitude, the guard was running after us. It looked like he was losing momentum as we were sprinting for our lives. As a murder of ravens flew across the twilights of the pitch dark sky he pulled out his musket, and shot a few bullets. BANG, BANG. One had pierced my torso, falling down, I also saw my Father who just got shot in the forehead. Just like my dream, it was the end. I shouldn’t have ever thought about escaping or listening to my Father. I shouldn’t have…

Left out in the dark to die, I found myself on the fields I started my slavery journey on, my first harvest and the field I was beat and enslaved on. Memories of our Fulani tribe, the yearly festival as I turned 18, a youthful version of myself, not knowing one day I would turn out to become myself; a body bleeding on the ground in pain. I thought about my brothers and sisters who cared about me and took care of me in my early years. As my body wasn’t able to hold itself any longer; it loosened, laying on top of the seed my elderly torn hands had planted at the start of my journey. A flower bloomed out its wings; ready to fly.