Kandia
Kandia
1803
A nother woman was speaking to Kandia in a tongue that she did not recognize. Still, Kandia understood. Fear was a language common to all people, and nothing was more fearsome than being stolen from yourself. They were squeezed into the hold of the ship with many others, after having been locked up, for days, in that cold stone house at the edge of the sea. Kandia had hoped to see her mother and sisters among the people who were shoved into the room, but she never did.
She closed her eyes, now, and held on to memories of home, murmuring what she could recall to her unborn child. The energy of the raw clay under her fingers. The tickle of warm dust on her feet. The voice of her child’s father, Mansa. She would give her child his name if they survived this voyage. Mansa, she said, speaking to the center of her body as her baby stretched and turned inside her. Mansa.
Later, the man who purchased Kandia would insist on calling her newborn child Moses. This was not so important, thought Kandia. The sound was close enough. And she would know her son by any name. She could smell the clay and iron in his skin. She and her child had been stolen from the place she called home, the people she called family, but on the morning that her son was born she decided that no, she would not allow them to be stolen from themselves.