Seven
Seven
The Female Institution was a proper educational institution that contributed greatly to my rearing. There, I learned how to
hate. How to be cruel. How to kill. And all with a smile.
Sierra Leone. 1855.
“Sally. You haven’t answered my question.”
A year of awakening.
That year, on a particularly hot day, I stood in the superintendent’s office, back straight with my arms out as she had ordered
me to, but even before being summoned to this godforsaken room, I’d promised myself that this time, it would be the only order
of hers I’d follow.
“Nor do I intend to, Miss Sass.”
I knew the whack on my hands was coming. Emma Sass’s cane bit into my skin, unforgiving as usual.
I knew what Sass wanted and I wouldn’t give it to her.
I was twelve years old, student number twenty-four of the Female Institution in Freetown, Sierra Leone. A particularly revelatory
place for me.
The superintendent’s room seemed like a repudiation of everything she considered to be too African. It was a room of suffocating order and a deep hatred for color. Drab gray curtains covered the windows, with only a sliver of space to let the sunlight inside. The wooden planks for floors reminded me of the ships that carried me to England, and then to Freetown once the Queen had banished me here.
I’d spent four terrible years in the Female Institution, a school sponsored by the Church Missionary Society. Every day, the
other girls and I would sit respectfully in the school chapel and listen to the preaching of a holy white man of God. God’s
plan, you see, was for all the savages of the world to achieve enlightenment. If all Africans would only learn from Britain’s
example, there would be fewer tribal wars, fewer enslaved, and fewer events of chaos that ripped parents from children, or
even murdered the children themselves. We learned the Bible. We learned housework and sang music from a robust repertoire
of the European classics. We learned how to be human. And when we rebelled, we learned just how intimately Britain’s Christian
education embraced corporal punishment.
Miss Sass set her cane down on her desk and picked up my copy of the Bible, which one of the teachers had shown to her in
distress. Holding it out in front of me, she flipped through the pages she’d bookmarked, each defaced with a single sentence.
Their “love” for you is conditional.
“For years, the teachers warned me that your apathy had devolved into something quite alarming,” Sass said. “Devilish, even.
At first, I thought you were simply slow to adjust to environments, but this.” She flipped to another defaced page. The same
words in ink tore through the page, defiling the beatitudes. “Do you have no respect for the word of God?”
Sass said this with the fury of a British missionary staring down at the empty eyes of a child who should have been more moldable than this.
“ Their ‘love’ for you is conditional . What does this mean?” Sass slammed my Bible onto her desk next to her cane, which clattered expectantly. Waiting. “Shall I tell the Queen that her goddaughter has been spending her days in school mocking the Church?”
“Tell the Queen?” My smirk was chilling, though I wasn’t sure when it had become so. “I see teaching the Queen’s African goddaughter
for a few years has given you delusions of your importance. That you think the Queen would even bother to read the letters
of a bottom-feeder schoolmarm like you—”
And as I devolved into laughter I felt the hot sting of a second whack. A third. A fourth. I clenched my teeth and squeezed
my eyes shut, but the fifth ripped my lips apart as I gasped for air. I wasn’t allowed to wipe the tears of pain dripping
down my cheek. But I wouldn’t do it anyway. I’d promised Ade that I wouldn’t give anything of myself, least of all my heart.
They didn’t deserve it.
Their “love” for you is conditional.
Ade’s last words were all I had left of him now. They were true then and even truer now. Miss Sass’s cane caught me around
my neck and lashed me around the eye. The other teachers would explain it away like they did all the other bruises. Each wound
was a lesson, Sass had told me once. Another brick laid for the foundation of my rearing into the good God-fearing woman and
wife I was destined to be.
I spent the rest of the morning in my dorm, lying on the floor bloodied while the other students were in their lessons listening
to Bach. For a moment, my heart convulsed and I thought it would stop. I held my breath and felt it thump wildly against my
chest.
I thought of Ade, too sick to fight his way to the ocean’s surface. How terrified he must have been when he felt the beating
of his heart grow more frantic, knowing there was no air to calm it. Knowing that the pain wouldn’t end until he was dead.
I held my breath so I could understand his suffering, and not for the first time. I kept my lips pressed shut so I could feel his fear as acutely as if it were my own. I held it until I passed out. Until my body couldn’t take it.
There were only a couple of dozen students being educated at the Female Institution. It wasn’t difficult to devise a plan
to get them out of the dorms.
“Samuel Crowther is here preaching in Freetown! Yes, that Samuel Crowther! Miss Sass has given us the day off. Let’s show initiative by attending his sermon!” I shouted to them.
Most of them had been terrorized into asking no questions.
I waited until the school was empty. All the teachers had gone home to their children.
That night, the Female Institution burned down.
One of Sass’s cigars had done the trick. As a missionary and especially as a woman, she would never admit publicly to using
one. Well, she would have to now. Especially when she’d have to explain to her superiors at the Church Missionary Society
why she’d left a cigar lit upon one of her students’ open Bibles. How sickening, how very despicable that her carelessness
had caused such an exorbitant loss of property and money.
Nobody had died in the fire. I wasn’t a killer. Not yet.
All the lessons I had learned from the Bible had told me that I should have been wracked with guilt. Every novel I read had
morals in it. The heroes and heroines always learned something. And if they did something bad, they would be struggling with
their demons, unable to hide from what they’d done. My brain whispered to me in English: this should and would become my lifelong
trauma. But that’s not what I felt in that moment.
The relief that washed over me as I saw the building burn from afar made me feel as if Ade was thanking me in a way. The flames
represented a rage I could no longer express to the outside world behind the cold mask they had beaten into me.
Sass’s life was ruined. She was stripped of her title as superintendent. Kicked out of the missionary fold. Her reputation in tatters.
A few days later, I wrote a letter to Queen Victoria telling her that I was unhappy in Freetown and wished to return home
to her, and the Crown granted my wish.
That was truly the beginning. I embraced the pain—realized it needn’t be my enemy, but my guide.
If Queen Victoria was curious to know the truth about what had happened to the school, she’d learn soon enough—the truth I’d
learned while educated by the missionaries: that cruelty was the point and the method. And I would need to be even crueler
if I was going to send my uncle George to hell.