The wind rises, p.27
The Wind Rises, page 27
“Won’t you sing?”
Nao opens her eyes. The little man has a loud, deep voice that doesn’t match his body.
“Listen to them,” he says.
The captives’ drumming rising towards them despite the roar of the wind.
“I think they’re calling you, little cousin.”
Three claps of thunder ring out, one after the other. On the men’s side, the rolling waves make the bodies slide, pulling on the chains, lacerating the skin. But the captives manage to keep time. At the stern of the ship, the women cling to the wooden pillars. Others, exhausted with seasickness, roll on top of each other, no longer resisting.
A man has begun to sing.
They’re listening to him in their hundreds.
“This time, I’m going to crush them!” cries Absalom, jumping from his hammock.
The singing voice is more powerful than anything that might fall upon the ship, whether wind, water, lightning, or fire. It’s even more powerful than the captives’ drumming. Heavy silences punctuate the phrases. They stop time, making you desperate for more.
“It’s coming from the rowboat!” shouts one sailor. Lanterns begin to appear across the deck.
The surgeon is the first to arrive. He lifts a corner of the canvas and plunges his lamp into the rowboat. He freezes. Those aren’t silences between the phrases; they’re verses that the pregnant woman is weakly singing from under the bench. She’s started singing again, her voice more bewitching than ever. And each time she pauses to catch her breath, the little man above carries her song with all his strength into the night.
“What is it?” asks Absalom, standing by the rowboat.
“It’s Adam.”
When the woman starts singing again, even the boatswain shivers a little as he listens to her.
“This one always sings at night,” says the surgeon. “It’s not usually bothersome. You can barely hear it.”
Clearly the surgeon isn’t too bothered by her singing, seeing as he always comes to sit right next to the boat. He stays to listen to her almost every night. When he gets up, icy sweat runs down his back, making his shirt stick to him.
“She doesn’t disturb anyone,” he repeats, feigning indifference. “But this one, Adam . . .”
The man they call Adam looks at them without stopping.
Absalom cracks his whip. His arm gains momentum, and he throws the cat o’ nine tails over his shoulder to strengthen the blow. But a hand grabs his wrist in mid-air.
Captain Gardel snatches the whip from him. His shirt is open, his ponytail in disarray. Absalom looks up at him, lost.
“I wasn’t going to touch the woman,” he says. “I know she’s yours. I was going to give the one who’s singing a good hiding.”
The captain plays with the whip between his hands.
The two captives continue to take turns singing. Nao’s eyes are still closed. The one the whites call Adam starts smiling again. The rowboat’s other occupants listen with bated breath.
“Don’t you want me to punish him?” asks Absalom.
“Haven’t you noticed something?” says Gardel through gritted teeth.
“No.”
“Below? Listen, you rapscallion! Listen!” he yells.
Other sailors begin to arrive on deck. They’re all listening. When the woman sings, they can’t help but listen.
“Well?” says Gardel. “Haven’t you noticed anything?”
When Nao pauses, their brains kick into action again.
“The noise!” cries one of the sailors. “Listen!”
Below deck, the drumming has stopped. The lower deck is silent.
“Let them sing,” whispers the captain. “I’d rather have two of them singing than six hundred of them cutting us to pieces.”
It didn’t take long for the captives to organise. On the women’s side, behind the men’s partition and the new wooden grating of the ship’s store, a few captives have been designated as messengers. They listen to the one the whites call Adam. Then they relay the sound of his voice. They’re singing for those around them. Others spread the words even further into the bowels of the ship, repeating them and translating them into all the different languages they know: Mandinka, Fula, Kikongo, Akan . . . Their words reach everyone from the Igbo women in the ship’s magazine to the men lined up along the floorboards, huddled beneath the scaffolding Dubois built in the steerage.
At first, Nao was singing to get their attention. She wasn’t telling them anything in particular, just preparing for the moment when she would have them all in the palm of her hand. Now she’s speaking to them directly:
Listen to me, you who weep,
In this forest made of wood and iron.
She likens her song to a canoe in a flood. She describes how her voice is kept afloat on a stream of tears. When she speaks of the branches that hang low over the river, all the captives look up at the ceiling of the steerage and see vines and birds appear in the darkness above their heads.
I give you courage, you who are weary.
As the boat drifts in silence, my song you will hear.
The sailors can’t help but listen.
“What’s she saying?” asks one sailor.
“Shh!”
The storm continues to rage, but alone in his quarters, all Gardel hears is the newly restored calm beneath his feet.
For a long time, Nao continues to cast her spell. Her song reaches the ears of those who no longer wanted to hear, wakes those who were sleeping, those who had given up on everything.
You may have given up on life, but life does not give up on you.
Memory is our solid ground. Listen.
These words, repeated over and over, spill from the rowboat and gradually slip between the beams, spreading their way through the ship. They linger in the darkness like starlight before they hit the ground.
They come without warning. Nobody realises the words are spinning a story. Then shadows begin to stir. And the story begins. The song is the tale of a unique people. A flourishing population of many, who all lived in freedom.
The Okos.
Freedom is what gives them life; without it, they will die.
Freedom is what cultivates the gifts within them, just as trees can grow as tall as the sky if they aren’t chopped down. Freedom becomes the air they breathe.
In a low voice, from the bottom of the boat, Nao sings the word “freedom.”
And the word in her language is alma.
She sings of the Okos’ sophistication, their beautiful gardens, their powerful doctors and griots, their brave warriors. Her people bear the same name as the birds that have always lived among them: okos, little emerald hummingbirds with silver beaks. The birds flock around the roofs of their houses, to the yellow flowers of their acacias.
They never leave the Oko people.
All night long, Nao’s song braves the storm, stifles the creaking of the ship, silences the cries and sobs. Slowly, it brings Alma back to life. The spirited, heart-wrenching song tells of damp clothes hanging at the entrances of houses high in the trees, hummingbirds gathering in clusters to drink, the births, the kidnappings, the looting. Life and flight are closely intertwined in the history of the Okos.
Whenever danger strikes in their surroundings, their freedom is at stake. The Okos are now hunted like all the other peoples. They’ve fled deeper into the land, further up the river.
An Oko who is caught will inevitably die. Not right away. They can survive in irons for as long as they still remember freedom. But the moment hope takes flight, their strength will desert them. They close their eyes. Okos, like hummingbirds, die when the cold strikes, when the night comes, when there are no more flowers. They fall into a state of inertia. Their heartbeat slows. They are no longer truly alive.
Little by little, the number of Okos dwindles, until they are fewer than a scattering of lentils in a bowl, then a sprinkling in the palm of a child’s hand . . .
. . . And now, if the last of the Oko were lentils, those lentils could fit on a fingertip.
And so, to avoid being captured, the Oko people make themselves invisible. They vanish into the forests.
Each time Nao stops singing and those carrying her voice fall silent, the ship seems to hover above the water for just a few moments. Catching her breath, she begins again. She sings of a people who are dying out, who decide they must preserve their memory.
Hunting, healing, growth, song, and war.
The five gifts of the Oko people.
All the knowledge of the Oko people is shared among the survivors. Each of them is born with one of these gifts so that they’ll never be lost.
Hunting, growing, healing, singing, or fighting. Every Oko has one of these powers within them.
The cloud of hummingbirds followed them deeper inland, crossing forests and nesting in the trees where the Okos built their homes, having found a common remedy for their shared fragility: secrecy and freedom.
“Who’s singing?” Alma asks feebly when the first night comes to an end.
The singing coming from the rowboat has stopped. Alma can’t open her eyes, but they’re flooded with tears. She’d never heard this story before, but she recognises the word “Okos.”
“Tell me who’s singing.”
45
The Middle of the Night
For the next two nights, the singing resumes, following long days of silence. Nao is sacrificing the last of her strength. The captives are coming back to life. Water flows in through the portholes during the storm, invading their prison, but Nao’s song protects them. It shelters them from everything.
Almost everyone aboard had already heard of the Okos. The drums of the Ibibio people tell their story. The Fante and the griots of the Oyo Empire, too. But now, as they listen to the song spilling over the edges of the rowboat, they begin to hear something of their own history—of the dangerous world they, too, grew up in.
During the daytime, the captives are silent, as though their lives depended on the coming night.
Memory must fight to survive. It must rise up, it must grow.
The fewer Okos remain, the more powerful their gifts become. Their hunters hunt like no one else can. Their healers can heal from afar. Their gardeners can make a garden grow up in the tops of the trees, on trellises of hemp or peat. The fire of persecution has concentrated the age-old spirit of the Okos. Their memory is becoming distilled, condensed like a potent liquid.
But the more powerful their gifts become, the more desirable they are to slave traders. From northern Virginia to the south of Brazil, a single Oko can be sold for the price of a cart holding ten captives.
Nao’s story becomes one of escape, choreographed to the rhythm of the hunters’ footsteps. Because it’s not only slave traders hunting the Okos. Each group, each village has to buy its own survival by handing over neighbouring peoples. Relationships are distorted and damaged. The slave trade has poisoned the entire continent.
Then came the day when just seven remained.
Four men, two women, and a young girl. They arrive at the source of a river, having roamed far and wide. They pitch their final camp in the heights of the forest, where the roots of the tall trees bathe in spring water.
What the Oko people don’t realise is that the innocent little birds that follow them will lead to their demise. As the seven fugitives pass from tree to tree without touching the ground to avoid leaving tracks, their birds venture high into the sky and swoop down into the clearings to drink from the lobelia and hibiscus. A manhunter is watching them. He’s worked out the link. To track down the survivors, all he has to do is follow the flight of the birds to their feast of flowers.
The hunter has two pistols strapped to his belt, a black coat on his back and a gold-rimmed hat on his head. He’s the most ruthless of them all. He’s the son of Fante fishermen but he eats at the forts on the coast, at the white men’s tables.
His men follow him. They surround the last camp in the middle of the flooded forest.
Four Okos are killed. Two more are captured.
The young girl is the only one who manages to escape. She continues to make her way through the branches.
The hunter pursues her, cutting through the black water below. He’s lost his men, who are still struggling to wade through the mud. Some stay behind to guard the captives.
There she goes, up in the trees, a cloud of green birds all around.
It’s as though there’s not a soul left in the steerage of The Sweet Amelie. Their souls are flying in a cloud of birds surrounding the fugitive girl. Their souls smell the hunter advancing behind them. But nobody can predict what will happen next. No drum has ever sung this part of the Oko story. It’s a secret only two people on earth know: Nao and Mosi, Alma’s parents.
The song doesn’t mention their names, but it’s about them.
Nao is standing face to face with Mosi. The water reaches up to her waist.
Moments before, Mosi fired a shot into the air. Nao, hit by his bullet, tumbled down from the branches. The birds dispersed into the sky.
Nao tries to stand up despite her injured foot and the mud sucking her into the swamp. Mosi turns his other pistol on her. His men have heard the shot. They’re calling him from afar.
The hunter moves closer to her.
“Don’t move.”
He thinks it’s all over.
Lightning hits the deck of The Sweet Amelie. Light radiates from the tip of each mast and yardarm. The boatswains up in the shrouds watch on as the masts are lit up with Saint Elmo’s fire, a phenomenon that occurs on ships, making them look as though they’re on fire—or perhaps inhabited by spirits. There’s a clap of thunder, and a fresh bolt of lightning tears through the sky. For a few seconds, Nao’s song is lost in the commotion of the storm.
Nobody can hear what’s happening between Nao and Mosi at the spring in the forest. But when the voice of the little old man in the rowboat resounds through the ship once more, it describes the hunter cutting through the swamps with the girl on his back. The voices of the other hunters echo through the forest. But Mosi isn’t heading towards them. He can feel the girl’s chin resting on his shoulder, her cheek against his ear. She has her arms around his neck. He’s holding her bleeding foot in his hand. He’s running away with her.
Little crocodiles watch on lazily as they pass by. Their eyes float on the surface like the buds of water lilies. But behind them, the hunters are losing their minds. They’re shouting their leader’s name. They’re calling him. If he doesn’t answer, he must be dead. They’ll avenge him, they’ll follow the girl to the desert if they have to, spill the last drop of Oko blood.
It’s midnight on the third night. Alma is listening to the story of her people. In a few moments, she’ll recognise the two fugitives. She’ll hear how they walk for many days and nights, until the arrival of the monsoon, how they cling together beneath a waterfall, how they make a boat from the trunk of a kapok tree, how they cross a ravine between cliffs and fall asleep in a cave with their canoe.
How they wake up under the watchful eye of a leopard to discover that they’ve arrived in a valley protected from everything.
The little old man’s voice falls silent as always after each verse, but this time the silence lasts a little longer than usual. For a few seconds, the captives in the steerage don’t think anything of it. The final echoes of their voices reverberate through the ship. They breathe slowly so that the silence won’t feel as long. They clear their throats. They wait. But nothing comes.
It’s over. But it’s only the middle of the night.
Up in the rowboat, the little old man reaches down to take Nao’s hand. He can see she can’t take any more. Nao is cradling her belly with one arm.
“Rest, little cousin. But stay with us. I’ll hold on to you so you don’t slip away.”
The man the whites call Adam feels very old. He’d like to be the one to go, to take her place. All he asks of her is that she hold his hand. He’ll hold her if she falls. Or he’ll go with her.
He feels the woman’s pulse beating between his fingers. But something else is beating, too.
The captives have started drumming again. They’re calling out.
They’re waiting. They’ve been left hovering above a valley, at the gates of paradise.
Up in the sky, there’s a head striking rhythmically against the mainmast.
He’s starving, his back lacerated, and he holds his mouth open to catch raindrops on his tongue. But the giant with the severed ear is waiting, too. For the two and a half nights he’s spent tied to the mast, the song of the Okos has kept him going.
He’s listening.
In the ship below, another voice has just resumed the song, silencing the captives’ drumming once again.
The voice tells of a valley, of the lines of elephants dotted in the distance, of the wind making ripples in the grass, the sound of insects, the swaying giraffes. It tells of the birth of children, the passing of moons, the generous rains, the sun. It tells of a zebra with no stripes, and a little boy who runs away.
“Who’s singing?” asks Nao.
“We don’t know,” replies the little old man.
