Blonde Roots Read Online Free PDF Page A

ran all day, all night, and for several miles down the litter-strewn thoroughfare of m’ Aiduru Valley, another rich enclave of chiefs and their sprawling compounds. The valley had a canal running through it that the residents used for an elite form of energy-efficient transport: slave-powered dug-out canoes. In this way they avoided the crowds and the red laterite soil of the market, which sprayed dust onto their clothes when dry and sank their feet into its mucky gunk when wet.
    I feigned a mild interest in the stalls as I passed, to appear as if I was out running an errand for my master, my head held high, basket on top, hands dangling. Yet to walk too upright and proud was deemed a sign of uppityness. It was a fine balance to tread: inner dignity versus survival instincts. I needn’t have worried because the only thing on the traders’ minds was whether you were likely to buy, and if so how much they could unreasonably charge, at which point you were expected to haggle, to endure a battle of wits and willpower.
    I passed overripe melons on stalls, their heads cleaved open, putridly sweet, cerise juice oozing out. They lolled like the heads of runaways who hadn’t made it, black seed eyes staring spookily up at me.
    I passed a gunsmith at work, an anvil placed between legs spread out on the ground.
    Salesmen from the Cotton Marketing Board sold baskets of raw white cotton so seductive I resisted the urge to plunge my hands into the thick foamy softness.
    I looked up just as a street seller thrust a fistful of four squirming, dying rats into my face. In his other hand were sachets of rat poison.
    A tall, wiry young man was speed-walking toward me, balancing on his head a plank of wood some four feet long. I ducked under just in time.
    Puffed-up matrons, walking off their feasts before resuming festivities later, pushed past me, their haughty faces marked with chalk and camwood, their thighs rubbing together like smacking lips.
    Spiced chicken roasting on a spit almost made me faint with hunger as my revved-up adrenaline had by now burned up every ounce of carbohydrate from my last meal.
    There were pyramids of red coffee beans, bowls of pink grapefruits, bolts of multicolored waxed cloth, decorated bed-boards, carved tip-stools.
    Hard green bananas, still on the stem, looked like bunches of upturned fingers.
    Desert salt looked like cakes of packed mud.
    Many of the market traders were immigrants from North Aphrika and the Lands of the Arabian Sands, some of whom had been instrumental in the slave trade—the Business. They came to Slavery HQ with the most impressive CVs detailing their brilliant horsemanship and exemplary skills at raiding villages and kidnapping Europane women and children into slavery. Some had been pirates, enslaving those Europane fishermen or seamen unlucky enough to be sailing the high seas at the wrong time. Unfortunately these Arabian immigrants soon found that their well-honed skills were pretty redundant in the UK, where the task of slavery was somewhat more managerial.
    Among the crowds were also the regular impoverished masses of the city, the Ambossan working classes who found work when they could and wore scraps of material so flimsy they came apart as easily as spiders’ webs. Such poverty had surprised me when I first arrived. Poor blaks in Great Ambossa? But it was true.
    I was even more astonished to discover that in earlier times Ambossans themselves had been sent to labor in the sugarcane fields on the islands, alongside us whytes. Some were indentured servants; others had been kidnapped as slaves.
    The Europane was considered better suited to the job in hand, though.
    Weren’ t we the lucky ones?
    The Ambossan poor wandered the streets on feast days, had little reason to celebrate and needed no excuse to escape from their cardboard shacks in the shantytowns of Harlesdene in the north, Poplarare in the east, Pe Khama in the south or Goatsherd Bush in the west.
    Their gamine