Blonde Roots Read Online Free PDF

children were bug-eyed with chiseled cheekbones, slack lips, sunken chests, bony hips and spindly heron’s legs.
    They wouldn’t bother me. Indeed it was a little-known fact that some of the Ambossan working class were active in the Resistance, united with us in the fight against the ruling class.
    Yet others were less sympathetic, shouting out “Wigger, go home! You’re taking our jobs!” from the other side of the road, even pelting us with rocks.
     
     
    THE THOROUGHFARE WAS LITTERED with discarded pecan-nut shells, coconut kernels, bacon rind, tobacco butts, mongoose and antelope droppings, used condoms made of pig gut and the rest of the ordinary debris of city life.
    I tried to walk quickly without appearing to. I had twenty minutes left to get to Paddinto Station, and it was going well until I came upon five or six whyte men with raggedy beards and scabrous chests. As they were playing dominoes underneath a baobab tree at night, they were obviously free men, and I could see that they had the feral awareness of most free whytes, alert to their surroundings, ready to slip out of view down a passage or get lost in a crowd to avoid confrontation or danger. As I suspected they would, they all looked up. (Whytes always clocked one another when out and about. It was a minority-awareness thing.) I tried hard not to panic, but the parameters of my life were suddenly changing. I was in no-man’ s-land: I was escaping slavery and walking toward freedom, but I had not yet arrived. Of one thing I was now sure: when I left my master’s compound, I had lost his protection, which meant I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen the men, as usual. For those of us who were still enslaved, the small communities of free ones were either objects of pity (many were desperate scavengers) or envy.
    This surprised me too when I had first arrived in Great Ambossa. That those slaves who were freed, for one reason or another, could remain in the country, although many Ambossans lobbied to get them kicked out.
    The free whytes were mainly consigned to living in squalor in communal tents in tumbledown ghettos on the outskirts of the large cities, derisively referred to by the rich Ambossans as the “Vanilla Suburbs,” quite distinct from the far superior coco-palmed avenues of their own “Chocolate Cities.”
     
     
    WE HEARD THAT IN THE BURBS you could buy the traditional costume of many nations such as sporrans, knickerbockers, leather jerkins, peasant skirts, metal helmets with horns, chain-mail tunics, boleros, trailing gowns with fur collars, bodices that reduced your waist to eighteen inches and bustles that expanded your hips to a hefty size eighty.
    In the Burbs there were hooch and grog dens, madrigal boy bands, recorder recitals and even civil rights protest singers. And there were also tambourine-bashing, tongue-speaking underground temples that syncretized Christianity with Voodoo.
    There were also whyte hairdressers who sold thin-toothed combs for our unmanageable, flyaway fine hair. In the Burbs you rarely saw a free whyte with natural hair. They wore the perms, twists and braids of Ambossan women, although Aphros were most in demand. The hairdressers used kinky Aphrikan hair on the Burbite women, who had their own fine hair chopped off and these bushy pieces sewn onto them so that the effect was (un)naturally Aphrikan. It took up to ten hours and when the blonde, red, brown or straight roots came through it looked just plain tacky, apparently.
    Our men used to joke that if you ran your fingers through a whyte woman’s hair, chance was it would come off in your hands. You’d see clumps of kinky hair littering the streets like black sheep’s wool.
    In the Burbs, tanning was all the rage too, and you could get a nose-flattening job done quite cheaply, we heard, although I always thought that flat, fat nostrils on whyte faces looked ridiculous. The very thought of a mallet smashing down on my nose was just too scary for