'I think I do,' Havzhiva said. After a while he said, 'I was born in a town called Stse.'
He told her about the pueblo, about the Other Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his mother the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about changing being; he told her about the historian's visit, and how he had changed being again, going to Kathhad.
'All those rules!' Yeron said. 'So complicated
and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran
away.'
'All I did was go team in Kathhad what I wouldn't learn in Stse,' he said, smiling. 'What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology.
What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules — a pattern that makes sense?' He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, 'I'm drunk. Come for a walk with me.'
They went out into the sunny gardens of the compound and walked slowly along the paths between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva's arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to hers.
'When you have to sit still, you want to fly,' he said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate hand on his arm. 'If you have to fly, you want to sit still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with the historians. But I still couldn't keep my balance.'
-a 193 a-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
'Then you came here,' she said.
'Then I came here.'
'And learned?'
'How to walk,' he said. 'How to walk with my people.'
a 194
A Woman's Liberation
GCa
1. Shomeke
My dear friend has asked me to write the story of my life, thinking it might be of interest to people of other worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman, but I have lived in years of mighty changes and have been advantaged to know with my very flesh the nature of servitude and the nature of freedom.
I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the faults of my narrative.
I was born a slave on the planet Werel. As a child I was called Shomekes' Radosse Rakam. That is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye. The Shomeke family owned an estate on the eastern coast of Voe Deo.
Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the Lord God. The Shomekes possessed over four hundred TAs> 195 i-'®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
assets, mostly used to cultivate the fields of gede, to herd the saltgrass cattle, to work in the mills, and as domestics in the House. The Shomeke family had been great in history. Our Owner was an important man politically, often away in the capital.
Assets took their name from their grandmother because it was the grandmother that raised the child. The mother worked all day, and there was no father. Women were always bred to more than one man- Even if a man knew his child he could not care for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time. Young men were seldom kept long on the estates. If they were valuable, they were traded to other estates or sold to the factories. If they were worthless, they were worked to death.
Women were not often sold. The young ones were kept for work and breeding, the old ones to raise the young and keep the compound in order.
On some estates women bore a baby a year till they died, but on ours most had only two or three children. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They did not want the men always getting at the women. The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded the young women closely.
I say men, women, children, but you are to understand that we were not called men, women, children. Only our owners were called so. We assets or slaves were called bondsmen, bondswomen, and pups or young. I will use those words, though I have not heard or spoken them for many years, and never before on this blessed world.
The bondsmen's part of the compound, the gateside, was ruled by the Bosses, who were men. some relations of the Shomeke family, others hired
a 196 a
A Woman's Liberation
by them. On the inside the young and the bondswomen lived. There two cutfrees, castrated bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grandmothers ruled. Indeed nothing in the compound happened without the grandmothers' knowledge.
If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to work, the Bosses would let that one stay home. Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman from being sold away, sometimes they could protect a girl from being bred by more than one man, or could give a delicate girl a contraceptive. Everybody in the compound obeyed the council of the grandmothers. But if one of them went too far, the Bosses would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut off. When I was a young child, there lived in our compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother, who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I thought that she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my grandmother Dosse's tongue would wither in her mouth. I told her that. She sai4, 'No. It won't get any shorter, because I don't let it get too long.'
I lived in the compound. My mother birthed me there, and was allowed to stay three months to
nurse me; then I was weaned to cow's milk, and my mother returned to the House. Her name was Shomekes' Rayowa Yowa. She was light-skinned like most of the assets, but very beautiful, with slender wrists and ankles and delicate features. My grandmother, too, was light, but I was dark, darker than anybody else in the compound.
My mother came to visit, the cutfrees letting her in by their ladder-door. She found me rubbing grey dust on my body. When she scolded me, 1 told her that I wanted to look like the others.
:a-.s 197 a»®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
'Listen, Rakam,' she said to me, 'they are dust people. They'll never get out of the dust. You're something better. And you will be beautiful. Why do you think you're so black?' I had no idea what she meant. 'Someday I'll tell you who your father is,' she said, as if she were promising me a gift. I knew that the Shomekes' stallion, a prized and valuable animal, serviced mares from other estates. I did not know a father could be human.
That evening I boasted to my grandmother:
'I'm beautiful because the black stallion is my father'' Dosse struck me across the head so that I fell down and wept. She said, 'Never speak of your father.'
I knew there was anger between my mother and my grandmother, but it was a long time before I understood why. Even now I am not sure I understand all that lay between them.
We little pups ran around in the compound. We knew nothing outside the walls. All our world was the bondswomen's huts and the bondsmen's long-houses, the kitchens and kitchen gardens, the bare plaza beaten hard by bare feet- To me, the stockade wall seemed a long way off.
When the field and mill hands went out the gate in the early morning I didn't know where they went. They were just gone. AH day long the whole compound belonged to us pups, naked in the summer, mostly naked in the winter too, running around playing with sticks and stones and mud, keeping away from the grandmothers, until we begged them for something to eat or they put us to work weeding the gardens for a while.
In the evening or the early night the workers eA-a 198 A-s A Woman's Liberation
would come back, trooping in the gate guarded by the Bosses. Some were worn out and grim, others would be cheerful and talking and calling back and forth. The great gate was slammed behind the last of them. Smoke went up from all the cooking stoves. The burning cowdung smelled sweet. People gathered on the porches of the huts and longhouses. Bondsmen and bondswomen lingered at the ditch that divided the gateside from the inside,
