Enslaved

February 17 1662

My Dearest Efuru,

           

I know that you will never receive this letter, and if by some miracle you do, you probably wouldn’t be able to read it because I’m writing in the native language of the settlers in this new world. I have been able to learn the language by using a guile plan that I came up with. Once a week when my master and his family are all asleep, I creep into their house in the dark of night and secretly take the little boy’s English homework. I study it for hours on end and finally before the cover of night fades away and the little boy wakes up, I return the papers to his bag and go back to my living quarters. I know that if I were to ever get caught my hateful master would gruesomely beat me.

It’s been almost seven years now since that tragic day when the white men came and took me from our house. It is imperative that I know how my child is doing. It breaks my heart that they took me away before I ever got to know him. I hope that he will make a great warrior and someday take my place as a strong leader of our tribe.

            I was taken to the new world on an unsanitary ship that was even disgraceful for slaves. We were forced to row for hours on end, and if we let out a word of complaint we would be starved for days. They wouldn’t dare beat us because they wanted to keep us strong so they could sell us for more money. If I had my old disposition I would have fought back, but now that I am a slave, I follow the orders of my masters. I was brought to a colony in the south, which I think is called North Carolina.

            I was sold to an older man by the name of Mr. Johnson. He has a family of 5, and 12 other slaves to work his cotton farm. Ginning cotton is hard work, and when a spontaneous strain of small pox pervaded throughout the plantation, 5 of the slaves died and work was almost doubled.

            I highly doubt I’ll ever see your precious, loving face again. But as I stare up into the sky while writing this message, I see the stars and I know that you are at the other end looking up at the same stars. I will never give up hope of seeing you again.

                                                Love,

                                                         Kweku  

Vulture Eye

I grimaced. The scream was short, electrifying; it lasted no more than a few seconds. But that’s all it took. I knew it instantly. It came from the old mans house right across the street. I had been weary of that house ever since the mad man went to work there. I had once known the mad man. He was a very nice man, of course that was before he went mad.

            He was a young man by the name of Alexander Johnson. He was a tall, handsome, gingerly man, until it happened. Alexander was working for me at the time. Although he knew he would always be poor he wouldn’t complain. He took on a job just to help his mother; everything he did was for his mother. His mother was a generous, kind woman. But she was poor and no matter what she did she could never get out of debt. She endeavored that by the time Alexander graduated from high school she would be out of enough debt to send him to college. Unfortunately she would never live to see him off to college. One day she had gone to the bank, which the old man had owned, to apply for another loan. The old man told her that if she did not pay off her debt bad things would happen. She wasn’t able to repay her debt, and 10 days later she was found dehydrated, dead in a shack outside of town clad in bloody sheets. Though no one could corroborate that it was the old man who had done it, everyone knew that it was he who had committed the foul crime.

            Alexander was never the same. He went to the old man’s house one night and had screamed at him in an abrasive tone until he had no voice left. Next he gruesomely drove a stick into the old man’s eye, knowing that that very eye that had witnessed his mother death. It blinding him forever, leaving the old man with a vulture eye. Alexander would wake up at night screaming for his life. I took inventory of how many times he did this and on the tenth time I succumbed to the idea that I would have to fire him. It was a hard thing to do; of course it wasn’t his fault. I just couldn’t live with a mad man in my house.

            Now, three years later Alexander had secretly changed his identity to evade the police (I only happen to know this because I had accidentally happened to stumble upon some forged documents he had in his room and had given them a cursory glance). He also was able to get a job with the old man as his assistant. I could sense he had a gruesome plan, but I felt pity on the boy after his mother died, so I decided not to turn him in. But the second I heard the scream I surmised that it was the young man getting revenge on the man’s eye that reminded him of his mother’s death. I simulated the death in my head as I lay awake. Maybe he crept up on him in the pitch dark of night and stabbed him brutally. But I knew he wouldn’t have; the man might have been mad, but he wasn’t an idiot. He would know not to leave a trail of blood. I rapidly phoned the police and concisely told them of what I surmised might have occurred. When I spoke to the police as they were leaving the house, I derived information about what happened inside the house. I was told how when the police went in to investigate they initially found nothing, but after a while the man went mad and showed them were he had stashed the suffocated body under some loose planks.

 I was told that the death penalty awaited him in the coming months. I was sad to hear of this, but I decided that he had committed a crime worthy of death. A heartless judge wouldn’t care to hear of the troubles this young man had been through that led to such an atrocity. I guess the young man would die happy knowing he had avenged his mother’s death.