SOUKOU: The Book Of No Mercy
THE BLOOD GIVER TREE
You are going to kill us all.
You don't remember what we are about.
You have forgotten your purpose.
Why? Why would you do such a thing? What makes you think we want to change what we are?
He hates himself. That's why he is doing what he is doing. He hates us all.
No one thought to ask: 'How did you do it? How does it grow?' No one thought to acknowledge, 'This is a miracle.'
He would not have had the answer anyway. He couldn't really remember. He had taken no notes on what he had done.
'The new specimens are more promising. The zoological specimens are mature enough to splice into the botanical specimens. The hybrid is emerging from the dicotyledon with mainly botanical features. However, there seems to be a network of red (and to a lesser extent, bluish) fluids running through the light green saplings.'
Matthias was already working as a doctor when the idea came to him. That was, maybe, about 130 years ago. In the midst of a plague of worms and cholera, there was an increase of miscarriages and abortions. It was hard to find healthy specimens, even among women who were feigning miscarriages in the hopes of not having to carry a baby through the plague and famine ridden world.
However, his first batch of experiments yielded results he never could have dreamed of. The splicing had delivered thoughtful, telepathic breadfruit and tamarinds that sang in chorus and choir, without words, but with clear, unmistakable prepubescent voices. The papaya made sounds like children eating playfully: 'Nyum nyum, nyum, nyum!' all day and all night; and oranges, grapefruit and limes who chattered non-stop until they fell asleep, snoring and whistling through their 'nostrils.'
And they all smelled like good, healthy, rich living blood. It was when he came to the mango that he realized what he had done. The mango as quiet, silent, like a fruit, even though through its translucent skin you could see the seed sleeping like a fetus in the red glowing juice of the fruit.
The mango tree was as silent as its fruit. They were, unlike the other genii, essentially fruit. The other fruits were not. They were people.
He picked a breadfruit. He was startled when it cried out in pain. He cut it open and it screamed and gasped while the others, in the tree, looking down, mumbled and moaned, while they witnessed the murder, helplessly. Even though it was night, he could see, for the first time, he could see their faces. They all had faces. Human faces. Men, women, but mostly children.
All those years he had spent trying to teach plants to grow blood were wasted. Instead of simply making blood for sap, the plants had learnt how to be human. They were sentient. There was no doubt. They were no longer plants. They were, in fact, more than animal.
He licked the red milk of the breadfruit, where the white sap should bleed.
'Blouwa!!!'
He spat. No one could consume this, not even in the worst of times. It tasted like breadfruit sap, except rich and rotten and sick. The breadfruit continued gasping, pleading in its own way for life, not wanting to die. He cut the breadfruit again in four pieces, put it in water and buried it in a hole in the earth.
The rest of them....
He delayed as long as he could, but there was only one answer for his mistake. He armed himself with blades - an ax and a cutlass - and chopped it all down and burned it.
Except for the silent mango. And the buried breadfruit, in the warm, dark womb of the earth mother.
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF A BREADFRUIT TREE
The mango tree may have turned away from the horror and blocked the unhappy business from its mind.
But the breadfruit tree remembered everything.
Everything she could not see and hear, the ground told her, so vividly that she could see the screams and hear the twisting of wood in the flame, taste the wood turning to charcoal turning to ash. She could see the merciless ax swinging, shimmering in the moonlight. She could not see the man. The man was black now. Blacker than the night full of clouds. The man was thunder and his ax was lightning. It was murder. It was massacre. It was genocide. There would be no more such as them on the face of all the earth. It was genocide, but also, it was not, because the man was god. He had given them life and now, their mad god was taking it away.
The greatest mercy was for those who died that night in the fire. For many days after that, the half-burnt and severely wounded lay whimpering on the ground in heaps the man had made of them. He dug ditches and he buried them under raw wood and set that wood on fire and covered that with burnt dirt and covered that with tinder and set that tinder on fire.
Maybe he gained silence.
But the ground moaned and wept and crept with new strange ghosts for months.
The breadfruit was the first tree to ever have the sense to be afraid of a man. The tree did not want to be born. It wanted to die in the subterranean, sunless womb of its mother. But its mother would not let it die, would not deprive it of salts or water, would not let it become too hot or too cold. And so it was that the tree, haunted to insanity by the ghosts of that lost generation, burst from its mother's belly, eyes half closed for fear of seeing the the face of its father.
The man ignored the sprout and the sprout stayed silent, fearful of provoking him. The man would sit silently for hours. The man would smoke and drink and begin to sing and dance to his own unseen ghosts of the past until he broke down crying - at first, a low, sad sobbing, growing deeper and rougher until it was a grunting, then a roaring rain of rage.
The man would disappear from the house for days and night. The man would come back with a woman and dance with her and drink with her and finally, drink her until she was empty. The man would lay drunk and unconscious, sleeping, cradling the shrunken empty body of the woman. The women.
The man dreamed, but the tree could not dream, only feel the rumblings of it when the man mumbled in his sleep.
'You want what you do not understand.'
The sleeping man would touch his lips with two fingers: 'You want it because they forbid it. And who are they? Who the hell are they? Presumptuous pedestrian plebes, that's who they are.'
The man had promised a woman something. But that was not what he gave her. He gave her the only thing he had to give. He gave her death.
The god of death, the breadfruit tree thought. He is the death god.
The man would awake and put a woman's shrunken carcass in a box. The man would sweep and scrub and clean through the night. The man would take the box away and when he returned, he would sleep for three days and nights.
Then, the man would go out and come back with another woman. And another. And another.
"I can't believe that just happened. So you really are a...I didn't think they were...Are fairies real? Are genies real? Are angels real? You must be the Devil...Do it. Do it to me. I can't resist you. Why can't I resist you. You're the black Devil and you have come to kill me and steal my soul.'
'I want nothing to do with your soul. I only want your body.'
'Oh God. Help me. Why won't God help me? Why can't I resist you? I feel it. I feel it! It's too much! I can't take it! It's too much! Don't stop! It hurts! It hurts! Oh my God, don't ever stop!'
The man was drunken, unconscious, sleeping. The man was putting a woman in a box. The man was standing in front of the young breadfruit tree, barely more than a sapling, looking directly at it.
'You must think I am a monster,' he said. 'Maybe I am. Maybe you are a monster, too. Or maybe, you just don't understand...'
The man stood silently, imprisoned in his thoughts.
'You're right,' he told the young breadfruit tree. 'These women are not the true object of our revenge. It is the men who have to pay...'
Thus it was be brought home men.
Most would have been incapacitated or at least pacified, well deceived by the time he brought them in. There was little conversation. He would break their necks and drink from them while the crippled bodies were still alive.
'I don't like the taste of fear,' he told the tree. 'Maybe that's why I prefer the women. I wish they would leave the homosexuals alone, so they wouldn't have to be so sickly and poxed. But then, the homosexuals are not the target either, are they? That preference does not make or unmake a racist.'
The man killed many men. But instead of oversleeping, he was restless.
'You don't trust me, do you?'
The man moved his chair and table closer to the tree.
'I guess you don't have a choice. I am the god of you.'
The tree and the man had agreed of something. It was good to have something to agree on, since they were stuck together, inseparable until death.
The man went away for many days.
The man came back with many other people, men and women. They danced and sang and ate and drank and talked and fucked. And then, the ones the color of night killed the ones the color of day and feasted on their blood. They all lay in drunken stupor among the exsanguinated corpses.
The cycle repeated. Years flowed by.
The tree grew. Then, one day, it flowered. And the flowers began humming in a high pitch, like a choir of children in a field of sugar cane.
'Be silent,' said their mother. 'Do not let him hear you. Do not let any of them ever hear you. Man is a mad god. He feeds on his own, like a plant that eats its own fruit and seed. Man is only good at killing. Do not do anything that calls his attention. Do not make a sound.'
Every day, the tall young breadfruit tree whispered to her flowers. At night, the flowers stayed silent, except for sometimes cooing in their dreams.
Then, the man was standing in front of the tree.
'I don't want to know,' he said. 'I just do not want to know.'
He clipped the flowers, gathered them, every single one, burnt and buried them. He clipped the top branches of the tree, so it would grow no taller and bear flowers at inconvenient heights. The tree couldn't hold back muffled screams. The man cut the branches, burned and buried them, without giving any sign he had heard a thing. When he was finished, he considered the tree.
'I know you can hear me. I know I'm not crazy.'
The tree wished for a breeze to break the awkward stillness, but the breeze did not come. A cloud covered the moon, then passed, exposing it again.
'You don't have to talk to me. I think you know what I did. I had to do it. They were...they just....things like that should not be. Nature does not intend it. If I had let them live, they would spread. They would not know how to hide. They would not know when to stop. There would be too much fear and chaos. I made a mistake and I had to take it back. I couldn't just let it go out of control.'
The tree held its thoughts tight and close. It wanted to call him a hypocrite. He was the one nature did not intend. He was the one who spread fear and chaos.
'I know. If only there was some dignified way to kill myself. If only I had the means and the courage.'
The tree determined that it would find the courage, build the courage in him. It was the only way to help him. It was the only way to get revenge.
But how would a tree kill a man when it had no poison except its own words?
XUMBI: Blood of My Blood
When Xumbi gave the Gana the poison cup and accepted the throne of Palmares, he knew there was a possibility it would end like this. What he could not know was how much it would hurt. But so many hundreds of miles from the burning ashes of the twin kingdom, with no place to call home, no way to turn back and no possibility of surviving what came next, the once confident young warrior who had, on numerous occasions performed and achieved that which was previously thought impossible, found himself on the edge of a precipice, ready to effect his own defeat.
In a way, he accomplished that task, too.
Xumbi never returned from that long walk through the mountainous jungle. The Xumbi who returned was so different that it was as if all that remained of the former freedom fighter were his physical features, his manner of speaking, his hatred of the slavers and his penchant for doing the impossible in the service of the people of the night.
'Do you want to live for ever?'
No one knows where Xumbi went that day, who he met or what transpired. No one knows and Xumbi never told. He promised to write it all down one day but either he never did or his recollections have been lost, weathered, weakened and finally blown away by the relentless wind, rain and decadence of colonialism.
'The king is dead...long live the king.'
Who can clearly remember the ritual he performed on his return, when by his magic and miracles, he remade his followers, so they were like gods, compared to men?
In this ritual of death and rebirth, he stood at the head of the circle, the wound from the nail in his hand pouring blood. Into the calabash, the blood of new life gathered in a great pool, reflecting the moon. Holding the calabash in his other hand, he gave them to drink as he wrote on their foreheads.
'When we die, we burn in hell for ever. But while we live, they will pay with their blood and their children's blood, with fear and their women's fear.'
He wrote on their foreheads two symbols in blood. The first symbol was the same for each of them. The second symbol was different for each of them. As such, each knew the personal sigils of every other but no one knew the personal sigil written on their own forehead except as much as it was written, not on their skins, but somewhere deeper in their substance.
'By these signs, I bury you and all your life before this. By this blood, I give you life - new life that cannot be taken from you, but can only be forfeited through your own fault and doing.'
It must have occurred to the others that they were partaking in a suicide, a spiritual and symbolic sacrifice that would deny their enemies the final certainty of their deaths. It would give refugees and runaways in the never-ending forest some undying sparks of hope with which to ignite new rage against cruelty and injustice. They probably thought it was one final 'Fuck you' to the masters and their hunters.
Imagine their surprise when they woke from the sleep induced by their sickness.
It was dusk. No telling what day it was.
The red of the sky penetrating their cave was like a furious, belligerent omnipresent flame, consuming everything except their precious shadows. There was confusion from having slept off the sickness through the day and awakening as though it was morning without first remembering what had transpired on the last night they could remember. Then came the disappointment of still being alive, at the failure of not even being able to kill themselves, of still having to pause at every unexpected sound, of still having to fight and run and fight again, repeating the cycle until all involved were inevitably defeated by time itself. Then came the silence, for what could be said to Xumbi after his great ritual had come to nothing.
Then came the night.
Xumbi painted his and their faces white.
He left the cave and they followed. Xumbi turned east at the bottom of the mountain. Xumbi was headed away from the forest, back to the place where they had spent seven years running from. They followed. Perhaps they thought they were now wrong about suicide and their king meant for them to make a symbolic last stand, dying like heroes in a great conflagration that would be seen and sung for generations.
Xumbi walked briskly. He broke into a jog. And then he ran. He was racing through the forest so fast it seemed that his feet were barely touching the ground. Their feet were barely touching the ground. The jungle raced past them and suddenly cleared into an opening that revealed a majestic landscape of blue-green mountain ranges. Xumbi raced into the opening and flung himself. There was no ground beneath him. They followed him without thinking. They had learned to die with Xumbi and he had delivered them alive into the arms of victory so many times. One last death and he would deliver them from the mouth of defeat.
They followed. And they learned that earth could no longer hold them down. They were free. Finally free. From forced labour. From running. From death itself.
He taught them how to feast.
No longer could they feast on the fruits of the earth like men, being, themselves, no longer men. He taught them that the satisfaction of their hunger and thirst was the satisfaction of their purpose. They were, at last, the great revengers they always wanted to be. Fruits were for men and the men who wronged them would be their fruits.
The fruit was so sweet. A new kind of sweet. A sweetness that ordinary men could never learn to savor.
First, they visited the administrative barracks of gold mines in Minas Gerais, starting of course, with Vila Rica. They were a long way from Pernambuco. A long way from Palmares. A long way from Africa. A long, long way from home.
In fact, there was no home anymore except for their togetherness.
When the serfs, slaves, peons and drudges woke up for work the next day, their drivers and overseers could not be found. A few days later, the strangely shrunken, bloodless corpses the bandeirantes and their brothers were found in a field by a river, abused by scavenging animals, but drained, worthless even to the eaters of carrion, who thought them diseased.
The Feast was pleasure and duty become one. It was sex and violence, orgiastic battle, hedonistic militancy. If there ever could be such a thing. The merging of victory and true physical satisfaction. It was revenge you could taste.
Not a one could regret the deal they had made to be the undying devils tormenting the tormentors, killing the killers and doing wrong to the wicked. Satisfaction had married achievement and now their souls were all pregnant with power.
The sound and the taste.
The fruit screamed to confirm that they were reduced by their fears to something less than human. The juice spurted hot and sweet, fresher than fresh picked cherries. Even in their fright, they were so slow, so weak as to be no different than if they were immobilized with no legs to run and no arms to flail. So scared. So submissive. So amenable to the finality and terror of true justice.
They licked the taste of vengeance from their lips.
For Palmares.
For the people of the mines and the plantations. For those on the auction block and those on the beds of rape. For all the children born, unborn and dead in slavery who would never know justice. Drunk with conquest and power and proof that they could punish the world for its wrongs, they had taken the corpses clumsily in the fields where no one could hear them scream and had floated home, tingling warmth from head to toe, even in the blustery cold of the high winds they rode.
High on their newfound sustenance, they staggered, as much as those who do not touch the ground may stagger, back into the cave, their collective tomb, their new world womb. Reborn, they slept as babes, dreaming new indecipherable dreams, writing their new lives on blank slates, sinking to new depths of peaceful slumber that slaves could never know.
Invincible they awoke, this time with no confusion, but rather, with all the confidence of those who know themselves the masters of their own fates as well as the fates of whomever they may chance to meet.
THE ANATOMY OF HATRED/ THE CULT OF VENGEANCE
At first, they focused on the obvious targets. The culprits.
And so, they cut a winding path of strange death through the mines and plantations of Minas Gerais.
'They must not see us coming. They must not see us going. Only the ones who we seek must ever know we are there. Revenge is personal. We are not spreading fear. We are making them pay their debts.'
Over the next ten years, many of the most cruel masters, overseers and underlings disappeared from the face of the earth, supplanted by their heirs and blessed by fortune to wait their turn before vengeance would turn its attention back to them.
'We must go about this more sensibly - with better intelligence. We are acting on circumstance. We should have more intelligence so that we could pay sooner respects to the more deserving.'
The hunting party of a creole aristocrat went missing. The coach of a well-landed adminsitrator was found with his body and those of his retinue burnt to a curious crisp. The captains of slave ships repeatedly found drowned in apparent suicide, their drained bodies bloated with brine, their eyes and genitals eaten by fish. A dozen good gentlemen consumed by fire in a reputed brothel - none of the traumatized women harmed, several of them leaving the town soon afterward. Three bankers fell to their deaths from a cliff after a nighttime walk, which seemed quite uncharacteristic of them. Bandeirante after bandeirante...
'People are still talking. After that brothel, people are saying that flying devils came and tore at the men with their teeth.'
It was a feast of 150 years.
Then came the first change. A change designed to increase the hurt and to spread supernatural fear.
SOUKOU: THE PRIDE, THE POWER & THE PUNISHMENT DUE
A WOMAN NAMED WEDNESDAY
She used to be called Wednesday.
Was she Xumbi's mother or sister? She was the mother of Woe, the only one of the Merciless Ones who was born after Xumbi buried them in his blood and made them new. Woe often spoke of Xumbi as though he was her father. Was it because Xumbi was the only father she ever knew? Was it because Xumbi was father and brother to them all? Or was it because Xumbi and Eka were not related by blood at all?
Wednesday, who used to be called Eka in the old days when they were only human, was the real life patron saint of the armed struggled against slavery. Over the nearly 200 years between the end of the twin kingdom and the emancipation of the night people, she became a legendary, really a mythical figure. she was there when Gaspar Nyanga forged his power in Mexico, terrorizing those who dared to cross his border. She was there to give safe passage to John Horse when he led the Seminoles across the southern United States to settle new lands away from their home in Florida.
Over the hundred years after the so-called Emancipation, she was an unseen but seminal figure in the popularization of the blues and the development of jazz. When they tell the story of Robert Johnson making a deal with the Devil at the crossroads of his life, they are talking about the woman named Wednesday. She was the one who met Robert Johnson at the crossroads. Because of her, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane stayed super high thinking the drugs in their blood would keep her from harming them.
She was also familiar to the Comanche, the Apache and the Navajo, becoming a well-known and well-feared protector of the indigenous peoples in the fight for survival and preservation of land rights. If there were 99 more like her, the history of the America's would have been very different. So it would have been, also, if there were none like her. Many of those who survived to modern times owe their existence solely to her, for without her they would have suffered the fates of those who never met her - extinction.
The romance of Eka and Xumbi is one of the few things that does not succumb to the loss of memory.
The woman called Wednesday was the most human of all the Merciless.
But she was also the most merciless of them.
WHEN GODS CRY
'It is all very nice to brag about what we have achieved since Emancipation, and it is all well and good to say now is not the time to turn our backs, because the Klan in all its forms is out to get us and our people. But while we are here defending riches and property, Europe is over there dividing up Africa.'
'Serve them right,' said Woe. She looked into their shocked faces defiantly. 'I wasn't there. I didn't come across the salt water like many of you. But I can read a book. I know what they did to us. I know what they did to our ancestors. They are not night people. They are day-whippers, just like the Europeans. The white skins bought us, but they sold us. They fucking sold us. They are not our people. They wrote their own fates.'
Wednesday knew more than Woe could ever know. Somewhere inside of her swam the memories of a child named Eka who crossed the cruel stormy ocean in the rank, vile hull of a shameless ship on an evil mission. The girl in her deep memory, the girl diving in the translucent memory of her new being, the girl remembers that it was not the white man who burnt her village, rounded up her people, killed her grandparents and all the other old ones as well as all the sick. It was not white men who tied them all together and herded them from one outpost to another until they were on the coast at the edge of the continent. It wasn't the white man who first sold them.
It was their own nobility.
'It's one thing for them to conquer these continents and bring us here as slaves,' Wednesday told her daughter with all the patience she could muster. 'It's another thing entirely for them to go Africa and make us slaves there.'
'Us? Us?' Woe was indignant. 'They are not making "us" slaves. They are making them slaves. They are giving these African slave traders a taste of their own medicine.'
'It would be double the calamity that...'
'It could be ten times the calamity. One hundred times. I don't care. Africans sold us. They get what they fucking deserve.'
Woe could not be persuaded.
And so they were truly divided for the first time. Divided by intent and action. Divided by a great ocean. Divided by sentiment.
Seven of them together could not hope to stop half the armies of Europe from achieving their objective in the old continent. Four of them could barely make a scratch.
'Remember,' Wednesday said, when they finally faced their foe, 'this is not a feeding, this is a massacre.'
But it was too much.
No matter how much blood they spilled, it was not enough.
It could never be enough.
