And then there were many, many days of walking until they came to the edge of the river. Across the river was James Island, named so by the English who had taken over that spot, fighting other white men from other countries for control.
The men put Kiné and others in a canoe and they rowed to the island, where white men waited. There, their clothes were taken from them and Kiné and the other women and girls were put in a stone-walled room with no windows. There was no bucket for relief, only a corner, and a terrible smell. At times, a white man or two would come to the room to pull out an older girl or woman, and there were new screams. And Kiné put her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth. In the stone-walled room Kiné could not be sure how many days passed—perhaps ten—before she and the other women and girls were taken from the room. Not to satisfy the white men’s desires, but to be loaded into the bottom of a ship that had sailed up to James Island.
Next came a journey she could not track, because she could not see the moon or the sun from the dark hold of the ship. At times, she was pulled up onto the deck into light. Other times, sailors with appetites visited the female side of the hold, turning women and girls into profane vessels. Kiné was spared this physically, but she bore witness. One of her comrades—if she could call her that—was tossed overboard after she died, succumbing to her bowels. The sailors threw her into the sea without the sheets used as shrouds for the two white men who had perished on board. The sharks tore at Kiné’s comrade, the water filling with her meat. It was the nature of those sea-swimming things: brutality seeks what is nearest.
After three months of lying in her own mess on wood, Kiné arrived in western land, on this side of the big water. She arrived in Savannah, Georgia, where she was doused with buckets of water to clean her off, and given a rough cotton dress. Then she was put on another ship, a much smaller one, and sailed up the river to Augusta.
“And then what happen?”
Kiné’s daughter would ask this over the years until she was old enough to understand her mother’s anguish. Kiné would only look away to the side as the people in her homeland did whenever something sorrowed or shamed or frightened them. She was still an African, no matter how many years had passed.
Kiné had been purchased that day in Augusta by Baron McCain. He had brought his young son Paul with him, and Kiné was put on a horse with Paul, who held her safe by the waist. They rode a long time through wilderness to a farm that was across a river, a few miles from the new federal road.
Before Kiné, Paul had been the only child on the farm, and Paul and Kiné played together like any other children. Kiné also helped Paul’s mother, Helen, take care of the three-room house and the chickens and the one pig and the cow and the large vegetable garden and the corn patch. Helen McCain was a mixed-blood Creek woman, as Baron’s own mother had been, and she was lonely out in the wilderness without her family. She had lost several babies, some in the womb, and some after birth, which had brought her much grief. Baron cherished his wife, and so he’d saved for three years to buy her a slave to help keep her company. Kiné was a child who would have time to grow up, a girl who could be devoted to Helen all her life. While Kiné helped Helen with the labors around the small farm, the woman told her stories of the wily rabbit who always tricked the other, larger creatures who wanted to bring him down. The stories reminded Kiné of the tales her mother had told her in their courtyard.
Neither Baron nor Helen could have dreamed of Paul and Kiné falling in love when they came of age, that the two children who played together after their chores would become inseparable. However, these were the early years of the place that would become Georgia, and after some alarm when Paul informed them Kiné was expecting a baby, the McCains gave in to logic. They were mixed-blood themselves. These things happened and—though there was no marriage in a church, as during that time, Christian ministers would not marry an African and an Indian—the two young people pledged themselves to each other. Then Kiné moved into Paul’s room in the back of the one-story house. When their child was born, she was named “Beauty” by her grandmother, and there was contentment for Kiné working in the garden with her child and her beloved’s mother, as she learned the earth and the uses of plants from Helen. As the older woman told Beauty stories of rabbits on this side of the ocean, so Kiné shared her own tales of creatures, while keeping her pain to herself. And no one ever stopped her from performing her prayers five times a day.