from That Fire of Great Dramas

You there! Hear! With your deepest inner ear, with your hearing house, ear mother, or whatever it’s called, hear the sound of the forest spirit, the song of the nightbird sung wistfully from the heart. Oh wilderness of pain! Oh sorrow of the enslaved family! A choir of echoes haunts the land! Undying scream from the chains! Aay, Nanabru-Nanabro!

Bomba mi yaya, bomba	Oh slave driver,
Bomba mi yaya, bomba!	hear this song!
A Biribisi wi d’o!	The song of Berbice.
A Kristankondre wi d’o!	The song of Kristenland.
senkete ba! senkete ba!	The slave demands you listen!
Bomba mi yaya, bomba!	Oh driver, hear the slave:
Bomba mi yaya, senekete ba,	he cannot escape you:
Bomba mi yaya, bomba!	you die with his song!

Old Esthello was an old-old African who had traveled throughout the entire colony, actually throughout all four colonies—Berbice and Demerary, Essequibo and Pomeroon. That was because of his former work in the service of a traveling master. Suspected of attempting to run away (his own spirit told him he was lost), they had whipped him and cut off one ear. That was his left human-ear. They had also worked on his Achilles tendon with a knife—the reason he dragged his foot.

He worked as a cook in Pilgerhuth, a remote missionary settlement on the Upper-Berbice. He could often be found in that boathouse, a small lean-to with palm leaves where a few pirogues lay. The brethren trusted he would not run away. Besides, where was he supposed to go? If he so much as took a little trip without a letter of permission, he would be arrested at the first plantation he came to in the area—Mattare for instance—and be shot to death, or at the very least severely mistreated. He at his ripe old age! What was he supposed to be looking for? Freedom? Not with those runaway Maroons, who would consider this old slow-goat a burden on their perpetual flight! Or he would end up in the hands of Indians, who swarmed all around with their treacherous camps, not to mention their poisonous arrows.

There was hardly a single African who could get along with these Indians. He was sure they had been trained by the white master (their gods and spirits bribed) to see the African as a forest beast that must be caught—an ingenious method of that whiteman to keep the Indians from his door—and the Indian could then pocket his rewards. Esthello considered those first few Arawaks, who let themselves be christened, stupid, almost pathetic. That they were prepared to cultivate subsistance plots with cassava! And corn! And pineapple! And other vegetables, fruits like papaya! And, of course, especially potatoes! That they stuck their paws out for the white masters to breed fish in ponds in remote swamp areas! That they hunted forest swine and apes, yes, and in lean times even snakes and tigers!

Just how old Esthello was, no one knew. No doubt he was one of the oldest in the colony and for sure in the settlement known as Pilgerhuth. Look at him sitting there, picking the sand fleas out of his toes with the needle from an awara tree! His tattered coat draped over his body. His straw hat, perched on his head, ripped completely open at the top. For such an old man he had a lot of hair, coarse and thick, bristling and bulging through the hole in the hat. No amulets on his arms. He was not allowed to wear them. For that was idolatrous, said the brethren. On his chest, above his black-buttoned belly—a navel as a kind of dry prune—there were many marks, scars. He was an old Yoruba, born in the land of the black buffalo. By that he meant Africa.

According to his beliefs, just before the creation of a human being, three days before the mother’s womb is fertilized, an animal is impregnated. Esthello himself had originated in the horned head of...