She drew a large price. We knew because the final bid made others gasp. The buyer was a short, stumpy, pale man with wide, shameless eyes. He would never honor our sister. We knew that. With her beneath him, he would become something disgraceful, something vile, something disgusting. She would be forced, like so many of our women at sea, to bear his weight and perhaps his children. On ship, those who conceived tried to send babies back. They reached into their vaginas with their fingers, hoping to sever the connection between fetus and womb, only to discover that the bond was usually out of reach. Some were visibly pregnant in the stall. Like Monifa. Her protruding belly could not be hidden. Crewmen had used her body as a plaything, and now she carried someone’s offspring. She wanted to love the child, at least the part that was hers, but how do you divide a living thing? How do you love one part and seek the destruction of the other? And which part belongs to you? This was a mystery with no answer. Elders once spoke such complicated riddles, training us to think past the confines of simple things, but this enigma rested well beyond anything we had ever conceived. Monifa never spoke with the joy of a mother. She never considered names and meanings. She never wondered which ancestor might return in her child. She simply sat, most days, rubbing her protruding belly, trying to figure out how to erase the pale man’s blood in her child’s veins. Her distress was in knowing she could not. Boy or girl, her child’s complexion would be diluted. Her perfect blackness would not be its inheritance. Every glance at the child would remind her that it had not been conceived in love—the way a child is supposed to be conceived—but in violence and force. Still, it was hers.

Monifa also bore the shame of having no husband. We were not a people to welcome children without communal consent. One did not bear children alone. Such a decision solicited great reprimand and caused immeasurable shame, both for the girl and the boy. But mostly the girl. She bore the child. She literally carried the act within her. It was not balanced, the public disgrace, but it was so. Usually the two were forced to wed. Then, when the child came, we celebrated it as if it had come right on time. In one instance, a young girl became pregnant and refused to marry her suitor. She was shunned and silenced for a lifetime. No other boy ever looked at her. Most other women avoided her. She lived out her days with a beautiful, yet rejected little girl, whom elders called Awiti, which means “The child that has been thrown away.” Her mother, however, called her Chiamaka, which means “The spirit always knows.” Most of us didn’t call her anything.