Camino Ghosts

When they were out of food, the men began to argue. They ordered the teenager to turn the oxcart onto a trail heading south. At dusk they smelled the smoke of cooking fires and came to a small village at the edge of the woods. Fencing of boards and wire encircled a farmyard that was filled with captives like themselves. Dozens of them, with the men separated from the women and children. Slave pens. Several of the guards had rifles and they watched as the women approached. A gate came open and they went inside where their shackles and chains were removed. A gray-haired African lady in a sack dress soothed their blisters and sores with animal grease from a bowl. She gave them beans and tasty bread and they ate until they were full. She and her husband owned the farm and charged a small fee to the slave traders who passed through. They would probably be sold to another gang who would take them away. She was sorry for their plight but could do little about it.

There were several children. Nalla and the other mothers from her village watched with longing and pity. They ached for their own lost children, but weren’t they better off being left behind? Surely the older villagers would take care of them. The poor children in the pen were weak and hungry. Many had sores and insect stings. They did not play and smile and skip around like normal children.

The pen was divided by a tall wire fence. The men and the women met there to examine one another, to look for a familiar face. Mosi was not there, though Nalla did recognize and speak to another man from their village. He said they had been divided into three groups after the first day. Mosi was led away with some others. No, Nalla had not seen his wife or his two daughters.

It rained hard that night, with fierce lightning and heavy winds. There was no shelter in the slave pens. They packed together between the stilts of a small hut and slept in the mud. In the morning the gray-haired lady brought bread and red rice, and as she distributed the food she noticed a rash on a child. She feared it was the measles and took the child inside a hut. She said that three children had died of smallpox a month earlier.

After a week in the slave pen, the women were divided again and told they were leaving. A different group of guards rounded up twenty women and three children and brought out the chains and shackles. Nalla and her friends had just been sold for the first time.

There was a new device, a new form of torture. It was called a coggle board and was nothing but a crude plank of wood six feet long with metal loops at each end, one for each prisoner. The loops went around the necks, so that the two women were not only joined firmly together but would have to support a heavy piece of wood with each step. A chain went around their waists and was looped through a shackle around the neck of a child, who walked between the women and under the board. To make bad matters worse, the guards placed water and supplies on the coggle boards to further burden their prisoners.

After a few minutes on the trail, Nalla almost missed the iron shackle around her neck. It really didn’t matter. One form of torture was as bad as the other.

Days passed and the sun grew hotter. The women became weaker and began fainting from heat exhaustion. Attached by a coggle board, one fainting caused both women to go down. The guards reacted by offering water, and if that didn’t revive the woman, they pulled out their whips.

Justice arrived in a small dose when a guard, the most sadistic of the three, stepped on a large green mamba and went down screaming. The snake got away as the prisoners scattered in a panic. They were corralled and shoved under a tree, where they rested in the shade and watched in both satisfaction and horror as the guard convulsed, wretched, vomited, and groaned until he died. Good riddance.

One day they topped a hill and saw the ocean in the distance. The blue water was somewhat comforting because it meant the end of an arduous journey. It was also devastating because they knew the ocean would take them away forever.

Two hours later, they approached a village and saw small boats anchored in the bay. The oxcart squeaked along and came to a stop at an encampment called a “fort.” The women were led to a shade tree and told to wait. Through the perimeter fencing they could see others inside the fort, women and children close by and men in another large pen. They searched in vain for familiar faces.