Friday Flash: No Mercy

Since I missed last week's challenge, I'm kind of mixing and matching Wendig Challenges. This week, we were to write a story of good vs. evil. I sort of managed, while using opening and closing lines from the previous week, when he gave us title, opening, and closing lines to choose from. I couldn't make any of the titles fit, though, so I have pretty much just done my own thing. Even the good/evil thing got a little fuzzy, and if I had had more words to play with, would have gotten fuzzier still. Funny about that.

This one ran a little long, at just under 1100 words.

No Mercy

Three days with no sleep was the least of my worries. I could endure that; I could endure just about anything.

Just about.

I couldn’t watch as the overseer beat my 9-year-old son for the stumble that had spilled a half a dozen berries into the dirt of the field. Nor could I stop it, and for that, I thought my heart would burst.

That night, when we crawled at last into the stifling hut that was our home now, I lit our single tallow candle and I looked from my son, whose face bore a large, purpling bruise, to my daughter. Pulling them close to me as I always did for our mutual comfort, I began to whisper.

“We are leaving. Tonight. I won’t let this go on.”

“Can we?” my son wondered. “The Masters say they created us to be their slaves.” Will had only been six when the Masters came and killed his father and brought us to this place to work in their fields. If I didn’t take Will away, he would soon remember nothing but slavery, and become the drudge they wanted. Or else he would learn to hate them, fight back, and be killed. I had seen both happen to the children of others.

I had to convince him. “If that is true, which I don’t believe, then they left us too long on our own, because we learned to think and feel.” I knew that the Masters took slaves wherever they found them, and I doubted their story of seeding our planet long ago. “I can’t stand by while they beat you.”

“I’ll be careful. It won’t happen again,” he began.

“It will if we stay. I can see only three choices: I can leave you here to suffer alone, or I can take you with me—or I can fight back until they kill me.” I felt his body stiffen under my arm, but it was Anna who spoke first. She would be 13 soon, and that was another reason for going soon.

“I’ll go with you, Mom.” Her eyes told me that she knew what puberty would bring, and soon we’d be unable to hide her growing breasts.

“Tonight, then,” I said, and glanced again at Will. “We are not their property, Will. If ever humans were their creation, that has changed. They should not have come back.”

At last, my son nodded.

“Sleep, for now,” I counseled. “I’ll wake you when it’s time.” Laboring from dawn to dark left them too tired to stay awake.

As I crept from the hut, I thanked the god I no longer believed in that I was off the rotation that had kept me sleepless the last three nights. It would have been a complication I didn’t need.

I crept through shadows to the communal food stores, which occupied the only sturdy building in our compound. It was locked, but I had a key.

Don’t ask me what I did to get it.

**
Our pockets stuffed with potatoes and a little dried meat, we crept through the darkness away from the huts. The compound wasn’t well guarded. The Masters relied on the fence, and the stories of the prey-beasts that roamed the scrub beyond, to keep their slaves in.

I knew a way over the fence, and chose to face the beasts rather than the Masters. When we were well clear of any possible listening ears, I knelt to speak to the children.

“Are you afraid of the prey-beasts?” Nod. “There are a hundred ways we might die doing this. But we won’t die as slaves. Do you understand? Do you still want to come with me?”

What would I have done if either had said “no”? I did not know if I was right to take my children into the unknown dangers outside the fence.

Anna took a step towards the fence and freedom without speaking. Will clutched my hand more tightly, and whispered, “Is it okay if I’m scared, Mommy?”

“Yes,” I said, squeezing back.

I had stumbled on the way over the fence once while hunting for edible plants in the spring, and it was a good route, and probably I wasn’t the first to use it. No one had come back to tell me what happened after crossing the fence.

The only challenge was getting Will into the tree. I let him stand on my shoulders, and his sister reached a hand to pull him up.

Three branches up, and then we had to inch our way out the one that hung beyond the fence. In this, Will was the best of us, having no fear of heights. I swallowed my visions of broken limbs and we all crept forward together.

When I looked down and could see the fence passing below me, I knew the worst was past. The end of the branch dipped just enough for me to lower the children and let them drop lightly the last few feet.

I landed a little more heavily, and when I regained my feet, a little dizzy from the fall, three armed men stood before me.

They were human, so I let them take us.

They led us a long way through the scrub. When we had gone perhaps two miles, and the children were stumbling with weariness, one of the men spoke.

“If you are strong enough to run, you are strong enough to fight.” It sounded like he was reciting a rule.

“Okay,” I said. Truth compelled me to add, “But I’ve never even held a gun.”

“There’s more than one way of fighting,” he answered.

“I’ll do what’s needed,” I promised. “Anything except go back there.”

“Only volunteers will do that,” he said.

That excited me. His use of the future tense told me that there was a plan. A plan to free us of the Masters once and for all? We could never return to Earth, but this planet would do well enough, if we were free. I would die, and yes, kill, to make that happen.

**
The rebellion was larger than I could have guessed, and the plans to eliminate the Masters well under way. I put my degree in chemistry to work, for the first time since Anna was born.

And when all was ready, I went with my team to do what was needed, and watched the result with fierce joy. The smoke was blue and grey and smelled like a promise.

***

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
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YA Review: Copper Sun, by Sharon Draper

Title: Copper Sun
Author: Sharon Draper
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006, 302 pages
Source: Library

Summary:
Amari has a perfect life in her African village. Then the traders come...and these traders are after humans, not goods. Her family is murdered, the village burned, and Amari is marched off to the coast in chains, to be shipped across the ocean to a new land. In America, she is sold to a plantation owner who gives her to his son as a 16th birthday present (hint: he's not looking for a mother figure). Life is a grim thing, until a really horrific event gives her the chance to escape, hand in hand with a white indentured servant her own age and with nearly as much need to run.

Review: 
This book was hard to read. Not because the words are big, but because the truth it speaks is horrific. There is no escape from the realities of being a young female slave: not just whippings, but rape. The challenge for Amari is to keep her spirit alive in the midst of cruelty beyond her imagining, and quite frankly beyond mine. Like 12 Years a Slave, this book leaves the reader unable to deny the inhumanity of slavery (and the indenture system was a form of slavery, make no mistake. That the plantation owner "owns" Polly's indenture, and can sell it where he will--even to a whorehouse--makes that very clear).

Polly is an orphan, indentured for 14 years to pay her parents' debts. That her position is tantamount to slavery is made clear by the fact that her new master (and Amari's) assigns her to work alongside Amari, to share her hut, and teach the African girl English and how to work. The story is told in alternating chapters or sections told from the perspective of each girl, and we see how suspicion and prejudice gradually break down to allow them to become allies and, in the end, friends.

Incredibly vivid and well written, this book is one of those that I could not recommend for anyone under the age of about 15, due to the disturbing nature of the story. But it's one that probably everyone over that age should read, because it reminds us of both man's inhumanity to man and the strength and resilience of the human spirit. And part of the lesson is that not everyone can be so resilient. Characters die, physically and spiritually, which makes the victory of Amari and Polly over their circumstances all the more powerful.

Oddly, this wasn't a tear-jerker. I didn't cry over the sad parts. It was, instead, a thought-producer, and I couldn't put it down (plus I would happily have meted out some justice to some people who couldn't begin to understand the concept).

Recommendation:
For those about 15 and up who can deal with the realities of our history.

Full Disclosure: I checked Copper Sun out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

Non-fiction review: 12 Years a Slave

 

Title: 12 Years a Slave

Author: Solomon Northrup 

Publisher: Penguin, 2013.  Originally published in 1853.

Source: Library 

Summary:

Given the publicity the movie got, I doubt I need to say much here.  Solomon Northrup was born a free man in New York State, and lived there until I think his late 20s, when he was lured to Washington by a promise of work, drugged, kidnapped, and sold to a planter in Louisiana.  Twelve years later he managed to get word out to the right people, and was rescued. He wrote this narrative shortly after regaining his freedom.

Review:

Being somewhat familiar with the narrative styles of some of Northrup's contemporaries, I expected to find this difficult to read.  It wasn't, except in the emotional sense.  Northrup has a very direct way with the narrative, and tells his story simply, allowing it to grip the reader by its own power.  He makes every effort to be fair in his narrative (he gives the men who lured him from home much more benefit of the doubt than I do--I have no doubt they were part of the plot), but he also pulls no punches.  Slavery was a huge evil, slaves were not happy being slaves, and he insists that his readers understand that.  It's hard to imagine anyone reading this and not getting it, and in fact his narrative and others like it contributed to the anti-slavery movement that led to the Civil War.

Seeing this unflinching depiction of what slavery did to both slaves and masters gave me a much better understanding of the difficulty the country, and especially the South, has had in overcoming that legacy.  Men and women denied all chance at education, told constantly they are less than human, and worked like beasts, all too often unsurprisingly seemed capable of little thought or reason.  But Northrup makes it clear that the men and women who believed their slaves were less than human not only were at fault for what they did to those slaves, physically and psychically, but that they themselves were rendered less human by their beliefs.  Slavery was an institution that destroyed both slaves and slave-holders, and Northrup show that it doesn't take a college education and a century of perspective to see it.

Recommendation:

I'd recommend this to anyone over the age of about 14.  There are hard truths in this book, and truths every American, at least, should look in the face.  Plus, it's very well written and communicates those truths elegantly.

Full Disclosure: I checked 12 Years a Slave out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."