Where the Blackbird flies

Lilo Kabui was playing with his siblings on the beach when he saw a ship on the horizon. It was a silver behemoth, bigger and faster than anything he had ever seen. And it seemed to be coming towards their island. His elder brother who was keeping a watch over the children ran to the village to alert the elders. The ship came somewhat close and stopped. Then a few boats were dropped onto the sea. A number of people got off and started rowing towards the island. Lilo and all the village children were now standing on the beach looking at what was happening. As the boats came close, Lilo saw the men on the boats. They had white skin and golden hair. Lilo had heard stories of white people who came from across the seas. They were always talked of as very evil. And yet, he and all the other children looked on. Lilo would regret that decision for years to come.

The men came ashore just as the elders were coming onto the shore. They walked up to the men and greeted them. But the men who came ashore just pointed the long metal sticks that they were carrying at them. There was a loud sound like something had exploded and some of them dropped dead. Suddenly, there was a commotion. Some people ran away like the wind, but the men killed then with their sticks. Others tried to fight and ran towards them with their spears and arrows, they too were killed. Others hid and still others just stood still, too scared to move. These two types of people, the men caught and dragged onto the ship. They would all regret not fighting or even running, at least they could have died and not have to live the life that would soon become theirs. On their way to the ship, Lilo saw the village go up in flames.

This was the first time Lilo had gotten on a ship. And it was not something he would ever want again. All the people from the village were taken to a compartment under the ship’s floor. There were already some other people sitting there. And their condition did not give much reason to hope. They were all very thin. In fact, they looked like they were dying of starvation. Some of them seemed very sick and were curled up like a baby, sleeping. Lilo sat down in the farthest place he could get from these people. At first, there was a lot of commotion of people trying to find out if their loved ones were on the ship. People talked of people they had seen die, and women the had seen being assaulted by the men. Before long, a man came from upstairs with the stick and bellowed something. The people who had been on the ship longer motioned the newcomers to shut up and everyone followed, having just seen the carnage at the island.

It was no wonder that the people they had seen on the ship earlier were so sick. They were given very little to eat or drink. A single bucket of water was placed in their compartment in the morning and evening. The villagers tried to establish some order of dividing the water, but the people who had been there fell upon the water so quickly that Lilo’s villagers too soon followed.  Food was mostly just the water from cooking the food for the ship’s workers a small piece of hard, stale bread. It was never enough and Lilo was always hungry. Soon enough people from Lilo’s village too started showing the signs of disease. They were tired and had high fevers and sometimes cried when they slept. Some days, they found that somebody had died and tossed them overboard. Lilo always prayed for the souls of the people who died. New people came onto the ship two more times. By the time, the ship journey was over, almost a third of all the people who got on were dead.

On the ship, Lilo had thought that this ship journey was going to be the worst thing that happened in his life and he was very wrong, because life on the sugar plantation he was taken to was worse. They were taken to a sugar plantation on the morning they arrived. There was a big white house surrounded by a lot of plants. Lilo and all the others from the ship were taken to a whole set of shacks behind the house. They all had thatch roofs and brown walls. The shacks seemed in desperate need of repair. The thatching, which Lilo later realised was done by the workers was very well done, but the walls looked old and cracked and is desperate need of repair. The people who had left Lilo’s village a few weeks ago would have refused to live there and demanded better accommodation. But the ship journey had taught all of them that that would just get them a beating. They were all given old and torn clothes in the style of the white people. Then they were taken to the fields to work even though they had just arrived and were all very tired. In the beginning, all the new arrivals worked at a very slow pace. A white man on a horse drew up near one of them and lashed at the man with his whip. He cried in pain and started working faster. The others also followed suit, seeing what had happened. The whip would crack many more times during the course of the day, but it would not always be effective, mostly because the people being whipped were too sick to work any harder. Lilo would come to know that feeling very well indeed.

The food that the workers got was very basic stuff. IT was mostly just the water that remained after vegetables were boiled for the masters’ daily soups. This came with stale bread and sometimes some other foods that were about to or had already gone bad. All this tasted very bad and gave very little energy. Not that the workers cared. They were more than happy to get anything at all. Things were the worst for the children. They had either been brought in from the islands along with their parents or were born on the plantation itself. At one point, the children all started falling sick. Some even grew frail, but with bulging stomachs. The children’s mothers begged the owner so hard, that he agreed to treat them. From that day on, the children got a single glass of milk which looked like it had lots of water in it. In exchange, their mothers would work for an hour extra and would leave only when the men left. The workers were given water from a dirty pond near the farm. The cattle that the master owned also drank and bathed there.  Lilo had always thought that it was a wonder how nobody got sick drinking that water. It later turned out that people were getting sick. Lilo would soon enough become one of them.

It started as a runny stomach. Lilo did not mind it and went to work. He was not fully at ease, but he was not going to risk a beating just for that. That would feel much worse. As the days wore by, however, Lilo’s condition get worse. For one, his shit started to become bloody, and he developed a very high fever and his stomach started to ache very badly. Lilo felt so sick, that he did not turn up for work. He just lay in his hut in pain. Not finding him at work, the overseer walked in yelling at him to get up and go to work. He rushed into the room mid yell and started raining down blows on Lilo with his stick and his leg. Lilo lay curled up begging him to stop. But the man just continued. After a few minutes, he went out and got his whip and started whipping Lilo. Lilo screamed and begged and cried to him till the overseer left, having tired himself out. As he lay there that day, Lilo realised that they did not care if he was sick. They wanted a worker and they would have one. If he wanted to live, he would have to get help. And he would have to find it himself, because all the other workers were too scared to help him. He had nothing really to lose now, if he stayed, he’d die of his disease. If he left, there would be at least a chance of him living. Lilo would try to escape. Otherwise, he would die.

Lilo waited till everyone was asleep at night. The entire farm was quiet by then. The workers asleep deep in sleep, enjoying in a world where they could do and feel whatever they wanted and the owners in their drunken stupor after hours of drinking with friends. Their guard dog was loose and avoiding it would be the deciding factor in his escape. It was a large ferocious dog trained to bite and maul anybody other than its owners. It was especially bad to people who were not white. Lilo once saw the dog almost kill a woman from the farm who had somehow angered the masters. Lilo had prepared a poison from a few herbs he had collected when no one was looking. He mixed them up and felt very thankful that he had been an attentive student in the lessons back home. Lilo took out the bamboo piece and the feather he had prepared to be used as an arrow. He had not used his blowgun ever since he got caught, so he was a little out of practice. But Lilo had only one arrow and one target. He had to make it hit.

Lilo slowly got out of his hut. They let it unlocked just in case somebody needed to go to the toilet shed. It was really just a shed over a ditch. When it started to get full, they would cover it up and move the shed. But this happened only when the owner allowed it, so the ditch stank and was now too full. Lilo made as if to walk towards it, just in case some of the workers were watching. Before he reached it, Lilo turned around to go search for the dog. He ducked into the plants so as not to be seen and looked around. Just then, he saw the dog slowly walking towards him. He was sniffing the air as if trying to make sure of something. Lilo lifted his blowgun and shot. It was a still night with not even a breeze. That was good because otherwise the arrow would have missed. The dog collapsed on his side instantly. As he walked past, Lilo noticed that the dog was still breathing. His poison was supposed to kill the dog, but it had failed. He would now have to do with what he had.

Having got past the dog, Lilo went into the woods. The trees were close but not close enough to be difficult to walk in. The first few minutes were spent in the urge to get as far away as possible and also the great relief from just having escaped the dog. After just about 10 minutes, Lilo started getting tired. He had a high fever and that was not the best for walking in a forest. The fear and excitement of dealing with the dog and the associated dangers had kept Lilo alert back in the plantation. But that had drained him, and now walking through a forest with nothing immediate to worry about made him start getting dizzy again. Lilo had to use all his effort to keep walking but that only made him more tired. His head started to hurt, and then it got worse and worse till eventually he had to lie down on the forest floor and sleep.

Lilo was woken up the sound of dogs barking. He stood up shaken and looked around trying to make sense of what was happening. When he remembered that he had escaped and the dogs were looking for him, he stated running away from the sound of the dogs. Lilo ran as fast as he could and the sound started to fade. But Lilo did not stop, he continued running for as long as he could. Just as he thought that he had finally gotten away, Lilo noticed that the forest was thinning. He stopped to take his breath, meaning to continue in just a while. But when he had gotten his breath back, Lilo could not move anymore. He was very feverish and was very tired from all the running. Lilo collapsed on the ground tired. Just then he heard a man yelling and running towards him. He was now near a farm and his escape attempt had been a grand failure. But, right now Lilo needed to rest. Everything else could wait.

Lilo woke up in a warm room surrounded by soft sheets. He opened his eyes and found himself on a cot in a small hut. It was just like the one he had lived in back in the plantation. But this one was much cleaner. A woman saw that he was up and called out to someone. It was not in English and yet Lilo understood. The woman was speaking in his own language. Lilo asked her how she knew it. He learnt that they were from neighbouring islands. This was another farm like his own. The owner here was a doctor. He was kind to his workers and they were all people who had signed up willingly to work. And they were treated fairly. When he had stumbled into the farm, one of the men had spotted him and they had treated him for a few days. The doctor was planning to send Lilo back to his own plantation as soon as he was well enough. But that was a long time away. For now, he just had to rest and get better.

Every once in a while, a white man came into the hut to look at Lilo. He was really nice and asked him about how he felt and gave the woman medicines to give him. But what the woman had said on the first day stuck to him. He would get sent back. That was not going to be nice. Sure, he was now getting better form his disease, but he would likely get beaten to death if he went back. Lilo’s decision to escape might have been part of his feverish dreams, but he had somehow succeeded and he was not just going to go back. He would have to try to escape again.  But that was when he was well enough. Till then, he enjoyed his new life around this farm. He talked to the other workers and helped the woman around the house, and looked after the children there. All this while, he planned his escape and gathered supplies. And then one day, the white man told him that he was well enough to go back to his old plantation. Lilo could not sleep that night. He was too anxious for his second escape.

Lilo lay in bed and waited for everyone to fall asleep. When he was sure that everyone was asleep, he got up from bed and walked quietly to the door. He opened it being very careful not to make any noise. He looked out to make sure there was no one about. And then he got out and ran to the gate of the farm, jumping from shadow to shadow to make sure he was not seen. Just as he was about to cross the road into the nearby forest, he saw a white man walking home with a gun in hand. Lilo ducked quickly into the forest and started running. But the man had seen him and ran after him, shouting for him to stop. But Lilo just ran and ran. Just as he thought he was about to escape; he heard a noise and felt a great pain in his chest. He had been shot. The man walked up to Lilo and tried to bind him, so that he can take him back and claim a prize. But Lilo fought him with all his might. He kicked and bit and punched and generally made himself impossible to tie. The man hit Lilo on the head with the butt of the gun. Lilo fell on the ground clutching his head in pain. He heard a sound just like the one before, only much louder and closer. And then there was only pain in the head.