"I'm not Yoruba." She spoke quickly and curtly, forcing the words past her anger as she huddled for warmth, legs drawn up, arms encircling her knees. Then she reached to pull her shift tighter about her and tried to clear her thoughts. The path on which hed carried her, through forests and fields, was a blurred memory. Only slowly had she realized they were on a hillside now, overlooking the sea. He was beside her, wearing only a blue shirt and loincloth, his profile outlined in the moonlight.
"Don't say that. The first thing you must know is who you are. Unless you understand that, you will always be a slave."
"I know who I am. I'm mulata. Portugues. I'm not African." She glanced down at the grass beside her bare feet and suddenly wished her skin were whiter. I'm the color of dead leaves, she thought shamefully, of the barren earth. Then she gripped the hem of her shift and summoned back her pride. "I'm not a preto. Why would I have an African name?"
She felt her anger rising up once more, purging her feelings of helplessness. To be stolen from her bed by this ignorant preto, brought to some desolate spot with nothing but the distant sound of the sea. That he would dare to steal her away, a highborn mulata. She did not consort with blacks. She was almost . . . white.
The wind laced suddenly through her hair, splaying it across her cheeks, and she realized the night air was perfumed now, almost as the cloth had been, a wild fragrance that seemed to dispel a portion of her anger, her humiliation. For a moment she found herself thinking of the forbidden things possible in the night, those hidden hours when the rules of day can be sacrificed to need. And she became aware of the warmth of his body next to hers as he crouched, waiting, motionless as the trees at the bottom of the hill.
If she were his captive, then nothing he did to her would be of her own willing. How could she prevent him? Yet he made no move to take her. Why was he waiting?
"But to have a Yoruba name means to possess something the branco can never own." He caressed her again with his glance. Even though she was pale, he had wanted her from the first moment he saw her. And he had recognized the same want in her eyes, only held in check by her pride.
Why was she so proud, he wondered. If anything, she should feel shame, that her skin was so wan and pale. In Ife the women in the compounds would laugh at her, saying the moons would come and go and she would only wet her feet, barren. No man would take some frail albino to share his mat.
Even more—for all her fine Ingles clothes and her soft bed she was ten times more slave than he would ever be. How to make her understand that?
"You only become a slave when you give up the ways of your people. Even if your father was a branco, you were born of a Yoruba woman. You still can be Yoruba. And then you will be something, have something." The powerful hands that had carried her to this remote hilltop were now toying idly with the grass. "You are not the property of a branco unless you consent to be. To be a slave you must first submit, give him your spirit. If you refuse, if you remember your own people, he can never truly enslave you. He will have only your body, the work of your hands. The day you understand that, you are human again."