Every minute seemed like hours for Mini-mini and Sarith. After a while she heard Kwasiba coming. She said loudly that she had brought food and that all the men downstairs also had food. Agosu now opened the bedroom window, which had been closed all this time, and called, “All of you take the weapons away and come back to collect more.”196 After he had eaten he went and lay down on the bed, saying, “It’s already dark. I will stay here.”197 Kwasiba went and sat in the rocking chair and began talking to him. She asked him all kinds of things: how they worked in the bush, how they lived, and every time she said, “Yes, you all are right, you’re getting them where it hurts, those infernal whites.”198
When she had gone downstairs, Kwasiba had seen none of the people from the house. She understood very well that they would not all have fled, but that some of them had perhaps gone into hiding somewhere. She had thought that the best thing she could do in this situation would be to let the treacherous Agosu think that she was completely on his side. It was perhaps for the best that he wanted to stay upstairs, for then at least he would not set fire to the house, which so often happened.
Perhaps the soldiers would come. Perhaps they would come to ask where that one was, that one who loved the misi but who now lay dead on the ground. If only the three in the cupboard could remain immobile and not make any noise. For that reason she stayed in the room and talked with Agosu. She spoke loudly to signal that he was still in the room and also in the hope that he would not notice any sound that was made. She had to stay and talk to him, therefore, and so she asked him about everything and nothing while she rocked to and fro in the chair. Was it true what the people were saying about Joli-Coeur? Had he really hacked off the head of that wretch Schulz? Was it true what they did with those whites on the plantations?
Agosu spoke. Yes it was true. Sometimes they acted cruelly. But all the negroes’ cruel acts totalled up would not come to one-thousandth of all the cruelty inflicted on the negroes by the whites. And in fact the negroes did not want to fight and murder whites at all. They just wanted their freedom. Freedom to live there in the bush. They wanted nothing from the planters or the government: just freedom. Because the whites seemed unable to grasp this, that was why they sometimes had to be cruel. But Kwasiba knew very well, in fact, that negroes were not of themselves cruel. Every cruel act they had first learnt from the whites. A negro would not be cruel without due cause. For this reason they so often left the white soldiers alone. They were, after all, innocent. No, a negroe’s faith would not permit him to treat cruelly someone who was innocent. If he did that, then his kra (spirit) could leave him. This was apparently very different for the whites, who, it would seem, had no kra. Did Kwasiba know what the soldiers did if they managed to capture an Aluku village? Women and children were murdered, cruelly with a lance pushed through the stomach and sometimes, yes sometimes, and Agosu looked at Kwasiba with a look of steel while he told her, “Soldiers have crushed our children in a mortar just as you might crush bananas, until they were dead.”199
“But I’ll tell you this,” Agosu stood up while he spoke. “If I come across a white child, I let the mother watch and then I take the child, I cut a finger off, then another finger, another one, then a hand, then a foot, the other foot, until I’ve cut the child into pieces like this right before his mother’s eyes.”200
In the cupboard, Sarith felt as if she would faint when she heard this. This is what she could expect: that her child would be cut to pieces in front of her eyes. Jethro had fallen asleep in Mini-mini’s lap. When she heard Agosu’s words, she clutched the child even more tightly and pressed her hand on his free ear to prevent him from hearing any of this. Sarith pressed herself completely against Mini-mini as if she wanted to creep into Mini-mini’s body.
Agosu and Kwasiba continued talking. Apparently he had gone to lie on the bed. Now and then it went quiet and you heard only the bump of the rocking chair. Then even that stopped occasionally. Hours passed. On the bed in the room Agosu slept with brief interruptions. In the rocking chair Kwasiba dozed off occasionally, as did Mini-mini in the cupboard. But Sarith did not sleep. She was wide awake. This was her punishment, that much she believed for sure. This is how God punished people who were bad. Was it not this very afternoon that she had asked Rein whether she wasn’t perhaps a bad woman? This afternoon – it seemed like a hundred years ago. And Rein, what had happened to him? Had he managed to flee or was he dead? This had all happened because of her wickedness. In silence she prayed, “Lord God, allow this to pass, let them leave, have them not murder me and Jethro. I shall never be bad again, I promise.” She thought over all the bad things she had done. Oh so many. Not only all this with Rein, but earlier, that with Rutger, when she had caused Elza so much sorrow. She had had Ashana whipped to death. And Julius, how bad she had been to Julius. In the first place she was married to him without being in love with him, and she had betrayed him. “Oh God forgive me,” she prayed. “I shall not be bad any more, may he go without doing anything to us, I beg of you.”