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the ville.
The actual settlement was about half a mile from the sea, built on higher
ground on the side of the island that faced the vast ocean. The ville had been
located here to secure optimum shelter from the elements. There was a path
that led to the inlet where Mildred could see the fishermen's boats.
The inlet below appeared to be the only safe place for them to launch,
information that Mildred stored in her memory as more than useful.
But her immediate thoughts weren't of escape.
Many of the stories she heard about the island echoed what Sineta had told
her. However, she also learned through these exchanges that the people of the
island had a strong sense of identity.
They were linked by their skin color, and although they were all
different-indeed there had been many who had differences between themselves
that spilled into bloodshed-still at the end of a day they would band together
at a threat
from the whitelands. They knew that they and their ancestors had existed as a
minority within the whitelands and had been treated as little more than
animals during their history. They lived on the island because their ancestors
had refused this way of existence and had chosen to live on their own, free
terms. Petty personal differences counted for little when ranged against the
fate of their people.
And it was then that Mildred realized that it struck echoes of her own
childhood within her, the days when her father had been a Baptist minister,
always fighting against those who wanted his daughter, his family, his
friends, his flock to use separate schools, restaurants, buses, washrooms& all
because they were seen as somehow lesser. She had been using God's name
because it was the strongest curse and the mightiest invocation she could use
as a child, and the society in which she found herself reminded her of the one
she had wished for when yet another driveby shooting or attack had stove in
the windows of a neighbor's house, when yet another gasoline bomb had razed a
church. As she had grown up and become a doctor, moving to places where things
seemed much more laid back, as the sixties had given way to the seventies and
eighties, it had seemed that things had
changed, that there was equality.
Yet the fact that she was black and the majority wasn't had never been that
far from the surface.
Some small incident would bring up comments.
"You people would say that."
"You wouldn't understand, being different& "
Never outright insults or condemnation on color, but always the implication.
Here, she found none of that. This was the society of which her father had
dreamed, in which black people were just people. At last she felt a sense of
kinship that went deep-deeper than the present, stretching into the past.
When she saw Jak, and he raised the matter of freeing the rest of their
companions, she had felt uncomfortable. She knew that rescue should be a
priority, yet she mouthed platitudes at Jak about leaving things as they were
for a few days while she gained the confidence of the baron's daughter.
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It would be a tricky matter to get them released, and escape would be
difficult, leaving them with no chance to avoid buying the farm if they were
caught.
Even as she spoke, she could see the disbelief
in the albino's burning red eyes. He knew she was stalling and couldn't work
out why.
Neither could she. Deep in her heart, she knew what the companions meant to
her, and she knew from some of the things she heard the Pilatans say about the
whitelands that there were things in this society that were merely the inverse
of what they had left behind.
Mildred was divided. The ideal for the oppressed that she had heard of as a
child, and the sense of historical belonging that she had never thought to
experience, raged against the ties forged by a life that toyed with the big
chilling everyday& ties forged by fire that couldn't be broken, no matter the
color of the skin or the historical antecedent.
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