1. She is born

Part 3.   

Fiona Consuela Blackwell

Chapter 1. She is born

Fiona Blackwell first saw daylight in the 42nd  day of the year 1606. Although daylight was not exactly what she saw; the negroes on the plantation where she was born, has told me that she was born during a storm that tore the roof of the barn. And though her mother was the plantation owner’s daughter (se more about this in part 2, pages x-xx) she was not born on silken sheets in a fancy decorated bedroom. She was born in the slavequarters, in a shack that was blowing apart around her infant body. Her mother had sought down to those who don’t speak (the slaves) to deliver this unwanted child of hers. Though she held the babe in her arms for a full hour after the delivery, she never once turned back after having handed the infant over to the slave Carmine, who had resently delivered a baby boy herself.

Fiona has confided in me that she has never seen her mother up close (‘I guess I knew her insides better than her outsides’, she has said). When Fiona was two years olde her mother got married to another plantation owner, and never again set foot in her childhood home.

Fiona has thus known no other mother than Carmine, a slave so dark she was almost invisible in the night. Fiona shared her milk with her milkbrother Matebe and they both grew up healthy and beautiful babies. No one amongst the slaves questioned the presense of this fairskinned child in their midst, and every one of them knew who her birthmother had been. Fiona was one of them, born in a slave’s shack and fed with a slave’s milk. She may be fair and blue eyed, but she was a slave just like them. So her first language was the native tongue of the Isles and off course slavespeake – the secret signlanguage that no white person has ever fathomed. Most has no knowledge of its existence at all. Only third did she learn the codorian language that the people of power spoke in her grandfather’s plantation.

It is on purpose that I mention no names in regards to her mother and maternal grandparents. Though Fiona holds no love for the maternal side of her family, she asked me to keep theire names secret. I believe she is actually ashamed of them. Loyally I oblige.

Slaves work from the day they can walk and carry things at the same time – as did Fiona. She was not spared, because of her pale skin. She saw for herself how independence and sense of justice was repeatedly punished, and maybe because of that she has grown to be a very independent woman with a keen sense of justice. She ever questioned everything, and the voodoopriestess, who lived in secrecy in the wilderment beyond the plantation foresaw that this child would do much for her people – the slaves. To this one of the older slaves has since told me: ‘Great things, yes we knew that, but most of the time, we just wished she would stoppe asking all those questions!’.

I never met this voodoopriestess myself since she only speakes to those she finds worthy and white people never are, I’m told. I doubt that the present priestess is the same as when Fiona was a child, fore she was olde already then, and would be well into her 12th decade if she was the same. I’m sure that in some mysterious way another has taken her place since. But I know not – they will telle me nothing of this. But I’m told that the priestess also has said of Fiona that her oceaneyes was proof that she had mermaidblood in her veins. I must admit that I believe that to be true. The Blackwells are more than mere people; they could very well be merpeople.