“I can understand this, but Markos will not, and if your albino friend attempts to free the pale ones, then he will be chilled. They all will.”
“Then let me speak to him, try to explain. Let me see the others,” Mildred implored.
Sineta shook her head. “Would that it was that simple. Markos will not allow it.”
“But you’re the baron’s daughter, for God’s sake,” Mildred exclaimed, “surely you outrank him!” Sineta smiled slowly, sadly. “You forget, I am also a woman. I have no authority while my father lives and I am unmarried. Nor will I have any when I am married and the wife of the next baron.”
Mildred sighed. “Well, this is just stupid. It’ll end in a firefight where people will get hurt unnecessarily. Why waste life and ammo when it’s not needed?”
“You speak almost as if you do not know which end of the burning stick to grasp,” Sineta said.
Mildred frowned. The baron’s daughter was right. Normally she would have no hesitation in saying or doing anything that would help her companions. She would go to any lengths to get them out of that jail. And yet this time it was different. Mildred remained silent, and Sineta left her to her thoughts.
The next couple of days went by quickly, all too quickly for Mildred. On the advice of the baron’s daughter, she said nothing about their discussion, and didn’t pursue the matter of gaining release for her companions. Instead she immersed herself in the life of Pilatu, learning about the society into which she had found herself.
She learned that she liked it. It had occurred to her that she had started to use the phrase “for God’s sake” more than the occasional profanity that spilled from her lips. And she wondered why this should be. It took only a day of wandering around the ville for her to realize what was happening to her.
The people of Pilatu were pleased to see her up and about. For the first day, Sineta went with her. That was more, Mildred felt, to prevent her making contact with the companions than to show her around. The people she met were pleased to show her their part of the ville and to talk with her about their island and the place from whence she had come. It had been some time since there had been new arrivals on the island—particularly a sister and an albino accompanied by whitelanders—so there was much curiosity about her history. Mildred skirted this wherever possible. She couldn’t betray her friends by describing them as her captors, but neither could she follow Sineta’s advice to describe them thus until the initial flurry of interest had died down. Instead she turned the attention back on the islanders by asking them about 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.