"Far from Wonderland" by Amanda Moses (2007 McCrimmon Award Runner-Up)
She wasn’t looking where she was going; she almost knocked over the basket of hands. Human hands. Fingers clutched at the interlocking grass sides of the basket like tarantula’s legs. Thick-fingered, thin-fingered, wrinkled, and smooth, all of the hands were a deep shade of brown.
‘Alice, dear, you are far from Wonderland.’
Her footsteps were barely audible as she walked slowly atop the dusty dirt road. Her delicate feet, cloaked in the softest white mary-janes; her bony ankles veiled in gauzy stocking. A fresh white petticoat peeked out underneath a dress the color of the fair sky overhead. Her long pink arms hung loosely at her sides, unsure of their purpose in a place like this. Mouse-blonde hair brushed her collarbone. She wore tiny pearls in her white ears, a striking contrast to her vibrant green eyes.
Indeed, her eyes were spectacular. Large, inquisitive doe eyes framed in long dark lashes. She darted them left, right; a shocking green glare the color of finely cut emeralds against the deep primrose flush of her cheeks.
Slowly, she looked up from the basket, her hazy lingering stare clouded by the barbarity of a basket of human hands. A beady-eyed man with a wide, craggy face snarled a yellow-toothed giggle. He flashed the hint of an impish grin and gave a wink in the direction of the three severed male heads posted in warning on the ends of poles behind her before he snatched the basket from the side of the road and clunk…clunk…clunked away.
‘Whose hands were those?’ she asks, placing another sugar cube in her cup of tea. ‘And who severed the hands of those children? The heads of those men? The feet of those women?’
‘Welcome to the Conundrum, my dear,’ he grins. ‘God bless the King.’
She continued down the road, passing another and another independent head…hand…head…foot…hand…head… The air smelled heavy, dry and hot. A faint breeze of stifling fieriness blew across her, choking her dainty neck. It threw yellow dirt over her, staining the soft blue cotton of her dress.
Men and women were working on all sides of her. Thuds steadily beating in the air from their axes, their dark sinewy backs gleamed in the hot sun like dozens of brawny black beetles scrambling to collect the scattering crumbs falling from around a bearded man’s mouth; they hacked away at the ankles of the trees until they bled rubber ivory sap, unfazed by the dismembered heads and hands of their brothers. Foul-faced white men in clean linens stood over the workers; long, gnarled whips with sharpened edges extended from their pale fat fingers.
Marching towards this sorrowful crowd, like Santa’s reindeer reluctantly trudging toward the home of some rotten brat, came rows of black human beings, tied ten to a rope, their scrawny arms full of baskets, ammunition, supplies, and trinkets. Appropriately at the rear were the minions of Saint Nicholas himself, the King’s armed soldiers, posing a frightful caboose for this train of wretchedness. The parade marched on, gaining closer and closer still to the working women and men.
Tears burned behind her green eyes. Her mouth hung softly open, her red lips chapped and cracking in the dry heat. She watched as one man began to turn around. Before his back was fully twisted so as to catch a glimpse of these new ‘recruits,’ the closest whip lashed a corkscrew kiss that left a bloody wrinkle across his brown back.
‘I just don’t understand,’ Alice murmurs softly before she takes a sip of tea. As she brings the cup to her delicate pink lips, her nostrils taste the fresh odor of her hands. Soap and rose water mingle with the potent spice of the African Roobios tea leaves in her cup.
‘Let me tell you a story.’ And the Cat lets out a long breath. He holds his thin gray paw sturdy as he sets the teacup onto its fine blue saucer. His head facing down, paws folded neatly in his furry lap, he looks up at her through his thin-framed spectacles and purrs. ‘It’s all true, mind you, all true. Some time ago, the dreaded king of Bassus as it were, promised to transform the region of Conundrum into a glorious and civilized place. He received immeasurable funds for his project.’
He brings one long front claw to his chin and begins to scratch in long, pronounced strokes. ‘And he then began a reign of terror over the native people. A tyrant and greedy man, he enslaved them and forced them to work gathering ivory, wood, and rubber; those laborers who failed to meet quotas were killed. For twenty-five years, dear.’
With a sudden wink, the fat black Cat leaps unto her lap. ‘At a cost of ten million lives…’ he whispers through smirking teeth.
‘Are you ready, Alice?’
These roads were the same. Not literally the same streets, for this was an entirely different time, an entirely different place, but the roads appeared identical. This was not Conundrum; this was Rusen.
It had a terrible smell. A dampness that lingered overhead in the air, as if this was once a place of great tragedy; the sun is not cheerful, the breeze is not refreshing, the clouds are not majestic. Goosebumps pricked her pink flesh. The hot wind speckled her hair with dirt. Her stockings had long since been shredded on scattered bits of barbed wire that lay strewn across the street. Her scuffed mary-janes collided with a sharp rock, slicing through the once-white leather.
‘Rusen was devastated,’ the cat explains between long, thoughtful licks meant to clean his black paws. ‘Millions of their people slaughtered in just a few days. From the hate leftover from Bassus’s rule.’
Alice shudders and reaches for another sugar cube.
She passed huts with doormats of crimson-stained grass, the blood ebbing and flowing in a pattern that spelled grief in slow, sorrowful scrawl. She passed children in their parents’ clothes, with faces of weathered and hardened maturity, and bodies of terrified adolescence. She passed the decaying remains of human beings, their battered clothing polka-dotted in bullets, their arms outstretched in a farewell to some greater fate.
The tears that before had stung her eyes dampened the neckline of her dress that was now tainted the dirty yellow-brown of the ground upon which she walked. Her breathing was rapid, animalistic; she choked on each devastated breath of air. She kept walking, her eyes wide and incredulous, until she reached at last, peculiarly, a door. A large, sturdy, brown door with no doorknob.
‘You know the one about curiosity, don’t you dearie?’ giggles the Cat.
She pushed her frail body against the door and leaned it open. She hurried into a dim and musty hallway. Moist grass brushed against her scraped, naked ankles. On both sides of her were dense green shrubs, trimmed smooth like walls twelve feet in height. The wide, thick leaves were wet and waxy.
One curiously long branch snarled far out from the neat sides of the walls. As she walked, trembling, the pointed branch caught on her petticoat and tore it from her body. Her nose breathed in the thick smell of sweat and fresh paint.
‘One lump or two?’ she asks, her long, thin fingers delicately grasping the polished silver tongs.
‘Just one, dear.’ His tail twitches left, right, left, right.
‘I think it’s simply awful what happened to those poor people in Conundrum and Rusen,’ she shrugs, tasting again the sweet, warm tea.
He looks up at her again, his gray-blue eyes glittering playfully. ‘It happened again, darling. What ended in Rusen began again in the rebuilt Conundrum not so long ago.’
There were faces in the walls. What began as thick leveled walls of brush had slowly transformed into the disheveled mess of shrubs that she walked slowly through now. Sharp springs stuck out around her, catching on her clothes and flesh, tearing bloody signatures into her thighs and neck.
The faces all had open eyes. Dark eyes, strong noses, full pink lips. They were of black men, women, boys, girls, infants. They were motionless, staring out at her with solemn expressions of emptiness and waste. Faces that were scattered amongst the bushes, some near the very top of the walls, and others around her feet.
‘Millions dead,’ the Cat continues. ‘Perhaps three, four million lives, gone forever at the hands of rebel armies.’
Most curiously of all was that these faces were painted. The deep black faces of these slaughtered people had been clumsily splattered with sticky white paint. Her dirty cheeks paled, her stomach grew tight, her skin became clammy and hot. ‘Why, they’ve painted your faces white!’ she exclaimed, staring dead into the blank eyes of a girl no older than she. To disturb the deceased…they hadn’t had even the respect of a proper funeral. And then to slather this graffiti over their cold corpses…Her knees and hands began to shake; she could not understand such preposterousness.
A sharp cackle of unanimous laughter reverberated through the halls of forgotten facts. It was faint, far away, but she could gauge from where it came. She continued on, slowly trudging toward the heart of this maze, this labyrinth of the dead. Her frail and bleeding legs moved briskly on her quest to find someone in charge, someone who could explain this arrant madness.
The battered mary-janes thud, thudded in the grass…another peal of laughter…thud, thud, thud, thud…laughter again, louder and louder still…thud, thud, thud…round a corner, thud, to the right, thud, thud, and finally…nothing.
She stood frozen. Her hair was wild, windswept into a savage halo. The soft skin of her lips had cracked. Her dress was a soiled mess, her stockings and petticoat gone, her shoes brown and broken. Her naked legs and neck had long bleeding scrapes; her dress was stained in blood as well. Her shoulders forward, arms at her sides, she stared in astonishment with fiery bloodshot eyes. The tears were gone, her gut felt empty as she tried to comprehend the sight in front of her.
‘I shall have to write a letter about this atrocity,’ she declares. ‘I would have liked very much to have read about it in the paper or at least heard of it. I don’t like to be ignorant of these things, you know.’
The Cat smirks from behind his steaming teacup.
‘To whom shall I send such a letter, do you think? The United Nations?’
His tea shoots straight across the room, and he doesn’t stop cackling for another half an hour.
A long, robust table stood elegantly in the center of the scene. There were just under two hundred chairs, just under two hundred place settings. A silk tablecloth of red gingham print lay atop the ornately crafted dining table. Gargantuan platinum teacups were set across it, overflowing with oolong tea from leaves hand-picked by monkeys in the Orient. Confetti in bold shades of pinks, greens, oranges, and violets decorated the table and most of the ground. At the center of this ridiculous scene was the largest teapot she’d ever seen: crafted of platinum and polished to a blinding degree, it stood no less than three feet tall, steam billowing out from around its gaudy lid and reeking of opulent luxury. Surrounding it were huge basins of sugar and cream with mirror-like surfaces and thick, shiny handles.
Each place was set with a mat hand-woven into the flag of a foreign country; Russia, India, Britain, Japan, all had a seat at this lavish tea party. The guests were a microcosm of global society: they were men and women, black and white, from the East and from the West. They were laughing, giggling, and cackling loudly as they mingled in outlandish costumes. They wore fuscia, chartreuse, aquamarine; they wore the yellow of sunflowers, the orange of tangerines, the gold of rings.
At the head of the table stood a man quite off-set from the rest of the crowd. His short, silver hair tucked behind his large ears, he had a look of the confused sort of evil in his brow. His tiny, beady black eyes penetrated out from behind a smirking grin. He wore a blue velvet jacket over a crisp white shirt, long loose pants striped red and white, and white cowboy boots with silver tassels. A large silver star plated his belt-buckle and he stood with his wrinkled hands shoved down into his pants pockets.
Surrounding this ludicrous crowd were the same walls from the maze before; the same blank black faces painted over with the same white paint.
The party halted abruptly and turned inquisitively toward Alice. Her breathing was panicked, rapid, wild. “Why…?” she narrowed her eyes and motioned toward the faces in the bush.
The man in the blue, red, and white took a step toward her. “What are you doing here?” He had a raspy southern accent.
“I…” Her eyes drifted back to the faces in the walls. “How can you…they’re dead…?”She tried to cry to expel the horror aching in her veins and throbbing in her head, but her tears were gone.
“I think you’ve spent enough time here,” the man said as he walked slowly to within an inch of her shaking body. His cold dry hands reached out and wrapped around her filthy arms.
Alice choked on her terrified breath and cried out, “You’re mad!”
The crowd moved closer, closing in. One man’s clumsy elbow knocked over the giant tea kettle, spilling the red tea over the table and onto the floor.
“We’re all mad here,” he laughed.
‘It’s really quite a shame.’ She shakes her head adamantly.
‘I know, dear,’ purrs the Cat, and he snuggles warmly into her soft cotton lap.
Far From Wonderland - Draft 2
She wasn’t looking where she was going; she almost knocked over the basket of hands. Human hands. Fingers clutched at the interlocking grass sides of the basket like tarantula’s legs. Thick-fingered, thin-fingered, wrinkled, and smooth, all of the hands were a deep shade of brown.
Alice, dear, you are far from Wonderland.
Her footsteps were barely audible as she walked slowly atop the dusky dirt road. Her delicate feet, cloaked in the softest white mary-janes; her bony ankles veiled in gauzy stocking. A fresh white petticoat peeked out underneath a dress the color of the fair sky overhead. Her long pink arms hung loosely at her sides, unsure of their purpose in a place like this. Mouse-blonde hair brushed her collarbone. She wore tiny pearls in her white ears, a striking contrast to her vibrant green eyes.
Indeed, her eyes were spectacular. Large, inquisitive doe eyes framed in long dark lashes. She darted them left, right; a shocking green glare the color of finely cut emeralds against the deep primrose flush of her cheeks.
Slowly, she looked up from the basket, her hazy lingering stare clouded by the barbarity of a basket of humans’ hands. A beady-eyed man with a wide, craggy face snarled a yellow-toothed giggle. He flashed the hint of an impish grin and gave a wink in the direction of the three severed male heads posted in warning on the ends of poles behind her before he snatched the basket from the side of the road and clunk…clunk…clunked away.
‘Whose hands are these?’ she asks, placing another sugar cube in her cup of tea. ‘And who severed the hands of these children? The heads of these men? The feet of these women?’
‘Welcome to the Congo Free State, my dear,’ he grins. ‘God bless the King.’
She continued down the road, passing another and another independent head…hand…head…foot…hand…head…and something that looked suspiciously like a ‘sexual member [i] .’ The air smelled heavy, dry and hot. A faint breeze of stifling fieriness blew across her, choking her dainty neck. It threw yellow dirt over her, staining the soft blue cotton of her dress.
Men and women were working on all sides of her. Thuds steadily beating in the air from their axes, their dark sinewy backs gleamed in the hot sun like dozens of brawny black beetles scrambling to collect the scattering crumbs falling from around a bearded man’s mouth; they hacked away at the ankles of the trees until they bled rubber ivory sap [ii] , unfazed by the dismembered heads and hands of their brothers. Foul-faced white men in clean linens stood over the workers; long, gnarled whips with sharpened edges extended from their pale fat fingers[iii] .
Marching towards this sorrowful crowd, like Santa’s reindeer reluctantly trudging toward the home of some rotten brat, came rows of black human beings, tied ten to a rope, their scrawny arms full of baskets, ammunition, supplies, and trinkets [iv].
Appropriately at the rear were the minions of Saint Nicholas himself, Leopold’s Force Publique, posing a frightful caboose for this train of wretchedness. The parade marched on, gaining closer and closer still to the working women and men.
Tears burned behind her green eyes. Her mouth hung softly open, her red lips chapped and cracking in the dry desert heat. She watched as one man began to turn around. Before his back was fully twisted so as to catch a glimpse of these new ‘recruits,’ the closest whip lashed a corkscrew kiss that left a bloody wrinkle across his brown back.
‘I just don’t understand,’ Alice murmurs softly before she takes a sip of tea. As she brings the cup to her delicate pink lips, her nostrils taste the fresh odor of her hands. Soap and rose water mingle with the potent spice of the African Roobios tea leaves in her cup.
‘Let me tell you a story.’ And the Cat lets out a long breath. He holds his thin gray paw sturdy as he sets the teacup unto its fine blue saucer. His head facing down, paws folded neatly in his furry lap, he looks up at her through his thin-framed spectacles and purrs. ‘It’s all true, mind you, all true. Some time ago, Leopold II, the dreaded king of Belgium as it were, promised to transform the region of the Congo into a glorious and civilized place [v] . He received immeasurable funds for his project [vi] .’
He brings one long front claw to his chin and begins to scratch in long, pronounced strokes. ‘And he then began a reign of terror over the native people. A tyrant and greedy man, he enslaved them and forced them to work gathering ivory, wood, and rubber; those laborers who failed to meet quotas were killed [vii] . For twenty-five years, dear.’
With a sudden wink, the fat black Cat leaps unto her lap. ‘At a cost of ten million lives…’ he whispers through smirking teeth.
Are you ready, Alice?
These roads were the same. Not literally the same streets, for this was an entirely different time, an entirely different place, but the roads appeared identical. This was not the Congo; this was Rwanda.
It had a terrible smell. A dampness that lingered overhead in the air, as if this was once a place of great tragedy; the sun is not cheerful, the breeze is not refreshing, the clouds are not majestic. Goosebumps pricked her pink flesh. The hot wind speckled her hair with dirt. Her stockings had long since been shredded on scattered bits of barbed wire that lay strewn across the street. Her scuffed mary-janes collided with a sharp rock, slicing through the once-white leather.
She passed huts with doormats of crimson-stained grass, the blood ebbing and flowing in a pattern that spelled grief in slow, sorrowful scrawl. She passed children in their parents’ clothes, with faces of weathered and hardened maturity, and bodies of terrified adolescence. She passed the decaying remains of human beings, their battered clothing polka-dotted in bullets, their arms outstretched in a farewell to some greater fate.
The tears that before had stung her eyes now dampened the neckline of her dress that was now tainted the dirty yellow-brown of the ground upon which she walked. Her breathing was rapid, animalistic; she choked on each devastated breath of air. She kept walking, her eyes wide and incredulous, until she reached at last, peculiarly, a door. A large, sturdy, brown door with no doorknob.
‘You know the one about curiosity, don’t you dearie?’ giggles the Cat.
She pushed her frail body against the door and leaned it open. She rushed into this unfamiliar place; anything could be better than Rwanda. Moist grass brushed against her scraped, naked ankles. On both sides of her were dense green shrubs, trimmed smooth like walls twelve feet in height. The wide, thick leaves were wet and waxy.
One curiously long branch snarled far out from the neat sides of the walls. As she walked, trembling, the pointed branch caught on her petticoat and tore it from her body. Her nose breathed in the thick smell of sweat and fresh paint.
‘One lump or two?’ she asks, her long, thin fingers delicately grasping the polished silver tongs.
‘Just one, dear.’ His tail twitches left, right, left, right.
‘I think it’s simply awful what happened to those poor people in the Congo,’ she shrugs, tasting again the sweet, warm tea.
He looks up at her again, his gray-blue eyes glittering playfully. ‘It happened again, darling. What ended in Rwanda began again in the Congo not so long ago. [viii]’
There were faces in the walls. What began as thick leveled walls of brush had slowly transformed into the disheveled mess of shrubs that she walked slowly through now. Sharp springs stuck out around her, catching on her clothes and flesh, tearing bloody signatures into her thighs and neck.
The faces all had open eyes. Dark eyes, strong noses, full pink lips. They were of black men, women…boys, girls…infants. They were motionless, staring out at her with solemn expressions of emptiness and waste. Faces that were scattered amongst the bushes, some near the very top of the walls, and others around her feet.
‘Millions dead,’ the Cat continues. ‘Perhaps three, four million lives, gone forever at the hands of rebel militias.[ix] ’
Most curiously of all was that these faces were painted. The deep black faces of these slaughtered people had been clumsily splattered with sticky white paint. Her dirty cheeks paled, her stomach grew tight, her skin became clammy and hot. ‘Why, they’ve painted your faces white!’ she exclaimed, staring dead into the blank eyes of a girl no older than she. Her knees and hands began to shake; she could not understand such preposterousness.
A sharp cackle of unanimous laughter reverberated through the halls of forgotten faces. It was faint, far away, but she could gage from where it came. She continued on, slowly trudging toward the heart of this maze, this labyrinth of the dead. Her frail and bleeding legs moved briskly on her quest to find someone in charge, someone who could explain this arrant madness.
The battered mary-janes thud, thudded in the grass…another peal of laughter…thud, thud, thud, thud…laughter again, louder and louder still…thud, thud, thud…round a corner, thud, to the right, thud, thud, and finally…nothing.
She stood frozen. Her hair was wild, windswept into a savage halo. The soft skin of her lips had cracked. Her dress was a soiled mess, her stockings and petticoat gone, her shoes brown and broken. Her naked legs and neck had long bleeding scrapes, her dress was stained in blood as well. Her shoulders forward, arms at her sides, she stared in astonishment with fiery bloodshot eyes. The tears were gone, her gut felt empty as she tried to comprehend the sight in front of her.
‘I shall have to write a letter about this atrocity,’ she declares. ‘I would have liked very much to have read about it in the paper or at least heard of it. I don’t like to be ignorant of these things, you know.’
The Cat smirks from behind his steaming teacup.
‘To whom shall I send such a letter, do you think? The United Nations?’
His tea shoots straight across the room, and he doesn’t stop cackling for another half an hour.
A long, robust table stood elegantly in the center of the scene. There are just under two hundred chairs, just under two hundred place settings [x]. A silk tablecloth of red gingham print lay atop the ornately crafted dining table. Platinum teacups the sizes of bowls were set across it, filled to the brim with oolong tea from leaves hand-picked by monkeys in the Orient. Confetti in bold shades of pinks, greens, oranges, and violets decorated the table and most of the ground. At the center of this ridiculous scene was the largest teapot she’d ever seen: crafted of platinum and polished to a blinding degree, it stood no less than three feet tall, steam billowing out from around its gaudy lid and reeking of opulent luxury. Surrounding it were huge basins of sugar and cream with mirror-like surfaces and thick, shiny handles.
Each place was set with a mat hand-woven into the flag of a foreign country; Russia, India, Britain, Japan, all had a seat at this lavish tea party. The guests were a microcosm of global society: they were men and women, black and white, from the East and from the West. They were laughing, giggling, and cackling loudly as they mingled in outlandish costumes. They wore fuscia, chartreuse, aquamarine; they wore the yellow of sunflowers, the orange of tangerines, the gold of rings.
At the head of the table stood a man quite off-set from the rest of the crowd. His short, silver hair tucked behind his large ears, he had a look of the confused sort of evil in his brow. His tiny, beady black eyes penetrated out from behind a smirking grin. He wore a blue velvet jacket over a crisp white shirt, long loose pants striped red and white, and white cowboy boots with silver tassels. A large silver star plated his belt-buckle and he stood with his wrinkled hands shoved down into his pants pockets.
Surrounding this ludicrous crowd were the same walls from the maze before; the same blank black faces painted over with the same white paint.
The party halted abruptly and turned inquisitively toward Alice. Her breathing was panicked, rapid, wild. “Why…?” she narrowed her eyes and motioned toward the faces in the bush.
The man in the blue, red, and white took a step toward her. “What are you doing here?” He had a raspy southern accent.
“I…” Her eyes drifted back to the faces in the walls. “How can you…they’re dead…?” She tried to cry to expel the horror aching in her veins and throbbing in her head, but her tears were gone.
“I think you’ve spent enough time here,” the man said as he walked slowly to within an inch of her shaking body. His cold dry hands reached out and wrapped around her filthy arms.
Alice choked on her terrified breath and cried out, “You’re mad!”
The crowd moved closer, closing in. One man’s clumsy elbow knocked over the giant tea kettle, spilling the red tea over the table and unto the floor like blood flowing out of a dying man.
“We’re all mad here,” he laughed.
‘It’s really quite a shame.’ She shakes her head adamantly.
[xi]‘I know, dear,’ purrs the Cat, and he snuggles warmly into her soft cotton lap.
Works Cited
“Congo Free State.” 21 Sept. 2006 Wikipedia. 5 Oct. 2006http://en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Congo_Free_State
Fonseca, Alroy “Four Million Dead: The Second Congolese War, 1998-2004.” April 2004.
5 Oct. 2006 http://www.geocities.com/afonseca/CongoWar.htm
“Forgotten Holocaust.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2001: B7.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial
Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Rosenberg, Matt. “The Number of Countries in the World.” 1 Jul. 2006About.com 9 Oct. 2006
http://geography.about.com/cs/countries/a/numbercountries.htm
[i] “Congo Free State”
[ii] “Forgotten Holocaust”
[iii]Hochschild 120
[iv] Hochschild 132-133
[v] Hochschild 45
[vi]Hochschild 94
[vii] “Forgotten Holocaust”
[viii]Fonseca
[ix] Fonseca
[x]Rosenberg
Far From Wonderland - Draft 3
She wasn’t looking where she was going; she almost knocked over the basket of hands. Human hands. Fingers clutched at the interlocking grass sides of the basket like tarantula’s legs. Thick-fingered, thin-fingered, wrinkled, and smooth, all of the hands were a deep shade of brown.
‘Alice, dear, you are far from Wonderland.’
Her footsteps were barely audible as she walked slowly atop the dusky dirt road. Her delicate feet, cloaked in the softest white mary-janes; her bony ankles veiled in gauzy stocking. A fresh white petticoat peeked out underneath a dress the color of the fair sky overhead. Her long pink arms hung loosely at her sides, unsure of their purpose in a place like this. Mouse-blonde hair brushed her collarbone. She wore tiny pearls in her white ears, a striking contrast to her vibrant green eyes.
Indeed, her eyes were spectacular. Large, inquisitive doe eyes framed in long dark lashes. She darted them left, right; a shocking green glare the color of finely cut emeralds against the deep primrose flush of her cheeks.
Slowly, she looked up from the basket, her hazy lingering stare clouded by the barbarity of a basket of humans’ hands. A beady-eyed man with a wide, craggy face snarled a yellow-toothed giggle. He flashed the hint of an impish grin and gave a wink in the direction of the three severed male heads posted in warning on the ends of poles behind her before he snatched the basket from the side of the road and clunk…clunk…clunked away.
‘Whose hands were those?’ she asks, placing another sugar cube in her cup of tea. ‘And who severed the hands of those children? The heads of those men? The feet of those women?’
‘Welcome to the Congo Free State, my dear,’ he grins. ‘God bless the King.’
She continued down the road, passing another and another independent head…hand…head…foot…hand…head…and something that looked suspiciously like a ‘sexual member[i] .’ The air smelled heavy, dry and hot. A faint breeze of stifling fieriness blew across her, choking her dainty neck. It threw yellow dirt over her, staining the soft blue cotton of her dress.
Men and women were working on all sides of her. Thuds steadily beating in the air from their axes, their dark sinewy backs gleamed in the hot sun like dozens of brawny black beetles scrambling to collect the scattering crumbs falling from around a bearded man’s mouth; they hacked away at the ankles of the trees until they bled rubber ivory sap [ii] , unfazed by the dismembered heads and hands of their brothers. Foul-faced white men in clean linens stood over the workers; long, gnarled whips with sharpened edges extended from their pale fat fingers[iii] .
Marching towards this sorrowful crowd, like Santa’s reindeer reluctantly trudging toward the home of some rotten brat, came rows of black human beings, tied ten to a rope, their scrawny arms full of baskets, ammunition, supplies, and trinkets[iv] . Appropriately at the rear were the minions of Saint Nicholas himself, Leopold’s Force Publique, posing a frightful caboose for this train of wretchedness. The parade marched on, gaining closer and closer still to the working women and men.
Tears burned behind her green eyes. Her mouth hung softly open, her red lips chapped and cracking in the dry heat. She watched as one man began to turn around. Before his back was fully twisted so as to catch a glimpse of these new ‘recruits,’ the closest whip lashed a corkscrew kiss that left a bloody wrinkle across his brown back.
‘I just don’t understand,’ Alice murmurs softly before she takes a sip of tea. As she brings the cup to her delicate pink lips, her nostrils taste the fresh odor of her hands. Soap and rose water mingle with the potent spice of the African Roobios tea leaves in her cup.
‘Let me tell you a story.’ And the Cat lets out a long breath. He holds his thin gray paw sturdy as he sets the teacup onto its fine blue saucer. His head facing down, paws folded neatly in his furry lap, he looks up at her through his thin-framed spectacles and purrs. ‘It’s all true, mind you, all true. Some time ago, Leopold II, the dreaded king of Belgium as it were, promised to transform the region of the Congo into a glorious and civilized place, renamed the Congo Free State [v] . He received immeasurable funds for his project[vi] .’
He brings one long front claw to his chin and begins to scratch in long, pronounced strokes. ‘And he then began a reign of terror over the native people. A tyrant and greedy man, he enslaved them and forced them to work gathering ivory, wood, and rubber; those laborers who failed to meet quotas were killed[vii] . For twenty-five years, dear.’
With a sudden wink, the fat black Cat leaps unto her lap. ‘At a cost of ten million lives…’ he whispers through smirking teeth.
‘Are you ready, Alice?’
These roads were the same. Not literally the same streets, for this was an entirely different time, an entirely different place, but the roads appeared identical. This was not the Congo Free State; this was Rwanda.
It had a terrible smell. A dampness that lingered overhead in the air, as if this was once a place of great tragedy; the sun is not cheerful, the breeze is not refreshing, the clouds are not majestic. Goosebumps pricked her pink flesh. The hot wind speckled her hair with dirt. Her stockings had long since been shredded on scattered bits of barbed wire that lay strewn across the street. Her scuffed mary-janes collided with a sharp rock, slicing through the once-white leather.
She passed huts with doormats of crimson-stained grass, the blood ebbing and flowing in a pattern that spelled grief in slow, sorrowful scrawl. She passed children in their parents’ clothes, with faces of weathered and hardened maturity, and bodies of terrified adolescence. She passed the decaying remains of human beings, their battered clothing polka-dotted in bullets, their arms outstretched in a farewell to some greater fate.
The tears that before had stung her eyes dampened the neckline of her dress that was now tainted the dirty yellow-brown of the ground upon which she walked. Her breathing was rapid, animalistic; she choked on each devastated breath of air. She kept walking, her eyes wide and incredulous, until she reached at last, peculiarly, a door. A large, sturdy, brown door with no doorknob.
‘You know the one about curiosity, don’t you dearie?’ giggles the Cat.
She pushed her frail body against the door and leaned it open. She hurried into a dim and musty hallway. Moist grass brushed against her scraped, naked ankles. On both sides of her were dense green shrubs, trimmed smooth like walls twelve feet in height. The wide, thick leaves were wet and waxy.
One curiously long branch snarled far out from the neat sides of the walls. As she walked, trembling, the pointed branch caught on her petticoat and tore it from her body. Her nose breathed in the thick smell of sweat and fresh paint.
‘One lump or two?’ she asks, her long, thin fingers delicately grasping the polished silver tongs.
‘Just one, dear.’ His tail twitches left, right, left, right.
‘I think it’s simply awful what happened to those poor people in Africa,’ she shrugs, tasting again
the sweet, warm tea.
He looks up at her again, his gray-blue eyes glittering playfully. ‘It happened again, darling. What ended in Rwanda began again in the Democratic Republic of the Congo not so long ago.[viii]’
There were faces in the walls. What began as thick leveled walls of brush had slowly transformed into the disheveled mess of shrubs that she walked slowly through now. Sharp springs stuck out around her, catching on her clothes and flesh, tearing bloody signatures into her thighs and neck.
The faces all had open eyes. Dark eyes, strong noses, full pink lips. They were of black men, women, boys, girls, infants. They were motionless, staring out at her with solemn expressions of emptiness and waste. Faces that were scattered amongst the bushes, some near the very top of the walls, and others around her feet.
‘Millions dead,’ the Cat continues. ‘Perhaps three, four million lives, gone forever at the hands of rebel militias.[ix] ’
Most curiously of all was that these faces were painted. The deep black faces of these slaughtered people had been clumsily splattered with sticky white paint. Her dirty cheeks paled, her stomach grew tight, her skin became clammy and hot. ‘Why, they’ve painted your faces white!’ she exclaimed, staring dead into the blank eyes of a girl no older than she. Her knees and hands began to shake; she could not understand such preposterousness.
A sharp cackle of unanimous laughter reverberated through the halls of forgotten faces. It was faint, far away, but she could gauge from where it came. She continued on, slowly trudging toward the heart of this maze, this labyrinth of the dead. Her frail and bleeding legs moved briskly on her quest to find someone in charge, someone who could explain this arrant madness.
The battered mary-janes thud, thudded in the grass…another peal of laughter…thud, thud, thud, thud…laughter again, louder and louder still…thud, thud, thud…round a corner, thud, to the right, thud, thud, and finally…nothing.
She stood frozen. Her hair was wild, windswept into a savage halo. The soft skin of her lips had cracked. Her dress was a soiled mess, her stockings and petticoat gone, her shoes brown and broken. Her naked legs and neck had long bleeding scrapes; her dress was stained in blood as well. Her shoulders forward, arms at her sides, she stared in astonishment with fiery bloodshot eyes. The tears were gone, her gut felt empty as she tried to comprehend the sight in front of her.
‘I shall have to write a letter about this atrocity,’ she declares. ‘I would have liked very much to have read about it in the paper or at least heard of it. I don’t like to be ignorant of these things, you know.’
The Cat smirks from behind his steaming teacup.
‘To whom shall I send such a letter, do you think? The United Nations?’
His tea shoots straight across the room, and he doesn’t stop cackling for another half an hour.
A long, robust table stood elegantly in the center of the scene. There were just under two hundred chairs, just under two hundred place settings[x] . A silk tablecloth of red gingham print lay atop the ornately crafted dining table. Gargantuan, platinum teacups were set across it, overflowing with oolong tea from leaves hand-picked by monkeys in the Orient. Confetti in bold shades of pinks, greens, oranges, and violets decorated the table and most of the ground. At the center of this ridiculous scene was the largest teapot she’d ever seen: crafted of platinum and polished to a blinding degree, it stood no less than three feet tall, steam billowing out from around its gaudy lid and reeking of opulent luxury. Surrounding it were huge basins of sugar and cream with mirror-like surfaces and thick, shiny handles.
Each place was set with a mat hand-woven into the flag of a foreign country; Russia, India, Britain, Japan, all had a seat at this lavish tea party. The guests were a microcosm of global society: they were men and women, black and white, from the East and from the West. They were laughing, giggling, and cackling loudly as they mingled in outlandish costumes. They wore fuscia, chartreuse, aquamarine; they wore the yellow of sunflowers, the orange of tangerines, the gold of rings.
At the head of the table stood a man quite off-set from the rest of the crowd. His short, silver hair tucked behind his large ears, he had a look of the confused sort of evil in his brow. His tiny, beady black eyes penetrated out from behind a smirking grin. He wore a blue velvet jacket over a crisp white shirt, long loose pants striped red and white, and white cowboy boots with silver tassels. A large silver star plated his belt-buckle and he stood with his wrinkled hands shoved down into his pants pockets.
Surrounding this ludicrous crowd were the same walls from the maze before; the same blank black faces painted over with the same white paint.
The party halted abruptly and turned inquisitively toward Alice. Her breathing was panicked, rapid, wild. “Why…?” she narrowed her eyes and motioned toward the faces in the bush.
The man in the blue, red, and white took a step toward her. “What are you doing here?” He had a raspy southern accent.
“I…” Her eyes drifted back to the faces in the walls. “How can you…they’re dead…?” She tried to cry to expel the horror aching in her veins and throbbing in her head, but her tears were gone.
“I think you’ve spent enough time here,” the man said as he walked slowly to within an inch of her shaking body. His cold dry hands reached out and wrapped around her filthy arms.
Alice choked on her terrified breath and cried out, “You’re mad!”
The crowd moved closer, closing in. One man’s clumsy elbow knocked over the giant tea kettle, spilling the red tea over the table and onto the floor.
“We’re all mad here,” he laughed.
‘It’s really quite a shame.’ She shakes her head adamantly.
[xi]‘I know, dear,’ purrs the Cat, and he snuggles warmly into her soft cotton lap.
Works Cited
“Congo Free State.” 21 Sept. 2006 Wikipedia. 5 Oct. 2006http://en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Congo_Free_State
Fonseca, Alroy “Four Million Dead: The Second Congolese War, 1998-2004.” April 2004.
5 Oct. 2006http://www.geocities.com/afonseca/CongoWar.htm.
“Forgotten Holocaust.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2001: B7.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial
Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Rosenberg, Matt. “The Number of Countries in the World.” 1 Jul. 2006About.com 9 Oct. 2006
http://geography.about.com/cs/countries/a/numbercountries.htm
[i] “Congo Free State”
[ii] “Forgotten Holocaust”
[iii] Hochschild 120
[iv] Hochschild 132-133
[v] Hochschild 45
[vi]Hochschild 94
[vii] “Forgotten Holocaust”
[viii]Fonseca
[ix] Fonseca
[x]Rosenberg
Far From Wonderland - Draft 4
Far From Wonderland: Alice’s Quest for Truth
She wasn’t looking where she was going; she almost knocked over the basket of hands. Human hands. Fingers clutched at the interlocking grass sides of the basket like tarantula’s legs. Thick-fingered, thin-fingered, wrinkled, and smooth, all of the hands were a deep shade of brown.
‘Alice, dear, you are far from Wonderland.’
Her footsteps were barely audible as she walked slowly atop the dusty dirt road. Her delicate feet, cloaked in the softest white mary-janes; her bony ankles veiled in gauzy stocking. A fresh white petticoat peeked out underneath a dress the color of the fair sky overhead. Her long pink arms hung loosely at her sides, unsure of their purpose in a place like this. Mouse-blonde hair brushed her collarbone. She wore tiny pearls in her white ears, a striking contrast to her vibrant green eyes.
Indeed, her eyes were spectacular. Large, inquisitive doe eyes framed in long dark lashes. She darted them left, right; a shocking green glare the color of finely cut emeralds against the deep primrose flush of her cheeks.
Slowly, she looked up from the basket, her hazy lingering stare clouded by the barbarity of a basket of human hands. A beady-eyed man with a wide, craggy face snarled a yellow-toothed giggle. He flashed the hint of an impish grin and gave a wink in the direction of the three severed male heads posted in warning on the ends of poles behind her before he snatched the basket from the side of the road and clunk…clunk…clunked away.
‘Whose hands were those?’ she asks, placing another sugar cube in her cup of tea. ‘And who severed the hands of those children? The heads of those men? The feet of those women?’
‘Welcome to the Congo Free State, my dear,’ he grins. ‘God bless the King.’
She continued down the road, passing another and another independent head…hand…head…foot…hand…head…and something that looked suspiciously like a ‘sexual member[i].’ The air smelled heavy, dry and hot. A faint breeze of stifling fieriness blew across her, choking her dainty neck. It threw yellow dirt over her, staining the soft blue cotton of her dress.
Men and women were working on all sides of her. Thuds steadily beating in the air from their axes, their dark sinewy backs gleamed in the hot sun like dozens of brawny black beetles scrambling to collect the scattering crumbs falling from around a bearded man’s mouth; they hacked away at the ankles of the trees until they bled rubber ivory sap [ii], unfazed by the dismembered heads and hands of their brothers. Foul-faced white men in clean linens stood over the workers; long, gnarled whips with sharpened edges extended from their pale fat fingers[iii].
Marching towards this sorrowful crowd, like Santa’s reindeer reluctantly trudging toward the home of some rotten brat, came rows of black human beings, tied ten to a rope, their scrawny arms full of baskets, ammunition, supplies, and trinkets[iv]. Appropriately at the rear were the minions of Saint Nicholas himself, Leopold’s Force Publique, posing a frightful caboose for this train of wretchedness. The parade marched on, gaining closer and closer still to the working women and men.
Tears burned behind her green eyes. Her mouth hung softly open, her red lips chapped and cracking in the dry heat. She watched as one man began to turn around. Before his back was fully twisted so as to catch a glimpse of these new ‘recruits,’ the closest whip lashed a corkscrew kiss that left a bloody wrinkle across his brown back.
‘I just don’t understand,’ Alice murmurs softly before she takes a sip of tea. As she brings the cup to her delicate pink lips, her nostrils taste the fresh odor of her hands. Soap and rose water mingle with the potent spice of the African Roobios tea leaves in her cup.
‘Let me tell you a story.’ And the Cat lets out a long breath. He holds his thin gray paw sturdy as he sets the teacup onto its fine blue saucer. His head facing down, paws folded neatly in his furry lap, he looks up at her through his thin-framed spectacles and purrs. ‘It’s all true, mind you, all true. Some time ago, Leopold II, the dreaded king of Belgium as it were, promised to transform the region of the Congo into a glorious and civilized place, renamed the Congo Free State [v]. He received immeasurable funds for his project[vi].’
He brings one long front claw to his chin and begins to scratch in long, pronounced strokes.
‘And he then began a reign of terror over the native people. A tyrant and greedy man, he enslaved them and forced them to work gathering ivory, wood, and rubber; those laborers who failed to meet quotas were killed[vii]. For twenty-five years, dear.’
With a sudden wink, the fat black Cat leaps unto her lap. ‘At a cost of ten million lives…’ he whispers through smirking teeth.
‘Are you ready, Alice?’
These roads were the same. Not literally the same streets, for this was an entirely different time, an entirely different place, but the roads appeared identical. This was not the Congo Free State; this was Rwanda.
It had a terrible smell. A dampness that lingered overhead in the air, as if this was once a place of great tragedy; the sun is not cheerful, the breeze is not refreshing, the clouds are not majestic. Goosebumps pricked her pink flesh. The hot wind speckled her hair with dirt. Her stockings had long since been shredded on scattered bits of barbed wire that lay strewn across the street. Her scuffed mary-janes collided with a sharp rock, slicing through the once-white leather.
‘Rwanda was devastated,’ the cat explains between long, thoughtful licks meant to clean his black paws. ‘One million of their people slaughtered in a hundred days. From the hate leftover from Belgian’s rule. There are two rival ethnic groups in Rwanda, you see. The white men put the Tutsi in charge while it was still a European colony. When they left, they gave the power to the Hutu. After years of oppression, the Hutu took a barbaric revenge on all Tutsi still living in Rwanda[viii].’
Alice shudders and reaches for another sugar cube.
She passed huts with doormats of crimson-stained grass, the blood ebbing and flowing in a pattern that spelled grief in slow, sorrowful scrawl. She passed children in their parents’ clothes, with faces of weathered and hardened maturity, and bodies of terrified adolescence. She passed the decaying remains of human beings, their battered clothing polka-dotted in bullets, their arms outstretched in a farewell to some greater fate.
The tears that before had stung her eyes dampened the neckline of her dress that was now tainted the dirty yellow-brown of the ground upon which she walked. Her breathing was rapid, animalistic; she choked on each devastated breath of air. She kept walking, her eyes wide and incredulous, until she reached at last, peculiarly, a door. A large, sturdy, brown door with no doorknob.
‘You know the one about curiosity, don’t you dearie?’ giggles the Cat.
She pushed her frail body against the door and leaned it open. She hurried into a dim and musty hallway. Moist grass brushed against her scraped, naked ankles. On both sides of her were dense green shrubs, trimmed smooth like walls twelve feet in height. The wide, thick leaves were wet and waxy.
One curiously long branch snarled far out from the neat sides of the walls. As she walked, trembling, the pointed branch caught on her petticoat and tore it from her body. Her nose breathed in the thick smell of sweat and fresh paint.
‘One lump or two?’ she asks, her long, thin fingers delicately grasping the polished silver tongs.
‘Just one, dear.’ His tail twitches left, right, left, right.
‘I think it’s simply awful what happened to those poor people in Africa,’ she shrugs, tasting again the sweet, warm tea.
He looks up at her again, his gray-blue eyes glittering playfully. ‘It happened again, darling. What ended in Rwanda began again in the Democratic Republic of the Congo not so long ago.[ix]’
There were faces in the walls. What began as thick leveled walls of brush had slowly transformed into the disheveled mess of shrubs that she walked slowly through now. Sharp springs stuck out around her, catching on her clothes and flesh, tearing bloody signatures into her thighs and neck.
The faces all had open eyes. Dark eyes, strong noses, full pink lips. They were of black men, women, boys, girls, infants. They were motionless, staring out at her with solemn expressions of emptiness and waste. Faces that were scattered amongst the bushes, some near the very top of the walls, and others around her feet.
‘Millions dead,’ the Cat continues. ‘Perhaps three, four million lives, gone forever at the hands of rebel militias.[x]’
Most curiously of all was that these faces were painted. The deep black faces of these slaughtered people had been clumsily splattered with sticky white paint. Her dirty cheeks paled, her stomach grew tight, her skin became clammy and hot. ‘Why, they’ve painted your faces white!’ she exclaimed, staring dead into the blank eyes of a girl no older than she. To disturb the deceased…they hadn’t had even the respect of a proper funeral. And then to slather this graffiti over their cold corpses…Her knees and hands began to shake; she could not understand such preposterousness.
A sharp cackle of unanimous laughter reverberated through the halls of forgotten faces. It was faint, far away, but she could gauge from where it came. She continued on, slowly trudging toward the heart of this maze, this labyrinth of the dead. Her frail and bleeding legs moved briskly on her quest to find someone in charge, someone who could explain this arrant madness.
The battered mary-janes thud, thudded in the grass…another peal of laughter…thud, thud, thud, thud…laughter again, louder and louder still…thud, thud, thud…round a corner, thud, to the right, thud, thud, and finally…nothing.
She stood frozen. Her hair was wild, windswept into a savage halo. The soft skin of her lips had cracked. Her dress was a soiled mess, her stockings and petticoat gone, her shoes brown and broken. Her naked legs and neck had long bleeding scrapes; her dress was stained in blood as well. Her shoulders forward, arms at her sides, she stared in astonishment with fiery bloodshot eyes. The tears were gone, her gut felt empty as she tried to comprehend the sight in front of her.
‘I shall have to write a letter about this atrocity,’ she declares. ‘I would have liked very much to have read about it in the paper or at least heard of it. I don’t like to be ignorant of these things, you know.’
The Cat smirks from behind his steaming teacup.‘To whom shall I send such a letter, do you think? The United Nations?’
His tea shoots straight across the room, and he doesn’t stop cackling for another half an hour.
A long, robust table stood elegantly in the center of the scene. There were just under two hundred chairs, just under two hundred place settings[xi]. A silk tablecloth of red gingham print lay atop the ornately crafted dining table. Gargantuan platinum teacups were set across it, overflowing with oolong tea from leaves hand-picked by monkeys in the Orient. Confetti in bold shades of pinks, greens, oranges, and violets decorated the table and most of the ground. At the center of this ridiculous scene was the largest teapot she’d ever seen: crafted of platinum and polished to a blinding degree, it stood no less than three feet tall, steam billowing out from around its gaudy lid and reeking of opulent luxury. Surrounding it were huge basins of sugar and cream with mirror-like surfaces and thick, shiny handles.
Each place was set with a mat hand-woven into the flag of a foreign country; Russia, India, Britain, Japan, all had a seat at this lavish tea party. The guests were a microcosm of global society: they were men and women, black and white, from the East and from the West. They were laughing, giggling, and cackling loudly as they mingled in outlandish costumes. They wore fuscia, chartreuse, aquamarine; they wore the yellow of sunflowers, the orange of tangerines, the gold of rings.
At the head of the table stood a man quite off-set from the rest of the crowd. His short, silver hair tucked behind his large ears, he had a look of the confused sort of evil in his brow. His tiny, beady black eyes penetrated out from behind a smirking grin. He wore a blue velvet jacket over a crisp white shirt, long loose pants striped red and white, and white cowboy boots with silver tassels. A large silver star plated his belt-buckle and he stood with his wrinkled hands shoved down into his pants pockets.
Surrounding this ludicrous crowd were the same walls from the maze before; the same blank black faces painted over with the same white paint.
The party halted abruptly and turned inquisitively toward Alice. Her breathing was panicked, rapid, wild. “Why…?” she narrowed her eyes and motioned toward the faces in the bush.
The man in the blue, red, and white took a step toward her. “What are you doing here?” He had a raspy southern accent.
“I…” Her eyes drifted back to the faces in the walls. “How can you…they’re dead…?” She tried to cry to expel the horror aching in her veins and throbbing in her head, but her tears were gone.
“I think you’ve spent enough time here,” the man said as he walked slowly to within an inch of her shaking body. His cold dry hands reached out and wrapped around her filthy arms.
Alice choked on her terrified breath and cried out, “You’re mad!”
The crowd moved closer, closing in. One man’s clumsy elbow knocked over the giant tea kettle, spilling the red tea over the table and onto the floor.
“We’re all mad here,” he laughed.
‘It’s really quite a shame.’ She shakes her head adamantly.
‘I know, dear,’ purrs the Cat, and he snuggles warmly into her soft cotton lap.
Works Cited
“Congo Free State.” 21 Sept. 2006 Wikipedia. 5 Oct. 2006http://en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Congo_Free_State
Fonseca, Alroy “Four Million Dead: The Second Congolese War, 1998-2004.” April 2004.
5 Oct. 2006http://www.geocities.com/afonseca/CongoWar.htm.
“Forgotten Holocaust.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2001: B7.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial
Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Rosenberg, Matt. “The Number of Countries in the World.” 1 Jul. 2006About.com 9 Oct. 2006
http://geography.about.com/cs/countries/a/numbercountries.htm
[i] “Congo Free State”
[ii] “Forgotten Holocaust”
[iii] Hochschild 120
[iv] Hochschild 132-133
[v] Hochschild 45
[vi]Hochschild 94
[vii] “Forgotten Holocaust”
[viii]Fonseca
[ix] Fonseca
[x]Rosenberg