Date Published: 08-24-2023
The Missy Box
In 1685 two ten-year-old girls cross the Atlantic, one in the hold of a
slave ship, and the other at the Captain’s table of a royal Danish
Ship. On St. Thomas their lives will become intertwined, along with that of
Mette, the brothel keeper, and Isaac and Pundi, two other wanderers who have
landed in this fomenting place at the dawn of its plantation history.
Eighty-five years later, in Copenhagen, this family story is uncovered by
Maria Suhm, the way many are, through treasures kept hidden. The Missy Box
gives up its secrets with tantalizing reluctance, against a backdrop in 1772
of historical scandal and conspiracy that will bring Denmark to a
crisis.
The Missy Box is an imagined story based on the young life of Maria Suhm
Wheelock, the wife of the second President of Dartmouth College and her
great grandmother, Maria Bourdoux Lasalle, a Huguenot refugee from
France.
Set in a time before the interior of American had been discovered by
Europeans, the Missy Box recreates a world connected by oceans, peopled by
refugees, and the kings who controlled their fates.
EXCERPT
Chapter Two: Africa 1685
Akila, ten years old, was leaning against a woman in the darkness with her eyes closed. Penned like an animal, she was wedged tightly in among some hundred standing bodies. She has travelled for three moons through jungle and desert to this place, harnessed to her fellow captives by leather straps around necks and ankles. New captives have been forcibly dragged or brought at gunpoint each evening to a stopping point on their route. Like a serpent, they have snaked through the jungle, the line growing longer with each passing day. Akila, one of the smallest, has strained to keep up.
She was captured one evening back returning with her mother from the fields to her village, grabbed and tied like an animal by a gang of armed men. Her mother fought back, trying to keep the men from her daughter, and in the struggle she had been hit hard in the head with the butt of a rifle. Akila had watched her fall, and seen her eyes open wide with a look of terror and rage. That vision of her mother’s face gripped her like the fangs of a lion for her entire lifetime. With the smallest thing—a smell or a sound—she would suddenly be in the gaping black hole of those jaws, devoured by gut-wrenching pain, taken to the depths of despair and darkness. Over the years she learned to tame the pain, to feel the lion about to pounce, so that she could turn away before it took her entirely into the darkness.
Akila had been the child of the village head, the beloved daughter of a much respected family. Her language was Soninke, a Mande language, but she had been raised a Muslim and spoke moderately good Arabic as well. Because of the status of her family she had also learned some of the related West African tribal languages. Her father had a Qu’ran and could read it. He had promised he would teach her to read one day. In the tradition of her people she had scars at her temples to indicate her tribal group, marks made soon after her birth. She followed her mother by day to the well where she would play games with the other children while her mother passed an hour in conversation with the village women. She helped her mother prepare the food and she worked with her in the fields, where they planted and harvested beans and melons and maize. She loved the butterflies, and the birds, whose calls she could imitate. The gecko that lived on the wall of her mud dwelling was her friend. Her mother taught her which plants could be useful for poultices, and she went with her to tend the sick of their village, and sometimes helped her catch a baby.
Slave hunters and the wild beasts of the jungle were the ever-present dangers in West African village life. You could hear the drums beating from far away when disasters like this had struck a village in the area. But there had been no drums this time.
Akila had travelled in a state of numbness, bey
About the Author
Anne Emerson is a writer and a painter in Jamaica Plain Massachusetts. Her
award winning first book, Letters from Erastus: Field Notes on Grace was
published by Levellers Press in Amherst MA. The Missy Box is an imagined
story based on the author’s 13th great grandmother, a Huguenot
refugee.
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