Reader Excerpt ~ The Call of Zulina by Kay Marshall Strom

CHAPTER 1
West Africa, 1787

Hot, dry harmattan winds swept across the African savanna and awakened the yellow-brown sand, whipping it up with wild gusts that swirled and soared high into the air. The sandy clouds that blew in with the first shards of daybreak to shroud the dawn in grit refused to release their grip, and by late afternoon a thick layer of dust coated the entire landscape. Irritated goats paused in their search for edible blades of grass to stomp and shake themselves, and the children who herded them scratched at the itchy grit in their own eyes and hair. On the road, donkeys turned their heads away from the sandy wind and refused to pull their loads. Impatient masters swiped at their own faces as they whipped at the donkeys’ flanks, but all that accomplished was to send still more billows of dust into the air.

Sand whistled through banana leaves thatched atop clusters of mud huts in villages, and it settled over the decks of ships as they rocked idly at anchor in the harbor. Even at what was mockingly called “the London house,” with its ostentatious glass windows locked tight and European bolts securing its imported doors, gritty wind found a way under and between and beneath and into.

Twenty-year-old Grace Winslow, who had claimed the plumpest of the upholstered parlor chairs for herself, shifted from one uncomfortable position to another and sighed deeply. She reached out slender fingers and brushed a newly settled layer of sand from the intricate lace trim on her new silk taffeta dress and resigned herself to the day.

“The ancestors are angry,” proclaimed Lingongo, Grace’s mother, from her imposing position beside the rattling window shutters. Silky soft kente cloth flowed over her in a kaleidoscope of handwoven color, framing her fierce beauty. Lingongo made a proud point of her refusal to sit on her husband’s English furniture--except when it was to her advantage to do so.

“Ancestors! Sech foolishness!” Joseph Winslow snorted . . . but only under his breath. “Wind jist be wind and nothin’ but wind.”

“Maybe the ancestors don’t want me to marry a snake,” Grace ventured.

No one could argue that the first harmattan of the season had roared through on the very day Jasper Hathaway first came to court her. He had swept through the front door and into the parlor in a blustering whirlwind of sand, his fleshy face streaked with sweat and his starched collar askew. He stayed on and on for the entire afternoon. Only when it became obvious that no one intended to invite him to eat supper with the family did he finally heft himself out of Joseph’s favorite chair and bid a reluctant farewell. When the door finally shut behind him and Grace’s father had thrown the bolt into place, Lingongo had turned to her daughter and warned, “Snake at your feet, a stick at your hand. So the wise men say. Keep a stick in your hand, Grace. You will need it with that snake at your feet.” .


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