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Ursula K. Le Guin
A Woman's Liberation
1. Shomeke
My dear friend has asked me to write the story of my life, thinking it might be of interest to people of
other worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman, but I have lived in years of mighty changes and have
been advantaged to know with my very flesh the nature of servitude and the nature of freedom.
I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the
faults of my narrative.
I was born a slave on the planet Werel . As a child I was called Shomekes ' Radosse Rakam . That
is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of Dosse , Granddaughter of Kamye . The Shomeke
family owned an estate on the eastern coast of Voe Deo. Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the
Lord God.
The Shomekes possessed over four hundred assets, mostly used to cultivate the fields of gede , to
herd the salt-grass cattle, in the mills, and as domestics in the House. The Shomeke family had been great
in history. Our Owner was an important man politically, often away in the capital.
Assets took their name from their grandmother because it was the grandmother that raised the child.
The mother worked all day, and there was nofather . Women were always bred to more than one man.
Even if a man knew his child he could not care for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time.
Young men were seldom kept long on the estates. If they were valuable they were traded to other estates
or sold to the factories. If they were worthless they were worked to death.
Women were not often sold. The young ones were kept for work and breeding, the old ones to raise
the young and keep the compound in order. On some estates women bore a baby a year till they died,
but on ours most had only two or three children. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They did not
want the men always getting at the women. The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded the young
women closely.
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 I say men, women, children, but you are to understand that we were not called men, women,children
. Only our owners were called so. We assets or slaves were called bondsmen, bondswomen, and pups
or young. I will use these words, though I have not heard or spoken them for many years, and never
before on this blessed world.
The bondsmen's part of the compound, the gateside , was ruled by the Bosses, who were men, some
relations of the Shomeke family, others hired by them. On the inside the young and the bondswomen
lived. There two cutfrees , castrated bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grandmothers ruled.
Indeed nothing in the compound happened without the grandmothers' knowledge.
If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to work, the Bosses would let that one stay home.
Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman from being sold away, sometimes they could
protect a girl from being bred by more than one man, or could give a delicate girl a contraceptive.
Everybody in the compound obeyed the counsel of the grandmothers. But if one of them went too far,
the Bosses would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut off. When I was a young child, there lived
in our compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother, who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I
thought that she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my grandmother Dosse's tongue would
wither in her mouth. I told her that. She said, "No. It won't get any shorter, because I don't let it get too
long."
I lived in the compound. My mother birthed me there, and was allowed to stay three months to nurse
me; then I was weaned to cow's milk, and my mother returned to the House. Her name was Shomekes '
Rayowa Yowa . She was light-skinned like most of the assets, but very beautiful, with slender wrists and
ankles and delicate features. My grandmother too was light, but I was dark, darker than anybody else in
the compound.
My mother came to visit, the cutfrees letting her in by their ladder-door. She found me rubbing grey
dust on my body. When she scolded me, I told her that I wanted to look like the others.
"Listen, Rakam ," she said to me, "they are dust people. They'll never get out of the dust. You're
something better. And you will be beautiful. Why do you think you're so black?" I had no idea what she
meant. "Some day I'll tell you who your father is, "she said, as if she were promising me a gift. I had
watched when the Shomekes ' stallion, a prized and valuable animal, serviced mares from other estates. I
did not know a father could be human.
That evening I boasted to my grandmother: "I'm beautiful because the black stallion is my father!"
Dosse struck me across the head so that I fell down and wept. She said, "Never speak of your father."
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 I knew there was anger between my mother and my grandmother, but it was a long time before I
understood why. Even now I am not sure I understand all that lay between them.
We little pups ran around in the compound. We knew nothing outside the walls.All our world was the
bondswomen's huts and the bondsmen's longhouses, the kitchens and kitchen gardens, the bare plaza
beaten hard by bare feet. To me, the stockade wall seemed a long way off.
When the field and mill hands went out the gate in the early morning I didn't know where they went.
They were just gone. All day long the whole compound belonged to us pups, naked in the summer,
mostly naked in the winter too, running around playing with sticks and stones and mud, keeping away
from grandmothers, until we begged them for something to eat or they put us to work weeding the
gardens for a while.
In the evening or the early night the workers would come back, trooping in the gate guarded by the
Bosses. Some were worn out and grim, others would be cheerful and talking and calling back and forth.
The great gate was slammed behind the last of them. Smoke went up from all the cooking stoves. The
burning cow dung smelled sweet. People gathered on the porches of the huts and longhouses. Bondsmen
and bondswomen lingered at the ditch that divided the gateside from the inside, talking across the ditch.
After the meal the freedmen led prayers to Tual's statue, and we lifted our own prayers to Kamye , and
then people went to their beds, except for those who lingered to "jump the ditch. "Some nights, in the
summer, there would be singing, or a dance was allowed. In the winter one of the grandfathers-poor old
broken men, not strong people like the grandmothers-would "sing the word." That is what we called
reciting the Arkamye . Every night, always, some of the people were teaching and others were learning
the sacred verses. On winter nights one of these old worthless bondsmen kept alive by the grandmothers'
charity would begin to sing the word. Then even the pups would be still to listen to that story.
The friend of my heart was Walsu . She was bigger than I, and was my defender when there were
fights and quarrels among the young or when older pups called me "Blackie" and " Bossie. "I was small
but had a fierce temper. Together, Walsu and I did not get bothered much. Then Walsu was sent out the
gate. Her mother had been bred and was now stuffed big, so that she needed help in the fields to make
her quota. Gede must be hand harvested. Every day as a new section of the bearing stalk comes ripe it
has to be picked, and so gede pickers go through the same field over and over for twenty or thirty days,
and then move on to a later planting. Walsu.went with her mother to help her pick her rows.When her
mother fell ill, Walsu .took her place, and with help from other hands she kept up her mother's quota.
She was then six years old by owner's count, which gave all assets the same birthday,new year's day at
the beginning of spring. She might have truly been seven. Her mother remained ill both before birthing and
after, and Walsu took her place in the gede field all that time. She never afterward came back to play,
only in the evenings to eat and sleep. I saw her then and we could talk. She was proud of her work. I
envied her and longed to go through the gate. I followed her to it and looked through it at the world.
Now the walls of the compound seemed very close.
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 I told my grandmother Dosse that I wanted to go to work in the fields.
"You're too young."
"I'll be seven at thenew year ."
"Your mother made me promise not to let you go out."
Next time my mother visited the compound, I said, "Grandmother won't let me go out. I want to go
work with Walsu . "
"Never," my mother said. "You were born for better than that."
"What for?"
"You'll see."
She smiled at me. I knew she meant the House, where she worked. She had told me often of the
wonderful things in the House, things that shone and were colored brightly, things that were thin and
delicate, clean things. It was quiet in the House, she said. My mother herself wore a beautiful red scarf,
her voice was soft, and her clothing and body were always clean and fresh.
"When will I see?"
I teased her until she said, "All right! I'll ask my lady."
"Ask her what?"
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 All I knew of my-lady was that she too was delicate and clean, and that my mother belonged to her
in some particular way, of which she was proud. I knew my-lady had given my mother the red scarf.
"I'll ask her if you can come begin training at the House."
My mother said "the House" in a way that made mesee it as a great sacred place like the place in our
prayer: May I enter in the clear house, in the rooms of peace.
I was so excited I began to dance and sing, "I'm going to the House, to the House!" My mother
slapped me to make me stop and scolded me for being wild. She said, "You are too young! You can't
behave! If you get sent away from the House you can never come back."
I promised to be old enough.
"You must do everything right," Yowa told me. "You must do everything I say when I say it. Never
question. Never delay. If my lady sees that you're wild, she'll send you back here. And that will be the
end of you forever."
I promised to be tame. I promised to obey at once in everything, and not to speak. The more
frightening she madeit, the more I desired to see the wonderful, shining House.
When my mother left I did not believe she would speak to my-lady. I was not used to promises being
kept. But after some days she returned, and I heard her speaking to my grandmother. Dosse was angry
at first, speaking loudly. I crept under the window of the hut to listen. I heard my grandmother weep. I
was frightened and amazed. My grandmother was patient with me, always looked after me, and fed me
well. It had never entered my mind that there was anything more to it than that, until I heard her crying.
Her crying made me cry, as if I were part of her.
"You could let me keep her one more year," she said. "She's just a baby. I would never let her out
the gate." She was pleading, as if she were powerless, not a grandmother. "She is my joy, Yowa !"
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