"Ursula K. LeGuin - A Woman's Liberation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

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."
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