He was referring to modern slavery, you must realize. The institution was very different in ancient times. But then everything was. We may use the same name for a thing today that the ancients did-"slave," "king," "emperor," "ghost"-but the meaning that the word contains is not at all the same. The distant past is not simply a foreign country, as someone once said, but another universe altogether.
I learned that I was a slave before I learned that I was Rom. Or to put it more accurately I always knew that I was Rom but it wasn't until I was six that I came to know that most other people were not.
We spoke Romany at home and Imperial outside and we shifted from one to the other without difficulty. I thought that everyone did the same. My mother told us old Rom tales, stories of gods and demons, of sorceries and witchcraft, of heroic journeys by caravan across strange far-off lands. I thought that everyone knew those tales. We kept Rom treasures in our house, gold pieces, musical instruments, brightly colored scarves, sacred icons. I never entered the houses of my playmates and so I never knew that they had no such possessions.
When I was six I went out one day to carve a gloryball from the gloryball tree on the riverbank and when I got there I found my sister Tereina being attacked by a band of other children. Tereina was twelve then and her attackers, both boys and girls, must have been eight or nine years old, so that she towered over them; but there were half a dozen of them and they were tormenting her. "Rom trash, Rom trash, Rom trash!" they were chanting as they circled round and round her. "Rom, Rom, Rom, Rom!"
They were trying to snatch away the necklace at her throat. It was a chain of gleaming wind-scarab shells that my father's brother had brought back as a gift for her from Iriarte and it was the most precious thing she had, pulsing with light of a hundred subtle colors. Tereina slapped frantically at the clutching hands. She was too tall for them, but they had managed to rip open her blouse and her breasts were showing, and I saw long red scratches on her skin.
"Rom trash, Rom trash, Rom trash-"
She saw me and cried my name. And asked me in Romany to help her, and then said in Imperial, "Yakoub, give them the evil eye! Put the spell on them, Yakoub!"
I was only six. But I was big and strong and I had no reason to be afraid of them. And my mother had told me the legends of the evil eye, the black magic that the drabarne, the old Gypsy witches, had used to make their enemies suffer. Some of those legends are pure fantasy and some are real, though at that age I had no way of knowing which was which. To me everything was real then and I thought I could hurl my sister's tormentors into the heart of the sun if only I said the right words and made the right gestures. I think they thought so too; for I made my eyes change and puffed out my cheeks and crooked my arms above my head and marched toward them, chanting, "iachalipe, iachalipe, iachalipe!"- enchantment, enchantment, enchantment-and they turned and fled, squealing like frightened pigs. I roared with laughter and screamed curses at them and squirted my urine after them to mock them.
Tereina was weeping and trembling. I comforted her the way a man comforts a woman, reaching up and putting my arms around her, though I was only a child. Then I asked, "Why were they doing that? Because we are slaves?"
"Why would they care that we are slaves? Half of them are slaves too."
"Then why-"
"Because we are Rom, little brother. Because we are Rom."
So that evening it was necessary for my father to explain a great many things to me that I had never known, and after that evening life would always be different for me.
"We call them Gaje," he told me. "Which means, in Imperial, a fool, a bumpkin, a clod-hopper. Their minds are slower than ours and they think in a clumsy plodding way. We go from one to five to three to ten while they are moving slowly along, one two three four. Of course some of the GaJe are quicker than others. The emperor is a Gajo and so are his high lords, and they all have very quick minds indeed. But most of the Gaje are simpletons and we have had to put up with their stupidity ever since we came to live among them. And they know how much quicker we are than they. Which is why they once persecuted and oppressed us, and why even now they fear us and mistrust us, though most of them would deny that they do."
"And are there many of these Gaje?" I asked.
"Ten thousand of them," my father said, "for every one of us. Or maybe more. Who can count the Gaje? They are like the stars in the heavens. And we are very few, Yakoub. We are very few."
My head was swimming with these surprises. My father, when he walked down the street, carried himself like a king; and I had thought we were people of great worth indeed, even though just now we might happen to be slaves. And now to learn that I belonged to a sparse and insignificant race, that we Rom were like scattered flecks of white foam in a vast sea of Gaje, came to me with stunning impact. In the eye of my mind I saw now my father's face and the faces of my father's brothers standing out in a crowd of Gaje and I understood for the first time how different they were, different in the set of their jaws, in the fire of their eyes, in the black luster of their thick strong hair. A race apart, an alien people-more alien even than I could suspect"You know there once was a place called Earth, Yakoub?" "Earth, yes."
"Destroyed long ago, ruined, shattered by Gaje idiocy. We lived there, we and the Gaje, before we all came out into the worlds of the stars. They called us Gypsies then. And a great many other names, Zigeuners, Romanichels, Gitanes, Tsigani, Zingari, Mirlifiches, Karaghi, dozens of names, because they had dozens of languages. Because they were too stupid and quarrelsome to speak only one, and so they befuddled themselves with tongues. We wandered among them, always strangers. Never staying in the same place for long, for what was the point of that? No one wanted us. They despised us and always schemed to harm us; so we stayed put only until we had earned a few coins by begging or telling fortunes or sharpening their knives, or until we had stolen enough to eat for a few days more, and then we moved along." "Stolen?" I said, shocked.
He laughed and put his huge hands on my shoulders, gripping me in that firm loving way of his, and he gently rocked me back and forth as I stood before him. "They called it stealing. We called it harvesting. The fruits of the earth belong to all men, eh, boy? God gave us appetites and put into the world the means to satisfy those appetites; when we take what we need, we are simply obeying God's commandment."
"But if we took things that didn't belong to us-" I said, thinking of those clutching Gaje fingers reaching for my sister's precious necklace.
"This was long ago and life was harsh. They would have let us starve, so we took what we needed, grass for our horses, wood for our fires, some pieces of fruit from the trees, perhaps a stray chicken or two. How could they deny us the things that were in the world to use when we were hungry, when we were thirsty?"
And my father sketched a picture for me of Rom life on the Gaje Earth that left me dazed and chilled. A race of shabby unkempt people, vagabonds, charlatans, beggars, thieves, weavers of spells, charmers of snakes, dancers and blacksmiths and tinkers and acrobats, traveling in rickety caravans from land to land, making their camps on the outskirts of towns amid terrible filth and squalor, keeping themselves together by an endless juggling act of trickeries and improvisations. Forced into a life of lying and cheating, of begging, of all manner of desperate struggles. Scorned and despised, feared, whispered about. Even put to death - put to death! - for no crime other than that of being unlike the dreary settled folk among whom they roamed. I began to see this lost world of Earth as a kind of hell where my ancestors had undergone a torment for thousands of years.