Song of Slaves in the Desert (14 page)

Which is how she found land.

And once upon a time rain fell onto the fields, and the fields beneath the sea swayed as if in a dance to the invisible and some not so invisible currents that ran on a slant in the parts of the ocean to which she had traveled, and she rose up out of the water and floated with these currents to the sun and the stars beyond, traveling to the most distant parts of the universe in the flick of an eye, as if all the universe lay within her own mind and all she need do to travel there was push out a thought. Did she know or not know? Worlds hung in the balance. And did she feel? Life on any of these rings of planets—how did she know the word? She didn’t know the word, Yemaya gave her the word, all the words she knew, all the words she did not know—leaped forth when she pushed out, and whatever endings there might be came when she turned her back. Yet let her merely glance back over her shoulder, and everything took fire and light again, and the singing echoed through the air, and the light became rain became ocean became air…

No place was Eden except Eden. But for the Pereiras, whose ancestors stretched in a long line of alert and capable people from the time of the Roman conquest of the Holy Land through their exile in Rome itself and then, generations later, Holland, the island of Curaçao came close enough. A great-grandfather of Jonathan Pereira had, in place of some money he was owed in a business deal that had gone wrong in Amsterdam, taken the title to a seaside farm on this remote and lovely island. Storms sometimes battered it in late summer and early autumn, yes, but for most of the year the Pereira heirs, three brothers whose own parents had emigrated from Holland to the New World, felt as though they were living in the place from which their earliest family, or so the Bible would have it, had been expelled.

Alas for all, the farm had come with a cadre of enslaved Africans, some of whom worked the land and others who served inside the house. For ten thousand years, men had taken other men as slaves, either in battle—which was certainly not the case for the peaceful Pereiras—or as payment and property. Not even these Jews, whose ancestors themselves had once lived in bondage in Egypt, could resist the temptation and opportunity that slavery offered. This led to some odd and strange situations, both on earth and in Heaven, as on a certain morning in hurricane season when the then-very-young Jonathan was visiting the family of the uncle who had stayed behind to work the farm after his two siblings had shipped out north, one to Charleston and the other to New York City.

He must have been seven or eight, well, who knows if he himself could not remember exactly, some young age, possibly nine years old, but not much older, when he left his Curaçao uncle’s seaside house and walked across his well-kept lawn—the slaves did a fine job of keeping it green and without weeds—and down through rows of sea grass to the beach. Let it be said, Jonathan was not a stupid child. Being able to lord it over the pickaninny offspring of the slaves had encouraged the mean streak in his character that most children, boys and girls alike, discover, sometimes to their sorrow, always to their amazement. Being a child himself, power over other children deluded him into thinking that he was a powerful boy.

This allowed him to believe that he found himself in no danger as he waded out into the lapping surf, waded out farther than ever before, feeling the strong waves wash over him and the tug of the undertow racing past the backs of his knees. The horizon growled black with storm clouds and thunder, and before he knew it a wave knocked him flat on his back, the undertow lifting him from below and behind, and carrying him out far beyond his usual limit.

A minute or two passed before he felt the fear surging through him even as the waves hoisted him up and lowered him, hoisted him up and lowered. And lowered, and suddenly he went under, flailing about, desperate for air.

Think! It was not just his life at stake as surf surged past his shoulders, as if to delight rather than to signal the imminent death by water that awaited him. And as he was sinking through the phantasmagorical aquamarine surroundings, seaweed torn around him, sand in upheaval, shells and starfish sailing past, even as the current, oddly warm but ferocious in its grip, boiled around his body and carried him along, to where he did not know—all of our fates hung in the balance, because so much was about to change for us, or never come to light at all.

A sudden stillness, and he watched the last bubbles of air float out of his mouth and float toward the surface. One bubble in particular caught his eye, and he tagged it with his glance as it rose higher and higher until it melded with the mass of other bubbles above his head.

“Goodbye,” he should have said to us, if he knew any better. “Goodbye, and sorry that I am dying and that you will never live. Liza, me, the others to be.” Stupid child, he had no sense of what ruled him now, the large dark hand of death squeezing his lungs and heart. He loved facing into the storm and walking forward. See where it took him.

Down he went so that his feet touched the sandy floor of ocean where he would, it seemed, come to his final (early) rest.

OOOOOOoooooooo…

He floated to his knees, his hair floating up in waves like sea plant and weed…

Was he gone?

Yes?

Poor fellow—yes, even he deserves our pity, for was he not then only a child?

Dying…

Now as much as men would like to believe that the gods to whom they pray remain mutually exclusive—that is, the God of the Jews is different from the God of the Christians and the God of the Musulman, to name the major ways of religious thinking in the West—that remains not to be the case. Or so we might surmise, given the story of what took place in the distance, behind the bubble-born veil of that undertow. Above the storm, in the pure sunlight that always reigned when you cast yourself off a certain distance from the planet, or so ancient astronomers and some modern storytellers would propose, roared a force as great as the impending storm below.

Yahweh, whose followers took him to be the force behind all the greatest forces in the universe, found Himself in a quarrel with what he took to be a lesser god. Or goddess, this certain Yemaya, whose followers regarded her as the force behind many natural wonders on Earth, especially the oceans and rivers and streams and even perhaps in the Heavens, but made no claims as great as the Jews who worshipped Yahweh.

Yahweh, whose voice, when he employed it, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, spoke his annoyance, sounding something like Zeus, one of his older cousin gods, worshiped by the smart and poetic pagans.

“You’re worried that he may drown? May? It seems quite certain to me.”

“Then rescue him.”

“I should rescue him? Can you give me a good reason. He is a nasty boy, bound to grow into a nastier man, and the world already has enough of these.”

Yemaya, loud in speech but also looking quite lovely in her mermaid form—a mermaid swimming in near-space? I cannot figure that, but that is how the story has it—challenged Yahweh the way a wife might challenge a husband—with the full force and knowledge of someone who knows her opponent’s greatest powers but also his greatest weaknesses.

“But so much depends on him!”

“He chose to walk into the waves.”

“He miscalculated.”

“He thinks he is invincible. This will show him.”

“Death will show him?”

“Some human beings have to learn the hard way.”

“And if he learns this, what good will it do him, what good will it do the world?”

“The world needs him? For what reason? Tell me a reason and I will save him. Though, let us admit it, you have the power to do that yourself, do you not? Which makes me believe that you want me to join in only out of a certain goddess-like perversity.”

“I want you to save him because he is one of yours.”

“In the narrowest way he is, yes, he has the sign upon his genitals that he belongs to me, and now and then he mutters a prayer when sitting with his congregation.”

“Do you want one less of him in the world?”

“Why would you want even one more of him?”

“Because…”

“You, Yemaya, are too coy to be in the Heavens! Come out and say it, because you know I see it, I see everything, you want him because without him—”

“Yes, without him—”

“Without him no one will be born to tell this story.”

“Exactly.”

Unheard cataclysms unechoed through the cosmos. Stars lived and died. Showers of some light that no one would ever, ever in the history of human science be able to explain came pouring up and down and sidewise among the galaxies.

“And your precious girl, not even born yet, and when she is conceived, conceived in awful torque and wretched forcefulness, you want her to be free?”

“Yes.”

“But you want me to take away this boy’s freedom to die?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to save one of my nasty own when you should be rejoicing that he will not live to do his damnedest in the world against your followers?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I am bound to do this?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Do you think I reserve the right to be free and take his life?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will allow you in person to save him. As if I have a choice. Yes, because you are bound to save him no matter what I wish, correct?”

But Yemaya had already dived through space into the deep air of our planet, listening to Yahweh, because like any deity she could hear everything everywhere but often deigned not to admit all the speech and all the cries of anguish and pain and all the noise and blunderbuss burstings and agony of torture and outpourings of misery into her outward realm of sound, but already on the way to do her deeding.

Thus a black mermaid burst out from behind the sea-foam and ocean-wrack curtain, taking the drowning boy by the elbows and hauling him onward and up toward the surface.

“From what I have seen,” the black mermaid—Yemaya, goddess of oceans and skies above oceans—declaimed in his ear, “I should leave you here to drown. But so much depends on you growing into a man, however despicable a man you might be, that I had to come to your rescue. You will grow older, and aid your family in Charleston and become an owner of men, women, and children as you learn the business of growing rice, and one day you will see a young woman, beautiful, brown, helpless, because she is your property, and you will use her as you would use a beast, though your vile actions will not make her one, neither will what you do to the daughter she gives to you keep her from going on to make her fate. Oh, you men are so much slower than us gods! I have just told you all of your future that matters, and you are still imagining that you are drowning!”

She hauled him to the beach and dropped him hacking and wheezing on the sand.

And she left him spitting up salt water, ready to begin his life to come. He certainly never saw her again. Though he felt a certain power, which had come from her. He felt as though he had survived a great test, and that he could do anything, anything! And suffer no harm. Poor thread of a human being, nearly lifeless detritus of an argument between two gods, he believed that if he had not saved himself then he at least had the powers of nature on his side, and that they had saved him—how close to the truth this was, and how utterly distant and far—to do great things on earth.

The ship had stopped moving!

Even before she opened her eyes she could smell, beyond the stench of feces, urine, blood, vomit, the perfume in the air, the flowers. She was sure she was dead.

“Home!” she called out, “we are home!”

“Home!” the word passed among them.

Others began to weep, some shaking those who had not yet awakened, only to discover that they would never awake, not in this world.

They had returned home! The home shores, the home beaches, the forests of home! This hope became only the first cruelties of their disembarkation in the New World.

Sailors descended the ship’s stairs, using whip-handles to goad the people onto the deck. Yes, warm breezes carried the scent of flowers and land lay no more than a body’s length away. Land—but not homeland. The sky above seemed a different shade of blue. Not home, not home! Women bleated like sacrificial lambs while men muttered to other men. The sound grew louder, like the rumbling of running animals on a plain. Sailors, and rough men who boarded from the shore, rushed among them, waving stanchions and threatening to beat them down. Slowly the muttering subsided as the news dawned on them that they were further from home than ever before.

Lyaa could hardly stand as she moved along with the herd of people to descend the gangplank. Seeing someone crumple and fall into the water, she held tightly to the rope railing, assembling with the others on the wooden pier. Flowers—and in the distance trees she had not seen before, with broad leaves, flowering. She breathed deeply, desperate to rid her nostrils of the awful stench of the ship. The sun came up behind her. Her legs trembled so they could scarcely hold her. How many days and nights? How many storms? How many bodies?

Shouts! Thunder of voices!

Pale-skinned men roughly dressed now herded them into a fenced-in place near the water and others came carrying buckets and doused them with cold water, again and again. A white-haired pale-skin wearing a mask over his eyes walked among them, daubing at his nose with a cloth. Now and then he pointed to a person, sometimes a man, but mostly women, and others came to lead them from the compound.

Lyaa enjoyed the dousing, and hoped for more. To rid herself of the stink of their long voyage was the only thing that she truly wished for, at least for the moment. And food! Yes, yes! When more pale-skins carried in barrels of soup and baskets piled with bread she elbowed her way past the frailer captives to lower herself to her knees and feast on the thin mixture.

Some people pulled themselves away from the barrels and collapsed onto the pier. Others ate, and then vomited, and ate again. And vomited. She herself ate until her belly ached, and then she paused for a breath or two, and ate again. More pale-skins pushed their way into the crowded pen, shouting in that language Lyaa could not understand.

What did it matter to her? At any moment she could shake loose these leg-manacles and fly out of the compound, soaring high above whatever land this new place happened to be. Nothing else mattered to her. Her freedom lay just outside the reach of her hand, just beyond the next cloud. She could fly away, and so she decided that she would soon make her departure.

At the edge of the fence she stared out at the countryside, and the bright off-white sky where beneath the ocean surged, she knew, she knew. Standing on tiptoe she thrust her mind into the air. As she was about to leap from the ground vicious cramps doubled her over and she sank to her knees, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting over herself, over the ground.

A large dousing of water shocked her awake. She lay on the ground, in the middle of a long row of bodies. Without the sun holding high in the sky she would have thought she had been shot back to the hold of the ship. People moaned, retched, tried to roll over on their bellies, but found themselves constricted by the manacles and chains. Even as she tried to lie still the wrenching and tugging along the line pulled her this way and that.

Eventually calm settled over them and the tall pale-skinned man with the eye-mask walked among them, with two short and ugly men following.

The tall man—he seemed older than the others—pointed and said some words, and the ugly men unlocked manacles and detached people from the line, some of them going in one place off to the side, some to another as the tall man directed. Some people shouted, others struggled. The two uglies, using stanchions, beat down the ones who tried to resist and let them lie where they fell. When the tall man came to Lyaa he paused, and reached down to touch a finger to her cheek and then to her belly.
Ah
, she decided,
a medicine man!
And yes, he pointed, said more words, and the two uglies unlocked her and led her off to one side, with the group of people who appeared to be slightly fatter and more steady than the other group.

A thick-armed man as black as the sky without a moon said to his companions in this group that he understood what the pale-skins had said.

“Yes? Yes?” People clamored to hear. “How do you understand them?”

“On the ship, I listened, I learned,” he said.

“And what do you know now?”

“We are good,” he said. “They mean we are going to live, we are healthy as can be after the ship.”

“I am sick,” Lyaa said.

The man clucked at her.

“You are not sick. I heard what he said. You are carrying a child. They like that.”

“I am carrying a child?”

“You did not know?”

“I did not.”

“He said it was true.”

“Who said it?”

“The shaman, the tall one.”

Lyaa smiled to herself, and touched her belly lightly with her fingers.

“This is not just a child,” she said.

The old man gave her an inquiring look.

“What else could it be?” he said.

“The goddess,” she said. “My mother was, and her mother before her, and before all of them they were, and this new one, she will be, too.”

The old man paused, as if he were considering something to say, and what a luxury that was, after all the horrors of the journey they had endured. But a pale-skin holding a stick pointed it at him and beckoned for him to follow, and he left Lyaa there, pondering her new condition.

At least, though confused, she remained alive. Over the next days and weeks as she walked about the small pen where the pale-skins had put them, walls all around but the sun shining over head and plenty of birds flying, she felt in her heart that she had, that all of them had, been abandoned. Once she might have thought of herself as one of those birds about to fly, but now, weighed down with grief and homesickness and the literal weight of her growing belly, she heard the birds laugh at her, stupid, earthbound girl. But the child she was carrying? She had no doubts. It was not another creature to be bought and sold—it would be able to fly.

During the early morning, nearly every day of her stay in this pen, she could hear the moans and shrieks as the uglies came to cart away the sick and dying, while Lyaa and her group stayed strong. She knew for a fact—the tall dark man reported it to them—that the pale-skins gave them more food than the sickly ones. And after a few days the sickly ones would sink even further into their illnesses, and the uglies would come to remove them from the pen.

Taking them where?

She did not know.

“I think they put them in the ground,” the tall dark man said. “They are dying here, and will be dead within a few hours. That is why they take them out of here.”

That must be true. As her group grew stronger, the number of the sickly weakened, and, according to the tall black man, something was going to take place soon—he heard the uglies talking about it, something new soon.

A few mornings later, with the sun and the laughing birds high overhead, the medicine man came around and looked each of them over, nodding, making musical sounds with his lips.

“What?” Lyaa said.

“We are ready,” the tall black man said.

Lyaa shook her head. She took a deep breath and felt the holy infant turn inside her belly.

“Ready for what?” she said.