Song of Slaves in the Desert (9 page)

“Same principle,” my uncle said. “She was a lovely woman. I met her only once, when I traveled up to New York on business and stayed with you.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said.

“You were the smallest of children then.”

“But I would have remembered.”

My uncle laughed and his bulky belly and arms and neck shook with his laughter.

“Because of my girth, no doubt, you think. But I was a lesser man back then. No bulkier than slender Jonathan here.”

“And so I have something to aspire to then, father?” my cousin said, sipping from his cup.

“You do, indeed, sir,” my uncle said.

We puffed out our smoke for a while longer, while the butler appeared with a bottle of port.

“Black Jack,” my uncle said, “this is my nephew, here from New York to learn the ways of running a plantation.”

I made to shake hands with the man but he backed a step away.

Alone then, we sipped the wine and talked.

“I’d like to hear all the news about my brother,” my uncle said.

I made a summary for him of all, or most, that had happened in the past year—telling mostly the story of our business.

“And so he is well?”

“He is, sir.”

“And your late mother’s sister? How is she faring?”

He paused in thought, while I idly studied the shadow of the candle flickering across his broad face. In and out of the light his face shifted, looking first younger, than old, younger, old.

“She is well, sir,” I replied, unhappy at the thought of Aunt Isabelle, whose person had not entered my conscious thoughts for a good long while.

“You say your father has not remarried.”

I shook my head.

“And he has no thought about marrying Isabelle? Isn’t that her name?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

My uncle tilted his large head to one side, then the other.

“It is an ancient custom of our people, you may recall, when a man becomes a widower to marry the sister of his late wife.”

The thought gave me the fearful chills.

“He has not said a word to me about it.”

“You would be the last to hear, I think,” my uncle said. “But I know men and I know my brother. Your visit here has much to do with business, but it does also give your father some time alone with Isabelle.”

It occurred to me with a shudder in my blood that all of this, my mission, my journey, might all have been a ruse constructed by my father, and then I brushed the thought aside and washed down some of my worry with more port. Where was the slave girl? Where was she?

“But it is business that brings me here,” I said, daring myself to squarely light on the matter at hand.

“Business, business, yes,” my uncle said, “the busyness of our lives. Your father seems quite determined to educate you in these matters.”

My attentive cousin poured me another glass of the wine, and then poured another for himself.

“These matters,” I said.

“My business is failing,” my uncle said.

I sat up, alert to the news.

“He never told me this. He told me only to study your enterprise.”

My overstuffed uncle leaned forward with a smile on his moon of a face, his large head floating in front of his body in the candlelight.

“Do you know the difference between us and the Gentiles?”

“They worship Christ,” I said. “We merely produced him.”

“Very good,” my uncle said, with a laugh. “Very good. But there is something more, something in the character of the Gentile to which I’m referring.”

“They are less devout?”

“Sometimes they are more devout, much more.”

“Then we are less?”

“People say we Reformed are less than whole Jews. But we are inspired to act as we do by an inner power.”

“But what about Gentiles? You were talking about them.”

“They go into the business without a thought for the morality of it.”

“And we Jews?”

“We struggle with the problem, we exhibit great soul-searching and painful thought.” He pounded a fist on the table. “We moan, we groan, we worry…”

“And then?”

“And then we go into the business.”

While he laughed at his own witticism, I took the liberty of pouring myself another glass of port. Before very long, I felt my head drooping.

“To bed!” my uncle announced. “Tomorrow for part of the day we will continue your education.”

“To bed,” Jonathan stood to announce—and make a toast—“where all life begins, and every day ends…”

I wove from side to side as I followed Black Jack who showed me to my room, a fine little closet on the second floor at the rear of the grand house with a window, covered with netting, wide open to the night.

I took some time removing my things from my bag, and from my person, such as the small pistol, which, figuring that I had arrived in the peaceful kingdom, I would not need, and so I placed it in the top drawer of the bureau, beneath a pile of handkerchiefs. I continued unpacking, eventually unwrapping the portrait of my mother and placing it on the bureau (and with a twinge of nostalgia poking at my chest like an insistent finger taking care to fold the newssheet from the New York newspaper that had wrapped my mother’s portrait that I might read some of it later). I lay there a while on my soft down bed with the lamp burning, musing on the faint memories of that dear departed woman, and then I put out the light and lay a while longer thinking in the shadows of the room. What was it? The humming in the near-distance, like a chorus of some tuning of strings in an orchestra, but also the sissing of a million tongues, as though the stars, so bright beyond the trees, were each a lamp hissing after some cosmic god had blown cosmic breath across the sputtering wicks. It was the music of the low country under cover of darkness, the news of the land, the swamps, the creeks, the woods, and the skies filled with those stars, but lower toward the earth, the insects and the swooping birds who flew with beaks wide open so that they might just scoop up all that they needed for nourishment. Thus settled over me the last night of comfort and freedom from care that I would ever spend.

Overhead, chattering away, monkeys awoke her. What they were trying to tell each other, Lyaa could not say, noticing only that they were excited. But then, as anyone knew, that might mean one of them had found a dead bird or a rat or a mate or had a dream and awoke as startled as people were when they awoke from dreams dark or dreams cheerful, dreams of flying or dreams of dying, which she, as she had once told the local witch, sometimes suffered to great degrees.

Those monkeys, what might they see? Growing to girlhood in this green world just to the south of the river Lyaa had learned some things about the life around her. These chatterers with sandy whiskers and shining eyes migrated to the south in the dry season and in the wet season returned to make a noise in the heaven above the forest floor that began before first light and went on until after sunset, their calls increasing in pitch or subsiding now and then to celebrate encounters and meals and discoveries and disappointments and fears, much like her own life amid these people whom she could not call her own, because they owned her.

They owned her!

That was every morning’s true awakening. In the pit of this green world, where insects crawled and swarmed and small rats ran right and left, even the smallest of animals was freer than she! Those monkeys looking down from the treetops upon this world of green, even they were freer than she! In this green world, no safe place offered itself. Nowhere could you hide. Her mother could not hide. She lived as her desert born mother lived, exercising ways not of the green world. After a while the greenness crept into her lungs and long before her time she lay weighed down in her breath by a terrible heaviness of green.

“I am your mother,” Wata said to Lyaa, who sat cross-legged by her side. “I want to give you hope and a clear view of life. But I am confused. (Her breath came hard as she spoke these words). Our mother left the desert god behind in the northern sands. The entire world, whether sand and rock to the north or this jungle, or whatever lay south beyond it, remains a place of imprisonment. The desert god enslaved the men who enslaved us.” Her whisper deepened, her breath turned into a rasp and a wheeze. “Pray now to the goddess of the forest. The goddess who rules the forest world and all the world’s waters, whom the desert god challenged, may be our only hope!”

Yemaya, Yemaya, hear my prayer. Carry me away from this green house, carry me out of this place of worry and woe
. She remembered even as a very young girl hearing such words in the language her mother called the tongue of the goddess. “My grandfather believed in submitting to his god,” she explained to young Lyaa, even before the girl could truly understand. “I say no, I say never give in or submit, we slaves of slaves, born into chains and misery in our hearts. You are my only hope. You must never give in to the desert god but instead devote yourself to Yemaya and her sisters, who travel with us all over land or water.”

Yemaya, Yemaya!

Yemaya made her heart full, and when she lost the path Yemaya helped her to find it again.

Yemaya! She of the fierce eyes and rough hands, a voice like a roaring stream, the queen of queens, mother of all the green jungle and blessed of all streams, rivers, and oceans, within and without. When Lyaa’s father/uncle stared at her ferociously with his one good eye, she did not look away. He hardly ever looked at either of them and so it seemed important to acknowledge his attention.
Yemaya
, she whispered to herself under her breath. Later his under-chief came to her and told her that she was not eating enough. She called on Yemaya then also for assistance. One night the big man himself, with his rolls of belly fat and that one good eye, strolled over and took her arm, inspecting it as if it belonged to a monkey or a bird.

She had heard stories, beginning with her mother’s stories.
If he touches me elsewhere
, she said to herself,
Yemaya, please give me the strength to kill him or kill myself.

As if he could feel the force of her prayer, the man released her. (But did it happen because Yemaya answered her prayers, or because he had seen enough? Lyaa had no answer. Perhaps there was no answer and could not be. Did the gods intervene in this world or did they not? Sometimes it seemed as though they did, sometimes as though they did not or would not or could not. Was it her name that called up the power of the First Woman?)

But as it happened on that morning early it was much worse than that, so much worse than she ever, in her innocence, might have feared. The monkeys could see the men moving along the forest paths, which is what gave them such cause for alarm.

Awake, Lyaa!
they called.
Awake and hide!

Awake and run!
Others called back.

Awake, awake!

Come!

Hurry!

Run!

Go!

Alas, she did not understand the language of the animals, knew only that something important had happened.

Or something terrible was happening.

She sat with her ailing mother, listening to the disruption in the trees. Not until—yes! no!—she heard the rush of men hurrying along the path, and heard the clank of the chains they carried, heard the sound even though the chains lay muffled in large sacks slung over the traders’ shoulders, did she try to urge her mother to her feet.

“Go,” her mother said, so deep in her whispery voice that it seemed as though she spoke from another realm.

“You must stand and come with me,” Lyaa said.

“Go,” her mother urged her, and then closed her eyes, closed her lips.

Men shouted, women screamed, and children screeched and howled.

Go!
The voice echoed in Lyaa’s mind.

She glanced down one last time at her supine mother, ran out into the light, and kept on running, running, beyond the village clearing, into the woods, along the creek. It was not until she reached the edge of the big forest that, hungry for breath, she paused, and then raced forward again, hearing now the pounding feet of pursuers breaking through the forest behind her.

Yemaya! Yemaya!

“Run!” A woman’s voice behind her urged her on.

Run!

Turning in the hope of catching a glimpse of how close the people hunters might be, she tripped on a root and fell forward, slamming her shoulder against a tree trunk that even though it bent with her weight was still large enough to bounce her back and send her catapulting off the path.

A moment later two men rushed past, chains clanking in the sacks at their shoulders.

She inched up above the grass and watched them disappear into the woods.

Oh, Mother! Oh, Yemaya!
Might she be safe now? Slowly she pulled herself to her feet, touching the raw place where her shoulder had hit the tree. She felt tears rising in her belly even as she bent over and spit up liquid and air. Safe? Where was her family? What should she do now?

The monkeys overhead had quieted down and this gave her pause. Perhaps the raiders had moved past the village, though if so she feared they might have left for dead those who resisted. In spite of herself, she called up the image of her father/uncle, the man who had made her life a little prison in itself. If anyone had been hurt, she hoped, hoped so hard she began to double over again with belly pain, may it have been him!

When she pulled herself upright once more she started back in the direction of the village, walking slowly, tentatively, alert to every sound in the woods around her, the chirping of the monkeys, the call of birds, the rustle of leaves as she brushed past plants and low trees. It sounded as though the terror that had driven her to run so fast and far had ended. Her heart settled down. She whispered prayerful thanks to Yemaya, and in a deeper part of her cursed the desert sky god who allowed those slave traders to live and track poor human beings such as herself and her family.

“Lyaa!”

Her father/uncle hailed her as she stepped into the clearing.

Never, ever could she have imagined she would feel so happy to see this man whom she despised!

She walked toward him as he gestured, which she took to mean that he was happy to see her, too.

And all of a sudden the world went black, she fell forward, or was pushed, and couldn’t catch her breath.

“And the cattle?”

Her father/uncle’s voice boomed above her where she lay sprawled, a cloth tied tightly over her head, on the sandy ground of the compound.

“You will have them tomorrow, you have my word.” This was a voice she didn’t recognize. One of the slavers! Or not?

“You take these people now and you give me your word you will bring the goods in return tomorrow?”

“You have my word.”

“Do I?”

“My word, for God.”

“Your god or mine?”

The slaver spat, and Lyaa could feel him stamp a step past her.

“Is that a curse?”

“Never,” her father/uncle said. “Never. I submit to your god.”

The trader did not respond, instead kneeling alongside Lyaa and tying something around her neck. He then pulled at a chain and she felt the collar tighten at her throat. When he yanked her to her feet she nearly choked.

“My men are fetching the others. And then we depart. You’ll have your cattle tomorrow before sundown.”

“Thank you,” she heard her father/uncle say, his voice more subdued than usual.

“I want to return to my mother,” she said in a raspy voice, her throat constricted by the chain.

“Oh, yes, yes, she will be meeting you,” her father/uncle said.

“She is ill. She needs help. She cannot take a deep breath. Did you see her back in the village? Did you?”

Lyaa felt strength flow into her arms and she reached up and tore at the chain.

Her father/uncle turned away.

“Tell me!” she shouted, at terrible cost to her throat. “Did you see her?”

“Take her,” her father/uncle said.

And the trader led her away, pulling her along for some distance before they stopped and he removed the hood. She stood quietly, confused, numb at heart, while he and the rest of his band rounded up others from the village. Women sobbed, nervously clutching handfuls of belongings, children cried because their mothers cried, unknowing, innocent. The monkeys overhead joined in, chattering, screaming. Finally she herself began to weep, for her mother, for all of them. When the slave returned to where Lyaa stood he stared and stared with coal-black eyes so fierce that she turned her head aside.

Pinching the flesh on her arm, the slaver said, “Worth every cow, worth every cow.”