Song of Slaves in the Desert (12 page)

“Why, though, young nephew”—here my uncle finally found the way to break into this intense exchange—“in the case of Liza you must recognize how impossible it would be to put any price on this young woman.”

“But say,” I responded, “in this hypothetical instance—”

Jonathan’s smile collapsed into itself and of an instant he showed me a rather strange façade, as though anger roiled him for a fleeting instant and then, blinking, he found peace again in his thoughts.

“This one, Liza, the slave girl, is priceless,” he said. “Utterly and absolutely and irrevocably without a price.”

Smoke, wind, water, salt, a cough, a kiss, a light in the eyes, a finger, a heel toe elbow shoulder hip, a plaintive wail…How do you prepare for a voyage that allows you nothing to carry except your memories and your soul?

Jonathan’s declaration, seeming half in jest and, to my ear, half in earnest, set the other family members to explaining themselves.

“I know that it must seem quite a fearful situation,” my uncle said, “because we are a people who lived all too long in bondage ourselves. And yet we own these people, you are going to say, yes, I know. Unfortunately right now we cannot run the plantation without their labor. But when the time comes we will effect their emancipation.”

“When the time comes, yes,” my aunt said quietly, and I could not tell by her voice whether she was ratifying what Uncle said or disputing it.

“You cannot,” my cousin said quickly, “set a slave free and expect he will know how to take care of himself. There have been experiments I have read about where birds of prey, wounded in one way or another, have been taken in by people of sympathy, and nurtured until their injuries, broken wings or legs, whatever they might have been, have been repaired, and then were set free into the wild again, only to perish, because they had forgotten their instincts for survival.”

“And so you keep them here until you have trained them.”

“We have only just begun our training, isn’t that true, Rebecca?”

His wife nodded in agreement, keeping her eyes on me as if in search for some acquiescence.

Turning to me, Jonathan added, “Over the years we have had both good luck and bad with the sort of Africans we have kept here, and it has only been lately that we put our minds to the question of why this has been so. It has been Rebecca, my wife, who has been instrumental in this.” He took another drink of wine and looked over at his wife.

Rebecca at last spoke up.

“Your uncle and my Jonathan did all the preparation,” she said. “With the help also of a physician friend of ours. Perhaps at some point you will meet him. He visits now and then and tends to the health of our people.”

“Or perhaps not,” my cousin said. “He has been ailing himself and lately does not visit that often.”

“In any case, dear Nathaniel, my little idea was like a small spark to their kindling.”

“It was your idea?” I said, feeling a small spark of interest myself.

“I had a vision,” Rebecca said.

“Really? I’ve never met one of us that had a vision.”

“But, dear cousin, I did. I…I had not yet been able to conceive a child, but I had found ways to help small children. It was honey-making season, just a few years ago, when this idea came to me. I was spending an afternoon to myself while waiting for my beloved—” and here she cast a sweet eye at my cousin—“who was working with the slaves at the brickyard, strolling in the fields at the edge of the house. And I saw a bee, and took it upon me to follow it.”

“Bees?” I said. “But what on earth can this have to do with slaves?”

“Explain to him,” Jonathan said.

“I will,” Rebecca said. “I followed the bee, keeping it in my sight as it made a rather dizzy pattern in the air just above and beyond my head, lighting from tree to vine to tree, until I thought I had lost sight of it and stopped to catch my breath. And the busy little insect buzzed just past my head, as if to invite to follow it further.”

“Busy and buzzing,” said my cousin, the wine having loosened his tongue a bit.

Rebecca took a breath and continued.

“And so I wandered through the woods, and I don’t know how long I took, until I saw the sun slanting down behind the trees and knew it was time to start back to the house because my dear Jonathan would be returning from the rice fields soon—in fact, I could hear the dark people singing, their voices carrying like the noise of the bees and birds above the trees and then—”

“The dark people?”

“The slaves,” Jonathan said.

“The darkies,” Abraham said from the doorway and just then the heretofore absent Liza came up behind him and gave him a rude side-wise shove, sending him full out into the other room.

Rebecca made a point of ignoring this distraction. I wished I might have ignored it, such a sudden spear of fire in my heart the sight of the slave girl produced in me.

Meanwhile, my cousin’s wife went on, “They were singing, and here she took a deep breath and I watched her chest heave up and down as she sang the words in a voice deeper than her own. ‘Don’t mind working from sun to sun, If’n you give my dinner when the dinner time comes…’”

Now I took a swallow of wine, and Jonathan took another.

The doorway was now empty, Liza gone.

“It was beautiful music,” Rebecca went on, “as beautiful in its own way as anything I hear in the synagogue—”

“Well, I certainly am not sure about that,” said my uncle, her father-in-law.

“Hush,” said my aunt.

“I am not trying to be disrespectful—”

“Please, my dear, continue,” said Jonathan. “Father?”

My uncle shook his head, a signal for her to go on with her story.

As she spoke, I pictured not her but Liza gliding through the woods on the trail of the bee, her piercing green gaze and skin the color of walnut stippled by sunlight as she roamed from glade to glade.

Rebecca recounted her discovery, which, as I recollect it, had something to do with a Biblical vision of bees making honey in the corpse of a dead lion. I was not sure what she meant by this but would have politely kept on listening, except that I could not keep Liza out of my thoughts. I put her on the auction block in my mind and turned her this way and that, so I could observe her build and her strengths and whatever weaknesses—there were none—she might show forth.

A thousand
, I bid. And then bid against myself.
Two thousand! Three!

I turned her again and again, and bid her stare down at me from the block, before turning a haughty pose and looking away.

Four thousand!

“However,” my uncle was saying when I prompted myself to pay attention to the conversation at the table, “I believe that while they may be children they can learn and become educated over time. In fact, I believe that all of the problems we have with our slave population comes from the fact that most owners ignore their capabilities rather than encourage them. For if he were treated as a perennial child, what man would not want to break his bonds and find his own freedom. Though, of course, that would be always disastrous for these people. Without an education, they could, in freedom, only fall back into the same mental bonds that held them back in the first place.”

My leg had begun to ache from sitting so long, and I gave it a little shake, drumming my fingers on the tablecloth, and letting my eyes wander as again my mind did, lighting first on Precious Sally, who stood upright in the corner of the dining room, unmoving except for her huge chest working up and down, up and down, as she breathed, and then to Black Jack, who himself stood perfectly still in the doorway.

“And so we cultivate them,” my uncle went on, “teaching them how to read, thanks to dear Rebecca here—” Rebecca made a gentle noise with her mouth and bowed her head toward Uncle—“and our physician friend from town, and teaching them such tricks of the artisan as making bricks.”

His eyes rested on me, and so I sat up and showed my interest in these matters.

“How long have you been doing this, dear Uncle?” I inquired.

“For some time now,” he said.

“And have you made many slaves ready to be freed?”

My cousin broke in.

“None, dear Nathaniel. We could not farm without them. But in a cultivated state they will, we believe, become much more cheerful in their present state and find some freedom in what they may read and discourse about.”

My aunt spoke up again.

“It is the Sabbath and I don’t want to hear any more talk about work and business, do you hear?”

“Yes, my dear,” said my uncle. He motioned to Rebecca, who broke out into a song about the Sabbath bride, and we all joined in, not that I knew the song, but I moved my lips and mumbled the words along with the rest of the devout and dutiful family.

“And tomorrow being the Sabbath all day,” my cousin Jonathan said, “we will take our leisure in the woods. Rebecca will be going back to town to visit with her family, so it will be you and me, dear cousin. And then on Sunday, the Gentile Sabbath, we’ll have another day of rest. We give our slaves both days of rest.”

“Two Sabbaths,” I said, “what a fine idea. But do you fall behind in your cultivation because of that?”

“When we do, we eliminate one of the Sabbaths,” he said. “Temporarily, of course.”

“Very interesting,” I said, and after the fine sherry following the dinner, I excused myself and retired, thinking to myself as I climbed the stairs that I had heard more talk about the Sabbath here in one meal than in an entire New York year.

I lay in bed, restless and worrying with my imagination, picturing again Liza on the auction block, and I went on bidding for a while.

Nobody wanted to board.

The noise, the noise rose to the sky. Shouting, screaming, crying all against the crashing and lulls of the surf. Women prayed, men lunged here and there, weighed down by chains. Black men slashed at them with whips. Men pale as ghosts, with long guns, stood along the sand, some of them shouting orders to the men with the whips. Shore birds squealed overhead. Lyaa, in the middle of things, gazed wildly about the beach strewn with belongings, hoping for a glimpse of her mother.

For a time it seemed as though nothing would happen. The captives did not budge, and the captors did not seem to care, all just huddled, muddled together in a mass of confusion and noise.

Suddenly one tall man leaped at one of the whippers, and a gunshot rang out into the pale-white sky. The tall man fell to his knees, tipped over onto the sand which his blood turned brown, and the screaming began, even as the terrified captives now allowed themselves to be herded into a row of small boats lined up just at the shoreline.

“Mama!” a girl screamed over and over, “Mama! Mama!” and much to her surprise Lyaa after a short while realized she was the screaming girl.

Somehow, she settled herself, even as her boat pitched and rolled in the deep surf, a good moment, settling, even as she became drenched with spray, because there came one bad thing after another, and she needed her strength to endure. Sailors, mostly pale-faces, some with dark beards, hauled them up like dry goods out of the small boats and lined them up on deck, ordering them to set down their belongings. When a woman refused, a rail-thin sailor in torn denim grabbed her by the throat and tore a bundle from her hands. A baby went flying across the deck and the woman charged after it, gaining only half the distance to the infant when the sailor struck her down. A man reached over to rescue the infant and the rail-thin sailor hit him with a truncheon. The child disappeared in the confusion of bodies and shouts and screams and curses in four or five languages.

A white bird soared overhead, watching out of one eye and then the other as the sailors gestured and shouted, driving everyone below decks.

Stumbling down the slippery stairs.

Dark down here, so dark. Stench of bitter stink stabs the nostrils. Sailors swarm everywhere, pushing, shoving, punching, kicking the captives and chaining them to benches scarcely long or wide enough to hold them all. Born a slave, Lyaa had never known freedom, but she had not, until the traders took her from her uncle/father’s village, known any darkness such as this.

Children wailed, infants screamed, one after another as one dropped away and another took up the noise. Sailors walked among the captives, plucking a child here, an infant there, and carting them away like debris while the mothers and some fathers screamed at the top of their powers, tearing hopelessly at their chains. Lyaa felt herself trembling, and then the world moved, shouts from up above, and began an intermittent pounding, pounding, that filled the air between the screams.

Her heart pounded, the wind pounded the sails, the ship pounded its way into the rolling sea. Where did they take those children? Lyaa asked in a voice raspy with thirst and emotion, hearing nothing but moans and hoarse shouting, the roar of wind and rush of water against cloth and wood. Hours passed. She strained for release from the bench but could not slip free of the chains. She tried to sleep, but the woman chained next to her made odd raspy noises in her throat, a noise that Lyaa could not shield herself from. And then came the hot high stink as the woman relieved herself in place. Lyaa vowed she would never do this vile thing, but hours later came the first time, as if in a dream of warm liquid and ammoniac air, she relieved herself in place. The urine perfumed the cabin, and then all the rest came down.

Shit. Vomit. Many became sick from the guttering rhythm of the ship. At some point some sailors descended into their mess, holding candles and one of them with a large pot.

“Hohlee farkin jeesus!”

The man shouted, the men shouted, the captives shouted.

“Farkin steeenk!”

Lyaa heard their words only as noise. Years would pass before she understood and spoke English well. But she already hated the language of the captor, just as she had despised the language of the Arab slavers and despised their Allah who had put her in chains. All gods seemed feeble, except Yemaya, who still apparently listened to her prayers, because some hours later came more candles in the dark, and crewmen rousted them upright, and others doused them with pail after pail of cold, stinging water that left her lips bitter with salt. Bless you, Yemaya, for cleaning us, bless you and all your children.

Though within minutes people began soiling themselves again, and, desperate for release, Lyaa strained at the manacles and chains until her ankles bled. Now the air around her reeked of the iron stink of blood. The wretched metallic odor leached through the space of confinement. It reminded her—Yemaya help her, she could not say why—of her mother when she was nursing the younger children. Was her mother enclosed in here somewhere? Would she ever see her again? Lyaa’s mind worked back through the events she had suffered, the advent of the traders, the chase through the forest, the confrontation with her uncle/father. Her mother had told her of the family’s travels as captives from Timbuktu to the forest, a tale Lyaa never tired of hearing, and amid all of the news of the family’s sufferings and displacements and disruptions Lyaa never imagined that she would one day—all too soon, all so soon—turn these details over and over in her thoughts, longing for her mother, and relishing those memories that included her.

The warm rush of her urine gushed again over the bench where she lay half-dreaming. She had not even thought of it, let alone worried about it. What might have been a half day or a day confined in this infernal cabin and she had given over to the rhythms of her bladder and bowels while everything else around her sank into chaos and disgust. If there was another way of living with this, she didn’t know, and if some of her fellow captives knew where they were going they didn’t shout it out—or even whisper it—and she tried to catch the rhythm of the ship and give herself over to sleep.

But just as she was dozing sailors descended into the midst of the captives carrying buckets of something that scarcely passed for food. With trembling hands Lyaa scooped up the lumpy mess and splashed the foul mixture into her mouth, swallowing but hating herself even as she did. Her stomach rebelled at the feel of it, and before she knew it she began to convulse and vomit up the slop.

“Better to eat,” came a voice from the shadows behind her.

A man lay stretched out on the bench nearly full-length. Lyaa wondered how he had been given so much space when she saw that the former occupant of the bench along with this man had fallen onto the floor beneath it, still in manacles but unmoving.

“What happened to him?”

“He is dead,” the man said. “I hope only they come and fetch him before he begins to rot.”

“Do not talk about a human being that way,” Lyaa said. “He was just like you, before he died.”

“Oh, yes,” the man said, “he was hungry and angry and filthy and sick, and I believe his heart stopped beating in the night. If we go on like this much longer, my heart will stop, too.”

“How much longer do we go?” Lyaa asked him.

The man shook his head.

“I have heard stories…”

“Stories?”

“About events like this.”

“Events?”

“These ghost traders—”

“Ghosts? Pale-faced men?”

“Yes, like these men.”

“And where do they come from?”

“That doesn’t matter,” the man said. “What matters is where they take us.”

“And they are taking us where?”

Lyaa listened to the rasping of her voice even as she felt the soreness while she spoke.

“Across the waters,” the man said.

Lyaa felt her heart sink into her bowels, her heart bathed in her own piss and shit.

“Is it a long journey?”

“Long enough,” the man said.

“What is on the other side of the waters? Is there another world?”

“It could be Paradise, or it could be filled with demons.”

“I am glad my mother is not with me,” Lyaa said.

“You should be,” the man said. And he inclined his head toward her.

“Yes?” she said.

“This man, who has fallen?”

“Yes?”

The man suddenly howled like a dog.

“He is my father!”

How she wept! Wept and wept! Out went her sullied heart, and her hopes bathed in her filthy fears, and she wept and wept again, and finally, finally, finally, at least for that night—or was it day? she didn’t know—she closed her eyes and even as she clutched in her right hand the small pouch with the stone her mother had given to her many mornings ago she drifted away from the bench where she lay enchained. Not even the stone could anchor her. Oh, my poor grandmother, neither living nor dying, but simply floating in her own odor and imagining she had been transported to a peaceful place even as the ship carried her to her hellish Paradise or splendid Hell full of demons. Whichever the other shore turned out to be, Lyaa longed with all her heart and strength to reach it alive.

No dreams, as far as we know, not in this round sleep. She awoke sharply in the dark to the jamming of water against wood, and beneath that larger motion and the noise of groaning sick and aching and sleeping captives all around her a tickling sensation at her ankle.

She sat up, glanced down, and saw the gray shadow gnawing at her.

No!

She kicked, and the animal fell away into the shadows. Her chest tightened, she could scarcely breathe. Her heart roared like the ocean on the other side of the timbered cabin wall. Quickly she used her hands to assess her state, ankles bleeding, toes, one two three four five, one two three four five, intact, knees, and her precious part, stomach, chest, present and aching.

The pouch with the stone she had worn around her neck?

Gone!

In a confusion of misery and great care—the stinking bench had grown slippery with her own residue and fluids—she leaned down and trying to keep herself balanced peered at the body of the man who had died and found rats gnawing at his flesh. Her gorge rose and she splashed vomit onto the floor, though the rats paid little attention, so intent were they upon their feast.

Better dead flesh than live! Fresh meant nothing, decay meant everything! Oh, they would love this voyage from the land of the living to the land of the dead! The rats would love it. And the captives and the crew would hate it worse than death.

She reached down and felt around on the filthy floor, unable because of the chains to stretch much further than the end of the bench. Here, she felt the cloth of the pouch. A rat nipped at her fingers and she flipped it aside. Before she could reach for the pouch again the rat returned. Once more she flicked her wrist and sent the animal sailing into the dark. With a deep intake of breath and a stretch beyond anything she thought she could summon up she found the pouch and clutched it in her hand as she pulled herself back onto the bench.

The pouch was empty!

Ay-ieee! It was as if her own heart had slipped from her chest!

It took a while for her to regain control of her breathing. Once more she leaned over the edge of the bench and walked her fingers through the filth, shoving aside aggressive rodents with her balled fist.

“Hah!”

A light appeared at the end of the row as one of the sailors completed his descent into the cabin. Catching sight of what she took to be the stone she reached again and picked it up. And with a cry of disgust tossed aside the piece of rat turd.

The light grew brighter as the sailor drew near, allowing her to see more clearly. Spying the stone she reached again—the last of her strength went the way of the smoke from the torch—and plucked it from the floor.

“All ow!”

The sailor shouted in words she did not understand, except that he spoke forcefully, and in a moment other crew members descended the stairs, with more torches and louder voices.

“All ow!”

They went from bench to bench, unlocking the manacles, raising the captives, some of them rearing up with strength and power, some of them sitting up as if brought back from the dead. Lyaa welcomed the climb up the steps to the deck, feeling power returning to her legs. In front and above her some people stumbled, a woman fell back, nearly pulling Lyaa and several others down with her. Drinking in the cool salt breeze that rushed down from the open port she regained her balance and surged up to the top.

On deck, the faint light of dawn, the sliver of a new moon already fading in the sky above the shivering sails. The wind conspired to cool the captives and buffet them about. More and more of them arose from below decks. Lyaa felt a flush of amazement at how many captives the ship held, and how many, like herself, seemed unable to do anything but blink into the rising light all around, the light of a dawn that seemed, as they did, to be coming up from below the surface of the ocean.

Some of the men began to chant at the sight of that rising light, an old song that Lyaa knew gave praise to the gods who made the days. How could it be after all she had been through that she found herself humming along?

“‘Nuff!”

Sailors shouted, brandished pails and flung sea-water water at the captives, an act that seemed hostile until they all realized that here was a chance to clean themselves. Some of the men removed their ragged clothing. Even a few of the older women availed themselves of the chance for a cleansing.

“—!”

A balding red-faced sailor, eyes nearly bulging out of his head, shouted at Lyaa, taking her by the shoulders and spinning her around, pulling at her clothes. Within seconds she stood naked on the deck while another sailor doused her with chilling water from a pail. And again! She pushed at the sailor and he pushed back. Her legs ached, her bare breasts stung, she hunched her shoulders against the cold, while she covered herself with her hands, a distinctly human figure distorted by pain and humiliation, waiting for the chance to retrieve her clothing. From all across the deck screams and cries arose, mostly the voices of women.