Song of Slaves in the Desert (13 page)

Worse, she learned immediately why they screamed as the same red-faced sailor charged at her, grabbed her even more roughly than before and dragged her to a place behind the mainmast. What happened next we can never truly know, unless we find ourselves forced into the immediate degradation sometimes suffered by the victim, usually female, when man turns beast and instinct—raw, foul, animal, devilish, destructive instinct—overpowers her. Lyaa struggled, and the sailor cuffed her on the mouth with the back of his hand. Blood spurted from her mouth as she shouted, wept, struggled, near to death but still struggling, although hopelessly, as it turned out.

“‘Yemaya!” she called. “Mama!”

Sea-birds glided above the deck. The sails flapped one way and then another. It wasn’t long before they herded everyone back below decks, and Lyaa found herself aching and chained once again, dressed in shreds of cloth, her (to others) mysterious pouch clutched close to her chest, wondering why she was not dead.

“I am sorry.”

A man’s voice woke her from a stupor.

Darkness enfolded the cabin as waves broke against the prow, hammer, hammering, stuttering back at the ocean. Her stomach ached, her ears roared from the mix of moans and silence among the people where she lay. She turned to the man whose father had died in the first hours of the first day of their journey. It had taken a long while—so long in darkness, she couldn’t count in days—for the sailors to drag the corpse from the cabin and carry it above decks. The odor of its rotting flesh still lingered in the air.

“What?”

His bowels creaked and whistled as he gave up a reeking bolus of wretched disgust right there on his bench.

“I am dying,” he said.

“No, no, no,” Lyaa said, “you have a life to live beyond your father’s life.”

“I cannot live as a slave anymore,” the man said.

“Death is slavery,” Lyaa said, not knowing where her words came from. “Life is freedom, because it can be free.”

“I do not understand,” the man said, “and yet I do want to know.”

She shook her head in amazement at her own speech, and though she tried she could not return to sleep, imagining all the spirits he had called down for her. One by one they settled in her body, presided over by Yemaya, and she knew this was good. Oh, goddess, she prayed, take us easily over the waters and break our chains on land, whatever land it is.

In the middle of the night the man reached over to touch Lyaa on the head.

“Bless you,” he said. “All the spirits on your head.”

As if in a miracle, up on deck some time later, chained together in rows of ten, someone pointed out an island off in the distance to the north.

Word pulsated through the captive ranks.

“Land! Land!”

The row of captives, urged on by the man whose father had died, shuffled toward the starboard railing and amid shouts from the sailors and the whirring and slap of whips as nearly one person they all went over the side.

Lyaa stared in horror at the empty space where a moment before all those people stood while the sailors shouted and whipped the air to hold back the rest. The captain in his dark uniform soon appeared on deck to call out orders to the rest of the crew. Sailors reshaped the sails and the ship began to turn. But circling back to the spot where the ten or so slaves had dived into the ocean no sign showed of any of the escaping captives.

The captain himself climbed down into the slave cabin along with a group of torch-bearing sailors. He shouted, cajoled, pleaded, ordered the slaves in his own language, none of which Lyaa could not understand. Many, many days went by before they were brought up on deck again.

Fewer of them gathered now. It was as if the god of death walked along the odiferous rows, pointing out those whom he would take with him on another sort of voyage.

But not Lyaa. She became sick, but she got well. She licked her palms after she ate the food the sailors delivered, licked rain water from the boards when on a beautiful sunlight morning after a vast rainstorm finally they did climb back up on deck again, if not gaining strength then at least not losing it as quickly as she might have. She prayed for more rain, and what better thing could happen than a dark cloud, lingering at the tail end of the boiling storm, poured down upon them, and Lyaa, along with the other survivors, turned her face to the sky and opened her mouth.

Returning to the benches some of the captives sang old god-songs and one or two of them—she swore she heard it, but she might have imagined it—laughed, a sound no one had heard in a long, long time. She held the laugh in her mind when she tried to sleep, but as had become usual a chorus of groans and weeping, coughing, whispering, farting, praying bubbled up constantly in the ranks around her. When at last sleep settled over her, her dreams became just as overcrowded as the cabin. Gods descended around her and spoke, in voices she could almost but not quite recognize, urging her to carry on through all of the filth and pain and discomfort and discouragement.

“For your mother,” Yemaya said.

“For all of her mothers, those who gave birth and became and came and went and bore still more children.” Yemaya’s brother spoke in stronger terms still. “You must eat and drink whatever and whenever you can. You have a mission. Your mission is to become free.”

Oh, yes, and darker spirits appeared to her as well. Shadows with horns and fangs and noses shaped like spears who chanted to her about welcoming death, and eating herself alive until she died.

Jump, dive, sink!

Follow your kinsmen down to the bottom of the sea. A lovely haven awaits you, the flowers of the ocean, jewels made of spindrift and the water sweeter to breathe than air.

“Don’t listen,” Yemaya cautioned her.

“Listen but don’t obey,” said the goddess’s son.

He gave her explicit instructions, and she drank the slops sloshed into her hands and licked the decks and when someone near her died she went through the woman’s pouch and found damp bits of nuts and she ate those, and when a man in the next row over caught and killed a rat she flinched before she took what he passed to her but took it she did, and drank the nasty animal’s blood and ate its flesh. The next time she did not flinch.

Some of them had a plan. Days and nights had passed—very few of the captives could tell them apart—since their last time on deck. At least they could speak freely, none of the sailors being able to understand their languages, and only a few among them capable of understanding all of the languages they spoke. But in the dark, amid the stench and foul litter, a few of the men were talking about what to do the next time the sailors allowed them up into the air. Finally, it coalesced into a scheme, so that when they came up through the hatch one group moved to starboard and the other to port.

They had discovered a glorious day at sea, with great heaving fields of waves making up an ocean that seemed to have no limit except where it touched the pale blue of the descending wall of the sky. The wind blew easy, with hints of salt and tar carried on its currents. However, the slaves paid little attention to their surroundings, casting their eyes upward to the heavens or staring down at their chains. None seemed to meet the eye of any other. For a few moments, all seemed calm, and the sailors hauled their buckets up from over the side, prepared to douse the filth-encrusted captives with stinging cold sea-water to splash away the fetid stains and disgusting daubings, evidence of their miserable life below decks.

Just then the first line, men and women bound together, began to chant and sing, and a few sailors dropped their buckets, picked up whips and clubs, and rushed toward them. As the first sailor struck the first captive a line of men—all men—on the other side of the deck turned to face the rail and threw themselves headlong overboard.

The captain standing tall on the bridge turned red-faced with rage, shouting orders and waving his fists.

This time as the ship turned it became clear by the boiling patch of water where the sharks swarmed exactly where the captives had perished.

The captain shouted at the remaining captives—and there were still a great many, no doubt of that—and sent them, under a rain of whips and clubs delivered by his crew, down below. As Lyaa hobbled along, aching in her chains, arms raised to protect herself from the blows, she saw staring down at her from the captain’s bridge, a blazing halo of sunlight coloring the sails behind him, the balding sailor—an officer, as it turned out—who had taken her behind the mainmast and wounded her soul. He stared at her as though she were some animal familiar to him from his travels in a foreign forest.

***

From that moment on, and she was not sure what it was that sent her in this direction, she dived down into her mind and tried to follow her path as far back in memory as she could, into her life and the life of her family.
Oh, Yemaya
, she silently called out, send me back, back to where I first emerged from my mother’s womb, back to where my mother first saw the light, back to a desert dawn where her mother first saw the first light, back to where her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, and many before her, first opened her eyes on a place without trees, with mountains only, and a great mountain had just blown open and splashed a fiery cloud above it made of smoke and ash. Lyaa’s belly ached and her head felt as though it were on fire as she lay dreaming in the dark, picturing those sparks, that sea, that sky, one far bright star above it breaking through the nearby fire so strong it was and so close to home. That star would ignite itself each sunset and serve as a signpost which each and all of her mothers would use as a marker of the trail toward safety and the future, even as she knelt in the dust and retrieved that stone that had shot up out of the burst of flame from the bowels of the earth, the stone gift from the belly and bowels of the mother.

Here it is!

Nothing settled down on this voyage except the pain, a dull rumbling in her belly and chest that never left but also never rose to the heights of the unbearable. It stayed with her, like the shifting of the timbers below decks, like the thumping of the waves against the hull, stayed always with her through the dark and into the moments when crew descended into the belly of the ship, torches burning.

When fever attacked her, she lay there burning in her own presence, calling again on Yemaya to grant her safe passage, though to where she could not say. For all she knew she might sail forever, bound to the bench, starved and thirsty, hearing voices in torment and voices in song. When she recovered from the fever—a miracle? Or just chance? She chose to see it as a gift from the goddess, who surely was guiding the ship toward safe harbor, wherever that might be—

Her blood had stopped.

Yemaya!

The goddess and her cohort tested her faith fully when the ship sailed into a deepening storm that made everyone in the hold as sick as dying monkeys.

Yemaya!

For days the benches—the world—rolled and pitched, dipped and pitched, and everyone threw up the contents of their near-empty stomachs, which meant blood and bile slopped the floor and swelled the air with a stench unimaginable to anyone who never lay chained to a bench in the middle of the ocean in a storm that nearly took the ship apart timber by timber.

When, after some nightmare of time, the ship settled once more into a steady forward pitch, she believed that she might have died, except that around her she could see some were living, some were dead, and there was a difference. The dead merely lay there, in various odd positions. The living twitched, vomited, and moaned.

Could anything more horrible happen? Oh, yes, oh, yes.

Once again into her world descended the bald-headed sailor and without a word released her from the bench and led her by the chain up the steps onto the upper deck. She had to follow, and yet she wanted to follow—if she were not on the chain she would still have kept quickly behind him, recognizing the pain in her belly was hunger and admitting to herself—forgive her, goddess!—that she would do anything for food.

And she did anything, and everything, and things she could never have imagined, under cover of darkness—dark below in the captives’ deck, dark above on the upper deck, with dark clouds covering a sky that seemed lighter than the ocean on which the ship coursed along, sails full of wind, Yemaya’s children blowing into the cloths to swell them and push the ship along.

This went on a while, this time, and other times, always in the middle of the night, and one night a full moon, graced with passing clouds, cast down its eye on her, and she became afraid, could not move, and the sailor twisted her and pushed her, goaded her with the handle of a whip, and she heard Yemaya telling her, “Go with him, young woman, go with him,” and she never wondered why after that. The sailor gave her bread and bits of meat, kept her alive so that he could have his way with her, but by living she had her way with him.

Now in the dark she could feel the weight of her ribs pressing down onto the bench on which she lay—and she was one of the lucky ones.

Now in the dark, she felt the rush and roar of ocean against hull as part of her own heart’s working.

Now in the dark, it sometimes became day, and she traveled back into the sunny world of before, when she was alive and living in the forest.

Now in the dark—

Now—

—holding tight to the stone each night in the dark she felt herself weighed down with it, descending, lowering herself as a body through the bench and through the deck floor, down through the hull and sinking below the ship, sinking fast beneath large fish and small, into a darker-than-dark level of ocean where strong currents pulled her one way and another, so that eventually she felt as though she were a ship in herself, sailing forward even as she sank down—

And down…

And down…

Until such time when she opened her mouth to taste the water and breathe, and the savor of it gave off a perfume in the back of the throat like that of delicious fruit, and she floated with her mouth open, so that the water flowed into her throat even as it flowed out of her nose, and she was breathing, breathing, cavorting like a mammal-fish, like whale or dolphin. And then she dove deep like a deeper fish, like other fishes we have not yet discovered, seeing in the dark as only some human being or animal can who has long lived down in the depths of light’s absence can see, seeing the dark as light. Even within this deep realm she sometimes closed her eyes and found deeper darkness still, and slept within her waking sleep, letting the currents carry her where they might.