Song of Slaves in the Desert (19 page)

The Sabbath had ended. Now it was time for business. First thing the next morning I went directly to the stables where I found Isaac working on the carriage.

“Are you ready, sir?” he said.

I nodded as we packed some jars of water from the house spring into our saddle-bags.

“You don’t want to drink the creek water, massa,” Isaac said. “Folks have been known to meet the Visitor from drinking creek water.”

“The visitor?” I said.

“The cholera, the doctor calls it,” he said. “Nasty awful. Empties you out and then dries you up for the grave.”

“No creek water for me, then,” I said as we hitched up our horses, or rather Isaac had taken care of his and mine, my old Promise again, and mounted up for the ride to the brickyard. The sun was just rising over the tops of the trees and the insects buzzed all around us. A faint haze hovered at fetter-length. Birds called and responded and called.

“Isaac?” I said.

“Yes, massa?”

“Were you born here?”

“Yes, massa.”

We rode a little way in silence.

“Do you have a family, Isaac?”

“My papa and mama is dead,” he said in rote fashion, which made me wonder if it was true or not.

“And no wife?”

“No, sir. Though I would like one some day.”

Though I gave no hint of it, a small shudder ran up my arm and into my chest as I imagined this man, finding a woman—Liza? Yes, I saw it!—like himself and going about the business of making a child.

But as happens sometimes with our desperate fantasies I was immediately distracted from it as we approached the clearing at the creek-side where the brickyard stood, and the same crew of men I had seen on my first tour of the spot were all in place, already set to their labors.

“Mornin’, massa,” a few of them said, raising their heads from their business.

We dismounted and tied up our horses and stepped closer to the men to watch as they worked, some of them at a large pool of water and mud where they mixed in straw from a large pile nearby, and others next to them, cutting and shaping the wet loose-formed bricks they extracted from the pool.

“They work here by themselves,” I said. “What is to stop them from bolting into the woods?”

“Is that why you wanted to come here first, massa? To see if any of them looked like he wanted to run away?”

“Not at all,” I said, embarrassed to myself at my secret motive for choosing the brickyard over the rice fields. “I’m merely curious. This is unusual, is it not it? Men, not free, working by themselves out here on the edge of the plantation, making straw into bricks. According to the Bible, that is what my own people did when they were slaves.”

“That is in the Bible?”

“The Jews were slaves once, yes.”

“I remember the missus teach us that,” Isaac said.

“Very good,” I said. “First labor in bondage. Then freedom.”

“Yes, and so it is our turn now, massa? Here you are, come down to figure things for your father, so that you all might buy a plantation of your own and work the slaves. I don’t hear how that means setting us all free.”

“You know a lot about my business here, it seems.”

“This a small place, a plantation, smaller than a small town.”

“It is small. But pretty.”

“Pretty hard,” he said, gesturing toward one of the men who was going back and forth to the creek and hauling water back for the brick pit, and two others digging up mud and two others hauling armfuls of hay from the back of an old wagon (without horse to haul it) and mixing it with the mud, so that when it had enough substance they cut brick-shapes from it and set these on the pallet in the sun.

Over and over.

A few bricks each few minutes.

Stand there long enough and you could see the entire life of the lowly brick from mud hole to baked entity lined up alongside the shed-house, where the finished bricks, lifted from the pallet, lay piled beneath the make-shift roof. In a thousand years, enough bricks for a holy tomb!

“You see how it’s done?” Isaac asked me. “Straw and mud into bricks. A simple thing. Like most things in life. One plain thing mixed with another makes something different yet the same. The way they do this, it hasn’t changed much since the first days we read of them in Exodus. Your ancestors, my brothers here, they work the same way as in Egypt, breathe the same way, eat the same way, make all of the same ablutions, and hold all of the same desires.”

“You are quite eloquent, Isaac, a fine example of just what my uncle’s plan for educating your people can accomplish.”

Isaac snorted through his nose the way my horse might, if stung by an insect or slapped by a tree branch.

“Uncle massa has a plan? Well, the doctor helps us,” he said. “He comes now and then from town.”

“I have heard of him but I have not yet met him.”

“Don’t know that you will, massa,” he said.

The look in his eye, I could not explain it, if asked, and I was not asking myself about it. I retreated over to where old Promise was tethered and I extracted a jar of spring water from the saddlebag and took a long drink.

“Massa, can I ask you a question?” Isaac said.

“Of course. What is it, Isaac?”

“Do you have an idea of why you are standing here?”

“Here, at this brickyard?”

“Here, in Carolina, on this earth.”

I looked around, seeing this place at the water, the drying bricks, the shed, and I was about to make an answer to Isaac, when I was jolted back into the workaday realm by a shout from one of the brick-makers.

“Boat coming up!”

“Hey, da boat!”

Isaac called out to the men, and I watched as around the bend in the creek a flatboat edged its way upstream on the power of several black men poling.

“Coming for the bricks,” he said to me. “So they can build more houses in the city, and all around the county. These men, they dig and mash the mud and water, mix in their straw, form the bricks and bake them in the sun, and next thing you know a house goes up in town and people make a life in it. All beginning with this mud.”

But that was enough philosophy, or history, however one might categorize his remarks, for this day, because we had immediately to oversee the docking of the boat and the loading of the bricks for shipment down the creek to the river and into town.

The doctor had noticed, and he had told the owner, who when he arrived home after his errand to Charleston, told his wife, the mistress of the house, and she told the head house servant, so that when Lyaa arrived at the plantation a good large number of people knew she was expecting.

A cloud of confusion settled in her mind. She knew and yet did not know. She had lost her mother—and not until she met Old Dou the head house servant, a rotund African woman the color of tar with large round eyes—also tarry in shade—who asked her a few questions in a language she understood from the first days of the passage and who gave her some answers as well, did she accept the facts about her condition.

Lyaa shook her head in refusal. Old Dou gave a shake of her head.

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what, mother (the formal way of addressing a woman this much older than she was, though Lyaa felt a tiny chill in her chest when she addressed her this way, because of a sudden she missed her real mother so desperately)?”

“You don’t know how it happened?”

Lyaa shook her head.

“Is it the goddess?”

“Yemaya?” The older woman shook her head. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“I am Yemaya, I believe in her, in me. She is in me and I am in her.”

“Put that old talk aside,” said Old Dou. “Tell me what happened in your passage.”

Lyaa, suddenly lucid, told her about the degradations and the deprivations, the suffering, the filth.

The woman listened for a short while before she said, “No, no, tell me about the men or a man.”

“Man?”

“Who was he?”

“Who was he?”

“You heard me, daughter. The man who took you.”

“I saw things in the passage, though, thank the gods, nothing happened to me except the heat and the sickness.”

“I am glad to hear that, daughter. But please now, tell me.”

“Yemaya protected me.”

“Daughter, who was he? One of us or one of them?”

Lyaa shook her head.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? It was too dark? You were too sick. But you said you did not get sick.”

“Perhaps I got sick.”

“And then?”

“And then the goddess helped me.”

“The goddess didn’t help you to get away from that man.”

“What man? Please, why do you keep asking about a man?”

“Daughter, you are carrying a child and that comes from being with a man. Did your mother never teach you that?”

Lyaa began to weep.

“I never saw my mother, not after they put us in the pens.”

“She did not sail with you?”

The girl shook her head.

“I don’t know where she is, whether she is alive or…”

“Oh, daughter,” said Old Dou, taking the girl in her arms. “This sorry life, this sorry world, I am deeply sad for you. For all of us.”

Suddenly the girl pulled free of her hold.

“You say I am carrying a child?”

“The man gave you a child. What man was it interfered with you, daughter?”

Lyaa bowed her head and took a breath that seemed to go on forever. She looked up and her eyes went inward down into a deep place darker than the tint of Old Dou’s flesh. Finally, she looked outward again. Finally she spoke.

“A sailor was the man,” she said. “He hurt me. I didn’t know it made a child. Is that why he gave me bread?”

“He gave you bread?”

“When he…did it with me…again.”

“He may have been a bad man, hurting you like that, but he gave you something else, greater than bread. You cannot eat of it, but it will give you nourishment all the rest of your life.”

Lyaa shook her head.

“A child?”

She brushed her hand across her belly.

“I don’t feel a child.”

“The child feels you.”

“I have the goddess inside me, and I am inside the goddess.”

“What are you saying?”

But before she could try to explain the doctor returned and directed her, as the master had directed him to tell Old Dou, to take the girl to the bedding at the back of the barn.

“This is comfortable,” Old Dou said once they arrived at the barn. “Better than most get when they arrive here. But these Hebrews have a funny way. They own us but they want us to like them. It is different from the old country. At least they are, though not a lot of the others. The Christian folks. I hear things, I see things. Word travels, and not just in carts and carriages. All the years here, they do whipping. They hang people in the sun. Can you see that? No, you cannot see that, sick as you are. I do not mean to frighten you. Be glad you are here. Be glad the master wanted to get me a helper, and not some ugly girl up out of the fields, her ways already all twisted. He wanted somebody new, somebody we could teach. That’s what he told me. Maybe the master decided he will get us a bargain, somebody who is two for one. That is you, daughter, clearly that is you. But right now I see we need to help you or else we might have nothing for our money. Listen to me, nothing for
their
money is what I mean. You know I sure don’t have any money, not even anything hidden under the clay in my little cabin. But you had something hidden, didn’t you? Right there in your belly. In your own little clay hiding place. So we need to get you comfortable, sure, and get you some food, and fatten you up because you are going to get fat from the child soon and soon, because that child will come out of hiding.”

Old Dou touched the girl on her cheek.

“No worry, I will take care of you.”

Most of this passed Lyaa by. She felt cleared out, exhausted, hungry, tired beyond the need just for sleep. Only just now she felt steady, after that long voyage. Only just now did the sky and trees and earth stop shifting in her vision, side to side, up and down. She settled into her bed in the barn, soothed by the odors of animals that drifted in from the front of the building.

“We are all brothers and sisters,” Yemaya told her in a small voice that Old Dou could not hear.
These horses, they carry us, but they do it as a favor. And we groom them, as a favor. The whole world works that way, daughter, and you are no exception. That sailor up on deck took something from you
that
you can never get back, but he left something in you, and that has grown to be the child within you, this little pip of a child grown into a swimming fish in your belly, growing now so fast and so big that I have to move over to make room for her.
”

“
Her?
”

“
Oh, yes, she is going to be a girl.
”

“
I am a girl.
”

“
No, a woman now.
”

“
And you are a girl.
”

“
Long ago, and now older, much older.
”

“
When you were a girl, tell me about it.
” Oh, all that life in the forest, all that running, all that pain of captivity, the pain of the passage, and rape, the ignorance of her own condition or of where she was living, in what place and what country, poor demented girl finding happiness only in the goddess, until the day the birth spasms took her over.

Another early morning, another ride, as Isaac and I mounted up, and rode along the trail. A swift furry animal low to the ground started across our path, startled the horses, which startled me, reminding me again of the runaway slave my cousin Jonathan and I had encountered on our fishing day. My heart beat up a flurry, and then settled down. I touched my hand to my coat, where the pistol had made a shape under my fingers. And then let go. I had decided I would not ride out without it anymore.

“Here we are, master,” Isaac said, as we left the woods and found ourselves at the rice fields.

We dismounted, tied up our horses, and walked toward the field, which looked to me like a large rectangular lawn, submerged by long rains. About two dozen slaves, men and women, some of them not much older than children, moved slowly up and down long rows, pulling up what looked to me like long stems of grass.

“Is that the rice?” I said.

Isaac shook his head.

“Few weeks ago, we planted the seeds and then we flood the field to make them grow. We call that the sprout flow. It covers the seeds and we keep the water in the field until the sprouts come out. What the folks do now is pull up weeds. Soon now, we drain the water and the sprouts grow more. We flood the fields again, that is called the point flow, and the water covers up to the top of the plants. Then we drain a little more—”

“How do you know when to do all this?”

“We watch the plants, we watch the tides, we watch the moon. You want to hear how it finishes?”

“Certainly.”

“We leave the plants half in water till they can stand up on their own, then we drain the rest of the field. That’s when the hard weeding work comes, and after that we let in the water to cover all the plants again and leave it that way until the early fall.”

All the while he was speaking I was watching the slaves in water to their ankles move up and down the half-submerged furrows, bent over and waving their hands and their hoes to take out the weeds. There was a tinge of brine in the air, and this turned my thoughts to the ocean I had traveled to reach this place, even if keeping the coast in sight most of the while, and the tides that washed in salt, and the pure creek water that flowed back in after the tide pulled out, and the waxing and waning of the moon. I tried to imagine the ocean voyage made by many of the slaves who worked here, but such an event lay beyond anything I could picture.

“Come,” Isaac said, with a gesture of his hand, and led me out into the field. The water sucked at my boots and I splashed myself up to my knees as we plodded along. Here in the middle of it the briny odor grew stronger.

The slaves—men and women of varying ages—stared at us as we approached, pausing only a second or so and then returning to their stooped postures as they moved along the rows.

Another master, I decided, that was how they saw me, the way beasts in the field might respond—and I disliked myself for the thought.

“It smells of the ocean,” I said.

“The ebb and flow of it makes for a mix of salt and fresh water,” Isaac said. “We learned how to do this across the water. It makes for good crop.”

“You learned in Africa?”

“The people from there learned,” he said, “They brought it here, and taught us how to do it.”

We had kept on walking as we talked and now we had reached the other side of the field and climbed out of the water onto the berm that made a border between the rice field and the marsh that bled out into the creek.

“And next, the harvest?”

Isaac held his arms out wide and then took up an invisible scythe and began to sweep it across the tops of our feet.

“We take the rice hook and cut the plants and lay them out to dry.”

“And after the harvest?” I said, stamping my boots on the ground and seeing the water spray out of them. I felt childlike, and at the same time a bit weary, because even as I walked and talked, the slaves kept bent to their labor.

“After the harvest?” Isaac’s eyes went watery for an instant. “After the harvest, yes. Much to be gained.”

“But how is it done?”

“In the old days across the water this is how it was done. We take the mortals and pestles—”

“Mortars, do you mean?”

“Mortars, that’s right! And we pound the rice to remove the outer husk, then we lay it onto the fanners, the flat baskets, to do what you call in English winnowing. We shake the basket back and forth, back and forth—” He held his hands out as though he were holding a basket in front of him and shook them, shook them—“and the husk falls away.”

He turned his head and pointed to the creek. “Comes the flatboat, and they take it away to town…”

“That takes a lot of time and fortitude,” I said, “to thrash the rice and hull it that way. And then the cleaning?”

“We did the cleaning over the water,” Isaac said. “Now the master here sends it on the flatboat and they clean it in the city. And sell it from there. What we don’t keep. This makes for a difference from the way we did it in Africa. ’Course I have never been in Africa. This is just what I hear from old folks in the cabins.”

Isaac sighed, allowing me a glimpse of the defenseless side of him, because, to be sure, up until now, he had been all bravado and strength.

“Nothing here is much anymore like it was across the water, from what I hear,” he said. “Beginning with the slavery.”

“Come, come,” I said, hearing—how strange—my father’s voice in my own, “I know from my studies of events there is slavery in Africa. Many, many thousands of slaves were captured by Arab traders and by your own people and then sold into bondage a second time.”

Isaac lowered his head as if he had immediately to inspect our shoe-tops.

“Yes, yes, I hear about it, I do. But I don’t know which is the worst, slavery by our own or slavery by another.”

“They are equally despicable,” I said.

His head jerked back and he looked wide-eyed.

“That is what you say about slavery?”

The man belonged to my uncle, and I was a guest down here, and so I did not want to become embroiled in anything that might initiate a family squabble.

I said, “We came here to talk about the rice. Tell me more about the threshing, Isaac,” I said.

“Yes, the rice. We brought it here, we grow it for you.”

He gathered himself together, shook his head and turned and went walking along the berm.

“Isaac?”

“You got to have great patience to grow the rice, massa,” he said over his shoulder.

“Tell me more,” I said, walking along behind him.

But he was silent.

A few moments later we arrived at the place in the berm where the dam-doors made of woven vines and flat slabs of wood stood against the inflow of the creek water, to be opened when it was necessary to bring in more water, closed to keep the briny creek water out when the tidal flush splashed upstream.

“See that?”

He pointed to the creek, widening here in a bend as the water flowed sluggishly against the berm.

I thought I saw something moving in the water and my first thought was that another runaway was crossing over. And then I decided it was a downed tree trunk.

Until I saw the yellow eyes in the elongated mossy green skull raise up just above the surface of the moving stream.

“What is he waiting for?” I said, making out the rest of the alligator now that I could see him.

Before he could answer, some five slaves came splashing along the creek bed, staves and metal tools in hand. The beast no sooner turned its mossy head when they attacked it, and its tail slashed back and forth churning the water to almost complete froth, and it roared, oh, Lord, it roared!

“Why are they doing that, Isaac?”

“For the meat,” Isaac said.

Before it was over, two slaves went down into the water, moaning and screaming, but the other three, with great bellowing themselves, and raising staves and fists beat the beast to death, and hauled it on shore. My heart nearly stopped at the sight of all the blood smeared on the black skin of these men, on the rough greenish hide of the dead beast. These peaceful souls, so enchained, could wreak murder if they cared to. The best of me thought it was good that they could conquer a monster such as they had. The worst of me feared they might sometime unleash their fury on their masters.