Song of Slaves in the Desert (35 page)

Who brought the news? The news just traveled, person to person to person, in this instance from the lips of someone from a neighboring plantation who met someone from the cabins out there in the fields, who told Precious Sally, who told Liza—that the doctor lay quite ill in his house in Charleston, and she, who had felt the suffered clasp of slavery every day in her young life now felt it in the most subtle ways, because she wanted nothing more than to go to town and visit her mentor except that there was no way for her to do this.

Except there was one way.

And did she know she could go through with it? The fact that she thought of it and kept it in mind and almost immediately put her plan into action suggests that she knew what she had to do, she knew what would probably occur, and she had prepared herself for that.

Did this mean that she had become a new woman or that everything in the past that had pushed her to this point was now about to begin blossoming? When it happened she had little idea, if any, of how much would transpire in the aftermath. In all of our lives we live in unknowing fashion, acting without thinking about consequences, until one day we stop to consider the consequences before we act, and it seems as though our life has become so strange it might be someone else’s life.

This slave child, daughter of slaves who were children of slaves who in their turn had been slaves, never to see the light or even contemplate the possibility of seeing the world by that longed-for illumination of freedom, how much did she know beyond the immediate plan of action? How much did she fret about what that plan might bring about? What do we know? Do I know, do you? Some doctors and geniuses think they can predict human behavior. I think at best, if we are lucky, that we might with great struggle possibly with some accuracy describe it.

Though sometimes even the actors cannot recall what took place in elaborate and significant detail.

This way, that way. It seems that everyone had a plan in those days. For example, Liza recalled putting
her
plan into motion by waiting in the big house at the end of her day, waiting for her father to arrive.

He might have been traveling, she didn’t know, and perhaps his return to the plantation took place some days after she first considered what she might do in order to get to town to visit the doctor. In memory hours, days such as this melt together.

Came the hour when he did arrive at the house, whether from the rice ponds or from some journey of further reach we do not know, and she was waiting for him.

Though she did try not to show this, her anticipation and her hope, her worry, and her desire. What good might that have done? She waited for him with a calmness she had never noticed before in herself, as calm as waters some days before a winter storm, as calm as sky before the end of daylight. Such were the ways she tried to describe her state of mind to herself as she waited for this man who had ruined her and yet had kept her alive. The harm he had done her she could not calculate, but aware of his power she understood just how much she had to placate him. As simple and at the same time as complex had been her ties to the gods—the ties she sometimes felt resonating in her limbs and chest and belly—her links to this man seemed both tame and wild.

She despised him, she had to admit to herself, and yet when she heard his footsteps on the front steps and then the sound of the front door opening her chest went taut and she could scarcely take a breath yet she needed to breathe more desperately than ever before in her life. Caught between sucking in air and holding her breath—she took a stance few others could imagine holding until they themselves, unlucky folk, might one day find themselves caught in the same way.

“You, girl,” he said when he stepped into the parlor, “what are you doing here? Your work better be long done. Is there something wrong with you?”

“Not with me, sir,” she said. (Not with me,
father
, she wanted to say, but he had forbidden such form of address ever since she could remember.)

“With whom, then?” he said. “My missus alright?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “But sir?”

He frowned at her, his hands busy at his sides.

“What is it?”

“Sir, the doctor has a sickness…”

“Yes, I heard he was ill.”

He looked this way and that, as though trying to find something in the room.

“I would like…”

Now he focused on her again.

“You would like what, girl?”

She found a breath and sucked in hard, and then spoke, suddenly, forthrightly.

“I would like to visit him.”

Her father’s eyes sparked, and he made his mouth into an odd shape.

“You would like to visit him.”

“I would, sir, yes, please.”

“Visit,” her father repeated.

“Yes, sir.”

“Follow me.”

Without another word, he led her from the parlor to the kitchen and into the pantry behind it where Old Dou had kept a pallet on which now and then she would nap between large chores. Liza had inherited the chores, and the pallet, though now she was not so happy about the latter. Everything she feared might happen in this encounter began to take place.

“Take off your clothes,” her father said.

She knew it, she knew, but still she hesitated.

“Did you hear what I said, girl?”

Without another word and certainly without looking at him, she removed her apron—easy—and then her dress, and the small cloth tied to cover her lower parts—so difficult she thought she might cry, or cry out. (But then her plan would evaporate and she would be left with nothing but her miserable indentured self.) In a moment she was standing naked before him, as if he were the doctor himself.

Without warning he slapped her in the face and she went reeling against the pantry wall, scattering boxes and bottles and bowls as she staggered.

“You put that man above me?”

“No, sir.”

She did not dare touch a hand to where her face burned and ached.

“Does he own you?”

“No, sir.” Now her breath seemed to fail her, and then started up again.

“Who owns you?”

“You do, sir.”

“Who made you live?”

“You did, sir.”

“Without me, you would be nothing, do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You would not be a thought, you would not be a breath, not a wisp of air or the smallest part of bone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lie down,” he said.

Liza had prepared herself, and pictured a dark rice pond into which she stepped carefully, and then, turning her face to the darkening sky, stretched out on her back and let herself float downward beneath the surface until the frothy water covered her face and breasts and thighs, and still she sank, deeper and deeper.

Liza heard distant noises floating above her where she floated beneath the surface of the water.

And splashing about, and pain down there, below, in her own deepest parts.

She opened her eyes to find her father kneeling next to her, working three fingers of one hand inside her while he held his loose naked member, loosened from his trousers, in his other hand and worked even harder.

For a moment she held off the pain, picturing three horizontal lines engraved on an otherwise smooth stone. She reminded herself of the story that followed from it, the star above Timbuktu, the flight across the desert, the years in the forest.
Yemaya
, she said in a whisper in her mind,
Yemaya-ay! I am yours, the way my unborn mother was yours when you rode the ocean together in the death ship. Come to me or I can come to you…Yemaya, dear…
Finally she could hold back the pain no longer.

“Stop,” she said in a whisper. “You’re hurting me…”

“Oh, my little African honey girl,” he said in a sing-song childlike voice, “sweety-weety, I don’t mean to hurt you, little African honey girl, tweety-sweety, I don’t…”

But he didn’t stop, and it kept on causing her pain even as he howled in frustration—the master howling like a dog!—and pulled away from her.

“Get dressed,” he said.

She pulled her clothing on while he stood and pushed himself back into his trousers, of a sudden pulling her close and wiping himself on her dress.

Her instinct was to draw away from him, but she stood there, intent on getting her way no matter what. And the worst had already taken place.

“Go back to the cabins,” he said.

“You promised,” she said, leaning against the door frame of the pantry.

Finally, with a slight nod of his head, he spoke to her as he might speak to a dog, “Very well. Tell Isaac to drive you to town. You may stay only an hour. Do you know how to tell time?”

She knew she risked everything to say what she said next in the tone in which she said it, but she said it anyway.

“You never taught me, father.”

He shook his head. If smoke might ever appear from a human skull, it might have puffed out of his nostrils just then.

“One hour,” he said. “Now go.”

She bowed her head.

“Thank you.”

“
One
hour.”

“Yes…master,” she said, waiting until he turned and left the pantry so that she might push her face against the wall and weep a while, feeling as though her head might explode. It hurt when she walked out of the room herself, but she did not care. She walked faster. Outside she ran.

Ever since the last encounter with her father her thoughts and feelings had become terribly confused, she noticed that her appetite waxed and waned, and some mornings before sunrise she felt a longing to sleep perhaps forever and on other mornings long before the moon had set she jumped up from her pallet, ready for the day that was still hours away.

Now and then Isaac came by to comfort her, especially after sundown when he could decide what he wanted to do on his own.

“What he do to you, Liza? What he do?”

His questions became more than insistent, they reverberated in her mind and made her already wandering imaginings worse than confused.

Isaac meanwhile swung pendulum-like between resignation and rage. And on one particular visit not long after the awful event, he swung further than ever before.

“I kill him,” he said, raising his arms as if grasping a declaration of his deed to come.

And Liza held him in her arms and said she did not want that.

“He is my father,” she said.

“I will cut him,” Isaac said. “I will drag him behind my horse.”

“He is my
father
. What do we do? What do I do? What do you do? I don’t know what to do!”

Isaac suddenly shoved her aside.

“I will kill him!” he shouted, standing tall in his rage.

“And they will tear you apart,” Liza said.

“Ah, ah, ah, ah!”

The boy charged the wall of the cabin and began banging his head against it.

“Stop!” Liza shouted at him. “Stop now!”

Isaac pulled away from the wall for a moment, blood having sprung from his skull.

“The man owns me, I am his creature, I am his animal! They owned my mama, they owned my papa!”

With a dramatic flourish, he turned back to the wall and resumed banging his skull against it, until exhausted and bloody about the face and neck he stumbled backward and then, regaining his balance, rushed out the door.

“Isaac!”

Liza followed him, terrified that he would race up to the big house and commit mayhem on her father. But he ran directly toward the rice ponds and from there, as far as she could see in the early morning light, into the woods beyond.

Slowly she returned in the direction of the cabins, but when she had almost reached her own, where she and dear Old Dou—long gone, gone now!—had lived through her childhood, she stopped, and here, one might say, at this point, where she felt helpless, hopeless, and on the verge of the sort of illness that had driven Isaac to such useless rage, the goddess touched her gently on the shoulder, and gave her a gentle push in the direction of a certain cabin other than her own. She stumbled toward it, in a daze, in a dream.

“Back again?”

The old witch woman greeted her at the door, in apron and heavy gown, as though she already knew she was coming and had dressed for a visitor. She took one look at the girl and told her to lie down. The cabin smelled of old sweat and dried blood, of animal stink, and the reek of certain natural compounds that must have come from the rice-ponds.

“Look at this,” the old woman said as she held up a ball of herb and bone, in fact, twirled it, over Liza’s head.

Liza stared at the thing, feeling her breath coming hard even as she lay back without exertion. For a moment she thought Old Dou had returned to help her, to save her. How she wished she could return to her infancy, when the old woman tended to her, hugged her to her great blooming chest. It was something she either remembered, or dreamed, that feeling of early life safe beyond the bonds of slavery, and she couldn’t say which.

“Breathe deeply,” the old woman said.

Liza willed herself back into the present moment. She felt her breath lapping in her lungs like waves from far offshore. Dots and wavering lines danced before her eyes. She heard the woman strike a match, and the phosphorous odor rose into her nose with a blooming stench that nearly pushed her head back against the wall.

She felt as though she had passed into another world, and the flesh on her neck rippled as the old woman took her hand, as if to keep her from floating away.

“Do you feel the change?” the old woman asked her.

“What change is that, mother?” Liza said.

“You know, I know, we all know. Do you feel it?”

“In my…?”

“Of course, this is what I talk about.”

Liza hesitated, then told her the truth.

“I’m afraid.”

“Because of it.”

“Yes.”

“We can do something. No creature from that wanton bastard ever wants to be born, not now, not in the future.”

“I did not choose it,” Liza said. “I did not choose to be born.”

“None of us do, my child. Whether we come into slavery or freedom, we do not choose it.”

“What can we do, Mother?”

She reached into the pocket of her apron and came up with a single grain of rice.

“Put this on your tongue, dear,” she said.

Liza, without hesitating, took the tiny offering and placed it on her tongue.

“Now you go,” the old woman said.

Liza swallowed, thinking to herself, this old woman, like Old Dou, is she making health or making wisdom, or are these one and the same? And even as she was thinking this, she felt her body, which moments seemed as though it might float away, taking on weight, great weight, and with only the lightest touch of the old woman at her shoulder, she lay down on the floor of the cabin and closed her eyes.

And sank beneath the floor, through the sandy soil beneath, and down through the sand into the tunnels of sea-water that washed in with the tide not all that far from where the cabins and plantation stood. She knew, she knew, it was a dream, but it seemed so real, or was the dream the real thing and all else that seemed so real, the pain and sorrow of her life so far, and all the travail that brought her to be born here after the long journey from Africa, was that the dream?

Down into the waters beneath the waters, where handsome Okolun suddenly leered at her through the bubbling current and reached out his hand to her, and she grabbed it, clenched it tightly—or did matters somehow turn around and he clenched
her
hand?—and sailed behind him as he rushed through the water with the powerful churning of a shark.

She took a wild ride, water streaming down her throat and curlicuing through her body and pushing from her anus, propelling her forward with the velocity of the god who rushed alongside.

“Daughter?” the god spoke in her mind even as he sailed, with an oddly calm expression on his face, lips closed, eyes straight ahead.

“Yes, Father?”

“I am your real father, yes.”

“Yes, you are.”

“That man who attacked your mother and now has attacked you, what is he? A belch in the belly of a god with a sense of humor. Can you laugh about it, is the question?”

“All these questions.”

“But can you, can you laugh? I went all the way home to Africa and have only just skipped back to see you, to see if you can laugh.” The god Himself giggled and made bubbles in the water. “Oh, I do hop and skip all about the world, all about the stars…It is a merry life, this infinity I inhabit…”

Liza wasn’t listening carefully, but struggled with the possibility of laughter in the face of her pain, wrestled with it, soared along beneath the water torturing herself with it, and nothing came, nothing, except the difficult question and the water rushing through her, light all around and then dark all around, and then light again, and her belly rustled and a tickle rose in her chest, a tickle rose, and the grain of rice in her lower parts turned over and doubled in size, some miracle in nature and finally, “Yes,” she said. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I can laugh, I can laugh!”

“Then I will tell you a joke,” the god said.

“Tell me,” she said.

“There is a man coming…”

“What?”

“A man…”

“Who?”

“This is for you to find.”

“What about him?”

“Oh, seek him out and you will know.”

“Seek him out?”

“You will come close, but do not be indifferent. Take a step toward him, and all will change for you.”

Liza turned her head aside, preferring to stare down into the dark water rather than gaze in that moment at the smug face of the god.

“No,” she said, “I don’t want to take a step toward a man. I do not want a man. I have had one man and that is one man too many. I will keep myself from men, because such creatures will destroy my life and make my children miserable down to several generations.”

It was the god’s turn to turn away.

“You are so difficult!” he said. “You make me, girl, so exasperated! Where is your hope, child? Where is your love of the future? Where is your love of yourself?”

“Sleeping,” Liza said. “Fast asleep.”

“Nah,” said Okolun, “nah, nah.”

“Oh, yes! Fast asleep!”

“Slow asleep is what you are. But you had better wake up, girl. Because your chance is coming, coming down the sea-road, and you don’t want to pass it up because it may not come again.”

“You say ‘nah’? I say it now back to you, nah, nah…”

“Oh, you are such a trouble!”

Liza heard herself scream out underwater—“Because I have known trouble, because I have lived trouble before I was born and when I was born and now in my young life!”

“Still yours to take,” the god said.

Suddenly he released her hand, and she immediately fell behind him in the rushing stream of his watery power.

“You are on your own now, girl, so wake up! Wake up! Yours to take up!”

Before she could reply Liza felt herself both slowing down and sinking at the same time. The god became only a dark blur in the water some distance ahead of her, and now some distance below her, and now was rising to meet her.

She opened her eyes, soaked through to her skin, the old woman hovering over her.

“Is it done?” the woman said in her creaking croak of a voice. “I think it is done.”

And then she croaked something, one last thing.

“This,” she said, “you forgot this.”

And she extended her hand, clenched, and opened her hand, and there was the stone, missing for some years, which had squirted out of her womb in a dream.