Song of Slaves in the Desert (8 page)

Days and nights in the forest. Green sun, green dark, green moon, green air. Months and years. Wata and the helpful Yemaya, always present at night in her dreams to give her good cheer, raised this child, Lyaa, well. The father never did more than now and then glance at the girl. Wata had hoped that the beauty of the child and the power of its name would keep him by her side. The master’s other wives pitched in, even as his own mother did her part to help with the girl’s upbringing. To everyone—except, apparently, the father—this was a special child and a woman to whom a link, more than just her name, stretched back in time all the way to the mother of them all.

Yemaya showed Wata that woman, after whom Lyaa was named, one night in a dream—

I can tell you what happened before you came to the forest, and I can push you toward the future, but I cannot show you the
future, because so many people must make choices to water its time, yes, future time, like a flower, needs watering from the actions of all those alive in the time before it occurred.

This was the dream:

***

Born on the side of a forest volcano she lived in the trees, though at a tender age she fell from a low branch and found herself standing upright on the forest floor. Putting one broad foot after another she now found herself moving forward. A handsome fellow who lived not far above chose to drop down out of the branches and take up the stroll with her.

This is good
, he made clear to her that he saw things this way.

She touched his thigh, his chest, and turned her head aside to laugh, so full was her she-heart.

He touched her breast, her throat, his own chest full of longing and desire.

Pluck at us! Pick here, pick there! Tickle us! We laugh, oh, yes.

They told each other stories, using gesture and sound. In the trees, wide-eyed and wondering about everything around them the most pleasure came from living close to each other. Gradually it became clear that the main dangers in life, the cats that stalked them and the snakes that when disturbed would strike and bite, had only their senses of smell and movement. Lyaa and her lover-neighbor used these senses they learned to good effect by watching the animals but also found themselves in the dream world in which the goddess taught them lessons about the waking world. Did the big cats dream also? Did the snakes? Could there be a goddess of cats and snakes?

That handsome fellow shook his head.

Lyaa touched him on the throat.

She agreed.

Lo and behold, they discovered one morning, early, when the air smelled of smoke, and the birds remained silent, that they each had slept with the same dream.

Yes, yes, yes, Lyaa showed him the picture in her mind and he looked and tilted his head as if he were in thought. And she could see the picture in his mind, yes, yes, she could.

This land was once no-land, lying on the bottom of a bitter salt-sea, no trees, let alone forests, only curling undersea shrubs, among which lived large flat-bottomed fish with eyes at the end of long tentacles, if they had eyes at all. Sea-snakes as long as the line of the horizon shimmied here and there on the pebbly floor of the sea while sharks as large as tall trees roamed with impunity, and now and then a broad-beamed swimmer—whales?—floated past, bigger than entire hillsides.

Yemaya, splashing silently with her tail, drifted in and among these creatures, hand in hand with her brother Okolun.

At that time the sea tasted of sulfur and sweet oxygen, a flavor like berries and tart stones, or the rank stink of a kiss when the other body has not yet digested the flesh of the other he has eaten.

Shssssssss…Ay!

Whale ate shark ate snake ate proto-flounder, all digesting all, and the least of the fish merely working its jaws as it itself became another’s meal, with a watery burp!

Okolun thought this was enormously comical.

He laughed and laughed, and his belly grew as he did so, and the noiseless sound of his laughter grew ten-fold and finally a thousand-fold—so it increased, and the sea-floor jiggled and tilted. He pointed to the comedy of meal-time and danced on the buckling ocean floor. Yemaya cocked her head at him and then took him by the hand.

“You’ve done it now,” she said. “There are powers here as great as yours, I feel them, though I don’t know what to call them or where they live. Inside the core of our world, where the fires boil and bubble and flow?”

She leaned over and gave him a more-than-sisterly kiss on the mouth.

Oh, the force below took the moment to burst open before them!

Stand back! Steam and undersea fire upshot straight to the surface and kept on going, even less deterred by air than it was by water.

Sister and brother looked at each other and instantly understood. Their father, a god beyond description, had decided to play some games in the molten sea beneath the salt-sea. Who could not bow to his power?

Some time later—a million years?—the sister and brother marveled at the mountain the father force had created, a tower that stooped above a green and all-spreading forest. So beautiful! Another couple of hundreds of thousand years went by—where was Yemaya during all this time? Amusing herself, swimming out to other planets to search for creatures who might accept her as their deity, but aside from some heat-worms who lived in the fumes beneath the surface of the ice on one of the moons of Jupiter, finding nothing. She accepted the fealty of the Ionian worms and returned to earth with a feeling of emptiness.

She arrived in this part of Africa, her old haunt, just as her father had decided to play around again with melted rocks and the earth’s storehouse of steam. Up blew a rain of rocks and ash, lava poured down the lip of the hot mountain like stew from a tipped pot, and she could see from afar the first couple, first woman, first man, first child, walking quickly and steadily across the plain to escape the erupting mass, leaving footprints behind. It was the first time this woman or any of her family or descendants had caught her attention. It would not be the last.

Ay, Yemaya, she of the thousand eyes, who watched them from the stars and from just above the treetops. Yemaya! Who held out a thousand arms to you if you were falling, and caught you in a thousand hands if it happened that you did fall. Yemaya! She in the intricate rhythms of the drums, in the twisted braids of sound in song, in the multitude of birdcalls and insect choruses throughout the forest.

***

Wata fingered the marked stone, now and then recalling that she had heard of a time when a bodiless god lived everywhere above and helped you to make even feeble claims on the world come to life. But by now this had faded, and she taught her daughter Lyaa to recognize who it was who made her and to whom her fate was tied. Yemaya! She of the moisture and she of the air! Everything belonged to her, all beings, all plants, all light, all particles, everything we found, cooked, ate, spit, shat, softened, soothed, sleep, waking, noise, silence, liquid blood within us, all liquid running in streams and in the river to the north, rain from the sky, all blood we released when the moon called, ah, Yemaya! Goodness of the moon, blessing of the sun, of whom she was both the chief and the concubine! The old sky god of the north had faded away and now only Yemaya reigned in her heart.

She asked one of the artisans in the village to bind the marked stone in a small pouch of animal skin and one morning she presented this to her daughter.

Oh, Lyaa, how long has it been since your namesake, the First Woman, erupted from the center of the earth? How long has it been since you yourself were born in fire? Yemaya watching over you, Yemaya making you strong! You planted your feet on the ground and made your path, leaving behind footprints for us all to follow. You walked the earth, you walked upon the waters, you walked in air, you walked in light, you walked in dark! You walked away from the fiery cone spewing ash and fire, you walked from mountain to desert, you made children whose names are lost to us, and they begat more who begat more who begat more. The volcano subsided, their lives blossomed, and then fell away like old leaves. More children took their places, one of them who married a potter. That one reminded Yemaya closely of you. Tall, as beautiful as a tree, as beautiful as lava stone, within you all blood begins to flow, tugged at by the moon, watered by hot rains and cold, and in the world through which we walk, the air we sing in—Yemaya, Yemaya!—everything is liquid, no solid is anything, because life itself flows to us and from us, toward us and away from us, we can only splash and drink and spit and flow for a short while that we have in this chattering green palace of a world.

Yet can she save you from torment in this world while you are here? That remains to be seen.

As we rode along my mind flickered back to home, and I wondered about what the city was like at this moment—decidedly cooler, of that I was sure—caught in its middle of the week hustle and fervor, my father at his desk, poor Marzy worrying about dinner, my Miriam, going about her day with her own family, perhaps thinking now and then about me. A surge of longing to be with her rolled through me, and I stared up at the leafy ceiling of the track along which we slowly trundled, wishing I could be there with her now instead of here, with these strangers, even if they were family.

“A hundred Africans to work in the rice fields,” I said, recalling to myself my reason for being here. “That is a large number of people to order about and care for.”

“Our father, your uncle,” Jonathan said, “is a bit of genius when it comes to that.”

And as if he were the director of some opera house back home he flicked the whip at the horse, we emerged from out of the canopy of trees, and came upon a line of black men in rough tattered clothes walking toward us, their voices raised in song.

Don’t mind working from sun to sun,

[they sang]

If’n you give me dinner—

When the dinner time comes!

He slowed the carriage almost to a halt and nodded as the men stepped to the side of the road to let us pass, doffing their caps in the old English peasant way. I could not help but smile at the simple music of their melodious outcry.

Don’t mind working from sun to sun,

[they sang again, voices languid in the heat]

If’n you give me dinner—

When the dinner time comes!

“Evening,” my cousin said to the crowd.

“Evening,” came the response from the men.

“Even.”

“Eben.”

“Ben.”

Don’t mind working from sun to sun,

If’n you give me dinner—

Their low voices faded away into the mix of sunlight and shade. In their wake rose up a wave of body stink from hard day’s work, and creek mud (though I hadn’t yet seen the creek), mixing with the general putrefaction of things in nature, riled up by men tramping through it and across.

“A bit less rhythm and they could sound like us singing at synagogue,” I said.

“You think you’re making a joke,” Rebecca said.

“What is she saying?” I asked of my cousin.

Jonathan allowed the reins to go slack and the horse slowed and thus the carriage, and we emerged out of the trees at the small wooden bridge over what he told me was Goose Creek, a broad and swiftly flowing stream of water that seemed as much like a small river to me as it did a creek.

“Here I used to come all the time when I was boy, to sit by the creek-side and drop in my line. Do you have places from your boyhood that you recall?”

“Of course,” I said, and was about to begin describing a boyhood place, when he tied the reins, jumped down from the seat, fetched a water bag from the rear of the carriage and filled it at the creek-side.

Rebecca and I sat quietly together while he watered the horse. Every now and then she would glance down at her full belly, as if to convince herself it was still there.

A few birds called from the woods behind us. The light was slipping away and now and then a fish splashed in the broad creek. In the distance the slaves kept up their chants, a sound wavering on the darkening air.

“It must be…” Rebecca spoke almost in a whisper.

“What is that?” I said.

“It must be…different from here up north in New York.”

“Quite different,” I said.

“Are the Jews different?”

“You see me,” I said. “Do I seem different?”

“No,” she said.

“Most Jews I know are like me. Except that most of them are more diligent in the practice of our religion.”

“You are not a diligent Jew?”

“No, diligence it seems is not my way.”

“We are Reformers, ourselves,” she said. “We ride on the Sabbath and the High Holy Days, for how else would we reach the synagogue? It is much too far to town to walk, as you must have noticed.”

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps Jews are better in the city then. For we can walk to the synagogue because it is only a short distance.”

“We try our best,” Rebecca said. “And God must know that. Because He knows everything. Our congregation is in turmoil. We are hoping that God will help us settle a number of our disputes.”

“Amen,” said my cousin as he climbed back up onto the bench. “Are you having a fine old theological discussion?”

“In part, yes,” I said, allowing myself a smile.

“Father’s always good for that around the dinner table,” he said. “A place I expect where you hope soon to sit.”

And with that he gave the whip a twist and we began moving again, taking the narrow road along the river for a short while and turning onto a path that took us back into the trees.

It was dark when we reached the house, though because of the wonderful array of lamps that illuminated it from within it seemed like something out of a dream, a construction of slender pillars and balconies with a wide porch running around like a girdle, the entire structure raised up on wide brick posts and a set of broad stairs leading up to the main floor—the entire building at first glimpse seemed almost like a confection for a party table. Jonathan handed over the carriage to the same tan-complected young man who had driven us back from town while Rebecca and I climbed the steps to the entrance. The same slave girl met us at the door, and it gave me a tiny jolt, as if lightning had struck my chest, to see her again, especially when for an instant she fixed her eyes, a pale green shade, firmly on me—the stranger—and then looked past me at Rebecca.

“Missy,” she said.

Jonathan came bounding up the steps, ignoring the girl.

“Come in, come along,” he said, “the parents are waiting.”

“Hello! Shalom!” came a hearty shout from the dining room and we walked in to find my uncle and aunt sitting already at the table.

“Where have you been?” said my uncle, whom I knew immediately by the set of his eyes and jaw, though his resemblance to my father ended there because of the rolls of fat in which these familiar features were embedded. “We thought the patrollers had gotten you.”

“Please, dear, don’t you joke about such things,” said the gray-haired woman—my aunt, I had already decided—whose size, or lack of it, was all the more noticeable because of my uncle’s girth.

“We gave our honored cousin a tour,” Jonathan said. “Through the woods to the brickyard and the creek.”

“It is a goodly property,” my uncle said. He patted his belly. “Like me, I’d say.”

The others laughed, and I gave up a smile. My father, a rather goodly shaped man himself, had warned me about his brother’s weight. But still when my uncle stood to introduce me all around I found that I could not keep my eyes off the globe of his belly.

“Goodly, sir,” I said. “I especially enjoyed the woods and the creek-side.”

“I told him how I used to fish there as a boy,” Jonathan said.

“Yes, you grew up in Paradise, did you not?” his father said. “But now.” He touched a hand to the shoulder of the gray-haired woman. “Your Aunt Florence.”

I bowed toward her and she bestowed a toothy smile upon me.

We took our places around the table.

At this point a tall young boy trundled into the room, looking partly like a youthful Jonathan and partly not.

“My son, your second cousin Abraham,” Jonathan said.

I nodded to the fidgety boy, who was as it turned out the only child of a first marriage made by my cousin Jonathan to a Jewish woman who had returned to the Antilles years ago. The boy’s eyes darted left to right, right to left, as though he expected at any moment to be overtaken by some adversary.

“You’re a Yankee,” he said.

“A Yankee Doodle Dandy,” I said.

“You don’t look different from the rest of us.”

“Did you expect me to have horns?”

“Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns,” the boy said.

“You have seen it?”

“I have seen drawings only. Papa says though he will send me to Europe for my tour when I’m older and I will see the original.”

“My father is sending me also,” I said. “Perhaps we could travel together.”

“You are too old,” the boy said.

“Abraham,” his stepmother said, “mind your manners. Please excuse him, Nathaniel. He may think you are old but he is still a child.”

“Damned if I am,” Abraham said.

“Abe!” My cousin rolled around in his chair. “Leave the room!”

My youngest cousin, who one day, I imagined, would become heir to the plantation in the long scheme of things after his father, having taken over after my uncle’s demise, loosed his reins, scowled in my direction and obeyed.

My uncle now raised himself out of his chair, a rather monumental action that combined a great intake of breath and a steely pressing of hands on table arms and the uplifting of his massive chest and belly. The odd thing, I noticed, was how delicately he performed this, almost like a performer on a stage. No grunts, no moans, no complaints—only that inward sigh and he was on his feet.

“I will see to the boy,” he said to my aunt, and then begging my pardon he moved slowly from the room leaving the rest of us to talk quietly in his wake.

“Such a young ruffian,” said Jonathan, pouring himself wine from a beautifully carved glass decanter.

“Jonathan,” said my aunt, “please wait for the blessing.”

“I bless this wine,” Jonathan said and took another sip.

“Jonathan,” his wife said, “please.”

“Am I a worse and more rebellious boy than my own son?”

He winked at me, and took another sip of wine.

“Abe is just a child,” my aunt said. “We must forgive him.”

“If I used language such as that at table I’d take myself into the hallway and give myself quite a talking-to.”

“But you do not,” Rebecca said.

“Because I will not,” Jonathan said. “Not because I do not have it in me.”

He drank again, and then reached for the decanter to refill his glass.

“Oh, Jonathan,” said his mother, my aunt, “I wish you would tutor that boy a little more vigorously.”

Jonathan merely took another sip of wine, and out of the desire to seem a good guest and accommodating member of the family I also took a drink. The blend of rich dry grape and the brandy I had drunk earlier stayed on my tongue a while. So this is how my Carolina cousins live, I sighed to myself, with this leisurely pace of taking food and drink—or in Jonathan’s case in the reverse order—while attended by numerous bonded servants.

A trio of them made their way in and out of the room in an intricate choreography, carrying steaming platters of beef and fish and corn and tomatoes and carrots and baskets of bread, and aligning the silver and wine bottles, silently, as if almost we were not present, or at least just mere statuary rather than living creatures and us, or at least the rest of the family, ignoring them, as though they were invisible.

But in fact they were quite darkly visible, and the more dark they were the more present, beginning with the cook, Precious Sally, as I soon learned she was called, who stood in the doorway, showing almost as much bulk and flesh as my uncle as she directed the other servants in their dance of food and service. Two women and one man, the women dressed in white aprons, like Sally’s, whose apron was as large almost as a tablecloth in order to cover her huge amount of flesh, which made their darkness all the more stark. The man, a tall old fellow, with a forehead like a bulldog’s and skin as dark as a night without a moon, wore a blue serving coat and britches, and bowed as each dish reached the table, ostensibly overseeing the service, but always with his ear cocked toward Sally, clearly the director of this entertainment.

I waited patiently—I was not just then sure why—for the advent of the lighter-skinned Liza, who had met us at the door. But she never appeared, since, as I quickly surmised, this was not in her line of duty.

My uncle lumbered back into the room, followed by his repentant grandchild Abraham. We waited and watched silently until they took their places at the table again.

“And now,” my uncle said, with an audible wheeze, “to begin. Abe, will you say the blessing?”

My younger cousin looked down at his plate and folded his hands in front of him.

“God of our Fathers, God of Abraham—that’s me—”

“Abe!” His father spoke up.

“—and Isaac, (we own him)…”

“Abe!” his mother cried out.

“…we thank you for the fruit of thy fields.”

“‘For our daily bread,’” Jonathan encouraged him.

“And for the bread of our table.”

“No Hebrew?” I said, turning to Rebecca.

“We are Reformed here,” she said. “Which means we have reformed our prayers.”

“We sound like Gentiles,” I said.

“At home do you speak Hebrew?”

“No,” I shook my head. “But I always imagine all other Jews as more religious than me.”

Abraham squinted at me across the table, wondering what it was I could be talking about and if it made any sense for him to listen well.

Through all this banter we ate and drank, and I watched the servants move to and fro through the room. I thought at one point that I might have caught a glimpse of the slender slave girl on the other side of the doorway, but when I looked again she was gone, if she had been there at all.

After supper we men retired to the porch—what they called here a “veranda”—and my uncle offered port and cigars to me and Jonathan. The smoke kept the insects at bay and we talked a while about matters broad and consequential and narrow and of no matter while imbibing the rich imported liquor.

“The Indians first smoked these,” my uncle said, “as I understand it, as a form of prayer. They puffed on these and it made a rope of smoke that rose from their lips to the nostrils of their gods.”

“Smoke instead of prayers?” I said.

“Smart boy,” my uncle said. “Yes, you might put it that way.”

A faint recollection, wispier than smoke, drifted into my memory.

“My dear mother, may she rest in peace,” I said, “lighted candles every Sabbath. I still remember that.”