Song of Slaves in the Desert (7 page)

The further west they traveled, the worse things became. Unlike most of the Arab men, these slavers, mostly dark-skinned ruffians, some with decorative scars on faces and foreheads and some with filed teeth, treated them roughly and without respect. They touched, they pinched, they pulled, and then laughed and spat. Brutes, infidels who never stopped to pray, they worried her. They harried everyone to move along during the day, and at night around the fires, as if picking a piece of roasted meat from a tray, they would pluck a woman from the group and carry her off into the dark.

Twice they took Zainab, and each time she prayed and resisted, but to no avail. The pain settled into her as if an exquisite punishment from God. Bruised in the flesh and chilled in her blood she returned to her family at the fire, refusing to speak, and taking the smallest child in her arms in the hopes of finding some warmth to live for—almost to no avail. Her soul felt as though she had dropped it into a deep well and left it to drown.

Lilith, her middle daughter, a willowy tan-complected girl with an even disposition, tried to calm her.

“Mama,” she said, “one day our father will find us and take his revenge on these awful men.”

Zainab shuddered, with a chill even more cutting than the remorse that already cooled her blood—that a child of hers would find it necessary to say such things! It was a horror, a horror! And yet things might have been worse, because she could not know what we know, that every hour and every day and month and year brought them closer and closer—the children’s children, at least, because she herself would not live to see it—to their terrifying passage over nearly limitless water.

More days of rough travel, the land becoming hilly and the trail turning away from the river, to climb and climb in the direction of the retreating sun. For the first time Zainab felt the chill of nights at a high elevation, and she slumped into a fever, and again her children attended to her while the dark enveloped them all and the noise of drums and the high ringing chirps of animals rang around them. She had been born into a land of few trees. Now that it became a possibility that she might die beneath a canopy of dark wood which at night seemed to fall slowly upon her as the flames of the cook-fire dimmed down to feebly glowing embers, she fought with the demonic thought of welcoming her end sooner than later. If the traders approached her one more time she would fight with them, until they killed her.

But then the worry of the children living without her changed her mind. And then the thought of the children living as captives in this dark and cooling land made her want to kill them and herself on the spot.

She slept holding Lilith to her breast, as if that might hide the girl from any traders with wandering eyes.

It did not.

After a long day’s trek westward through the dry bush of a long valley the traders stopped the caravan to camp beneath a giant acacia tree and settled in to cook. Zainab had herself long ago given up on prayer, unable to find it within herself to submit to a god who would allow such torment to persist. Her own years were over, but the worry that her children would live as chattel, however well treated, for the rest of
their
lives filled her with dread. What kind of a god would inflict such suffering on so many for such a long period of time?

Daughter Lilith appeared at her side with a thick piece of bark that held a slice of fruit and some mashed vegetable.

“Mama, you must eat,” she said.

“Ah, I’ve become the child and you’ve become the mother,” Zainab said. “The whole world is turned around, upside down.”

“Yes, mother,” Lilith said, “backwards is forwards and forwards is back. Please eat. I heard the traders talking and it seems we still have at least one more day to walk before we reach Tambacounda.”

“Tambacounda?”

“That is where we are going,” Lilith said. “There is a market there.”

Zainab could not help but groan.

“You heard them talking about that, too?”

“Yes, Mama.”

Zainab felt a stabbing pain in her chest and turned away from her daughter to clutch her hands to her heart.

“What is it, Mama?”

“In that town, a place I have never heard of before all in the days we lived in Timbuktu, they will sell us.”

“No, Mama,” Lilith said. “No, no, no, no. They have a chief there, and he will take care of us, feed us, and give us clothing.”

“He will buy us first,” Zainab said. “For you and me and your sisters he will offer these brutes some coins. Or cloth. Or perhaps even a horse or a camel or two.” She took her daughter in her arms and pulled her tightly to her chest. “You know we are worth more than anything anyone can pay…”

“I like to ride a horse, Mama,” Lilith said. Such innocence in her eyes when she spoke, and when she remained silent—the thought of some man riding her daughter was almost more than Zainab could bear.

“Here,” she said, pushing the sack with the marked stone into her daughter’s hands. “This is not for you to lose.”

***

At a crossroads—could this be Tambacounda?—they entered a large market. Stalls and tents, horses and camels tethered behind them, the vast animal smell of caravan life rose like smoke from a vast fire as they approached. One half the sky lay in darkness—this to the east—the other with the last light of the day. Drums resounded behind the large array of covers and pennants, and Zainab could also hear, ever so faintly, a wavering call to prayer.

The traders led their entourage into the city where from the gates of a domed palace hundreds and hundreds of slaves, armed with various weapons—bows, short lances, shields—burst forth into the large square before it. Within the walls a sultan presided over business in a lofty pavilion, and off to one side stood troops, governors, young men, slaves. Musicians among the slaves blew bugles and beat drums with sticks and made a wonderful sound. Before the sultan’s chair jugglers and acrobats performed. The traders led their entourage off to one side of the courtyard, where a long-bearded man with a book inscribed numbers with a reed pen. His wives and many concubines stood behind him wearing fine silks, bands of gold and silver around their heads, singing quietly among themselves while their master went about his work of dispatching the goods presented to them by the traders.

Zainab screamed and the girls wailed and before they knew it they lived apart from each other for the rest of their lives.

A long, dusty carriage ride brought us to a location about fifteen miles outside of Charleston—and I tried my best to look forward at the road ahead rather than stare at the dusty beauty of the woman—the slave—who had joined us as we left town. A fairly good road, repaired by good hands after spring rains—thick trees covered with vines and mosses—swampy ditches stretching out at either side of the road. My own old New York countryside up near the Bronx farm or the woods atop the cliffs on the New Jersey side of the Hudson seemed barren by comparison to this lush and overgrown landscape.

A near-mile-long avenue of enormous oak trees, a tunnel of trees, led to the entrance of my uncle’s house. With the moss hanging in long beard-like wisps from the upper branches and the light as subdued as in some grotto beneath the ocean, the avenue gave the impression of leading from one world to the next, a road that might take you to the land of dreams instead of merely leading you from the main road to the mansion.

“There is certainly nothing like this up north,” I said to my cousin, even as I stared and stared at the slender shoulders of the slave girl—who sat demurely, waiting for the carriage to come to a halt. “Our winters are cold and chill, with icy winds blowing off the rivers that bound our rock island. If you can imagine it, picture winter nights, with our family huddled around a warming stove, closer to the way the Eskimaux live, or those others, Russians and such, who spend their lives either freezing in winter or boiling in summer, up near the icier oceans of the world.”

“I believe that, Nathaniel,” my cousin said. “Here in our dreamy land we live lives like no other, we know that.”

“Even we Jews partake of it,” Rebecca said. “Where else Jews can live as we do I can’t imagine. Except for the Holy Land in the Bible, where else a paradise like this? Friendly Gentiles, the laws allowing us as much freedom as anyone else. The trees, the air, the water…” She gestured as a man might to the wide creek that ran parallel with the road. “Here we might make a special place for all Jews…” At which point she reached forward and touched the shoulder of the slave girl. “And those who would be Jews.”

My cousin turned to his wife and said, “I admire your dreaming…” He turned to me and with the slightest hint of a sneer on his face—but somehow kept covert in his voice—added, “My wife is a dreamer.”

Rebecca withdrew her hand from the girl’s shoulder and sat upright on the carriage bench, making a toss of her curls.

She said, “Without dreams to compare to, how do we know when we are truly awake?”

I had no answer, as if this question could find one. I took another glance at the slave girl, hoping she might turn around.

“Rebecca has a vision,” my cousin said, his tone turned slightly acerbic, as the driver, Isaac, his name was, I recalled, pulled the carriage to a halt before a grand old white house at the end of the tunnel of trees. Someone must have given some signal that I had missed, because just as we stopped, the slave girl descended gracefully from the carriage and without a glance back at us began walking to the house.

“A vision?” I said, noticing the smoothness of her movement—almost a gliding motion, as though her feet scarcely touched the earth.

“That we and all the niggers live happily together in our new Promised Land,” my cousin said. He must have imbibed more of the brandy—did that flask have a bottom?—because his voice sounded a bit muzzy and booze driven. I marveled at this, because I had never known a Jew who drank like this, or, for a fact, owned a plantation with slaves, either.

“What kind of talk is that?” Rebecca said.

He paused and turned back to his wife. “We are quite a pair, are we not? You supply the sweetness and light, my darling girl, and I supply the shadows.”

He addressed me directly.

“She’d want the Africans to raise themselves up and live—”

“Please, no more,” Rebecca said. “We have a guest and we must give him the tour of the plantation.”

“I know we have a guest. I can see we have a guest. I am attempting to explain our way of life to him.” To me, he said, “You’ve had a long sea voyage, would you like first to rest?”

I shook my head, noticing that the girl, carrying herself as beautifully upright as any woman I had ever seen before, had turned the corner of the house and disappeared behind it. Dear God and Moses, perhaps it was the small amount of drink I myself had taken, but I wanted to follow her, anywhere!

“Very well,” my cousin said, of course unable to notice the strongly magnetic feelings in my chest and loins. He dismissed the driver and climbed up onto the bench. Flicking the reins, he called “Onward!” to the horse, taking us with a left turn into the fields.

“We have about a thousand acres,” he said as we trotted off on a raggedy dirt road, “with about two hundred and fifty of them well-fenced and well-drained and in a high state of cultivation…mainly with rice…altogether I’d say there is about a little less than half the plantation under cultivation and the other half mostly woods—yellow pine, oak, and hickory. We have a number of horses and mules and cows and oxen…and there are about a hundred Africans working here, though you will not see many of them just at this hour.” He sighed, and took a deep breath, as if to regain some strength he might have given up when he had taken his last taste of brandy. “They will have stopped work in the rice fields for the day and while there may be some crews coming back from work on the dikes at the creek, most everybody else is at home for supper by now. Oh, yes, and there is a little brickyard also, near the bridge by the creek. It is a fine location, the water supply is inexhaustible, and the water is deep enough to accommodate flatboats from town so we can ship out the bricks. Some of the slaves work there, too.”

He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. Despite the slipping by of the day the sun remained hot, and the air whirred thick with buzzing insects and above us the constant cry of birds. There were a number of questions I knew I should ask, about the means of cultivation, and how much rice was grown each year, and how it was shipped, and so forth. But the heat weighed on my brain and on my tongue. I rode silently, and my cousin did not speak, so that the only sound for a while was the light rumbling of the carriage wheels on the dusty track. It had been a long day already and it had not yet ended.

The place called Wassadougou—a green world, and Lilith suffered an obsidian-complected husband, rotund and unsmiling, whose southern features contrasted sharply with her own distinctively northern face—Semitic and almond-eyed, thin-lipped, an elongated jaw. He silently weighed her down so many nights that Lilith felt flattened even when great with child. His other wives chattered like monkeys. His many children treated her with disdain and sometimes outright cruelty. She hated them one and all. Her only friends were her own children, which meant that she lived for years alone in the midst of a crowded family compound, until the children grew old enough for serious conversation and discussion, most of which had to do with their ancestors and how proud they should be because of where they came from. The past was a glorious story, the present was a green and nattering hell. Large, biting, piercing insects assailed her, and in the trees devil creatures chattered and sometimes shat upon those who gathered below. At night she held the holy stone and stroked its inflected surface until her fingers became too tired to move. If only she could see a future better than what she had in mind, living until she died in this prison of green. If only she might have had her mother at her side!

Oh, Zainab, my mother, where do your bones lie? Oh, mother, mother, surely long gone now and never to comfort me again!

Her only comfort? Wata, her oldest daughter, dark about the face, pale in her back and belly and legs. Husbands did the naming, and the dark man called this child after a local goddess. The girl grew into a womanhood charged with passion and invention, becoming skilled at weaving, a family art, it seemed, and the cultivation of herbs, as well as caring for her younger sisters even as her mother grew more and more uninterested in the task. (She sat inside their house made of tree and grass for more and more hours as the years went by, talking to her own mother whom she saw sitting in a corner of the enclosure and beyond that claiming that she was sending prayers to God). Lilith appeared to be shrinking, if not fading away all together. She certainly had no standing with Wata’s father, and among his wives she was barely recognized. Wata, lighter than many of her siblings, assumed a larger and larger role among the children—there were some sixteen or seventeen of them, from all the wives—and eventually she took a place among the wives themselves. This had its dangers, and sure enough, one night after the moon set and the entire forest seemed to have sunk into a deep and dreamless sleep Wata heard a rustling just outside the entrance. Fearing an animal, she sat up on the pallet where a moment before she had been lost in some nameless vision that came along when she had closed her eyes.

And who was this? Some forest demon?

Wata caught a glimpse of a woman peering down at her, and then the woman disappeared.

She thought she was dreaming—perhaps she was—so she lay back and closed her eyes.

At dawn she rose and went to visit her mother, whom she found still asleep. But not asleep!

She did not breathe!
Oh, Lilith, mother, mama, gone, gone gone
!

It took Wata months to get over the initial shock of her mother’s death. She longed to see her again, in fact, now and then becoming convinced that Lilith had just peeked at her from behind a tree, and when a thought came to her on some matter about which her mother had taught her she could hear Lilith say the very words she was thinking.
Fetch water before sunrise while it is still cool. Or, look before you step to keep from offending a snake.

She hoped for a miracle, she hoped she might find another mother. Who knows what lay outside her vision? You could not walk a forest path without seeing demons or go to bed at night without worrying about ghosts. She had, in fact, overheard the prayers of her father’s other wives too often not to know words that she might say in protection. The god her mother prayed to, and her mother’s parents before that, a man’s god, did not have much power here in the deep forest. Where she lived now only the local spirits held sway, and on a night such as this, when she awoke with an instant flash of fear, she could not help but turn to them, to the dark mother whose figure arched over all when Wata tried to imagine her, in her body of shadows and smoke, a cloud above the hut, a wave of air shimmering in sunlight. Wata! Yes, she thought of herself now in that way, named after a goddess, and trying to live according to how the goddess might want her to live.

And what would the goddess do with the creature who appeared next to her just now in the middle of another of those nights of half sleep, half waking dream, her mother in her thoughts both in darkness and in light?

“Wata…”

Here was the chief’s oldest boy by his second wife, and he smelled of bitter oil and some not so sweet brew he must have been drinking.

“Go away, you stupid boy,” Wata said.

The boy threw himself down next to her and said, “I am not so stupid for choosing you, am I?”

“Choosing me? What is your little game?” Wata said. “Now, shoo! Shoo! Go back to your mother, little boy!”

Instead, he grabbed her wrist.

“And who are you to order me around? I am my mother’s son, also, and my father is your master.”

“What do you want with me? It is the middle of the night. I was asleep, I was dreaming.”

“What were you dreaming?”

“I do not remember.”

“Try to remember. Tell me.”

“Are you a healing man? Did I come to you and say that I had a bad dream?”

He sat down next to her, as still as could be, which was not entirely still, because, after all, he was a boy.

“Tell me your dream, and I will let you go.”

“Am I your prisoner that you can let me go?”

“Tell me your dream.”

“And then you will let me go?”

The boy laughed.

“Sly you are, very sly.”

“A woman has to be,” Wata said.

“Yes, yes, especially a woman who belongs to my father and who will one day belong to me.”

“You will never own me,” Wata said. “No one will ever own me. I belong to my mother only, and her mother before her.”

“What?” The boy held up his hands in mock-amazement. Outside in the forest a wild thing howled, a monkey or a cat feeling the claws of another beast rake along its back or side or a small animal recognizing that it was about to be devoured by a beast larger than itself.

Wata!

A voice cried in her ear. That of the small beast? She didn’t know.

Wata!

Could the boy have been speaking? He sank to his knees and then lowered himself on top of her.

“Go away,” she said, squirming beneath him.

He didn’t pay attention to her voice, only to her body.

Wata!

Before she knew he had pried open her legs and stupidly probed away at her.

“Stop!”

“Hush,” he said, suddenly half out of breath.

“Stop it now!”

He kept on probing, stabbing.

She raised her fists as if to strike him—hard—but he grabbed her by the wrists and pushed himself into her at the cost of tearing pain at her center.

Wata!

A net fell out of heaven, through the roof of the house, and covered her in a spidery essence of slim silver-coated ropes as the music of small fingered instruments tinkled in her ears. Voices began to sing. A hot soupy liquid replaced her blood and all she could do was open her eyes and see through the dark. Dark eyes stared back at her, unblinking.

Later that year she bore her half-brother’s child.

Who was a good girl—another girl! whom Wata named Lyaa, after the First Woman of this green place, this girl who was as dark as a black river on a night without a moon. Some shades bleach out. Lyaa turned even darker, and, as it happened, Yemaya the goddess known by many other names, who, in addition to reigning above the great waters and rivers, presided over these green parts of the continent, approved. Lurking above the forest as she always did, sometimes in the form of sunlight, sometimes in the form of tiny droplets of moisture, she surveyed her domain, watching, listening always, for creatures who turned to her for assistance. In this way she showed herself forth in quite different fashion from the god who ruled the desert lands to the north, a deity who rather than reveal himself appeared to encourage everything among his followers that would keep him hidden. None of that for Yemaya! She was not shy or, for whatever reason, withholding.

One dark night, as dark a night as the night of Lyaa’s conception, she appeared to Wata, and told her how glad she was that Wata had given the world this child. Far down the trail, she told Wata—of course, to Wata this encounter with the goddess seemed like a meeting in a dream—
I will look after her
. This girl will ache and she will dance and she will deliver a child whose children’s children’s child, or thereabouts, I am not counting, but merely trying to look ahead through the wavery dark and smoky curtain that keeps the future from our eyes, will free us all from the prison of our days. That is, if my plan runs true, and sometimes even the plans of the gods can go awry.

Wata awoke from that dream coated in sweat, and to the daughter to whom she eventually revealed this prophecy she appeared never to have quite recovered. As time in the forest went by, Wata grew so frail as to give the appearance of being already dead, her body an ashen gray beneath the usual sandy lightness of her skin.

In dreams along the route of the years Yemaya appeared to her again, stretching out her long dark arms to her and inviting her in.

Come to me, darling girl, she said. Come to me. Dance in my arms. Whirl about my feet when I am flying. When he was not much older than you, his own long arms covered with bramble cuts and the pocking of wood shards, my own son came to me in the night and had his way with me. I knew your mother’s sorrow, I knew her shame, I knew the bitter blood that flowed in her veins. From where I live up here in the treetops I descend as dew and sometimes as river water. And tears. And spit. And urine. And the monthly blood. Poor men, they never suffer the flow. I ask them to cut their arms and bleed on my behalf, showing their loyalty. Walk with me and I will walk with you. You will have glory, rather than shame, and your daughter, named after the First Woman, will show forth as well.