Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “That is sweet,” Rebecca said. “Do you miss her?”

  “I have not been away that long,” I said. “But I am sure I will.”

  By this time in our journey my coat was soaked through, as was the handkerchief I used to dab the rivulets of sweat from my face.

  “The weather here,” I remarked, happy to change the subject, “it takes some getting used to.”

  My cousin laughed deep in his throat, but, I was noticing, however deep his merriment seemed somehow forced.

  “We are born into it here,” he said. “The amusing part is that the Africans themselves have some trouble with the heat.”

  Rebecca leaned across my cousin’s chest and touched me on the arm.

  “The worst is not the heat but the sickness. The fevers and agues that abound in this part of the country, they sometimes grow ferocious. With the swamps to the north and west and south and the ocean to our east, it is as though we live on an island, and now and then we find we have an unwanted visitation in the fever. A torrent of it swept through the county last year and took half a dozen of our people. The Africans, in fact, call it ‘The Visitor.’”

  “So,” I said, taking a deep breath and hoping to lift us out of the momentary slough we’d fallen into, “you are comparing me to a disease? I am, after all, just a visitor.”

  The two of them laughed.

  “And quite welcome,” my cousin said. “That is true, is it not, Rebecca?”

  She reached across my cousin and touched me again, giving me cause to think how fortunate any child of hers would be, to know a mother’s touch so gentle.

  “Yes, yes, absolutely. Why, we have had no guests in a long while and we’re all looking forward to getting to know you.”

  “Yes, yes,” my cousin said, “though with all this talk about disease, you will be quite sick of all of us long before the time comes for you to depart.”

  “I doubt that,” I said, but then what did I know at the time?

  ***

  It was growing late, but there remained a part of the city my cousins wanted me to see, the lovely turns of road where the town met the ocean, and we had one more errand to run, so we headed to what he called The Battery. There we stopped the carriage and admired the pretty houses (with their white columns and plentiful flowering trees and vines, quite different from our staid northern brick facades) and gazed awhile at the ocean. Fort Sumter lay a mile or two offshore, like a man-made shoal, and the sun showed silver off the placid sea. Few creatures moved around us, and the heat lay heavy on everything, settling in our lungs. I could imagine that even the ocean had stopped for a while beneath this weight of sun, the ceaseless waverings of its surface and perhaps even its deeper current flows. I could imagine that standing here over and again, time itself might seem to have a stop.

  “But we must go now,” my cousin said, speaking as if to contradict me and rousing me from my overheated reverie. “Liza is waiting.”

  And so we headed away from the sea, rolling back to the pier where in the small enclosed market I had first seen the auction of dark human beings. There a woman emerged to meet us, carrying baskets in each hand, a bright turban atop her head, her face a splendor of mahogany cheek bones and bright green eyes and a straight nose that made her look more Hebraic than African.

  The sight of her made me shiver in the heat.

  Rebecca smiled as the slave girl approached. “Cousin, she is my prize.”

  I shut my eyes tight and then opened them to watch the woman climb aboard the carriage onto the driver’s bench, on which sat the lean young dark man who had taken my bag.

  At such close quarters, the sight of her shut my throat.

  Chapter Eleven

  ________________________

  Tambacounda

  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 Timb
uktu, 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  ________________________

  The Old Oak Plantation

  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.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ________________________

  The Forest

  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!