Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  Here it is!

  Nothing settled down on this voyage except the pain, a dull rumbling in her belly and chest that never left but also never rose to the heights of the unbearable. It stayed with her, like the shifting of the timbers below decks, like the thumping of the waves against the hull, stayed always with her through the dark and into the moments when crew descended into the belly of the ship, torches burning.

  When fever attacked her, she lay there burning in her own presence, calling again on Yemaya to grant her safe passage, though to where she could not say. For all she knew she might sail forever, bound to the bench, starved and thirsty, hearing voices in torment and voices in song. When she recovered from the fever—a miracle? Or just chance? She chose to see it as a gift from the goddess, who surely was guiding the ship toward safe harbor, wherever that might be—

  Her blood had stopped.

  Yemaya!

  The goddess and her cohort tested her faith fully when the ship sailed into a deepening storm that made everyone in the hold as sick as dying monkeys.

  Yemaya!

  For days the benches—the world—rolled and pitched, dipped and pitched, and everyone threw up the contents of their near-empty stomachs, which meant blood and bile slopped the floor and swelled the air with a stench unimaginable to anyone who never lay chained to a bench in the middle of the ocean in a storm that nearly took the ship apart timber by timber.

  When, after some nightmare of time, the ship settled once more into a steady forward pitch, she believed that she might have died, except that around her she could see some were living, some were dead, and there was a difference. The dead merely lay there, in various odd positions. The living twitched, vomited, and moaned.

  Could anything more horrible happen? Oh, yes, oh, yes.

  Once again into her world descended the bald-headed sailor and without a word released her from the bench and led her by the chain up the steps onto the upper deck. She had to follow, and yet she wanted to follow—if she were not on the chain she would still have kept quickly behind him, recognizing the pain in her belly was hunger and admitting to herself—forgive her, goddess!—that she would do anything for food.

  And she did anything, and everything, and things she could never have imagined, under cover of darkness—dark below in the captives’ deck, dark above on the upper deck, with dark clouds covering a sky that seemed lighter than the ocean on which the ship coursed along, sails full of wind, Yemaya’s children blowing into the cloths to swell them and push the ship along.

  This went on a while, this time, and other times, always in the middle of the night, and one night a full moon, graced with passing clouds, cast down its eye on her, and she became afraid, could not move, and the sailor twisted her and pushed her, goaded her with the handle of a whip, and she heard Yemaya telling her, “Go with him, young woman, go with him,” and she never wondered why after that. The sailor gave her bread and bits of meat, kept her alive so that he could have his way with her, but by living she had her way with him.

  Now in the dark she could feel the weight of her ribs pressing down onto the bench on which she lay—and she was one of the lucky ones.

  Now in the dark, she felt the rush and roar of ocean against hull as part of her own heart’s working.

  Now in the dark, it sometimes became day, and she traveled back into the sunny world of before, when she was alive and living in the forest.

  Now in the dark—

  Now—

  —holding tight to the stone each night in the dark she felt herself weighed down with it, descending, lowering herself as a body through the bench and through the deck floor, down through the hull and sinking below the ship, sinking fast beneath large fish and small, into a darker-than-dark level of ocean where strong currents pulled her one way and another, so that eventually she felt as though she were a ship in herself, sailing forward even as she sank down—

  And down…

  And down…

  Until such time when she opened her mouth to taste the water and breathe, and the savor of it gave off a perfume in the back of the throat like that of delicious fruit, and she floated with her mouth open, so that the water flowed into her throat even as it flowed out of her nose, and she was breathing, breathing, cavorting like a mammal-fish, like whale or dolphin. And then she dove deep like a deeper fish, like other fishes we have not yet discovered, seeing in the dark as only some human being or animal can who has long lived down in the depths of light’s absence can see, seeing the dark as light. Even within this deep realm she sometimes closed her eyes and found deeper darkness still, and slept within her waking sleep, letting the currents carry her where they might.

  Which is how she found land.

  And once upon a time rain fell onto the fields, and the fields beneath the sea swayed as if in a dance to the invisible and some not so invisible currents that ran on a slant in the parts of the ocean to which she had traveled, and she rose up out of the water and floated with these currents to the sun and the stars beyond, traveling to the most distant parts of the universe in the flick of an eye, as if all the universe lay within her own mind and all she need do to travel there was push out a thought. Did she know or not know? Worlds hung in the balance. And did she feel? Life on any of these rings of planets—how did she know the word? She didn’t know the word, Yemaya gave her the word, all the words she knew, all the words she did not know—leaped forth when she pushed out, and whatever endings there might be came when she turned her back. Yet let her merely glance back over her shoulder, and everything took fire and light again, and the singing echoed through the air, and the light became rain became ocean became air…

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ________________________

  Voices in My Ear

  The Goddess Intervenes in a Kingdom by the Sea

  No place was Eden except Eden. But for the Pereiras, whose ancestors stretched in a long line of alert and capable people from the time of the Roman conquest of the Holy Land through their exile in Rome itself and then, generations later, Holland, the island of Curaçao came close enough. A great-grandfather of Jonathan Pereira had, in place of some money he was owed in a business deal that had gone wrong in Amsterdam, taken the title to a seaside farm on this remote and lovely island. Storms sometimes battered it in late summer and early autumn, yes, but for most of the year the Pereira heirs, three brothers whose own parents had emigrated from Holland to the New World, felt as though they were living in the place from which their earliest family, or so the Bible would have it, had been expelled.

  Alas for all, the farm had come with a cadre of enslaved Africans, some of whom worked the land and others who served inside the house. For ten thousand years, men had taken other men as slaves, either in battle—which was certainly not the case for the peaceful Pereiras—or as payment and property. Not even these Jews, whose ancestors themselves had once lived in bondage in Egypt, could resist the temptation and opportunity that slavery offered. This led to some odd and strange situations, both on earth and in Heaven, as on a certain morning in hurricane season when the then-very-young Jonathan was visiting the family of the uncle who had stayed behind to work the farm after his two siblings had shipped out north, one to Charleston and the other to New York City.

  He must have been seven or eight, well, who knows if he himself could not remember exactly, some young age, possibly nine years old, but not much older, when he left his Curaçao uncle’s seaside house and walked across his well-kept lawn—the slaves did a fine job of keeping it green and without weeds—and down through rows of sea grass to the beach. Let it be said, Jonathan was not a stupid child. Being able to lord it over the pickaninny offspring of the slaves had encouraged the mean streak in his character that most children, boys and girls alike, discover, sometimes to their sorrow, always to their amazement. Being a child himself, power over other children deluded him into thinking that he was a powerful boy.

  This allowed him to believe that he found hims
elf in no danger as he waded out into the lapping surf, waded out farther than ever before, feeling the strong waves wash over him and the tug of the undertow racing past the backs of his knees. The horizon growled black with storm clouds and thunder, and before he knew it a wave knocked him flat on his back, the undertow lifting him from below and behind, and carrying him out far beyond his usual limit.

  A minute or two passed before he felt the fear surging through him even as the waves hoisted him up and lowered him, hoisted him up and lowered. And lowered, and suddenly he went under, flailing about, desperate for air.

  Think! It was not just his life at stake as surf surged past his shoulders, as if to delight rather than to signal the imminent death by water that awaited him. And as he was sinking through the phantasmagorical aquamarine surroundings, seaweed torn around him, sand in upheaval, shells and starfish sailing past, even as the current, oddly warm but ferocious in its grip, boiled around his body and carried him along, to where he did not know—all of our fates hung in the balance, because so much was about to change for us, or never come to light at all.

  A sudden stillness, and he watched the last bubbles of air float out of his mouth and float toward the surface. One bubble in particular caught his eye, and he tagged it with his glance as it rose higher and higher until it melded with the mass of other bubbles above his head.

  “Goodbye,” he should have said to us, if he knew any better. “Goodbye, and sorry that I am dying and that you will never live. Liza, me, the others to be.” Stupid child, he had no sense of what ruled him now, the large dark hand of death squeezing his lungs and heart. He loved facing into the storm and walking forward. See where it took him.

  Down he went so that his feet touched the sandy floor of ocean where he would, it seemed, come to his final (early) rest.

  OOOOOOoooooooo…

  He floated to his knees, his hair floating up in waves like sea plant and weed…

  Was he gone?

  Yes?

  Poor fellow—yes, even he deserves our pity, for was he not then only a child?

  Dying…

  Now as much as men would like to believe that the gods to whom they pray remain mutually exclusive—that is, the God of the Jews is different from the God of the Christians and the God of the Musulman, to name the major ways of religious thinking in the West—that remains not to be the case. Or so we might surmise, given the story of what took place in the distance, behind the bubble-born veil of that undertow. Above the storm, in the pure sunlight that always reigned when you cast yourself off a certain distance from the planet, or so ancient astronomers and some modern storytellers would propose, roared a force as great as the impending storm below.

  Yahweh, whose followers took him to be the force behind all the greatest forces in the universe, found Himself in a quarrel with what he took to be a lesser god. Or goddess, this certain Yemaya, whose followers regarded her as the force behind many natural wonders on Earth, especially the oceans and rivers and streams and even perhaps in the Heavens, but made no claims as great as the Jews who worshipped Yahweh.

  Yahweh, whose voice, when he employed it, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, spoke his annoyance, sounding something like Zeus, one of his older cousin gods, worshiped by the smart and poetic pagans.

  “You’re worried that he may drown? May? It seems quite certain to me.”

  “Then rescue him.”

  “I should rescue him? Can you give me a good reason. He is a nasty boy, bound to grow into a nastier man, and the world already has enough of these.”

  Yemaya, loud in speech but also looking quite lovely in her mermaid form—a mermaid swimming in near-space? I cannot figure that, but that is how the story has it—challenged Yahweh the way a wife might challenge a husband—with the full force and knowledge of someone who knows her opponent’s greatest powers but also his greatest weaknesses.

  “But so much depends on him!”

  “He chose to walk into the waves.”

  “He miscalculated.”

  “He thinks he is invincible. This will show him.”

  “Death will show him?”

  “Some human beings have to learn the hard way.”

  “And if he learns this, what good will it do him, what good will it do the world?”

  “The world needs him? For what reason? Tell me a reason and I will save him. Though, let us admit it, you have the power to do that yourself, do you not? Which makes me believe that you want me to join in only out of a certain goddess-like perversity.”

  “I want you to save him because he is one of yours.”

  “In the narrowest way he is, yes, he has the sign upon his genitals that he belongs to me, and now and then he mutters a prayer when sitting with his congregation.”

  “Do you want one less of him in the world?”

  “Why would you want even one more of him?”

  “Because…”

  “You, Yemaya, are too coy to be in the Heavens! Come out and say it, because you know I see it, I see everything, you want him because without him—”

  “Yes, without him—”

  “Without him no one will be born to tell this story.”

  “Exactly.”

  Unheard cataclysms unechoed through the cosmos. Stars lived and died. Showers of some light that no one would ever, ever in the history of human science be able to explain came pouring up and down and sidewise among the galaxies.

  “And your precious girl, not even born yet, and when she is conceived, conceived in awful torque and wretched forcefulness, you want her to be free?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you want me to take away this boy’s freedom to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to save one of my nasty own when you should be rejoicing that he will not live to do his damnedest in the world against your followers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think I am bound to do this?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Do you think I reserve the right to be free and take his life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will allow you in person to save him. As if I have a choice. Yes, because you are bound to save him no matter what I wish, correct?”

  But Yemaya had already dived through space into the deep air of our planet, listening to Yahweh, because like any deity she could hear everything everywhere but often deigned not to admit all the speech and all the cries of anguish and pain and all the noise and blunderbuss burstings and agony of torture and outpourings of misery into her outward realm of sound, but already on the way to do her deeding.

  Thus a black mermaid burst out from behind the sea-foam and ocean-wrack curtain, taking the drowning boy by the elbows and hauling him onward and up toward the surface.

  “From what I have seen,” the black mermaid—Yemaya, goddess of oceans and skies above oceans—declaimed in his ear, “I should leave you here to drown. But so much depends on you growing into a man, however despicable a man you might be, that I had to come to your rescue. You will grow older, and aid your family in Charleston and become an owner of men, women, and children as you learn the business of growing rice, and one day you will see a young woman, beautiful, brown, helpless, because she is your property, and you will use her as you would use a beast, though your vile actions will not make her one, neither will what you do to the daughter she gives to you keep her from going on to make her fate. Oh, you men are so much slower than us gods! I have just told you all of your future that matters, and you are still imagining that you are drowning!”

  She hauled him to the beach and dropped him hacking and wheezing on the sand.

  And she left him spitting up salt water, ready to begin his life to come. He certainly never saw her again. Though he felt a certain power, which had come from her. He felt as though he had survived a great test, and that he could do anything, anything! And suffer no harm. Poor thread of a human being, nearly lifeless detritus of an argument between two god
s, he believed that if he had not saved himself then he at least had the powers of nature on his side, and that they had saved him—how close to the truth this was, and how utterly distant and far—to do great things on earth.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  ________________________

  The Pest House

  The ship had stopped moving!

  Even before she opened her eyes she could smell, beyond the stench of feces, urine, blood, vomit, the perfume in the air, the flowers. She was sure she was dead.

  “Home!” she called out, “we are home!”

  “Home!” the word passed among them.

  Others began to weep, some shaking those who had not yet awakened, only to discover that they would never awake, not in this world.

  They had returned home! The home shores, the home beaches, the forests of home! This hope became only the first cruelties of their disembarkation in the New World.