The Salt Roads

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Can Mer come too?”

  “What?” Patrice sat up and looked at me like I suddenly just appeared there in front of him.

  “Can Mer come with us, I said.” Tipi looked at me. She hadn’t forgotten I was beside them. “Do you want to go to the bush, Mer? With me and Patrice?”

  I looked at this woman, my heart, my sister. By the lamplight, I could see her face glowing with the dream of a place where the Ginen could come home to themselves again. Could we ever get far enough to be free of the blans? Tipi, I want to go with you.

  “No,” I whispered. “I can’t come.”

  “Why?” she cried out. She leapt to her feet. Patrice whispered for her to shush. She lowered her voice. I shut my eyes against the pain in it when she said, “Mer, you won’t come with me? You won’t come and live free with me?”

  “Ti-Bois,” I told her, my heart breaking, “he’s getting big now. A few more years and his voice will deepen. He’s learning healing well from me. Georgine has another baby coming. And Belle’s hand is starting to heal. If I leave, would be no one to put compresses on it. And you know Hector has a sickness of the spirit. Days in the field, he works beside me and tells me how sad he feels all the time, how sleepy. I listen to him, Tipi. I think it helps him. When I can steal it off Master’s trees without anyone seeing, I give Hector kowosol leaf tea at night. Won’t make him happy, but he sips it, and looks into my eyes while he drinks, like a child gazes trusting at his mother’s face. The tea helps him to sleep. I need to stay, Tipi.”

  She said nothing, only walked off into the darkness. I heard her footsteps, then they faded and there were only the crickets fiddling in the bushes. Beside me, Patrice sighed. I said to him, “You want me to come with you and Tipi?”

  He sighed again. Considered. Replied, “If you come, I will treat you with honour. Like I do here.”

  It was truth. He was always respectful to me. And thoughtful to Tipingee. A younger wife would mean less work. But Patrice didn’t say he wanted me to be there in the bush with them. I didn’t remark on it. We sat together by the guttering lamp and waited for Tipingee to return with her answer.

  With a final, grunting push, the woman squeezed the baby out from her. “It’s a girl,” said Tipingee. The child began to wail.

  “How does she look?” I asked from where I sat on a stool beside the woman’s palette. They had told us the woman’s name, but I didn’t remember. Mind getting dim nowadays.

  “She looks strong,” Tipingee replied, with a laugh in her voice. “She’s wriggling so much, it’s hard to hold her.”

  “Let me hold her,” the child’s mother said. Her voice sounded frightened.

  “Don’t worry.” I leaned down and patted her arm. “Tipingee won’t drop her. You know how many babies she’s delivered with me? She’s my hands and eyes now.” Ah, Tipingee. A hard choice you made, staying with me in bondage instead of going to the bush and to freedom with Patrice. And every day I give thanks that you are here with me.

  “I’m just washing her,” Tipingee told us. The child’s cries let me know when Tipingee sponged her with a wet cloth. “Here she is.”

  My darkened eyes saw Tipingee as a shadow, smelling sweet of rosewater, that came and knelt by the woman’s side. “Oh . . .” the woman said.

  “Let her take your nipple. It will comfort her. She’s just made a hard journey.”

  She’s got a harder journey coming, poor little slave girl, I thought, but I did not say it. There was no need.

  Marie-Claire’s husband had grown even richer than before. He had bought me and Tipi both now that we were too old to labour in the fields, and brought us to live with them here, not far from Cap Français. He had gentled little bit as he got older. We were his, but he treated his wife’s mother and her companion with what respect he could muster for slave women. For the first time in our lives, we had some ease. Tipi and I still ministered to the slaves on the nearby plantations, though. I felt sad when I thought of how I had failed Mami Wata. I had not discovered what she wished me to do. But I had taught Ti-Bois about her; what her favourite foods are, and colours. How to sing the songs that honour her. Ti-Bois is a man now, they tell me. Perhaps he will find a way to clear the spirit roads for Mami Wata.

  The little girl was making strong sucking sounds. Mama, pray you that this one lives. No lockjaw or smallpox. “What will you call your child, mother?” I asked.

  The woman’s voice was soft, tired. “Dédée,” she told us.

  “Dédée Bazile,” said Tipingee. This was Bazile’s plantation, and his slaves took his name.

  “Yes,” the woman answered.

  Dédée Bazile, they will call you Défilée when you and I march with the Haitian soldiers of the revolution, urging them to keep moving. They will call you mad after your brothers are massacred and grief makes you wild. They will call you sane again when you collect the torn pieces of the body of the black Emperor Dessalines who made the flag of the land he called Ayiti, as the original Taino inhabitants had named it. Dédée Bazile, they will obey you when you demand that Dessalines be buried. I call you Défilée Danto. Sister.

  I wondered what would happen to people like us. There were more stories every day of slaves planning to rise up. Even the free coloureds, they were meeting and plotting how to get out from under blan laws which forbade them from voting, told their women how to dress. I think Makandal was right. There is a time to fight, fierce as a cornered dog, for your freedom. But I have not the heart for it. It is ugly in this world, and when the killing starts, the same stick will beat the black dog and the white. Mama, I pray I will be coming to you soon.

  Forty days and forty nights,

  Inna de wilderness.

  —Jamaican folk song

  There was a whispering, a whispering. Just inside my head. I could almost hear the words clearly. Sitting on a red desert rock, I pulled my spine up straighter. Judah, bless him, knew not to bother me when I got like this. I could hear him where he lay in the cave, keeping still in the heat of the day. I could hear his breathing. Could hear the scurrying of a scorpion behind that bit of scrub over there. Could hear my heart slushing in my chest.

  I hadn’t eaten in many days, nor drunk water, neither. When I did, the sound of the food moving in my belly and the shit moving through my gut were so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else. So I took no food, no water. I needed to hear, to listen. What were they saying?

  What are they saying? I strain to hear, to see. This young Meritet who holds me in her is learning to listen, and I along with her.

  My womb had gone silent, too, I think. I hadn’t bled again. I listened for it, coiled tight as a nut in my belly. Silence. Judah’s body gurgled and grumbled in its sleep, noisy at its work of turning beans to shit, water to piss, air to breath. How could he stand all the noise? How could he sleep through it? How could he hear the whispering, if all that was in his ears was his own body’s rumblings?

  I quieted even my breathing and I listened, hard and deep. There came a voice, not spoken:

  Blighted rock everywhere, and not a bit of shade. God of gods, which way is the fucking road?

  Clearly, I was now listening so hard I could hear thoughts. That was not me, calling on some other man’s god, nor Judah neither. I opened my eyes. There was the sound of feet scrunching on gravel, of a staff hitting rock. Lizards scurrying out of the way. My wide open ears heard the man thinking his own name. I stood, quickly, and scrabbled down to the foot of the rock, where I couldn’t be seen from the direction he was approaching. “Zosimus,” I called out.

  “Wha . . . ?” came the deep voice. “Who calls my name?”

  Judah was awake. I heard his eyelids blinking, tick, tick. “Judah,” I whispered, “stay hidden.” He rose to a crouch, but stayed inside the cave as I asked.

  “Father Zosimus,” I shouted again, “please stand off, for I am not dressed.” My one good tunic had fallen apart. In the day’s heat it was no matter. In the chill of night, I stayed war
m inside the cave, under the rugs that Judah had brought there.

  “Who is there?” said Zosimus. His feet were moving closer. A Christian monk like he would be horrified at my woman’s naked flesh.

  “Stand off, I said, for I am naked.”

  He gasped and stopped moving. There was a great bird, soaring high above us, hunting. I could hear the lazy flap of its wings. Zosimus’s thoughts were all, What’s there? Who’s that? Is she pretty? Judah was mostly thinking, What now? These past weeks had been hard on poor Judah.

  “Do you need assistance, my dear woman?” called the monk. I could hear that he meant it, too, would offer aid if I needed it. Even though a fragment of his mind was whispering words he strived to ignore, of bouncing breasts and bellies. A good man. Suddenly, I wanted to talk to him.

  “Only throw me your cloak,” I said, “that I might be covered.” Judah, protective, made to come out of the cave and reveal himself, but I motioned him back. I stood behind my rock and waited. In these few short minutes, my hearing had grown even more keen. There was a snake, a day’s walk away, winding across the sand from one rock to the shade of another. Far above me, the hawk saw a tiny mouse down on the ground. The bird snapped its wings shut and dove for the kill. The hopping mouse that was its prey ran some little way, its feet making a loud pat-a-tat in my ears. It only squeaked once when it was caught. The hawk fed, with wet, tearing sounds. My belly pulled about itself even tighter.

  Zosimus was panting with the heat as he undid his cloak. Presently, he threw it up over the rock. It landed almost in my hands. “Thank you, Father,” I said. The cloak was simple undyed homespun, the colour of my skin when I had been long out of the sun. It smelt sweaty. I heard the scritch, scritch of fleas clambering through its fibres. I tied it around my neck and gathered it about my body. “You may come and see me now,” I told Zosimus. I sat in the shadow of the rock.

  I could feel the eager curiosity that pulled him around the curve of the rock, and the disappointment when he spied me. He found me thin, the flesh of my face wasted. That surprised me. Had it been so long that I hadn’t eaten? And Judah was always after me to drink water. I did sometimes, didn’t I? Did I look so different from the beautiful girl who had entered the desert?

  “Your name, girl?” said Zosimus. He was a big man, with a massive, hooking nose and a frizzy head of copper hair and beard. The beard was lighter in colour, as it often is with men, the hair of their chins being younger than that of the tops of their heads. His eyes were like the Nile at the point where it meets the sea: a vibrant brown with green moving in them. Judah was thinking that Zosimus would be handsome if he cleaned himself up a little. Judah was also thinking of lamb chops. His belly rumbled so loud that I expected Zosimus to hear it. He didn’t, and he didn’t hear the hawk take wing again, its belly full with meat. Maybe it had a baby in a nest somewhere. Maybe it would spit some of that food up to feed its child. My breasts no longer ached. Their milk had dried up.

  “My name is Meritet,” I said to Zosimus. “Will you sit with me?”

  He did, lowering himself and his bags to the ground with a sigh. He had a rotting tooth. I could smell it. He had decided that I was a desert whore, one of those raving Christians who mortifies the flesh—and keeps it on her bones—by offering her body for money (muttering prayers to Jesus the while) to men passing through the desert. Let him think what he would. It was fun to listen to it.

  “Do you need anything, child?” he asked me.

  “Would you listen with me?” I replied.

  “What? Listen to you?” He looked confused.

  I shrugged. “All right. That’ll do too.”

  Making more noise than the crashing seas, Judah had settled himself back down onto one of the rugs. He was dozing, his mind telling itself stories.

  “Do you want me to hear your confession?” asked Zosimus. “Is that it?”

  “What’s a confession?” It was itchy under the smelly cloak.

  “You’re not a Christian, are you?” he said. Now he was thinking about people burning up in fires. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that hot here in the shade.

  “No, I’m not much of anything, come to that,” I said. “Neferkare wanted me to worship Hathor, and my mother worships Isis, and my father, well, I guess Bacchus. He likes a good cup of wine, Daddy does. At least he did the last time I saw him.”

  Zosimus looked pityingly at me. “Poor child, what has happened to you? Will you come back with me to the city?”

  “No, I don’t want to go back yet. It’s quiet out here. You can hear the rocks breathe. Can’t you hear them?”

  “Rocks don’t have life, Meritet.”

  “Don’t they? How do you know? They expand when the sun is on them, I can hear it. And all through the night, when it’s cool, they get smaller and smaller. And then big again during the day. That’s like what our chests do when we breathe, isn’t it? Only slower.”

  “The rocks get smaller?” He shaded his eyes and looked up at the big rock that was sheltering us. “What do you mean? This rock—it shrinks at night until it’s a pebble?”

  He wasn’t very smart, this one. I put my hands up to my hair, which had wound itself into thick, tight locks. Each one cast out tendrils and tried to trap its neighbours. I was forever keeping them apart. With my hands, I separated some of the locks of hair, tearing them away from their sisters. “They don’t shrink enough that you’d notice, Zosimus. Just a tiny little bit. I hear them creak as they do it. My ribs creak like that when they let air in and out of my lungs. Do you hear that? Do you hear your ribs creak?”

  He gave a bemused little laugh. “I hear my belly rumble when I’m hungry,” he said. “And if I’ve been running hard, or if I’m very frightened, I can sometimes hear my heart hammering in my chest. Feel it, is more like it. But no, I don’t hear my ribs creak, except that time I was wrestling with my big brother when I was a child, and he sat on my chest. Thought he would crush me.”

  His chuckling made lines spring up on his tanned face. I liked that. He pulled a leather bottle from around his neck and offered it to me. “Would you like some water?”

  I shook my head. “No. It makes too much noise inside me when I drink it.”

  He frowned. “You asked me what a confession is. It’s when you tell a man of God your sins.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So that he can implore God to forgive you.”

  “Why wouldn’t I go to the temple and ask the gods myself?”

  He unstoppered his bottle and drank from it. The swallowing sounded like rocks banging together. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at me. “Well, there’s no temple around here, is there?”

  “No, I guess you’re right. I went to the Church of the Sepulchre a little while ago, but I didn’t ask the gods anything.”

  He looked shocked. “There is only one God at the Church of the Sepulchre; the true God of the Christians!”

  He was a lot older than me. Before this, a man like him would have cowed me. But now, I had been a mother, if only for a little while. “Zosimus, that church is built over the tomb of your Jesus, right?”

  “Yes, praise his name.” He made the Christian sign on his chest. I made it with him, out of respect.

  “And your God lives there too?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose he does,” he replied doubtfully.

  “And I saw a statue to the virgin Meri there as well.”

  “Mary,” he said, correcting my pronounciation. “Yes, the image of Christ’s mother is also there in the church.”

  “So, that’s three gods: Jesus, his father who has no name, and his mother Mary.”

  Zosimus gasped and traced the Christian cross in the air between us. “Child, you blaspheme! Mary is not a god!”

  “But Jesus is, and your God is?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “So that’s still two!”

  He sighed. “They are two aspects of the same thing.”

  “Li
ke Isis and Hathor,” I said.

  “Oh, God preserve me. Not like Isis and Hathor. Those are false gods, and base, being women.”

  He was making no sense. I decided to try talking about something else. “Father, I work in a tavern in Alexandria.”

  “So you are a prostitute, then. How sad.”

  I shrugged. “I’m a slave.”

  “You’ve run away from your master? Child, that is a sin.”

  “I’ll go back soon. But listen. I came here, and I went to the church, and I thought it would be so wonderful, but I didn’t like Capitolina, and when I tried to go into the church, I got sick, right there at the door.”

  He looked at me as though I were a leper. “You couldn’t enter the house of our Lord,” he whispered, “because you debauch your body with men.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. “I fell right at the feet of the statue of that Meri woman, and I started bleeding, bleeding. Then I heard a woman’s voice, and she told me . . .”

  But Zosimus had leapt to his feet, a look of reverence on his face. “Our Holy Mother spoke to you?”

  “No, not then, but after the bleeding stopped, and I was lying in a bed they gave me there, I kept thinking I could hear whispering. But it was too noisy in Capitolina.”

  He nodded slowly, signalled me to continue. I don’t think he was really hearing me.

  “I left the church and went down to the river, but I still couldn’t hear clearly. I crossed the river, and I came here. And I’ve been sitting here being quiet, so quiet. I can almost make out the words. Can you hear them, Zosimus? Can you tell me what she is saying?”

  “Meritet,” he said, but his gaze on me looked right through me. “When last did you eat?”

  “Oh, I don’t eat any more. Except some beans sometimes.”

  “And you don’t drink,” he said, staring at the water bottle in his hand that I had refused. “How long have you been out here?”