Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [107]
But she detected somehow the tears in the girl’s eyes.
“What, new girl?” she said.
Lyaza hesitated, and the woman said, “Do not be sad. We all go. Come and go. Yemaya…take us in her arms.”
The old woman slipped further away, like someone out at sea at the end of a long rope that kept growing longer.
“Yemaya,” she said, slipping, slipping.
“Ah, Yemaya,” the girl said.
“Yemaya,” the old woman said in a whisper floating atop her breath.
“Mother,” the girl said.
“New one,” the old woman said in a voice so soft that the girl had to lean her ear down to the woman’s lips. Her chest, always soft with her pillow-like breasts, seemed hard, calcified. Her breath smelled sour, like bad onion.
“Mother,” the girl said again, pressing herself closer to the woman’s face.
“New…”
The girl wept through the old woman’s last breath.
Light had faded from the cabin. She was still weeping at dawn when the doctor returned.
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said as though he were addressing a girl from town. “What have we here?”
He knelt at the side of the old woman, lifting her hand and feeling for her pulse. Gently he placed the dead woman’s hand at her side and turned to ask a question of the slave girl. His eyes narrowed as he took in her figure, the blood that had darkened on her skirt.
The living old woman’s fist had been clenched, the dead old woman’s hand lay open, a stone resting in her cooling palm.
The doctor picked it up, turned it over, and then handed it to Lyaza.
“This must be yours to keep,” he said.
Chapter Forty-two
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Man to Man
Another morning came, and Isaac was waiting for me at the back door.
“It’s time, mas’,” he said, escorting me out to the barn.
“How are you this morning?” I said.
“It’s a big morning, mas’, for the rice.”
“For the rice crop, I know, yes,” I said. “But what about you, Isaac?”
“Me, massa?”
He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in a foreign language.
“You.”
Isaac shrugged.
“What’s me?” he said.
I stared at him but said nothing and we mounted up and rode a while in silence.
I did not know what to say. It was all so odd, to be in the company again of a man who was not, according to the law, if not the law of nature, truly a man, with all the attendant rights and freedom. Might this have been what it was like to be in the company of an ancient Hebrew, a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt? This man seemed so placid, as if his people had not been brought here in chains, like animals, like imported goods, where mine had left behind lands where they had less than the rights they deserved and so arrived in America to find their full share of freedom.
I tried to keep all this in mind as I spoke to him, though I could not keep out of my mind the image of Liza gliding up to his cabin door in the dark and him coming out to greet her. I was not someone who could guard his feelings from obtruding, such as my father could, or my cousin Jonathan, so I am sure he must have heard some of my rough emotion in my voice.
“Isaac, will you tell me, how old you are?”
He shook his head.
“Let me ask you a question, massa.”
“What is your question?”
“Would you talk to this horse?” he said.
“Talk to the horse? I suppose I might talk at it, to keep it going or to make it feel as though I was its friend, that I wasn’t going to beat it.”
“Then you can’t talk at me.”
“I would like to talk with you, Isaac.”
“Why? What’s the use of it?” He gave a shake of his head and turned his gaze to his horse. “Come on, boy,” he said.
“You talk to your horse.”
“Animal to animal,” he said. “This horse and me, we speak the same language.”
“Damnation!” I said.
“Is that a question, massa?”
“An expression,” I said. “You are not fooling me, Isaac. You are obviously an intelligent fellow, or you could not be overseeing the rice planting as you do.”
“Oh, massa from the North, I can oversee the rice because I am close to the rice. And close to the horse. I can tell you what the wind says, what the water says, and then I tell the rice what to do.”
“You did tell