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By Root 1119 0

long in the tooth and with a pair of eyes each of which seemed different from the other, everyone called her Precious Sally, took over the kitchen, apparently suggested to the master by Black Jack, but she could not stand up to the master’s son, who worked his will on Lyaza whenever it came upon him. Like some dog in heat, he would find her in the cabin or in the kitchen of the big house (where if she was alone he would rush her into the pantry). Breathing his foul hot breath in her face, he would push her around and wrestle her into position, hiking her skirts so that he could penetrate her, from the front or from behind, making low rough noises, spew his fluid, and then immediately depart. Left to clean herself off in the darkness of the pantry, Lyaza felt more sorrow than shame. She knew if she told the doctor he might do something, but she withheld all this from him. The doctor would go to the master. The master would find an easy solution, and it would not come out well for her. Better to endure the torture than to be sold off to some other household, perhaps some household far south of here, where the stories that circulated among the slaves would have it that worse misery and brutality reigned. Where Old Dou had cared for her, that was home. The old woman was gone, but she could feel her, like the goddess, in the air.

On the veranda there opened in the dark each warm night in season a night-blooming flower that gave off the most ferociously intense perfume. This rush of body and overbearing soul that went on between her and the young master over and over again reminded her for some reason of that night-blooming flower, something quite beautiful that in its fullness reeked a little of rotting meat.

“He hurting you so much, ain’t he?” Precious Sally said to her one morning in the kitchen.

Lyaza shrugged it off.

“Not any more. I don’t feel nothing.”

The air was delightfully warm, and as clear as it could ever be now that the season of pollen had shifted into summer’s end. Heaven must be close to a morning such as this. And yet she felt nothing.

And then in the next moment she felt something twitch in her belly.

“Dou,” she said, to the ghost of the old woman who, in her dreams sometimes, hovered over her head in the small cabin, “I do not want it, this seed.”

The old woman—she saw her, hand in hand with Yemaya, dancing on a cloud—nodded, but did not speak. The goddess, through the lips of the old woman, gave her some instructions about which mushrooms to hunt and grind up with mare’s milk, that when rubbed into her privacy, would keep the man’s seed from taking root.

You take this, Yemaya said, you will be a fine young girl again.

Drinking the potion made of this recipe made her ferociously ill—and cleaned her out. Blood again, running from her nether inner parts.

This happened to her twice.

Sometimes after these events the girl lay there in the dark, worn down by cramps and prophecy, sobbing, so alone she might have been a seed herself, lost in some field as vast as the night sky that covered them all, so clear in late summer and early autumn. Camel, fox, turtle, monkey, dog, all these animals came alive as spaces between the stars, and not just the girl, but all her neighbors listened quietly on clear nights for the voices of these heavenly creatures, hoping for guidance, as the girl always was, hoping for secrets to fall into their laps. These old ways flourished, especially here on the plantation owned by the Hebrews, where traveling Christian ministers, always ready elsewhere to convert the pagan slave to the proper religion, never seemed to find their way.

Several times a year, on feast days from the old religion from home, everyone who could stole off into the woods after dark and watched the ceremonies, the animal sacrifice—usually a goat but sometimes chickens—at the center of things. Two and three times a night this went on, in small groups each time, to keep the masters and overseers from becoming suspicious and wondering about the absence of activity out in the slave cabins. Lyaza stayed sometimes