Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [118]
A dog barked.
She felt her head floating free while the bottom half of her leaked like a broken crock.
Up on the roof Yemaya and Oganyu wrestled accompanied by great yells and thumping for the soul of the unborn child. She looked up through the wood and saw Old Dou dancing around the squabbling siblings. She cheered on one, and then the other, and then the first. Lyaza took up the cheers, wriggling out of her aching, writhing body and sailing up onto the top of the cabin, naked, trembling, feverish, excited, desperate, lonely, sad, despondent, hungry, happy to see Old Dou, so recently departed, even under such awful circumstances, sad that in a short while she would bring forth the spawn of the awful slave-keeper.
“Monster,” Old Dou called him, reading her mind.
“I kill him,” Lyaza shouted back.
“But the baby,” Old Dou said, folding her arms across her chest as the god-sister and god-brother flew off into the black sky, going where neither woman could say. Up to the moon? Up to heaven beyond? Back to the home country? Up and up and up, and then diving back down beneath the sea? Yes, perhaps there, where Yemaya kept her home and where Obatala had raised her and her brother, among the flow of great undersea currents, among the fishes, cousins to whales, lovers of dolphins.
In that water Lyaza saw the outline of a plan. As if in a dream she leaped from the roof and landed some yards away from the cabin and leaking water and fluids made her way across the fields to the rice paddies where the water surged into the holding ponds at high tide and the salt leached out, making a mist that stung the nose. By the edge of the lapping pond she lay down and eased her legs apart so that the child slid freely from her body. Taking up the light burden she held the ropy tie in her teeth and cut the placenta from the living child. Her mouth tasted of salt and blood, as if she licked herself down below where the child had emerged.
Drums in the distance, either just on the other side of the rice ponds, or at some distance in the world of her head, that close, that far the sound.
Yemaya spoke to her from the pond.
“Take your child up and raise her.”
Lyaza stood up and held her child above the water.
“Raise her,” the goddess said.
“Take her,” Lyaza said.
“No no no no no no no no no no,” the goddess said.
Lyaza screamed at Yemaya.
“Take her away!”
“No!”
“This child filthy spawn of filthy master wretch!”
She took a deep breath and hurled the infant into the air, as though she were pushing against someone in a dance. It disappeared into the mist and she waited to hear the splash, but none came. She stumbled on leaden legs through deserted fields back to the cabin where she lay back down on the bloody pallet. Closing her eyes, she saw behind the lids the stout figure of Old Dou, and a shadowy woman standing behind her, either the ghost of the mother she never knew or Yemaya, just which she could not say. With a loud sigh she settled down into the filth of her life and the wretched sleep of the hopeless, awaking at the first light of dawn, a soft light that stole in like an ocean dew, settling over the doorway and then the floor and finally touching her where she lay in her misery, an empty hulk of a girl ready for nothing but death.
Soon after the light arrived a boy named Isaac showed up with the infant in his arms. The boy grew taller and taller, and his face turned into that of Jonathan, the master’s old son who stood there, nodding his head, the infant now in his possession.
“Devil!” she screamed at him.
Oh, Yemaya! These women reached the heights of childbirth, and then they plummeted into darkness. Lyaza stood up, reached for her child, and fell dead on the cabin floor.
Chapter Fifty-one
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Love in Town
That morning I slept late, one of the indulgences of plantation life. Liza, I presumed, must