Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [150]
“You, girl,” he said when he stepped into the parlor, “what are you doing here? Your work better be long done. Is there something wrong with you?”
“Not with me, sir,” she said. (Not with me, father, she wanted to say, but he had forbidden such form of address ever since she could remember.)
“With whom, then?” he said. “My missus alright?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “But sir?”
He frowned at her, his hands busy at his sides.
“What is it?”
“Sir, the doctor has a sickness…”
“Yes, I heard he was ill.”
He looked this way and that, as though trying to find something in the room.
“I would like…”
Now he focused on her again.
“You would like what, girl?”
She found a breath and sucked in hard, and then spoke, suddenly, forthrightly.
“I would like to visit him.”
Her father’s eyes sparked, and he made his mouth into an odd shape.
“You would like to visit him.”
“I would, sir, yes, please.”
“Visit,” her father repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
“Follow me.”
Without another word, he led her from the parlor to the kitchen and into the pantry behind it where Old Dou had kept a pallet on which now and then she would nap between large chores. Liza had inherited the chores, and the pallet, though now she was not so happy about the latter. Everything she feared might happen in this encounter began to take place.
“Take off your clothes,” her father said.
She knew it, she knew, but still she hesitated.
“Did you hear what I said, girl?”
Without another word and certainly without looking at him, she removed her apron—easy—and then her dress, and the small cloth tied to cover her lower parts—so difficult she thought she might cry, or cry out. (But then her plan would evaporate and she would be left with nothing but her miserable indentured self.) In a moment she was standing naked before him, as if he were the doctor himself.
Without warning he slapped her in the face and she went reeling against the pantry wall, scattering boxes and bottles and bowls as she staggered.
“You put that man above me?”
“No, sir.”
She did not dare touch a hand to where her face burned and ached.
“Does he own you?”
“No, sir.” Now her breath seemed to fail her, and then started up again.
“Who owns you?”
“You do, sir.”
“Who made you live?”
“You did, sir.”
“Without me, you would be nothing, do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You would not be a thought, you would not be a breath, not a wisp of air or the smallest part of bone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lie down,” he said.
Liza had prepared herself, and pictured a dark rice pond into which she stepped carefully, and then, turning her face to the darkening sky, stretched out on her back and let herself float downward beneath the surface until the frothy water covered her face and breasts and thighs, and still she sank, deeper and deeper.
Liza heard distant noises floating above her where she floated beneath the surface of the water.
And splashing about, and pain down there, below, in her own deepest parts.
She opened her eyes to find her father kneeling next to her, working three fingers of one hand inside her while he held his loose naked member, loosened from his trousers, in his other hand and worked even harder.
For a moment she held off the pain, picturing three horizontal lines engraved on an otherwise smooth stone. She reminded herself of the story that followed from it, the star above Timbuktu, the flight across the desert, the years in the forest. Yemaya, she said in a whisper in her mind, Yemaya-ay! I am yours, the way my unborn mother was yours when you rode the ocean together in the death ship. Come to me or I can come to you…Yemaya, dear…Finally she could hold back the pain no longer.
“Stop,” she said in a whisper. “You’re hurting me…”
“Oh, my little African honey