Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [152]
“Back again?”
The old witch woman greeted her at the door, in apron and heavy gown, as though she already knew she was coming and had dressed for a visitor. She took one look at the girl and told her to lie down. The cabin smelled of old sweat and dried blood, of animal stink, and the reek of certain natural compounds that must have come from the rice-ponds.
“Look at this,” the old woman said as she held up a ball of herb and bone, in fact, twirled it, over Liza’s head.
Liza stared at the thing, feeling her breath coming hard even as she lay back without exertion. For a moment she thought Old Dou had returned to help her, to save her. How she wished she could return to her infancy, when the old woman tended to her, hugged her to her great blooming chest. It was something she either remembered, or dreamed, that feeling of early life safe beyond the bonds of slavery, and she couldn’t say which.
“Breathe deeply,” the old woman said.
Liza willed herself back into the present moment. She felt her breath lapping in her lungs like waves from far offshore. Dots and wavering lines danced before her eyes. She heard the woman strike a match, and the phosphorous odor rose into her nose with a blooming stench that nearly pushed her head back against the wall.
She felt as though she had passed into another world, and the flesh on her neck rippled as the old woman took her hand, as if to keep her from floating away.
“Do you feel the change?” the old woman asked her.
“What change is that, mother?” Liza said.
“You know, I know, we all know. Do you feel it?”
“In my…?”
“Of course, this is what I talk about.”
Liza hesitated, then told her the truth.
“I’m afraid.”
“Because of it.”
“Yes.”
“We can do something. No creature from that wanton bastard ever wants to be born, not now, not in the future.”
“I did not choose it,” Liza said. “I did not choose to be born.”
“None of us do, my child. Whether we come into slavery or freedom, we do not choose it.”
“What can we do, Mother?”
She reached into the pocket of her apron and came up with a single grain of rice.
“Put this on your tongue, dear,” she said.
Liza, without hesitating, took the tiny offering and placed it on her tongue.
“Now you go,” the old woman said.
Liza swallowed, thinking to herself, this old woman, like Old Dou, is she making health or making wisdom, or are these one and the same? And even as she was thinking this, she felt her body, which moments seemed as though it might float away, taking on weight, great weight, and with only the lightest touch of the old woman at her shoulder, she lay down on the floor of the cabin and closed her eyes.
And sank beneath the floor, through the sandy soil beneath, and down through the sand into the tunnels of sea-water that washed in with the tide not all that far from where the cabins and plantation stood. She knew, she knew, it was a dream, but it seemed so real, or was the dream the real thing and all else that seemed so real, the pain and sorrow of her life so far, and all the travail that brought her to be born here after the long journey from Africa, was that the dream?
Down into the waters beneath the waters, where handsome Okolun suddenly leered at her through the bubbling current and reached out his hand to her, and she grabbed it, clenched it tightly—or did matters somehow turn around and he clenched her hand?—and sailed behind him as he rushed through the water with the powerful churning of a shark.
She took a wild ride, water streaming down her throat and curlicuing through her body and pushing from her anus, propelling her forward with the velocity of the god who rushed alongside.
“Daughter?” the god spoke in her mind even as he sailed, with an oddly calm expression on his face, lips closed, eyes straight ahead.
“Yes, Father?”
“I am your real father, yes.”
“Yes, you are.”
“That man who attacked your mother and now has attacked you, what is he? A belch in the belly of a god with a sense of humor. Can you laugh