Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [18]
Who wouldn’t have been afraid? Zainab had never seen anything like it, this huge rough animal bedecked with feathers and paint. It gave her a thrill she never knew as a child and made her wonder, as she breathed deeply at the approach of a line of dark-limbed women dressed in gaudy clothes and feathery headdresses, just what kind of a world she was entering here, where the desert ended and hills rose to the west and where, as her own daughters would one day discover, the river struck out from its source. Clouds lurked above the hills, threatening to burst open and drench everything below.
Chapter Six
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A Line in the Water
In the first light of the new morning at sea I awoke, sat up, and said my prayers, feeling the very change in the weather, as though a line had been drawn in the water which we had crossed sometime in the night. From where we had sailed, New York, Perth Amboy, the Virginia coast, it had been winter, and now we moved through spring and the air itself sang a different tune in the spreading sails overhead.
“…yawlfancyforatoinpashatteras…”
A voice from above—God? No, a sailor climbing the highest point of the deck.
“What, sir?” I called up to him.
“…past Hatteras,” he said, pointing to the coast line, a burnished high yellow green in the first light of morning.
“The Cape Hatteras?”
“Yes, sir,” he called down to me. “Turning past it just now…”
I went to the rail and took a deep, deep breath, feeling the salt air rise in my lungs as if I were inhaling the chemic broth of the South. I felt like the boy in the Hawthorne story, a kinship not merely formed by the likeness of the author’s name and mine, but because of the sense of having put one world behind me as I faced the new one just coming over the horizon. The paternal old God of my father and his father before him had drawn a line in my life, and I had crossed it already, on my way to the new parts.
Sails and hulls littered the green waters near shore the closer we got to our destination. Past Cape Lookout—another sailor kindly informed me of our location—by lunch (which, not caring much to speak again with the other passengers, I took in my cabin), and after dinner, as the last of the sun quickened toward the western horizon, we sailed past Cape Fear. The winds changed yet again, becoming less intermittent and undependable, as if the gods whose breath they were—I’m joking, of course, in a metaphorical way here, as only old tutor Halevi has taught me to do—were working more in tandem with our fates. Dolphins swooped up out of the depths and skimmed the waves and dove again. Their beautiful swimming gave me such a sign of hope as I can hardly describe!
One more night at sea. Though the ocean was calm my heart and mind were not, no matter how intensely I tried to concentrate on my reading by lamplight. Alas, I felt so suddenly sorry for myself, sailing south as I was instead of across the heaving Atlantic on my way to England and my tour. In disgust at myself and the world, I turned down the lamp. As I lay in the rolling dark, I was not only traveling south over the water in this ship but traveling in my mind back north into the past, to the morning in Perth Amboy when I awoke to my dear mother’s last outcries, the morning I watched her slip away into another country. Oh, sleep, I cried out on the stage in my imagination where all this played out. Sleep, come soon and blot all this into blackness!
***
A bell clanged me awake. Shouts and cries, the shrill pitch of seabird calls, the roar of barrels rolling and sails flapping, announcing Charleston in the morning. If in New York the air was thin and drenched with sun, here it was thick, syrupy and wet with light that seemed to rise up from within the shallow turbulent waters rather than settle upon us from the sun above. And that thick air carried a different sort of sound, not so much music as the essence of birdsong—calls from the seabirds skimming above us, calls from birds ashore—and that thick air bore a certain