Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [183]
I will be free, she said to herself, I will be free. I faced a beast in the swamp and I have been ravaged by the monsters of slavery and still I am here.
She stood up and stared into the wavery haze that covered the swamp water almost to the level of her breasts.
You! She addressed every god and goddess and no one, she addressed every slave and citizen, pointing an accusatory finger at the haze, at the world beyond, above, below it, and within. You, hear me! I…will…be…free!
Chapter Eighty-six
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Her Plan
Three days later she emerged, soaked, hungry, exhausted, her legs bedecked with leeches, on the western side of the swamp where she collapsed, as it turned out, about fifty yards from an encampment of a band of renegade slaves who had made a small community in the forest.
A squint-eyed girl a year or so younger than herself and more dark than pale found her in the weeds, took charge of her, and a few days later asked her about her plan.
“Plan, honey?”
Liza shook her head.
“I plan to follow a moon and a star all the way to the end of the west.”
The girl—turned out she was half Cherokee, half African—nodded.
“Half the people here came with that plan.”
“Half stayed, half went?”
“That’s right,” the girl said.
“I’m the half that goes,” Liza said.
“Do you know what’s over that mountain?” the girl asked her, inclining her head toward a nearby ridge.
“Freedom,” Liza said.
The girl shook her head.
“Another mountain,” she said.
“And after that?”
“Another mountain.”
“And after that?” And Liza answered with her, saying “Another mountain” just as the girl intoned it.
In the shade of that first mountain, darkness came early, seeping down from the side of the ridge like fog or slow heavy water held up somehow against gravity. It rained that night, and the cold entered Liza’s bones. If she didn’t know herself better, she would have thought she was aching from the same illness that kept my father from traveling with her. How did that half-Indian woman know how much Liza was shivering on her pallet? It remains a mystery, but before too long she had crawled under the thin blanket made of corn sacks and took Liza in her arms and held her.
“What are you doing?” Liza said.
“Keeping you warm,” the woman said.
“I don’t even know you,” Liza said.
“I am Old Dou,” the woman said, “I am the old Herb Woman. I am—”
“Mother!” Liza said, shivering and then calming herself in the woman’s arms.
They touched lips. They touched noses. Power passed between them through their mouths, nostrils—and eyes.
When she awoke it was as if nothing had happened, except that she was sure she had not dreamed this, though she had. Or had not. Or had.
Moons rose and set, moons waxed and waned. Winter in the west of Carolina grew colder than winter in the east. Sporadically, snow fell.
Liza’s belly grew. Heat from thinking about it kept her mind warm through the cold months. But unless, she told herself, she could keep moving she would never feel completely free.
“Still want to go west?” the Cherokee girl asked her.
“Yes,” Liza said.
“Why?”
“We’re not free here, we’re only lucky.”
***
Her luck held. The next stage of her westward journey began after the winter snow-melt. The half-Indian woman traveled with her. As it turned out, Liza had infected her with the longing for true freedom, not just the freedom to hide in the woods from occasional patrollers and slave-trackers. This pair climbed up over the mountains (the first range of old old American mountains, worn by many millions of years of weather from above and sinking from below). Wild turkeys strutted alongside them as they walked through glens of azaleas and listened to hawks whistling overhead. After the foothills came the flatlands, and then an ascent up limestone pathways to the top of a wildly green plateau, and then down again. It took more than a month of traveling through slave territory to reach the broad banks of the great middle river that divided the continent in half, in the last