Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [187]
The animals lowed and moaned. Time unrolled to the pace of a turning wheel. A million years ago she had started out in the dank dark swamp. Back in a time before that the river rushed beneath the flat bottom of the boat she crossed on. Before that the Christians, her old man among them, bellowed on the prairie, waking the stars with their testaments of faith. She breathed hard, and time moved forward, she breathed again and time moved back, again, and time flowed out to all the horizons and time rushed like a gusher toward those recently awakened stars. At what seemed like the highest point of the high prairie over which they plodded they came to a crest from which you could look down and see, miles below, a thin strand of river. An unfamiliar voice came into her head and told her in a plain, straightforward way, that if she jumped she would sail down to meet her mother, and mother’s mother, and all the mothers before her, and she would stay at peace and in serenity for all the time to come. Hawks swooped below her where she stood. Whose voice was that?
“No, no, no, no, no!”
She leaned a little closer to the edge and her gaze sank down a mile to where her very own goddess Yemaya stood breast-deep in the rushing river. It shocked her to meet the goddess so far from her home grounds.
“Shango speak to you,” Yemaya said. “Don’t listen. Everything I did, even saving the life of your monster father, I did so you can live near the other ocean. Don’t stop now! It is always better to be born, no matter how it happens, than never to come to life! And you don’t know, the child you are carrying may be the one to save everyone and everything! Back away! All of us carry such regrets, woman,” the voice—almost now completely her own—said to her, “all of us. Slave or free, none of us is truly free, not in this world. And there is no next! Run! Come! Go!”
The goddess raised a hand as she raised her voice, and as if she were standing next to her Liza fell back, then fell to her knees and said to Yemaya and to the hawks floating below the edge of the cliff and to anyone else who might be listening, “My ancestors walked away from a volcano, they settled in a red city only to flee from beasts who wanted to sell their bodies, they traveled west on a river, and, captured again, sailed west on an ocean in, oh, how difficult a passage! I will keep going.”
***
Some nights later—or was it months or was it years?—as chastely she and the old man lay together under the desert moon east of the California border, she heard him give out a loud expiration after which came silence.
First, she had to dig a grave. And when she had done this—a shallow declivity was all she could produce even with great struggle—and said a few words (“Old man, I offer you my thanks for a place in your wagon and wish you speedy transport to your heaven!”) she still had a desert to cross, the dry land once a sea-bed, a hazy burning sun above! The wagon animals died next. She abandoned these bloated oxen, their tongues stiff in their mouths, and the wagon and most of her belongings, a monument to all she had done to travel this far. She proceeded first on foot and then—arriving in a small town on the edge of the desert and, with money she had taken from the dead old man’s pocket, buying a horse—on horseback, north and west to San Francisco, the city she had heard described all along her way as the great and beautiful metropolis on the bay.
She sold the horse to a passing Mexican, striding up a hill, drinking in the fog. From the top of the hill—water three-quarters all around—islands—a bay—the seemingly placid ocean to the west bleeding into the low horizon. A pastel city! Half in sun, half in fast-moving fog,