Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [196]
“Read it, Son, and we will find out what I think.”
“It’s as much how you will feel as think about it, Mother,” I said.
She gave me a commanding look, arching her eyebrows and leaning back in her chair.
“Read, then.”
I opened the book to the verse that had so boldly caught my best attention.
WHERE are we going? Where are we going,
Where are we going, Rubee?
Lord of peoples, lord of lands,
Look across these shining sands,
Through the furnace of the noon,
Through the white light of the moon.
Strong the Ghiblee wind is blowing,
Strange and large the world is growing!
Speak and tell us where we are going,
Where are we going, Rubee?
“And that is what?” my mother said. “Show me the book. Ah, it is a song, as the poet calls it, a song sung by slaves in the desert. And the poet overheard this singing? Ah, a song from the old days. Ishmael, I have to confess, because we have been talking about those times…even if you hadn’t been asking me about them all these past few years, oh, I would have been thinking about them. Yes, I would. Yes, I would…a day does not go by that I do not think of them, those old days. And do you know, I still remember the first poem I ever read. The doctor had me learn it by heart, and it still remains in my heart. Would you like me to recite it for you?”
“I would love to hear it, Mother.”
She then spoke it thusly:
“The world is round, and like a ball
Seems swinging in the air,
A sky extends around it all,
And stars are shining there.
Water and land upon the face
Of this round world we see,
The land is man’s safe dwelling place,
But ships sail on the sea.
Two mighty continents there are,
And many islands too,
And mountains, hills, and valleys there,
With level plains we view.
The oceans, like the broad blue sky,
Extend around the sphere,
While seas, and lakes, and rivers, lie
Unfolded, bright, and clear.
Around the earth on every side
Where hills and plains are spread,
The various tribes of men abide
White, black, and copper red.
And animals and plants there be
Of various name and form,
And in the bosom of the sea
All sorts of fishes swarm.
And now geography doth tell,
Of these full many a story,
And if you learn your lessons well,
I’ll set them all before you.”
When she finished, she had tears in her eyes.
“Have I learned my lessons well? Have I? Have I?”
Eliza had two doctors, a Harvard Medical School graduate who had grown up in the Central Valley (who for her conjured up memories of her Carolina benefactor) and a Chinese herbalist who had come by boat across the Pacific only a few years before she arrived overland from the East. During a long winter and spring she suffered aches and pains but neither of them could find evidence of any serious illness. Then there came a cold afternoon in August (again) with fog and wind passing over us, as summer in our city chilled its citizens to the bone. My mother, ebullient that very same morning, felt suddenly quite exhausted and took to her bed, her vital light fluttering as if the wind from off the bay had pierced the very wall of her room, believing, or so she confessed to me, that the first sign of her decline she had somehow inexplicably detected when she looked at her ashy-tinged image in the mirror on that foggy afternoon long ago. Illness or no illness, even now her bones remained arched and triumphant, holding her face in beauty and agelessness.
Whereas in childhood she spoke to me in a strong high voice, now all of her speech had degraded to a whisper, the wisp of a whisper, in stops and starts, with many many breaths between.
“Remember how this began, with the stone,” she said to me, beginning her story again from the beginning, telling me (again) of her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s, back to Timbuktu and so on back before then until it took that event, the exploding volcano