Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [23]
“Perhaps it was a mistake to come here first,” he said when at last we left the market for the sweeter, fresher air of the pier-side. “But do not judge what we do by what you just witnessed. If you went into a hospital surgery and saw the surgeons sawing off limbs you might be disturbed but you would not think all surgeons did such things to all people they knew.”
“I am not here to judge anyone,” I said, remembering the business of my purpose. “I am here to learn about the workings of the plantation.”
“Of course,” said my cousin, leading me, flask in hand, from the place of misery.
“Was it awful?” Rebecca said as we approached.
I nodded.
“It makes me want to run away from here,” she said. “Nathaniel, they do not do things like this up north, do they?”
“No, no, they don’t,” I said. “Up north everyone’s free.”
“Jews are free, I know.”
“Of course,” I said. “Everyone is free. Or most everyone.”
“Then I cannot wait to visit the North.”
“Yes,” I said, “you two must come and visit us in New York.”
Lapsing into polite chatter, punctuated by further sips from my cousin’s flask, I bathed copiously in my own sweat, and soon we made our way to the carriage. I confess that the memory of the auction crowd, bathed in brandy, quickly faded from my mind.
Chapter Nine
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Koulikoro
In the land of cloud and rain, first, they separated Zainab from her mother—she, as it turned out, was put into service as one of the caretakers in a nursery—leading her into a large compound where a fountain flowed in a central courtyard and many servants, some jet black, some as brown as the desert and herself, moved languidly to and fro as they carried out various tasks. Two tall dark women led her into a room off this courtyard where they undressed her and bathed her in warm water and rubbed her with oils. They gave her sweet food and something to drink.
“I want my mother,” was the last thing she remembered saying before waking up under a carpeted canopy, with moonlight spilling down onto a small central pool. A huge man with a smooth face who smelled of animals held her in his flabby arms.
“From this moment on, I am your mother, and I am your father,” the man said, and raised her face to his to give her a wet animal kiss. He reached down toward his waist, as if he were groping for lice or a hidden bag of gold, and before she knew it he had her lying on the carpet, her silks tossed aside, jabbing at her with a large purple-tipped growth from his groin. In he shoved and she screamed in fear that he would rip her apart.
Two-thirds of a year later she felt the same way as she gave birth to her first child, a plump brown girl. Motherhood gave her pleasure. Not so for her own mother, not so when she caught a glimpse of her son carried off in chains to some unknown destination, not so when she heard that one of her sisters had died in child-birth and other, who after producing two children, ran off with one of the other slaves and died somewhere in the forests to the south.
The news of the first death sent her mother into a despair from which she never recovered. She lasted a year, and then came a morning when she never awoke. Ten years after that first morning when the family fled from Timbuktu, Zainab had given birth to four children (one of whom, her second boy, had died within days of being born), and acquired a wealth of silk clothing, and still possessed that stone with the markings. She carried the object with her wherever she went, and at night she kneaded it in her palm, trying to recall the fading details of her father, the jar-maker, her last images of his smiling face and the work of his hands, those plates and pots and jars, but mostly what came to mind was his outstretched hand, the small marked stone resting in his still palm.
Zainab’s children grew around her, and she grew complacent in her silks, happy to have her health despite all the births, and happy with the attentions of the Master, the big man, the head of a large clan whose political branch