Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [27]
I shut my eyes tight and then opened them to watch the woman climb aboard the carriage onto the driver’s bench, on which sat the lean young dark man who had taken my bag.
At such close quarters, the sight of her shut my throat.
Chapter Eleven
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Tambacounda
The further west they traveled, the worse things became. Unlike most of the Arab men, these slavers, mostly dark-skinned ruffians, some with decorative scars on faces and foreheads and some with filed teeth, treated them roughly and without respect. They touched, they pinched, they pulled, and then laughed and spat. Brutes, infidels who never stopped to pray, they worried her. They harried everyone to move along during the day, and at night around the fires, as if picking a piece of roasted meat from a tray, they would pluck a woman from the group and carry her off into the dark.
Twice they took Zainab, and each time she prayed and resisted, but to no avail. The pain settled into her as if an exquisite punishment from God. Bruised in the flesh and chilled in her blood she returned to her family at the fire, refusing to speak, and taking the smallest child in her arms in the hopes of finding some warmth to live for—almost to no avail. Her soul felt as though she had dropped it into a deep well and left it to drown.
Lilith, her middle daughter, a willowy tan-complected girl with an even disposition, tried to calm her.
“Mama,” she said, “one day our father will find us and take his revenge on these awful men.”
Zainab shuddered, with a chill even more cutting than the remorse that already cooled her blood—that a child of hers would find it necessary to say such things! It was a horror, a horror! And yet things might have been worse, because she could not know what we know, that every hour and every day and month and year brought them closer and closer—the children’s children, at least, because she herself would not live to see it—to their terrifying passage over nearly limitless water.
More days of rough travel, the land becoming hilly and the trail turning away from the river, to climb and climb in the direction of the retreating sun. For the first time Zainab felt the chill of nights at a high elevation, and she slumped into a fever, and again her children attended to her while the dark enveloped them all and the noise of drums and the high ringing chirps of animals rang around them. She had been born into a land of few trees. Now that it became a possibility that she might die beneath a canopy of dark wood which at night seemed to fall slowly upon her as the flames of the cook-fire dimmed down to feebly glowing embers, she fought with the demonic thought of welcoming her end sooner than later. If the traders approached her one more time she would fight with them, until they killed her.
But then the worry of the children living without her changed her mind. And then the thought of the children living as captives in this dark and cooling land made her want to kill them and herself on the spot.
She slept holding Lilith to her breast, as if that might hide the girl from any traders with wandering eyes.
It did not.
After a long day’s trek westward through the dry bush of a long valley the traders stopped the caravan to camp beneath a giant acacia tree and settled in to cook. Zainab had herself long ago given up on prayer, unable to find it within herself to submit to a god who would allow such torment to persist. Her own years were over, but the worry that her children would live as chattel, however well treated, for the rest of their lives filled her with dread. What kind of a god would inflict such suffering on so many for such a long period of time?
Daughter Lilith appeared at her side with a thick piece of bark that held a slice of fruit and some mashed vegetable.
“Mama, you must eat,” she said.
“Ah, I’ve become the child and you’ve become the mother,” Zainab said. “The whole world is turned around, upside down.”
“Yes, mother,” Lilith said, “backwards is forwards and forwards is back. Please eat. I