Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [30]
He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. Despite the slipping by of the day the sun remained hot, and the air whirred thick with buzzing insects and above us the constant cry of birds. There were a number of questions I knew I should ask, about the means of cultivation, and how much rice was grown each year, and how it was shipped, and so forth. But the heat weighed on my brain and on my tongue. I rode silently, and my cousin did not speak, so that the only sound for a while was the light rumbling of the carriage wheels on the dusty track. It had been a long day already and it had not yet ended.
Chapter Thirteen
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The Forest
The place called Wassadougou—a green world, and Lilith suffered an obsidian-complected husband, rotund and unsmiling, whose southern features contrasted sharply with her own distinctively northern face—Semitic and almond-eyed, thin-lipped, an elongated jaw. He silently weighed her down so many nights that Lilith felt flattened even when great with child. His other wives chattered like monkeys. His many children treated her with disdain and sometimes outright cruelty. She hated them one and all. Her only friends were her own children, which meant that she lived for years alone in the midst of a crowded family compound, until the children grew old enough for serious conversation and discussion, most of which had to do with their ancestors and how proud they should be because of where they came from. The past was a glorious story, the present was a green and nattering hell. Large, biting, piercing insects assailed her, and in the trees devil creatures chattered and sometimes shat upon those who gathered below. At night she held the holy stone and stroked its inflected surface until her fingers became too tired to move. If only she could see a future better than what she had in mind, living until she died in this prison of green. If only she might have had her mother at her side!
Oh, Zainab, my mother, where do your bones lie? Oh, mother, mother, surely long gone now and never to comfort me again!
Her only comfort? Wata, her oldest daughter, dark about the face, pale in her back and belly and legs. Husbands did the naming, and the dark man called this child after a local goddess. The girl grew into a womanhood charged with passion and invention, becoming skilled at weaving, a family art, it seemed, and the cultivation of herbs, as well as caring for her younger sisters even as her mother grew more and more uninterested in the task. (She sat inside their house made of tree and grass for more and more hours as the years went by, talking to her own mother whom she saw sitting in a corner of the enclosure and beyond that claiming that she was sending prayers to God). Lilith appeared to be shrinking, if not fading away all together. She certainly had no standing with Wata’s father, and among his wives she was barely recognized. Wata, lighter than many of her siblings, assumed a larger and larger role among the children—there were some sixteen or seventeen of them, from all the wives—and eventually she took a place among the wives themselves. This had its dangers, and sure enough, one night after the moon set and the entire forest seemed to have sunk into a deep and dreamless sleep Wata heard a rustling just outside the entrance. Fearing an animal, she sat up on the pallet where a moment before she had been lost in some nameless vision that came along when she had closed her eyes.
And who was this? Some forest demon?
Wata caught a glimpse of a woman