Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [40]
They owned her!
That was every morning’s true awakening. In the pit of this green world, where insects crawled and swarmed and small rats ran right and left, even the smallest of animals was freer than she! Those monkeys looking down from the treetops upon this world of green, even they were freer than she! In this green world, no safe place offered itself. Nowhere could you hide. Her mother could not hide. She lived as her desert born mother lived, exercising ways not of the green world. After a while the greenness crept into her lungs and long before her time she lay weighed down in her breath by a terrible heaviness of green.
“I am your mother,” Wata said to Lyaa, who sat cross-legged by her side. “I want to give you hope and a clear view of life. But I am confused. (Her breath came hard as she spoke these words). Our mother left the desert god behind in the northern sands. The entire world, whether sand and rock to the north or this jungle, or whatever lay south beyond it, remains a place of imprisonment. The desert god enslaved the men who enslaved us.” Her whisper deepened, her breath turned into a rasp and a wheeze. “Pray now to the goddess of the forest. The goddess who rules the forest world and all the world’s waters, whom the desert god challenged, may be our only hope!”
Yemaya, Yemaya, hear my prayer. Carry me away from this green house, carry me out of this place of worry and woe. She remembered even as a very young girl hearing such words in the language her mother called the tongue of the goddess. “My grandfather believed in submitting to his god,” she explained to young Lyaa, even before the girl could truly understand. “I say no, I say never give in or submit, we slaves of slaves, born into chains and misery in our hearts. You are my only hope. You must never give in to the desert god but instead devote yourself to Yemaya and her sisters, who travel with us all over land or water.”
Yemaya, Yemaya!
Yemaya made her heart full, and when she lost the path Yemaya helped her to find it again.
Yemaya! She of the fierce eyes and rough hands, a voice like a roaring stream, the queen of queens, mother of all the green jungle and blessed of all streams, rivers, and oceans, within and without. When Lyaa’s father/uncle stared at her ferociously with his one good eye, she did not look away. He hardly ever looked at either of them and so it seemed important to acknowledge his attention. Yemaya, she whispered to herself under her breath. Later his under-chief came to her and told her that she was not eating enough. She called on Yemaya then also for assistance. One night the big man himself, with his rolls of belly fat and that one good eye, strolled over and took her arm, inspecting it as if it belonged to a monkey or a bird.
She had heard stories, beginning with her mother’s stories. If he touches me elsewhere, she said to herself, Yemaya, please give me the strength to kill him or kill myself.
As if he could feel the force of her prayer, the man released her. (But did it happen because Yemaya answered her prayers, or because he had seen enough? Lyaa had no answer. Perhaps there was no answer and could not be. Did the gods intervene in this world or did they not? Sometimes it seemed as though they did, sometimes as though they did not or would not or could not. Was it her name that called up the power of the First Woman?)
But as it happened on that morning early it was much worse than that, so much worse than she ever, in her innocence, might have feared. The monkeys could see the men moving along the forest paths, which is what