Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [46]
“Oh, Lord!” the writhing woman’s cry went up.
The women around her used their hands on her, muttering, mumbling, chanting.
“Rize is,” I thought I heard. Or were they some other words?
“Gawdamighty!”
“Careful, careful,” Isaac said, looking down at them from his place in the circle of slaves.
“Isaac?” I said, looking down at him from my perch atop the horse.
The woman, eyes shut tight and jaw clenched, and breathing in rhythm as the others raised the hem of her raggedy field dress to reveal a brown belly swollen beyond any limit I had ever imagined, her lighter-shaded legs spread wide to reveal an orifice darkening like the track of a slice into one of our Marzy’s red cakes and opening wider than any I had ever dreamed.
For a moment, the air went out of me and I clung to the horses’ mane, fearing that I might fall. When I recovered to myself, I sat silently, watching, listening. Minutes went by, possibly more than minutes. The woman writhed on the ground in the center of the circle of women, breathing hard, breathing hard, breathing hard, and then resting, resting, and then breathing again, breathing again. She moved her lips, and I heard sounds, but it didn’t seem as though the sounds I heard came from those lips.
Baby come soon,
Git a name…
“An’ breathe…” A woman called up to the trees.
“An’ breathe…”
Isaac stood at the edge of the circle, watching me, watching the trees, rarely glancing down at the woman in the center.
“What’s her name?” I called to him.
He shook his head and gave me a look of great contempt.
“Lucy’s Delilah,” he said, almost as though he were spitting on the ground.
I ignored his disrespect, merely nodded, glanced up at the sun, and looked back to the circle.
Baby come soon…
One woman had applied a cloth to the laboring woman’s forehead, another rubbed her feet, while a third held her hand and breathed along with her.
Aha, aha, aha, aha, aha…
Over and over.
After a while, I dismounted and held the reins, but when a scream went up from the circle I let them drop and rushed to the crowd. Isaac stepped in front of me.
“That horse going to wander,” he told me.
“Of course,” I said, turning back to pick up the reins. Something moved in the tall weeds at the side of the trail—a long green snake I rushed to catch a further glimpse of. Behind me a hush fell upon the crowd and I could hear creatures—birds—singing in the trees at the edge of the clearing. It made me dizzy to look up at the clear blue of the sky, almost as if I were about to fall—somehow, suddenly—upwards, losing all of my weight and gravity that held me upright on the ground.
The horse gave a snort, recalling me to my purpose, and I strode after it, about ten paces along the trail before I tried for the reins.
“Ho, Promise,” I said. “Come here, Promise.”
And finally I caught him.
At that moment a cry of triumph went up from the crowd down the trail and I turned to see one of the older women holding aloft a small pale bundle, which at first I thought were wrappings or bandages used in the birth.
Coming back up the trail alongside Isaac, I said, “It’s not African, it’s white.”
“It will darken, don’t you worry,” he replied.
With some difficulty I remounted.
“I’ll fetch the carriage,” I said.
“A wagon will do,” Isaac said. “Yes, you go on, ride back and send a wagon.”
The woman cried out again, and a second small bundle appeared over the heads of the women.
“A twin!” I said.
“The afterbirth,” Isaac said to me. “We keep that dry now, and bury it later. There’s a ceremony.” He turned a hand palm up. “Massa? Will you ride?”
And so I obeyed the order of the slave-overseer and turned my horse back toward the house.
Except it did not want to go in that direction. A few yards