Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [47]
A group of about six male slaves labored at the side of the building, hauling finished bricks to make a stack of them at the end of a small wooden pier built out into the water where the sloop from Charleston would arrive at some point, sooner than later I had to assume from their urgency, to take the shipment away.
Some of the men looked up at me as we approached, and one of them waved—the foreman, I supposed, from the way that he kept his head a little higher than the rest.
“Yes, sir?” he called to me.
“No matter,” I returned his greeting and sat a while atop my horse as though this were what I had come for, to study the work of these men forced into labor, instead of being carried along by the beast with its own will.
Unlike the slaves in the rice field, they stood to face the heat of the day. The sweat that ran down their necks and backs might have watered all the rice, so copiously it streamed. I watched in fascination as they mixed their compound for the bricks and added the straw to hold the finished block together, and then lay them on a large rectangular pallet with handles on both sides which took four of them to lift—making a sharp cry in unison that made my horse start—and guide onto the space they had set aside for the drying.
“Now—hush!”
And raised it to the pallet.
“Now—push!”
And carry the pallet over.
Then, as if he had been waiting to witness this display, my horse turned and began walking me back through the trees, putting the brickyard far behind us as we joined the main trail.
Isaac had already been back to the house and passed us on the trail coming the other way, seated up on a wagon.
“You awful slow, massa!” he called to me as we passed in the dust.
I knew that, I knew that. There were things here I had never imagined going on in ways I never could have suspected, which feelings were heightened for me all the more when I considered that this child whose birth I had witnessed had come into the world as a piece of chattel.
Chapter Twenty
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Journey
By flatboat, a dozen women and children made the journey west, eventually disembarking when at Ziguinchor the river became unnavigable and their captors herded them ashore. A vast flock of flamingos, disturbed by the disruption in their fishing rights, rose into the air to become a great curtain of white, their flapping wings sounding like hundreds of curtains rustling in the wind. The captives spent the night in a large sandy area that smelled of dead fish and other rotting things. Dogs barked them awake long before the sun rose, accompanied by an intermittent chorus of roosters. Lyaa stood up and walked in the direction of the river when one of the traders called sharply to her and she stopped in her tracks.
The man pointed to a scraggly row of reeds.
She shook her head.
He walked toward her, raising his rifle as he moved.
Again, Lyaa shook her head and went to do her business in the reeds in full view of the slaver and anyone else who might have been watching as the first hint of the day’s new sun inched up above the southern forest.
The man barked out a loud guffaw, but Lyaa refused to raise her eyes toward him as she walked, as proudly as she could muster, back to where the other prisoners lay.
The day passed, with more and more captives arriving from the direction of the river. Lyaa scanned the crowd chained together on the beach, longing for a glimpse of her mother. More than two dozen of the new arrivals spent the next night in that same place, and Lyaa, though she recognized some by the colors of their