Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [48]
Old Mother, Yemaya, she raised her eyes in prayer, help us to break free of this terrible lonely place and return up river to the forest where we belong. But then she could not help but remember that it was her uncle/father who had sent her off in slavery. Her mother had railed against the old desert god who hovered behind the selling of human bodies. Take Yemaya to your heart, daughter, she had often said, and you will find freedom. But her uncle/father prayed to the forest gods, and he did no better than the desert traders who bought and sold human beings.
How was it that Yemaya had not cursed him and crushed him where he stood, watching as the slavers herded Lyaa and the others like cattle onto the flatboats?
How was it?
She asked this of herself, she asked this of other girls with whom she became acquainted as they continued their captive journey along the banks of the river, a passage that took many days and nights. Some spoke her language, others had a few words and many hand gestures, others she could not communicate with at all except by gestures and sometimes by drawing stick figures in the damp earth.
Three horizontal lines, one vertical--in quiet moments she copied the designs on the stone, knowing that it had something to do with where she came from, but unsure of where that was. Back, back in time, beyond the desert city where the sand blew through the streets, this she remembered from stories her mother had told her, stories her own mother had told her, stories that her mother’s mother had told her mother, all the way back into the first times. The rest of it came to her in dreams that visited her when she lay like a dead girl under the bright stars, the moon sometimes glazed with a slight corona of moisture-tinged clouds.
This she knew—
Her oldest grandmother, a slight woman, scarcely taller than a girl, with almond eyes, rough dark hair, and a flattened nose, holding the hand of her oldest grandfather, slightly taller, long arms, while behind them trailed along their first child, a creature even slighter of build than either of them, because food had been so scarce, a spouting volcano laying a fine rain of ash over the already parched country, driving away what animals it had not yet buried, and just that morning another wave of explosions from the flattened top of the peak to the east, so that they fled, along with the small beasts of the desert, those that could still scurry or crawl or fly, crossing old water holes and trailing the bank of a desiccated river, at one point feeling the moisture beneath their feet and—the grandmother glanced down to see it—leaving their tracks behind in the rapidly hardening mud.
At sundown they looked back once more and saw a faint new sun rising in the east where a great smoky fireball shot out of the volcano and soared into the air before spraying out its flowering of flame and smoke and ash. A memory blossomed in the woman’s mind, a roar of a command to put their home behind them and start walking, as a vast canopy of fire and storm hovered over what had been their first home for as long as they could remember.
Another two days, and they arrived in darkness and pulled the rafts to shore. She felt such fatigue that sleep came quickly. She awoke to the stark light of the early sun, and, as she had been learning, immediately made preparations—gathered plants for tea, some nuts, a piece of fruit—to travel. When she looked around she saw dozens of people, dozens more than she had traveled with, and still no sign of her mother. The air smelled different. It had an edge that cleared her nose and tickled it at the same time.
Onto the boats again. Behind her another flatboat with even more people crowded onto it. Silently they moved along the river, boatmen poling them slowly along. That sting in the air grew sharper, and to the west the sky brightened at the upper reaches of the air. Blue faded to white, white glared, made her turn her eyes away. She feared