Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [55]
“Two Sabbaths,” I said, “what a fine idea. But do you fall behind in your cultivation because of that?”
“When we do, we eliminate one of the Sabbaths,” he said. “Temporarily, of course.”
“Very interesting,” I said, and after the fine sherry following the dinner, I excused myself and retired, thinking to myself as I climbed the stairs that I had heard more talk about the Sabbath here in one meal than in an entire New York year.
I lay in bed, restless and worrying with my imagination, picturing again Liza on the auction block, and I went on bidding for a while.
Chapter Twenty-four
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The Passage
Nobody wanted to board.
The noise, the noise rose to the sky. Shouting, screaming, crying all against the crashing and lulls of the surf. Women prayed, men lunged here and there, weighed down by chains. Black men slashed at them with whips. Men pale as ghosts, with long guns, stood along the sand, some of them shouting orders to the men with the whips. Shore birds squealed overhead. Lyaa, in the middle of things, gazed wildly about the beach strewn with belongings, hoping for a glimpse of her mother.
For a time it seemed as though nothing would happen. The captives did not budge, and the captors did not seem to care, all just huddled, muddled together in a mass of confusion and noise.
Suddenly one tall man leaped at one of the whippers, and a gunshot rang out into the pale-white sky. The tall man fell to his knees, tipped over onto the sand which his blood turned brown, and the screaming began, even as the terrified captives now allowed themselves to be herded into a row of small boats lined up just at the shoreline.
“Mama!” a girl screamed over and over, “Mama! Mama!” and much to her surprise Lyaa after a short while realized she was the screaming girl.
Somehow, she settled herself, even as her boat pitched and rolled in the deep surf, a good moment, settling, even as she became drenched with spray, because there came one bad thing after another, and she needed her strength to endure. Sailors, mostly pale-faces, some with dark beards, hauled them up like dry goods out of the small boats and lined them up on deck, ordering them to set down their belongings. When a woman refused, a rail-thin sailor in torn denim grabbed her by the throat and tore a bundle from her hands. A baby went flying across the deck and the woman charged after it, gaining only half the distance to the infant when the sailor struck her down. A man reached over to rescue the infant and the rail-thin sailor hit him with a truncheon. The child disappeared in the confusion of bodies and shouts and screams and curses in four or five languages.
A white bird soared overhead, watching out of one eye and then the other as the sailors gestured and shouted, driving everyone below decks.
Stumbling down the slippery stairs.
Dark down here, so dark. Stench of bitter stink stabs the nostrils. Sailors swarm everywhere, pushing, shoving, punching, kicking the captives and chaining them to benches scarcely long or wide enough to hold them all. Born a slave, Lyaa had never known freedom, but she had not, until the traders took her from her uncle/father’s village, known any darkness such as this.
Children wailed, infants screamed, one after another as one dropped away and another took up the noise. Sailors walked among the captives, plucking a child here, an infant there, and carting them away like debris while the mothers and some fathers screamed at the top of their powers, tearing hopelessly at their chains. Lyaa felt herself trembling, and then the world moved, shouts from up above, and began an intermittent pounding, pounding, that filled the air between the screams.
Her heart pounded, the wind pounded the sails, the ship pounded its way into the rolling