Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [59]
“What?”
His bowels creaked and whistled as he gave up a reeking bolus of wretched disgust right there on his bench.
“I am dying,” he said.
“No, no, no,” Lyaa said, “you have a life to live beyond your father’s life.”
“I cannot live as a slave anymore,” the man said.
“Death is slavery,” Lyaa said, not knowing where her words came from. “Life is freedom, because it can be free.”
“I do not understand,” the man said, “and yet I do want to know.”
She shook her head in amazement at her own speech, and though she tried she could not return to sleep, imagining all the spirits he had called down for her. One by one they settled in her body, presided over by Yemaya, and she knew this was good. Oh, goddess, she prayed, take us easily over the waters and break our chains on land, whatever land it is.
In the middle of the night the man reached over to touch Lyaa on the head.
“Bless you,” he said. “All the spirits on your head.”
As if in a miracle, up on deck some time later, chained together in rows of ten, someone pointed out an island off in the distance to the north.
Word pulsated through the captive ranks.
“Land! Land!”
The row of captives, urged on by the man whose father had died, shuffled toward the starboard railing and amid shouts from the sailors and the whirring and slap of whips as nearly one person they all went over the side.
Lyaa stared in horror at the empty space where a moment before all those people stood while the sailors shouted and whipped the air to hold back the rest. The captain in his dark uniform soon appeared on deck to call out orders to the rest of the crew. Sailors reshaped the sails and the ship began to turn. But circling back to the spot where the ten or so slaves had dived into the ocean no sign showed of any of the escaping captives.
The captain himself climbed down into the slave cabin along with a group of torch-bearing sailors. He shouted, cajoled, pleaded, ordered the slaves in his own language, none of which Lyaa could not understand. Many, many days went by before they were brought up on deck again.
Fewer of them gathered now. It was as if the god of death walked along the odiferous rows, pointing out those whom he would take with him on another sort of voyage.
But not Lyaa. She became sick, but she got well. She licked her palms after she ate the food the sailors delivered, licked rain water from the boards when on a beautiful sunlight morning after a vast rainstorm finally they did climb back up on deck again, if not gaining strength then at least not losing it as quickly as she might have. She prayed for more rain, and what better thing could happen than a dark cloud, lingering at the tail end of the boiling storm, poured down upon them, and Lyaa, along with the other survivors, turned her face to the sky and opened her mouth.
Returning to the benches some of the captives sang old god-songs and one or two of them—she swore she heard it, but she might have imagined it—laughed, a sound no one had heard in a long, long time. She held the laugh in her mind when she tried to sleep, but as had become usual a chorus of groans and weeping, coughing, whispering, farting, praying bubbled up constantly in the ranks around her. When at last sleep settled over her, her dreams became just as overcrowded as the cabin. Gods descended around her and spoke, in voices she could almost but not quite recognize, urging her to carry on through all of the filth and pain and discomfort and discouragement.
“For your mother,” Yemaya said.
“For all of her mothers, those who gave birth and became and came and went and bore