Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [60]
Oh, yes, and darker spirits appeared to her as well. Shadows with horns and fangs and noses shaped like spears who chanted to her about welcoming death, and eating herself alive until she died.
Jump, dive, sink!
Follow your kinsmen down to the bottom of the sea. A lovely haven awaits you, the flowers of the ocean, jewels made of spindrift and the water sweeter to breathe than air.
“Don’t listen,” Yemaya cautioned her.
“Listen but don’t obey,” said the goddess’s son.
He gave her explicit instructions, and she drank the slops sloshed into her hands and licked the decks and when someone near her died she went through the woman’s pouch and found damp bits of nuts and she ate those, and when a man in the next row over caught and killed a rat she flinched before she took what he passed to her but took it she did, and drank the nasty animal’s blood and ate its flesh. The next time she did not flinch.
Some of them had a plan. Days and nights had passed—very few of the captives could tell them apart—since their last time on deck. At least they could speak freely, none of the sailors being able to understand their languages, and only a few among them capable of understanding all of the languages they spoke. But in the dark, amid the stench and foul litter, a few of the men were talking about what to do the next time the sailors allowed them up into the air. Finally, it coalesced into a scheme, so that when they came up through the hatch one group moved to starboard and the other to port.
They had discovered a glorious day at sea, with great heaving fields of waves making up an ocean that seemed to have no limit except where it touched the pale blue of the descending wall of the sky. The wind blew easy, with hints of salt and tar carried on its currents. However, the slaves paid little attention to their surroundings, casting their eyes upward to the heavens or staring down at their chains. None seemed to meet the eye of any other. For a few moments, all seemed calm, and the sailors hauled their buckets up from over the side, prepared to douse the filth-encrusted captives with stinging cold sea-water to splash away the fetid stains and disgusting daubings, evidence of their miserable life below decks.
Just then the first line, men and women bound together, began to chant and sing, and a few sailors dropped their buckets, picked up whips and clubs, and rushed toward them. As the first sailor struck the first captive a line of men—all men—on the other side of the deck turned to face the rail and threw themselves headlong overboard.
The captain standing tall on the bridge turned red-faced with rage, shouting orders and waving his fists.
This time as the ship turned it became clear by the boiling patch of water where the sharks swarmed exactly where the captives had perished.
The captain shouted at the remaining captives—and there were still a great many, no doubt of that—and sent them, under a rain of whips and clubs delivered by his crew, down below. As Lyaa hobbled along, aching in her chains, arms raised to protect herself from the blows, she saw staring down at her from the captain’s bridge, a blazing halo of sunlight coloring the sails behind him, the balding sailor—an officer, as it turned out—who had taken her behind the mainmast and wounded her soul. He stared at her as though she were some animal familiar to him from his travels in a foreign forest.
***
From that moment on, and she was not sure what it was that sent her in this direction, she dived down into her mind and tried to follow her path as far back in memory as she could, into her life and the life of her family. Oh, Yemaya, she silently called out, send me back, back to where I first emerged from my mother’s womb, back to where my mother first saw the light, back to a desert dawn where her mother first saw the first light, back to where her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, and