Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [62]
Now in the dark, it sometimes became day, and she traveled back into the sunny world of before, when she was alive and living in the forest.
Now in the dark—
Now—
—holding tight to the stone each night in the dark she felt herself weighed down with it, descending, lowering herself as a body through the bench and through the deck floor, down through the hull and sinking below the ship, sinking fast beneath large fish and small, into a darker-than-dark level of ocean where strong currents pulled her one way and another, so that eventually she felt as though she were a ship in herself, sailing forward even as she sank down—
And down…
And down…
Until such time when she opened her mouth to taste the water and breathe, and the savor of it gave off a perfume in the back of the throat like that of delicious fruit, and she floated with her mouth open, so that the water flowed into her throat even as it flowed out of her nose, and she was breathing, breathing, cavorting like a mammal-fish, like whale or dolphin. And then she dove deep like a deeper fish, like other fishes we have not yet discovered, seeing in the dark as only some human being or animal can who has long lived down in the depths of light’s absence can see, seeing the dark as light. Even within this deep realm she sometimes closed her eyes and found deeper darkness still, and slept within her waking sleep, letting the currents carry her where they might.
Which is how she found land.
And once upon a time rain fell onto the fields, and the fields beneath the sea swayed as if in a dance to the invisible and some not so invisible currents that ran on a slant in the parts of the ocean to which she had traveled, and she rose up out of the water and floated with these currents to the sun and the stars beyond, traveling to the most distant parts of the universe in the flick of an eye, as if all the universe lay within her own mind and all she need do to travel there was push out a thought. Did she know or not know? Worlds hung in the balance. And did she feel? Life on any of these rings of planets—how did she know the word? She didn’t know the word, Yemaya gave her the word, all the words she knew, all the words she did not know—leaped forth when she pushed out, and whatever endings there might be came when she turned her back. Yet let her merely glance back over her shoulder, and everything took fire and light again, and the singing echoed through the air, and the light became rain became ocean became air…
Chapter Twenty-five
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Voices in My Ear
The Goddess Intervenes in a Kingdom by the Sea
No place was Eden except Eden. But for the Pereiras, whose ancestors stretched in a long line of alert and capable people from the time of the Roman conquest of the Holy Land through their exile in Rome itself and then, generations later, Holland, the island of Curaçao came close enough. A great-grandfather of Jonathan Pereira had, in place of some money he was owed in a business deal that had gone wrong in Amsterdam, taken the title to a seaside farm on this remote and lovely island. Storms sometimes battered it in late summer and early autumn, yes, but for most of the year the Pereira heirs, three brothers whose own parents had emigrated from Holland to the New World, felt as though they were living in the place from which their earliest family, or so the Bible would have it, had been expelled.
Alas for all, the farm had come with a cadre of enslaved Africans, some of whom worked the land and others who served inside the house. For ten thousand years, men had taken other men as slaves, either in battle—which was certainly not the case for the peaceful Pereiras—or as payment and property. Not even these Jews, whose ancestors themselves had once lived in bondage in Egypt, could resist the temptation and opportunity that slavery offered. This led to some odd and strange situations, both on earth and in Heaven, as on a certain morning in hurricane season when the then-very-young Jonathan