Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [63]
He must have been seven or eight, well, who knows if he himself could not remember exactly, some young age, possibly nine years old, but not much older, when he left his Curaçao uncle’s seaside house and walked across his well-kept lawn—the slaves did a fine job of keeping it green and without weeds—and down through rows of sea grass to the beach. Let it be said, Jonathan was not a stupid child. Being able to lord it over the pickaninny offspring of the slaves had encouraged the mean streak in his character that most children, boys and girls alike, discover, sometimes to their sorrow, always to their amazement. Being a child himself, power over other children deluded him into thinking that he was a powerful boy.
This allowed him to believe that he found himself in no danger as he waded out into the lapping surf, waded out farther than ever before, feeling the strong waves wash over him and the tug of the undertow racing past the backs of his knees. The horizon growled black with storm clouds and thunder, and before he knew it a wave knocked him flat on his back, the undertow lifting him from below and behind, and carrying him out far beyond his usual limit.
A minute or two passed before he felt the fear surging through him even as the waves hoisted him up and lowered him, hoisted him up and lowered. And lowered, and suddenly he went under, flailing about, desperate for air.
Think! It was not just his life at stake as surf surged past his shoulders, as if to delight rather than to signal the imminent death by water that awaited him. And as he was sinking through the phantasmagorical aquamarine surroundings, seaweed torn around him, sand in upheaval, shells and starfish sailing past, even as the current, oddly warm but ferocious in its grip, boiled around his body and carried him along, to where he did not know—all of our fates hung in the balance, because so much was about to change for us, or never come to light at all.
A sudden stillness, and he watched the last bubbles of air float out of his mouth and float toward the surface. One bubble in particular caught his eye, and he tagged it with his glance as it rose higher and higher until it melded with the mass of other bubbles above his head.
“Goodbye,” he should have said to us, if he knew any better. “Goodbye, and sorry that I am dying and that you will never live. Liza, me, the others to be.” Stupid child, he had no sense of what ruled him now, the large dark hand of death squeezing his lungs and heart. He loved facing into the storm and walking forward. See where it took him.
Down he went so that his feet touched the sandy floor of ocean where he would, it seemed, come to his final (early) rest.
OOOOOOoooooooo…
He floated to his knees, his hair floating up in waves like sea plant and weed…
Was he gone?
Yes?
Poor fellow—yes, even he deserves our pity, for was he not then only a child?
Dying…
Now as much as men would like to believe that the gods to whom they pray remain mutually exclusive—that is, the God of the Jews is different from the God of the Christians and the God of the Musulman, to name the major ways of religious thinking in the West—that remains not to be the case. Or so we might surmise, given the story of what took place in the distance, behind the bubble-born veil of that undertow. Above the storm, in the pure sunlight that always reigned when you cast yourself off a certain distance from the planet, or so ancient astronomers and some modern storytellers would propose, roared a force as great as the impending storm below.
Yahweh, whose followers took him to be the force behind all the greatest forces in the universe, found Himself in a quarrel with what he took to be a lesser god. Or goddess, this certain Yemaya, whose followers regarded her as the force behind many natural wonders on Earth, especially the oceans and rivers and streams and even perhaps in the Heavens, but