Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [67]
Taking them where?
She did not know.
“I think they put them in the ground,” the tall dark man said. “They are dying here, and will be dead within a few hours. That is why they take them out of here.”
That must be true. As her group grew stronger, the number of the sickly weakened, and, according to the tall black man, something was going to take place soon—he heard the uglies talking about it, something new soon.
A few mornings later, with the sun and the laughing birds high overhead, the medicine man came around and looked each of them over, nodding, making musical sounds with his lips.
“What?” Lyaa said.
“We are ready,” the tall black man said.
Lyaa shook her head. She took a deep breath and felt the holy infant turn inside her belly.
“Ready for what?” she said.
Chapter Twenty-seven
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Voices in My Ear
Yemaya
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooohgh! The feeling! I have been away from these shores for so long! The people carried their bodies here, they carried their blood in their veins, they carried their memories of the past life in the forest and deserts, along the seashores and up the rivers. They carried me, too! Oooooh, yeah!
I came with them. Because without me, what are they? Sacks of skin, stalks of bones, hearts and livers breathing, fluids flowing? Ooooh, yeah! But I am what lies behind the eyes, I am what lurks in the part behind the dreaming! I am the bigger thing than anything they know! I am what seizes the heart when love comes, and makes life seem so sweet! Even when it grinds the bones and sears the flesh! I am the I am, and that is nothing to sneeze at, if that is what you say when you want to say how surprised you are at the turns life takes, the zigzag of it all! I am here, I was there, and am there, too, but here now also, and in the laughing in the lungs, in the moisture in the mucus in the lungs and in the dreaming part too, daydream and night-journey, all in the all, oh, do say you love me, is all you have to do and I am yours and you are mine!
Chapter Twenty-eight
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The First Sabbath
My mother had just appeared to me in a dream when early the next morning I was awakened by a knock at the bedroom door. I roused myself to answer the knock and found the slave Liza standing there, posed in a not very submissive way, hands on her hips, an almost scolding pout to her lips.
“Time for the Sabbath ride, massa,” she said and seemed about to say something more when my aunt called her name from down the hall and she turned and without a word to me walked away.
As it happened, I had no time at all to linger. Drugged by the country air, I suppose, I had overslept, and the family was waiting for me downstairs, where I hurriedly appeared, my face dripping from the fresh water I had splashed on myself, my stomach an empty knot.
“Please, massa,” Precious Sally said, handing me a mug of coffee as we went out the door. I scarcely had time to thank her as we went out the door.
“I am sorry if I make us late,” I said to my uncle and aunt. “I have not slept this long since I was a child.”
“No matter, sir,” my uncle said, raising a beefy hand toward the carriage where Isaac stood, holding the horse’s reins. “We always give ourselves plenty of time before the service, coming as we do from afar.”
“Do many other Jewish families live on plantations?” I said as we climbed into the carriage. I sat up front with Jonathan while his parents and young son and wife sat behind us, squeezed together like chattel on the way to market. (Yes, the thought did occur to me!)
“A few,” my uncle said, “though most live in town. The town is better for business, of course. We had a business there when we first arrived here.”
“The import and export?” I said, mentioning the only business I knew really well.
“Import, yes, export, some,” he said as Jonathan flicked his whip and the horse pulled us away from the house. “We had shares in some ships bringing Africans to Charleston. This produced enough money for us to buy the plantation and our own force of