Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [79]
Langerhans leaned down along the mane of his horse and gave me his eye.
“Yankee down from the nigger north, are you?”
“We do not think of it that way, I have to tell you,” I said.
“What you have to tell me,” the patroller said, “is which way the nigger ran. Oh, shit and barnstorms, the dogs’ll find him. We just have to find the dogs before they tear him to pieces. Before anything else, the nigger needs a whipping.”
“So no funeral?” Jonathan said.
“Not if we can help it.” The man smiled, and it appeared to be the same as his sneer. “Nigger’s someone’s property and we’re bound to protect it.”
In the distance the dogs broke into a high melodic whine.
“Well,” Langerhans said, “we got to be off. Give my regards to your father. Tell him anytime he’s got trouble with a nigger we’re ready to help out.”
“We don’t happen to have any problems these days, do we?” Jonathan said to me.
But before I could speak the three men turned their horses and trotted off into the woods in the direction of the dogs.
“Well…” I said, wandering over to the creek-side, where the ground was torn up by the horses.
“A not-so-pretty side of the way we live down here,” my cousin said.
“Yet on our family’s property we have no runaways?”
“No, sir. They love us and we love them. They respect us, and we are trying to teach them.” Again, that demonic sneer appeared on his face. “Why, they look upon me as royalty, as a king!”
We heard the now distant dogs singing even higher in their frenzied whining, and we stared at each other and I did not like that look on my cousin’s face. I could not see the look on mine, but I felt it. Oh, I felt it! If I myself could have bolted and run, that would have been the time.
Chapter Thirty-one
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The Promised Land
The tall dark man had counted the moons. Ten of them had risen and set before one early morning the uglies herded them into small boats and sailed across a short stretch of water to another pier. It astonished her, the sadness of this last short trip! One of the Africans rolled over the side into the water and despite his manacles began to swim toward the rising sun. Before the shouting subsided he had sunk out of sight.
This weighed on Lyaa like a stone, and between that and the weight of her unborn child, whom she was sure was the goddess herself waiting to be born again, she found herself slow to move and thus the object of shouts from the pale-skinned uglies. From the riverside to the long barracks where the Africans first were penned seemed like a great distance to her, walking as she did as if in water. Here now, she peered through the metal slats of the barracks wall, watching the pale-skins pass by in what seemed to be a market. Piles of fruit and vegetables lay on tables all across the yard. Bolts of bright-colored cloth and baskets, figures made of sticks and clay lay displayed as wares the strolling customers might choose among. Oh, how she would have loved to have strolled there, too, and touched and inspected and chosen pieces of colorful cloth to dress herself. She was dreaming awake in this fashion when someone touched her shoulder and she turned to see the white-haired man with the clear mask over his eyes staring at her belly.
At the nod of his head another pale-skin came up to them and holding her by the manacles led her out of the pen into the sunlight and up onto a large raised wooden block. Even after all the time lying below decks on the long passage and the many moons under guard in the crowd of women and men alike on the other side of the river it still shamed and disturbed her to stand naked in the bright sunlight before a crowd of shouting pale-skinned men. One of them pointed at her with a stick and a man behind her used a stick to prod her into turning around.
The voices grew louder, and she felt the sun bearing down on her head with the weight of a large stone.
Let us fly away now, she urged the goddess, but when she took a deep breath and urged herself upward nothing happened, except the man next to