Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [84]
Isaac called out to the men, and I watched as around the bend in the creek a flatboat edged its way upstream on the power of several black men poling.
“Coming for the bricks,” he said to me. “So they can build more houses in the city, and all around the county. These men, they dig and mash the mud and water, mix in their straw, form the bricks and bake them in the sun, and next thing you know a house goes up in town and people make a life in it. All beginning with this mud.”
But that was enough philosophy, or history, however one might categorize his remarks, for this day, because we had immediately to oversee the docking of the boat and the loading of the bricks for shipment down the creek to the river and into town.
Chapter Thirty-four
________________________
Old Dou
The doctor had noticed, and he had told the owner, who when he arrived home after his errand to Charleston, told his wife, the mistress of the house, and she told the head house servant, so that when Lyaa arrived at the plantation a good large number of people knew she was expecting.
A cloud of confusion settled in her mind. She knew and yet did not know. She had lost her mother—and not until she met Old Dou the head house servant, a rotund African woman the color of tar with large round eyes—also tarry in shade—who asked her a few questions in a language she understood from the first days of the passage and who gave her some answers as well, did she accept the facts about her condition.
Lyaa shook her head in refusal. Old Dou gave a shake of her head.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what, mother (the formal way of addressing a woman this much older than she was, though Lyaa felt a tiny chill in her chest when she addressed her this way, because of a sudden she missed her real mother so desperately)?”
“You don’t know how it happened?”
Lyaa shook her head.
“Is it the goddess?”
“Yemaya?” The older woman shook her head. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“I am Yemaya, I believe in her, in me. She is in me and I am in her.”
“Put that old talk aside,” said Old Dou. “Tell me what happened in your passage.”
Lyaa, suddenly lucid, told her about the degradations and the deprivations, the suffering, the filth.
The woman listened for a short while before she said, “No, no, tell me about the men or a man.”
“Man?”
“Who was he?”
“Who was he?”
“You heard me, daughter. The man who took you.”
“I saw things in the passage, though, thank the gods, nothing happened to me except the heat and the sickness.”
“I am glad to hear that, daughter. But please now, tell me.”
“Yemaya protected me.”
“Daughter, who was he? One of us or one of them?”
Lyaa shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? It was too dark? You were too sick. But you said you did not get sick.”
“Perhaps I got sick.”
“And then?”
“And then the goddess helped me.”
“The goddess didn’t help you to get away from that man.”
“What man? Please, why do you keep asking about a man?”
“Daughter, you are carrying a child and that comes from being with a man. Did your mother never teach you that?”
Lyaa began to weep.
“I never saw my mother, not after they put us in the pens.”
“She did not sail with you?”
The girl shook her head.
“I don’t know where she is, whether she is alive or…”
“Oh, daughter,” said Old Dou, taking the girl in her arms. “This sorry life, this sorry world, I am deeply sad for you. For all of us.”
Suddenly the girl pulled free of her hold.
“You say I am carrying a child?”
“The man gave you a child. What man was it interfered with you, daughter?”
Lyaa bowed her head and took a breath that seemed to go on forever. She looked up and her eyes went inward down into a deep place darker than the tint of Old Dou’s flesh. Finally, she looked outward again. Finally she spoke.
“A sailor was the man,” she said. “He hurt me. I didn’t know it made a child. Is that why he gave me bread?”
“He gave you bread?”
“When he…did it with me…again.”
“He may have been a bad man, hurting you like that, but he gave you something else, greater than bread. You cannot eat of it, but