Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [89]
“That’s a way,” Old Dou said as a foreman might speak to a struggling novice laborer in the fields.
“Take a breath, girl,” the doctor said. “Take a breath, and then push from under your belly and out.”
Old Dou, standing at his side and because she was more round than tall looking up at him as they both lay hands on the laboring woman, spoke quietly, the doctor less so. He was used to taking a forceful role in such medical matters as childbirth—the people he treated appreciated a physician with a firm hand.
“She don’t understand you,” Old Dou said. “Even I talk to her sometimes she don’t understand me. Look at her eyes.”
“She’s in a state,” the doctor said.
“She been this way ever since she arrived. It happens to folks on the passage, they just lose their minds, sail right past them, is how I see it, and they never be good anymore. Except, like she is, good enough to give up a new baby to the world.”
“Not just yet…” He raised the woman’s skirt and took a clinical look at the widening divide between her legs.
“Soon,” Old Dou said, and she began to weep.
She shocked the doctor with this show of emotion.
“What is wrong with you, Dou?” he said.
“I see one coming, but I see one going, too,” the woman said.
“I do not see any sign of trouble,” the doctor said.
“Only because you can’t see it,” Old Dou said.
“What do you see?” The doctor kept his eye on the patient, listening to her breathing along with the cries and shouts of pain.
“One coming—see?”
The infant’s head began to breech.
“Here we go,” the doctor said, preparing to reach for the child and help it arrive.
“But look,” Old Dou said, meaning, look at the woman’s face, notice the sudden decrease of breath, feel the decrease in the blood-pulse at her wrists and neck. “Going, going.”
“All right,” the doctor said. “Here, you have done this many times before, you take the child.” He saw it now as a question of pacing, the child rising into the world as the mother sank into the dark clouds beneath which awaited her death.
“All too young,” he said.
“Oh, she’s old,” Dou said. “That passage, it makes you old. Either it kills you or you live a long while.”
“She came through alive,” the doctor said.
“Naw, naw,” Old Dou said, bold and brave and wise enough to know when she knew more than this medical man of the modern world who had trained at the best college in the world. “The death begin on the passage in her mother’s womb, and it’s just finishing with her now. That’s where death is, death is in life, nowhere else.”
“Hush a moment,” said the doctor, “we need to pay close attention.”
Here came the child! Coughing, and then crying, breathing into this new world!
The doctor wanted to laugh, but, as he watched the mother sink, he also wanted to cry—and his training prevented him from doing either. This young woman who had survived the ocean passage, now she set out on another journey, crossing over from this world to wherever it is, if anywhere, we go when we die. These slave women broke his heart, and challenged his ability to believe that everything had a practical answer. They gave birth, and then they died, more, so many more, than other—which is to say, white—women. Was it simply the brutal nature of their lives? Or were they cursed? And if so, why? Why them? Why them?
He was deep in a mood, mulling all this over while wrapping the body as Old Dou cuddled the newborn, when into the cabin stepped the plantation owner’s son.
“I…was overseeing some work in the barns and I heard about the screams,” Jonathan said. He did not give a second glance to the corpse of the mother covered with a sheet but rather walked directly up to the newborn child.
“You are a sweety little thing,” he said in a made-up high-pitched voice. “Sweety-weety, yes, you are, so sweet and weety, weety and sweet.”
The doctor had