Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [93]
Old Dou looked him hard in the eyes, not an act a slave made without serious decision at that time, and then laughed.
“I am a witch, yes, and you are another.”
The doctor ignored what she said about him and asked her to show him what she was doing and explain why. A few minutes passed while she talked about the blood river in the old woman’s body and how sun, moon, sky, and certain stars could change the course of the body’s flow, as directed in the hands of someone like herself.
The doctor listened in fascination, but in the end he went along on his own way, employed his training, and bled the old woman. This seemed to have kept her alive for a few days, but then without more than a whisper, with the entire family gathered around her bed while the doctor and Old Dou stood off to one side, she expelled through her lips a single bubble of air and passed away.
And what had all of this to do with the little girl child who lay murmuring in the basket in the single room of the shack behind the big house where Old Dou, her stature long ago elevated beyond that of the field hands, had been allowed to sleep and live? Well, it had all to do with the old African woman herself, who had, while Lyaza’s mother had passed from pregnancy to birth—and young girlhood, we have to say, to womanhood, in the throes of her murderous labor—listened to the tormented woman’s stories, sometimes garbled, sometimes lucid, about her passage, and her family back in the forest and back further still into the desert land where they had first come to awareness of themselves. Her (old African) religion helped her to understand the meanness, if not wickedness, of the slaveholder’s way of seeing, because she understood that all life on earth, from scorpions to mayflies and everything in between, every stone and rock, flowing stream, and cloud, and tree and plant, and certainly every living creature above that level of life, was filled with god, each one had a spirit, some smaller, others greater, and that it was no slander—as the slaveholders often depicted it—to think of us having descended from the large animals that lived in trees and foraged for food on the ground, and fought, and mated, and nursed and raised their children, and even laughed and played nearly as we still do, when sorrowful occasions pass us by, rather than saying only Africans came down in the world that way, and were not truly human, while the slaveholders, Christians almost all of them—with a few exceptions, such as the Pereiras—were made directly by their god, or passed down in a line from the angels above.
See what this woman held in her hand just before the birth of that child! A stone, marked at some distant moment in the dark or light or invisible past! Where had it come from? Was it witchcraft? How did Old Dou find it? Had Lyaa handed it to her before she went into labor? Or did she find it, when it was forced out of the center of the mad, young girl’s body during childbirth, just before the new girl-child arrived into the light of a Carolina summer morning? The foundation stone, a pebble yet a boulder, mysteriously carried in the body, first mineral of earliest creation, now it saw the light again.
The doctor held this stone up and studied it, before Old Dou asked him for it.
“I’ll keep it for the girl ‘til she’s grown,” the African woman said. “It’s like hearing the true stories of the old country,” she said. “It is a piece of the old country, a piece of the first world on earth…”
Chapter Thirty-nine
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“Abraham Seixas”
The Oaks
Goosecreek
South Carolina
My dearest Miriam:
Though it has been several weeks now since I saw you at the pier, I can still hear the music of the band and I can still picture your charming face before me, far below, down there in the crowd, yet still close to me. Of course I must admit from the moment that we lost sight of the Battery, life began to change for me in many other ways. We sailed down the Arthur Kill and put in at Perth Amboy, where I was overwhelmed with emotion, because there in that town