Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  Sailors descended the ship’s stairs, using whip-handles to goad the people onto the deck. Yes, warm breezes carried the scent of flowers and land lay no more than a body’s length away. Land—but not homeland. The sky above seemed a different shade of blue. Not home, not home! Women bleated like sacrificial lambs while men muttered to other men. The sound grew louder, like the rumbling of running animals on a plain. Sailors, and rough men who boarded from the shore, rushed among them, waving stanchions and threatening to beat them down. Slowly the muttering subsided as the news dawned on them that they were further from home than ever before.

  Lyaa could hardly stand as she moved along with the herd of people to descend the gangplank. Seeing someone crumple and fall into the water, she held tightly to the rope railing, assembling with the others on the wooden pier. Flowers—and in the distance trees she had not seen before, with broad leaves, flowering. She breathed deeply, desperate to rid her nostrils of the awful stench of the ship. The sun came up behind her. Her legs trembled so they could scarcely hold her. How many days and nights? How many storms? How many bodies?

  Shouts! Thunder of voices!

  Pale-skinned men roughly dressed now herded them into a fenced-in place near the water and others came carrying buckets and doused them with cold water, again and again. A white-haired pale-skin wearing a mask over his eyes walked among them, daubing at his nose with a cloth. Now and then he pointed to a person, sometimes a man, but mostly women, and others came to lead them from the compound.

  Lyaa enjoyed the dousing, and hoped for more. To rid herself of the stink of their long voyage was the only thing that she truly wished for, at least for the moment. And food! Yes, yes! When more pale-skins carried in barrels of soup and baskets piled with bread she elbowed her way past the frailer captives to lower herself to her knees and feast on the thin mixture.

  Some people pulled themselves away from the barrels and collapsed onto the pier. Others ate, and then vomited, and ate again. And vomited. She herself ate until her belly ached, and then she paused for a breath or two, and ate again. More pale-skins pushed their way into the crowded pen, shouting in that language Lyaa could not understand.

  What did it matter to her? At any moment she could shake loose these leg-manacles and fly out of the compound, soaring high above whatever land this new place happened to be. Nothing else mattered to her. Her freedom lay just outside the reach of her hand, just beyond the next cloud. She could fly away, and so she decided that she would soon make her departure.

  At the edge of the fence she stared out at the countryside, and the bright off-white sky where beneath the ocean surged, she knew, she knew. Standing on tiptoe she thrust her mind into the air. As she was about to leap from the ground vicious cramps doubled her over and she sank to her knees, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting over herself, over the ground.

  A large dousing of water shocked her awake. She lay on the ground, in the middle of a long row of bodies. Without the sun holding high in the sky she would have thought she had been shot back to the hold of the ship. People moaned, retched, tried to roll over on their bellies, but found themselves constricted by the manacles and chains. Even as she tried to lie still the wrenching and tugging along the line pulled her this way and that.

  Eventually calm settled over them and the tall pale-skinned man with the eye-mask walked among them, with two short and ugly men following.

  The tall man—he seemed older than the others—pointed and said some words, and the ugly men unlocked manacles and detached people from the line, some of them going in one place off to the side, some to another as the tall man directed. Some people shouted, others struggled. The two uglies, using stanchions, beat down the ones who tried to resist and let them lie where they fell. When the tall man came to Lyaa he paused, and reached down to touch a finger to her cheek and then to her belly. Ah, she decided, a medicine man! And yes, he pointed, said more words, and the two uglies unlocked her and led her off to one side, with the group of people who appeared to be slightly fatter and more steady than the other group.

  A thick-armed man as black as the sky without a moon said to his companions in this group that he understood what the pale-skins had said.

  “Yes? Yes?” People clamored to hear. “How do you understand them?”

  “On the ship, I listened, I learned,” he said.

  “And what do you know now?”

  “We are good,” he said. “They mean we are going to live, we are healthy as can be after the ship.”

  “I am sick,” Lyaa said.

  The man clucked at her.

  “You are not sick. I heard what he said. You are carrying a child. They like that.”

  “I am carrying a child?”

  “You did not know?”

  “I did not.”

  “He said it was true.”

  “Who said it?”

  “The shaman, the tall one.”

  Lyaa smiled to herself, and touched her belly lightly with her fingers.

  “This is not just a child,” she said.

  The old man gave her an inquiring look.

  “What else could it be?” he said.

  “The goddess,” she said. “My mother was, and her mother before her, and before all of them they were, and this new one, she will be, too.”

  The old man paused, as if he were considering something to say, and what a luxury that was, after all the horrors of the journey they had endured. But a pale-skin holding a stick pointed it at him and beckoned for him to follow, and he left Lyaa there, pondering her new condition.

  At least, though confused, she remained alive. Over the next days and weeks as she walked about the small pen where the pale-skins had put them, walls all around but the sun shining over head and plenty of birds flying, she felt in her heart that she had, that all of them had, been abandoned. Once she might have thought of herself as one of those birds about to fly, but now, weighed down with grief and homesickness and the literal weight of her growing belly, she heard the birds laugh at her, stupid, earthbound girl. But the child she was carrying? She had no doubts. It was not another creature to be bought and sold—it would be able to fly.

  During the early morning, nearly every day of her stay in this pen, she could hear the moans and shrieks as the uglies came to cart away the sick and dying, while Lyaa and her group stayed strong. She knew for a fact—the tall dark man reported it to them—that the pale-skins gave them more food than the sickly ones. And after a few days the sickly ones would sink even further into their illnesses, and the uglies would come to remove them from the pen.

  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

  ________________________

  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

  ________________________

  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 Africans.”

  I did not know what to say, speaking about slaves.

  “They seem a healthy bunch,” I finally let out, my thoughts called back to Liza in my doorway earlier that morning.

  “Either them or their parents tested by the passage and by nearly a month in the Pest House,” my cousin said. “And looked after by the doctor.”

  “The Pest House?” I said.

  “The quarantine that separates the living from the dead.”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” Rebecca said. “I hate it when you sink so low as to speak in that manner.”

  “It’s the truth,” my cousin said to his wife. “Don’t you like to know the truth?”

  “Not that truth,” she said, and turned her face away from husband. “Do you know what is the truth? Can you look the truth in the eye? You may not want to.”

  “Children,” my uncle said. We all hushed up, and Rebecca began to hum a tune.

  The horse pushed along. Soon country yielded to city and within what seemed like a few minutes we turned the corner at Coming Street and pulled up before the same trim stone building I had seen on my little tour upon arrival.

  We stepped down and a smiling black man took charge of the carriage while we climbed the steps, my uncle and aunt and cousins greeting others who entered along with us.

  Here something strange began. At home, where my father and I attended synagogue together on the Sabbath—a custom honored more in the breach than in practice after my mother died—I took certain things for granted: such as prayers in Hebrew from a thick old-perfumed book, which I had not made much of an effort to learn, even though prodded by my tutor Halevi; and the separation of the sexes, the women up in the balcony, the men below; and the cantor singing whiny and sinuous melodies that echoed of the exotic East. Here I was handed a slim pamphlet that smelled more of new ink than old hands as my uncle, after easing his bulk onto one of the benches to the rear of the hall, bade us all sit together, wife and daughter-in-law and son and nephew alike. (I had the mixed pleasure of being squeezed in between Rebecca and Abraham.)

  The choir commenced to sing a prayer in English, with the same melody as Rebecca had hummed over the noise of the carriage on our way to town. The congregation sang, muttered, mumbled, chanted, swallowed the words.

  Next a trim man in a dark suit mounted the dais and said a prayer about harmony and peace.

  I raised my chin in a question and Rebecca said to me in a whisper, “The Officiating Minister.”

  “No rabbi?” I whispered back.

  “We are Reformed, and newly so,” said Rebecca.

  I gave a shrug as a hymn in Hebrew rang through the hall, and then a version in English. Instead of following the words in the pamphlet, I gazed around the place, enjoying the morning light that flowed in from the high stained glass windows. I took note of white-haired men and women in beautiful lace shawls, fidgeting children, and some girls and fellows my age. There was one girl, in fact, who turned her dark eyes toward me as I glanced at her and then we both looked away. When I looked back, she was staring at the stained glass window, as if the study of it might yield some fascinating information.

  “Ah,” Rebecca said in a whisper.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “What?” Abraham said.

  “Someone for you?” Rebecca said.

  “For me?” I said.

  “Her name is Anna,” she said. “She is my second cousin.”

  “Who is?” I said.

  “You know exactly whom I am talking about.” And despite the seriousness of the service and the music, she puckered her lips and laughed at me through them.

  I looked down at the pamphlet, turned pages and then looked at the front again at the Articles of Faith of Reformed Society of Israelites, giving myself a way to forget my immediate embarrassment. Ten of them! I didn’t know that I could articulate more than one. But here I read these carefully while the service continued on around me, as though I needed nothing more than these first articles to survive in the moment.

  I. I believe with a perfect faith, that God Almighty (blessed be his name!) is the Creator and Governor of all creation; and that he alone has made, does make, and will make all things.

  II. I believe with a perfect faith, that the Creator (blessed be his name!) is the only ONE IN UNITY; to which there is no resemblance; that He alone has been, is, and will be God.

  III. I believe with a perfect faith, that the Creator (blessed be his name!) is not corporeal, nor to be comprehended by any understanding capable of comprehending only what is corporeal; and that there is nothing like him in the universe…

  I looked up and caught that girl looking over at me, and I looked back at the pamphlet while all around rose the sound of voices gathered in prayer.

  IV. I believe with a perfect faith, that the Creator (blessed be his name!) is the only true object of adoration, and that no other being whatsoever ought to be worshipped…

  One more article, I said to myself, and I’ll look at her again.

  Which I did.

  Our eyes met and she might have smiled as I looked quickly away.

  V. I believe with a perfect faith, that the laws of God, as delivered by Moses in the ten commandments, are the only true foundations of piety towards the Almighty and o
f morality among men…

  One more, I told myself. But then I looked up again.

  “I saw you,” Rebecca said again in a whisper.

  I didn’t dare look at the girl again, and so turned back to my reading. Voices rose around me, louder now.

  Hear O Israel,

  The Lord our God,

  The Lord is One…

  Yes, well, now this was familiar, and as the prayers rolled on I longed heartily to be back in my old room, with the airs of Marzy’s cooking drifting up the stairwell and Father humming while he clenched his pipe in his teeth and outside my window a New York robin might be singing to announce that spring was near.

  I believe with a perfect faith…oh, what did I believe, outside of these memories that drew up such desire in me? What perfect faith did I possess that I could listen with perfect attention as the Officiating Minister read from the Torah—

  “Now after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel…”

  I believed…I believed…that I was hungry, and that that I was tired of all this talk about Africans in the family’s possession, and I hoped to complete this family chore down here as quickly as I could so that I could return to Manhattan and leave for my tour and then return a year later to join my father in his business and to pay a visit to dear Miriam’s house and speak to her father and ask for her hand in marriage, and enjoy our engagement and then the wedding, in the synagogue, with flowers and music and a honeymoon out on Long Island in the warm season, where birds sang and the gentle waves of the Sound lapped at the shoreline and we were free of all of life’s calls and demands, at least for a time.