Song of Slaves in the Desert Page 8

  Her only comfort? Wata, her oldest daughter, dark about the face, pale in her back and belly and legs. Husbands did the naming, and the dark man called this child after a local goddess. The girl grew into a womanhood charged with passion and invention, becoming skilled at weaving, a family art, it seemed, and the cultivation of herbs, as well as caring for her younger sisters even as her mother grew more and more uninterested in the task. (She sat inside their house made of tree and grass for more and more hours as the years went by, talking to her own mother whom she saw sitting in a corner of the enclosure and beyond that claiming that she was sending prayers to God). Lilith appeared to be shrinking, if not fading away all together. She certainly had no standing with Wata’s father, and among his wives she was barely recognized. Wata, lighter than many of her siblings, assumed a larger and larger role among the children—there were some sixteen or seventeen of them, from all the wives—and eventually she took a place among the wives themselves. This had its dangers, and sure enough, one night after the moon set and the entire forest seemed to have sunk into a deep and dreamless sleep Wata heard a rustling just outside the entrance. Fearing an animal, she sat up on the pallet where a moment before she had been lost in some nameless vision that came along when she had closed her eyes.

  And who was this? Some forest demon?

  Wata caught a glimpse of a woman peering down at her, and then the woman disappeared.

  She thought she was dreaming—perhaps she was—so she lay back and closed her eyes.

  At dawn she rose and went to visit her mother, whom she found still asleep. But not asleep!

  She did not breathe! Oh, Lilith, mother, mama, gone, gone gone!

  It took Wata months to get over the initial shock of her mother’s death. She longed to see her again, in fact, now and then becoming convinced that Lilith had just peeked at her from behind a tree, and when a thought came to her on some matter about which her mother had taught her she could hear Lilith say the very words she was thinking. Fetch water before sunrise while it is still cool. Or, look before you step to keep from offending a snake.

  She hoped for a miracle, she hoped she might find another mother. Who knows what lay outside her vision? You could not walk a forest path without seeing demons or go to bed at night without worrying about ghosts. She had, in fact, overheard the prayers of her father’s other wives too often not to know words that she might say in protection. The god her mother prayed to, and her mother’s parents before that, a man’s god, did not have much power here in the deep forest. Where she lived now only the local spirits held sway, and on a night such as this, when she awoke with an instant flash of fear, she could not help but turn to them, to the dark mother whose figure arched over all when Wata tried to imagine her, in her body of shadows and smoke, a cloud above the hut, a wave of air shimmering in sunlight. Wata! Yes, she thought of herself now in that way, named after a goddess, and trying to live according to how the goddess might want her to live.

  And what would the goddess do with the creature who appeared next to her just now in the middle of another of those nights of half sleep, half waking dream, her mother in her thoughts both in darkness and in light?

  “Wata…”

  Here was the chief’s oldest boy by his second wife, and he smelled of bitter oil and some not so sweet brew he must have been drinking.

  “Go away, you stupid boy,” Wata said.

  The boy threw himself down next to her and said, “I am not so stupid for choosing you, am I?”

  “Choosing me? What is your little game?” Wata said. “Now, shoo! Shoo! Go back to your mother, little boy!”

  Instead, he grabbed her wrist.

  “And who are you to order me around? I am my mother’s son, also, and my father is your master.”

  “What do you want with me? It is the middle of the night. I was asleep, I was dreaming.”

  “What were you dreaming?”

  “I do not remember.”

  “Try to remember. Tell me.”

  “Are you a healing man? Did I come to you and say that I had a bad dream?”

  He sat down next to her, as still as could be, which was not entirely still, because, after all, he was a boy.

  “Tell me your dream, and I will let you go.”

  “Am I your prisoner that you can let me go?”

  “Tell me your dream.”

  “And then you will let me go?”

  The boy laughed.

  “Sly you are, very sly.”

  “A woman has to be,” Wata said.

  “Yes, yes, especially a woman who belongs to my father and who will one day belong to me.”

  “You will never own me,” Wata said. “No one will ever own me. I belong to my mother only, and her mother before her.”

  “What?” The boy held up his hands in mock-amazement. Outside in the forest a wild thing howled, a monkey or a cat feeling the claws of another beast rake along its back or side or a small animal recognizing that it was about to be devoured by a beast larger than itself.

  Wata!

  A voice cried in her ear. That of the small beast? She didn’t know.

  Wata!

  Could the boy have been speaking? He sank to his knees and then lowered himself on top of her.

  “Go away,” she said, squirming beneath him.

  He didn’t pay attention to her voice, only to her body.

  Wata!

  Before she knew he had pried open her legs and stupidly probed away at her.

  “Stop!”

  “Hush,” he said, suddenly half out of breath.

  “Stop it now!”

  He kept on probing, stabbing.

  She raised her fists as if to strike him—hard—but he grabbed her by the wrists and pushed himself into her at the cost of tearing pain at her center.

  Wata!

  A net fell out of heaven, through the roof of the house, and covered her in a spidery essence of slim silver-coated ropes as the music of small fingered instruments tinkled in her ears. Voices began to sing. A hot soupy liquid replaced her blood and all she could do was open her eyes and see through the dark. Dark eyes stared back at her, unblinking.

  Later that year she bore her half-brother’s child.

  Who was a good girl—another girl! whom Wata named Lyaa, after the First Woman of this green place, this girl who was as dark as a black river on a night without a moon. Some shades bleach out. Lyaa turned even darker, and, as it happened, Yemaya the goddess known by many other names, who, in addition to reigning above the great waters and rivers, presided over these green parts of the continent, approved. Lurking above the forest as she always did, sometimes in the form of sunlight, sometimes in the form of tiny droplets of moisture, she surveyed her domain, watching, listening always, for creatures who turned to her for assistance. In this way she showed herself forth in quite different fashion from the god who ruled the desert lands to the north, a deity who rather than reveal himself appeared to encourage everything among his followers that would keep him hidden. None of that for Yemaya! She was not shy or, for whatever reason, withholding.

  One dark night, as dark a night as the night of Lyaa’s conception, she appeared to Wata, and told her how glad she was that Wata had given the world this child. Far down the trail, she told Wata—of course, to Wata this encounter with the goddess seemed like a meeting in a dream—I will look after her. This girl will ache and she will dance and she will deliver a child whose children’s children’s child, or thereabouts, I am not counting, but merely trying to look ahead through the wavery dark and smoky curtain that keeps the future from our eyes, will free us all from the prison of our days. That is, if my plan runs true, and sometimes even the plans of the gods can go awry.

  Wata awoke from that dream coated in sweat, and to the daughter to whom she eventually revealed this prophecy she appeared never to have quite recovered. As time in the forest went by, Wata grew so frail as to give the appearance of being already dead, her body an ashen gray benea
th the usual sandy lightness of her skin.

  In dreams along the route of the years Yemaya appeared to her again, stretching out her long dark arms to her and inviting her in.

  Come to me, darling girl, she said. Come to me. Dance in my arms. Whirl about my feet when I am flying. When he was not much older than you, his own long arms covered with bramble cuts and the pocking of wood shards, my own son came to me in the night and had his way with me. I knew your mother’s sorrow, I knew her shame, I knew the bitter blood that flowed in her veins. From where I live up here in the treetops I descend as dew and sometimes as river water. And tears. And spit. And urine. And the monthly blood. Poor men, they never suffer the flow. I ask them to cut their arms and bleed on my behalf, showing their loyalty. Walk with me and I will walk with you. You will have glory, rather than shame, and your daughter, named after the First Woman, will show forth as well.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ________________________

  First Woman

  Days and nights in the forest. Green sun, green dark, green moon, green air. Months and years. Wata and the helpful Yemaya, always present at night in her dreams to give her good cheer, raised this child, Lyaa, well. The father never did more than now and then glance at the girl. Wata had hoped that the beauty of the child and the power of its name would keep him by her side. The master’s other wives pitched in, even as his own mother did her part to help with the girl’s upbringing. To everyone—except, apparently, the father—this was a special child and a woman to whom a link, more than just her name, stretched back in time all the way to the mother of them all.

  Yemaya showed Wata that woman, after whom Lyaa was named, one night in a dream—

  I can tell you what happened before you came to the forest, and I can push you toward the future, but I cannot show you the future, because so many people must make choices to water its time, yes, future time, like a flower, needs watering from the actions of all those alive in the time before it occurred.

  This was the dream:

  ***

  Born on the side of a forest volcano she lived in the trees, though at a tender age she fell from a low branch and found herself standing upright on the forest floor. Putting one broad foot after another she now found herself moving forward. A handsome fellow who lived not far above chose to drop down out of the branches and take up the stroll with her.

  This is good, he made clear to her that he saw things this way.

  She touched his thigh, his chest, and turned her head aside to laugh, so full was her she-heart.

  He touched her breast, her throat, his own chest full of longing and desire.

  Pluck at us! Pick here, pick there! Tickle us! We laugh, oh, yes.

  They told each other stories, using gesture and sound. In the trees, wide-eyed and wondering about everything around them the most pleasure came from living close to each other. Gradually it became clear that the main dangers in life, the cats that stalked them and the snakes that when disturbed would strike and bite, had only their senses of smell and movement. Lyaa and her lover-neighbor used these senses they learned to good effect by watching the animals but also found themselves in the dream world in which the goddess taught them lessons about the waking world. Did the big cats dream also? Did the snakes? Could there be a goddess of cats and snakes?

  That handsome fellow shook his head.

  Lyaa touched him on the throat.

  She agreed.

  Lo and behold, they discovered one morning, early, when the air smelled of smoke, and the birds remained silent, that they each had slept with the same dream.

  Yes, yes, yes, Lyaa showed him the picture in her mind and he looked and tilted his head as if he were in thought. And she could see the picture in his mind, yes, yes, she could.

  This land was once no-land, lying on the bottom of a bitter salt-sea, no trees, let alone forests, only curling undersea shrubs, among which lived large flat-bottomed fish with eyes at the end of long tentacles, if they had eyes at all. Sea-snakes as long as the line of the horizon shimmied here and there on the pebbly floor of the sea while sharks as large as tall trees roamed with impunity, and now and then a broad-beamed swimmer—whales?—floated past, bigger than entire hillsides.

  Yemaya, splashing silently with her tail, drifted in and among these creatures, hand in hand with her brother Okolun.

  At that time the sea tasted of sulfur and sweet oxygen, a flavor like berries and tart stones, or the rank stink of a kiss when the other body has not yet digested the flesh of the other he has eaten.

  Shssssssss…Ay!

  Whale ate shark ate snake ate proto-flounder, all digesting all, and the least of the fish merely working its jaws as it itself became another’s meal, with a watery burp!

  Okolun thought this was enormously comical.

  He laughed and laughed, and his belly grew as he did so, and the noiseless sound of his laughter grew ten-fold and finally a thousand-fold—so it increased, and the sea-floor jiggled and tilted. He pointed to the comedy of meal-time and danced on the buckling ocean floor. Yemaya cocked her head at him and then took him by the hand.

  “You’ve done it now,” she said. “There are powers here as great as yours, I feel them, though I don’t know what to call them or where they live. Inside the core of our world, where the fires boil and bubble and flow?”

  She leaned over and gave him a more-than-sisterly kiss on the mouth.

  Oh, the force below took the moment to burst open before them!

  Stand back! Steam and undersea fire upshot straight to the surface and kept on going, even less deterred by air than it was by water.

  Sister and brother looked at each other and instantly understood. Their father, a god beyond description, had decided to play some games in the molten sea beneath the salt-sea. Who could not bow to his power?

  Some time later—a million years?—the sister and brother marveled at the mountain the father force had created, a tower that stooped above a green and all-spreading forest. So beautiful! Another couple of hundreds of thousand years went by—where was Yemaya during all this time? Amusing herself, swimming out to other planets to search for creatures who might accept her as their deity, but aside from some heat-worms who lived in the fumes beneath the surface of the ice on one of the moons of Jupiter, finding nothing. She accepted the fealty of the Ionian worms and returned to earth with a feeling of emptiness.

  She arrived in this part of Africa, her old haunt, just as her father had decided to play around again with melted rocks and the earth’s storehouse of steam. Up blew a rain of rocks and ash, lava poured down the lip of the hot mountain like stew from a tipped pot, and she could see from afar the first couple, first woman, first man, first child, walking quickly and steadily across the plain to escape the erupting mass, leaving footprints behind. It was the first time this woman or any of her family or descendants had caught her attention. It would not be the last.

  Ay, Yemaya, she of the thousand eyes, who watched them from the stars and from just above the treetops. Yemaya! Who held out a thousand arms to you if you were falling, and caught you in a thousand hands if it happened that you did fall. Yemaya! She in the intricate rhythms of the drums, in the twisted braids of sound in song, in the multitude of birdcalls and insect choruses throughout the forest.

  ***

  Wata fingered the marked stone, now and then recalling that she had heard of a time when a bodiless god lived everywhere above and helped you to make even feeble claims on the world come to life. But by now this had faded, and she taught her daughter Lyaa to recognize who it was who made her and to whom her fate was tied. Yemaya! She of the moisture and she of the air! Everything belonged to her, all beings, all plants, all light, all particles, everything we found, cooked, ate, spit, shat, softened, soothed, sleep, waking, noise, silence, liquid blood within us, all liquid running in streams and in the river to the north, rain from the sky, all blood we released when the moon called, ah, Yemaya! Goodness of the moon, blessing of the s
un, of whom she was both the chief and the concubine! The old sky god of the north had faded away and now only Yemaya reigned in her heart.

  She asked one of the artisans in the village to bind the marked stone in a small pouch of animal skin and one morning she presented this to her daughter.

  Oh, Lyaa, how long has it been since your namesake, the First Woman, erupted from the center of the earth? How long has it been since you yourself were born in fire? Yemaya watching over you, Yemaya making you strong! You planted your feet on the ground and made your path, leaving behind footprints for us all to follow. You walked the earth, you walked upon the waters, you walked in air, you walked in light, you walked in dark! You walked away from the fiery cone spewing ash and fire, you walked from mountain to desert, you made children whose names are lost to us, and they begat more who begat more who begat more. The volcano subsided, their lives blossomed, and then fell away like old leaves. More children took their places, one of them who married a potter. That one reminded Yemaya closely of you. Tall, as beautiful as a tree, as beautiful as lava stone, within you all blood begins to flow, tugged at by the moon, watered by hot rains and cold, and in the world through which we walk, the air we sing in—Yemaya, Yemaya!—everything is liquid, no solid is anything, because life itself flows to us and from us, toward us and away from us, we can only splash and drink and spit and flow for a short while that we have in this chattering green palace of a world.

  Yet can she save you from torment in this world while you are here? That remains to be seen.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ________________________

  The Tour

  As we rode along my mind flickered back to home, and I wondered about what the city was like at this moment—decidedly cooler, of that I was sure—caught in its middle of the week hustle and fervor, my father at his desk, poor Marzy worrying about dinner, my Miriam, going about her day with her own family, perhaps thinking now and then about me. A surge of longing to be with her rolled through me, and I stared up at the leafy ceiling of the track along which we slowly trundled, wishing I could be there with her now instead of here, with these strangers, even if they were family.