Free Song of Slaves in the Desert by Alan Cheuse Page B

cousin said, “though with all this talk about disease, you will be quite sick of all of us long before the time comes for you to depart.”
    “I doubt that,” I said, but then what did I know at the time?
    ***
    It was growing late, but there remained a part of the city my cousins wanted me to see, the lovely turns of road where the town met the ocean, and we had one more errand to run, so we headed to what he called The Battery. There we stopped the carriage and admired the pretty houses (with their white columns and plentiful flowering trees and vines, quite different from our staid northern brick facades) and gazed awhile at the ocean. Fort Sumter lay a mile or two offshore, like a man-made shoal, and the sun showed silver off the placid sea. Few creatures moved around us, and the heat lay heavy on everything, settling in our lungs. I could imagine that even the ocean had stopped for a while beneath this weight of sun, the ceaseless waverings of its surface and perhaps even its deeper current flows. I could imagine that standing here over and again, time itself might seem to have a stop.
    “But we must go now,” my cousin said, speaking as if to contradict me and rousing me from my overheated reverie. “Liza is waiting.”
    And so we headed away from the sea, rolling back to the pier where in the small enclosed market I had first seen the auction of dark human beings. There a woman emerged to meet us, carrying baskets in each hand, a bright turban atop her head, her face a splendor of mahogany cheek bones and bright green eyes and a straight nose that made her look more Hebraic than African.
    The sight of her made me shiver in the heat.
    Rebecca smiled as the slave girl approached. “Cousin, she is my prize.”
    I shut my eyes tight and then opened them to watch the woman climb aboard the carriage onto the driver’s bench, on which sat the lean young dark man who had taken my bag.
    At such close quarters, the sight of her shut my throat.

Chapter Eleven
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Tambacounda
    The further west they traveled, the worse things became. Unlike most of the Arab men, these slavers, mostly dark-skinned ruffians, some with decorative scars on faces and foreheads and some with filed teeth, treated them roughly and without respect. They touched, they pinched, they pulled, and then laughed and spat. Brutes, infidels who never stopped to pray, they worried her. They harried everyone to move along during the day, and at night around the fires, as if picking a piece of roasted meat from a tray, they would pluck a woman from the group and carry her off into the dark.
    Twice they took Zainab, and each time she prayed and resisted, but to no avail. The pain settled into her as if an exquisite punishment from God. Bruised in the flesh and chilled in her blood she returned to her family at the fire, refusing to speak, and taking the smallest child in her arms in the hopes of finding some warmth to live for—almost to no avail. Her soul felt as though she had dropped it into a deep well and left it to drown.
    Lilith, her middle daughter, a willowy tan-complected girl with an even disposition, tried to calm her.
    “Mama,” she said, “one day our father will find us and take his revenge on these awful men.”
    Zainab shuddered, with a chill even more cutting than the remorse that already cooled her blood—that a child of hers would find it necessary to say such things! It was a horror, a horror! And yet things might have been worse, because she could not know what we know, that every hour and every day and month and year brought them closer and closer—the children’s children, at least, because she herself would not live to see it—to their terrifying passage over nearly limitless water.
    More days of rough travel, the land becoming hilly and the trail turning away from the river, to climb and climb in the direction of the retreating sun. For the first time Zainab felt the chill of nights at a high elevation, and