Gloryland (31 page)

I
t was hot and the old man sitting in the sand was pushing flies away with his right hand, trying to shade his eyes with the same hand. His face was lined and brown like a delta, and I wondered if it was rain or tears that did that.

His left hand was behind him in the sand, propping him up as he smiled at the little boy in the river. The river was low, and the boy who was like copper was laughing from the coldness. His little brown legs were almost buried in blue as the water went around and through them. He laughed again. The woman lying behind the old man heard that laugh and moved. She was red and brown like mahogany, if mahogany was soft enough for skin.

She reminded me of Grandma Sara. She was old too, but her hair was long and still black. She had dark oval eyes that were sunk in her face like pools in red sandstone, the kind you see in Arizona. There was something about her that made me see and feel and taste the desert, as if she had very little water in her, and even that was deep down and beyond the reach of roots. But somehow it strengthened her, gave her the grace of a flower that only needs one drop of water to bloom.

I loved her, and I didn’t know her name.

Looking again at the man, I recognized how he held his shoulders and how those shoulders held him, saw how he saw, watched how he looked at the boy and the river and the sky. It was me, the me that was yet to be. It took a while for me to know myself in that place, cause that Elijah was so happy. You could see it all over him, coming off him like steam off your body when you step away from a hot fire into the darkness, clouds just sweat in a hurry to become air.

The air was heavy with joy. I could move my hands through it and taste it on my tongue. I could feel it trickling down my back, and it felt cold and hot at the same time. For him to laugh would have been too much.

I was watching myself watch my grandson who has not been born, my grandson laughing and peering shyly at an old but beautiful woman who I didn’t know, but who was his grandmother.

It was my family, the family I was going to have, and I remember thinking how lucky I would be, how lucky I am right now, that this could be someday. And then I knew I wasn’t alone. Looking back into the leaves and branches of the trees that crowded the river, I saw the faces of my people who had run with me through the curving paths of night in many dreams, dripping with sweat, dripping with the river that runs through us all, and they were watching the little boy and smiling too.

I was eavesdropping on my future, and they were seeing theirs too. My people who had come before, who’d been running through blackness, had eaten and drunk blackness and become blackness, had made it to this day, and they were beyond tears that happiness could be found.

It’s a good day when a past that was forgotten finds a future to be remembered. And they weren’t alone. Behind them, half hidden by leaves and twigs, were all the Africans who had walked out of the Atlantic Ocean in another dream, striding up a silent beach. They were here, and I heard deep within me
Yoruba
and
Fon
and
Adja
and
Bantu
and
Fulani
and
Senoufou
and
Malinke
and
Seminole
and
Fang
and
Punu
and
Kota
and
Mandinka
and
Fula
and
Wolof
and
Jola
and
Hausa
and
Mende
and
Ovimbundu
and
Bakongo
and
Kanuri
and
Tiv
and
Ewe
and
Akan
and
Ga
and
Tsalagi
and
Susu
. All those names sounding though not spoken, words coming through me, making a drum of my body. Trembling from the blows, I still could see a forehead there, an arm over here, a bit of a thigh sticking out way back there, and eyes like stars blazing in the black of the forest that surrounded us, so black even though the sun by the river was yellow and hot.

And we were all breathing hard, taking big gulps of air, as if we had just stopped running after running for days or years or centuries, and now was the first chance to slow our hearts. And that started the sweat shining down over bodies and down to our feet, water or tears flowing. What was coming off of us was real, but where did all that water come from?

There were thousands and thousands of black people, streaming with water like they’d all walked out of the sea, and it was flowing off me too, flowing in trickles and streams and little currents right down to my toes, as if I was standing under a waterfall you couldn’t see. And I realized this was where the river came from, the river in the desert that the boy and the man and the woman were lying next to and swimming in and wet with. All that water was going to them, to the family that was mine and theirs too, all the people behind.

Maybe if you ran and ran for a hundred thousand years, the sweat and tears eventually would come back from the air, from the sky, and flow to you, from you, down you, making creeks, and rivers. Or if you’d been buried at the bottom of a sea you jumped into rather than be a slave, waiting for the moment to be free again, and then you stood, walked out from under the cold, and rose up onto that white beach, maybe the water would never stop coming off you.

The river was flowing from the dead and from the living, making the plants grow tall and the rocks sing loud, cooling the sky round the very hot sun that felt so good, so good that the woman turned into it fully like some kind of flower trying to find the best way to receive the light.

And I knew I would never know thirst again, and knew I would never be alone again, and it went on and on that way until I woke up. I slowly rose on one arm just the way she did, the woman in the dream, the woman who would one day be my wife, and I looked out with my eyes closed, looked for my boy’s boy or my daughter’s boy, I didn’t know which, and I smiled, cause from somewhere close and somewhere far away there came to me his sweet laughter.

I
hobbled Satan so he wouldn’t wander off. Bingham did the same to his mount though he didn’t have to, cause his horse would stay with my mule. We were on a ridge overlooking Tuolumne Meadows. We’d been looking for a sheepherder named Emanuel cause we’d gotten reports of him and his herd of about a thousand sheep illegally grazing in the country south of Soda Springs, but we hadn’t been able to find him.

These sheepherders were mostly Portuguese, Basque, Chilean, Mexican, and Indian. They knew the country better than we did. They followed the drainages of creeks and streams, cause they knew we patrolled the trails. They figured if they avoided moving along the trails they’d avoid the law, but sometimes that ain’t so easy.

Since leaving South Carolina, I’d been accustomed to not taking the easy road. So me and Bingham went cross-country, looking for signs of sheep, and, well, it’s not an easy thing to hide the traces of hundreds of sheep. We just looked for country that looked eaten, and when we found it way up in Lyell Canyon, we found the sheep. We also found a Mexican named Emanuel.

We could understand each other fairly well cause I’d picked up some Spanish in the Philippines. Besides, there really wasn’t much to say. He knew what he’d been doing, and he knew our opinion on the matter. I remember him saying in frustration,
No es facil a trabajar en estas montañas, porque los soldades negros!
over and over again, jabbing his finger at me like a knife.
No es facil a vivir o trabajar en Yosemite! No me gusto!
And then in a whisper he said over and over,
Ah, mi familia! No hay nada, no hay nada!

He was sitting on a small granite boulder with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth and talking more to himself than to us. He knew what we were going to do, which is why he was so upset.

The policy, started by an officer years ago, was to take any herder found illegally grazing sheep in the high country, escort him down to the western park boundary, and then take the sheep over the eastern park boundary along the crest of the Sierra. In other words, I had to take Mr. Emanuel here down into the foothills on the west side of the Sierra, while Bingham and some men stationed at the post in Tuolumne would march his sheep over the crest to the east side, outside the park.

By the time Mr. Emanuel could get back up here to look for his sheep, it would be too late. They’d be scattered far and wide by then, and the season would be over.

This policy worked really well, but it didn’t say anything bout a man trying to make it on his own. It didn’t say anything bout some of the sheepherders being darker than some of my men, and it didn’t say anything bout how these herders weren’t allowed to graze their stock down in the Central Valley on account of them being Mexican or Indian or Basque, and not white. That’s why Emanuel was up on the rocky edge of sky.