Song of Slaves in the Desert (42 page)

Three days later she emerged, soaked, hungry, exhausted, her legs bedecked with leeches, on the western side of the swamp where she collapsed, as it turned out, about fifty yards from an encampment of a band of renegade slaves who had made a small community in the forest.

A squint-eyed girl a year or so younger than herself and more dark than pale found her in the weeds, took charge of her, and a few days later asked her about her plan.

“Plan, honey?”

Liza shook her head.

“I plan to follow a moon and a star all the way to the end of the west.”

The girl—turned out she was half Cherokee, half African—nodded.

“Half the people here came with that plan.”

“Half stayed, half went?”

“That’s right,” the girl said.

“I’m the half that goes,” Liza said.

“Do you know what’s over that mountain?” the girl asked her, inclining her head toward a nearby ridge.

“Freedom,” Liza said.

The girl shook her head.

“Another mountain,” she said.

“And after that?”

“Another mountain.”

“And after that?” And Liza answered with her, saying “Another mountain” just as the girl intoned it.

In the shade of that first mountain, darkness came early, seeping down from the side of the ridge like fog or slow heavy water held up somehow against gravity. It rained that night, and the cold entered Liza’s bones. If she didn’t know herself better, she would have thought she was aching from the same illness that kept my father from traveling with her. How did that half-Indian woman know how much Liza was shivering on her pallet? It remains a mystery, but before too long she had crawled under the thin blanket made of corn sacks and took Liza in her arms and held her.

“What are you doing?” Liza said.

“Keeping you warm,” the woman said.

“I don’t even know you,” Liza said.

“I am Old Dou,” the woman said, “I am the old Herb Woman. I am—”

“Mother!” Liza said, shivering and then calming herself in the woman’s arms.

They touched lips. They touched noses. Power passed between them through their mouths, nostrils—and eyes.

When she awoke it was as if nothing had happened, except that she was sure she had not dreamed this, though she had. Or had not. Or had.

Moons rose and set, moons waxed and waned. Winter in the west of Carolina grew colder than winter in the east. Sporadically, snow fell.

Liza’s belly grew. Heat from thinking about it kept her mind warm through the cold months. But unless, she told herself, she could keep moving she would never feel completely free.

“Still want to go west?” the Cherokee girl asked her.

“Yes,” Liza said.

“Why?”

“We’re not free here, we’re only lucky.”

***

Her luck held. The next stage of her westward journey began after the winter snow-melt. The half-Indian woman traveled with her. As it turned out, Liza had infected her with the longing for true freedom, not just the freedom to hide in the woods from occasional patrollers and slave-trackers. This pair climbed up over the mountains (the first range of old old American mountains, worn by many millions of years of weather from above and sinking from below). Wild turkeys strutted alongside them as they walked through glens of azaleas and listened to hawks whistling overhead. After the foothills came the flatlands, and then an ascent up limestone pathways to the top of a wildly green plateau, and then down again. It took more than a month of traveling through slave territory to reach the broad banks of the great middle river that divided the continent in half, in the last part of which, helped by friends of runaways, they rolled along hidden beneath carpets in the back of a rickety wagon. (Oh, my mother, carrying me as a seed while, like some heroic figure in a tale out of the
Thousand and One Nights
, hidden beneath those magic carpets!)

Her luck wavered again late on her last afternoon east of the Mississippi. Under the deep cover of several layers of carpets she could not smell the river. But when the wagon halted abruptly, she could hear the voices of men in disagreement, though she could not make out all the words.

“What is it?” her half-Cherokee friend said in a whisper.

“I don’t know,” said Liza.

And then she knew, as someone pulled the top layer of blanket away, and then the next, and she and her companion stared blinking up at a pale blue sky.

“Lookee here,” said the man who pulled the cover aside.

“Two snug bugs,” a companion said.

The women remained silent, not knowing who the men were, or where any of them were—except that the breeze off the river made clear their proximity to freedom.

“Leave them be,” put in another voice, which Liza recognized as that of their driver.

“You leave us be, nigger-stealer,” said the first man, holding up a pistol—Liza saw this by raising herself up off the wagon bed and holding on to the side railing. The driver sidled away down the embankment, as if to wait for what he believed to be the inevitable to end.

“Keep quiet,” said the man with the pistol.

Liza stood up in the wagon bed.

The Cherokee woman stood up next to her, holding a pistol she had apparently kept strapped beneath her baggy clothing.

“I’ll make you pay dearly…”

Liza noticed the woman’s hand shook violently as she tried to keep control of her weapon.

“No, you won’t.”

The man with the pistol walked right up to the side of the wagon.

“Now you just hand that pistol to me and my pal and I will climb aboard and show you a little fun before we return you to your rightful owners.”

He walked around to the back of the wagon and put a hand on the flatbed as if to raise himself up.

Liza snatched the pistol from her companion, took a deep breath and held it, and shot the man between the eyes.

The other man turned and ran.

“You killed him,” the Cherokee woman said.

“I’ve done it once before.”

“You have?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t make it any easier,” Liza said, “except I know that I can do it. He was going to have his way with us, and then sell us. What should I have done?”

Another man came running—but it was their driver.

“Get back down,” he said, motioning toward the flat bed as he jumped into the seat behind the horses. “People heard that shot, they’ll be coming.” He turned and looked back at Liza and smiled. “Or running the other way.” He clucked at the animals, and the wagon began to roll, traveling only about a quarter of a mile along the river before stopping at a small sailboat tied at a dock.

A short man with a white beard waved them aboard.

“Hurry, ladies!” he called to them.

“Goodbye, ladies,” said the wagon driver, rolling away down the pier before they had even boarded the boat.

***

So that was how on a late afternoon that promised cold rain they crossed the rushing though meandering Mississippi, hidden on this short segment of their journey beneath a load of grain in the boat of a friendly anti-slaver. (Oh, my mother, carrying me as seed and then as burgeoning innocent fetus all these many months! Oh, mother, hiding me among grain!) The rain seeped from the sky and soaked everything under its rule, making the great broad water road of tangled currents even wetter than it already was. Her stomach heaved along with the surge of the river. If she had not been burdened by having shot the nasty man on the embankment she might have reveled in this crossing over water, because she knew it would not be the end of things, but rather a beginning. She was dreaming of this when the boatman shouted, and the Cherokee woman grabbed her hand. Liza turned to see a large shadow filled with lights churning alongside them in the near-dark.

The steamboat rushed past.

“Hold on, ladies,” the boat man said, and a few moments later the wake knocked their small boat sidewise.

Ladies! Lady! I am a lady!
Liza exulted to herself.

And then she threw up.

***

A few minutes later my mother peered out into the misty depths of Arkansas darkness. The soles of her feet touched free soil. Why go on?

The young Cherokee woman put that question to her.

“Doesn’t everybody talk about an ocean to the far west of us?”

“Yes,” the half-Indian woman said.

“That’s why I’ll keep going. To see that ocean.”

The woman gave her an odd look.

“That river we just crossed ain’t good enough for you?”

Liza shook her head.

“Somehow that fresh water doesn’t call to me.”

“And the ocean does? Why?”

“It must be the salt sea water,” Liza said.

“I never seen it,” the Cherokee woman said.

“Come with me and you will. The other big ocean is behind us. We can’t go back.”

“No, we can’t,” the Cherokee woman said in such a quiet way that Liza considered that she might be thinking about all this.

Liza started counting on her fingers. One, two, three…

“I have about seven more months,” she said.

“Before the baby comes?”

“That’s right.”

“Seven moons is a long time, but it’s supposed to be a big country out there,” the Cherokee woman said.

“Seven moons to reach the ocean,” Liza said, as though thinking out loud. “We can do it!” Death lay behind her, ahead of her all life!

***

Still, time was running out. In wet weather and dry, with sun, cold, wind, wind and fire, smoke and rain, it took them four months, sometimes riding, sometimes walking, to cross the plains, until eventually those majestic western mountains that seemed to rise higher and higher each day both beckoned and barred their way. One night under a sky stippled with stars she and her companion lay together in each other’s arms (as was their way to keep warm) and talked about what might lay ahead for them.

“I’ve heard about the city,” Liza said. “It sits on hills, surrounded on three sides by water.”

“I want no city,” the Cherokee woman said. “I want woods and streams, with here and there a clearing where I can farm.”

“African people, Indians, everyone is free there,” Liza said.

“You say you heard this,” her companion said. “Where? In a dream?”

“I hear people talk,” Liza said. “I’ve always listened.”

A breeze blew across them and they clung all the more tightly to each other. Warmth of desire trickled through their bodies. It had happened a few times before.

“We are kind of free here,” Liza said, kissing the woman on the ear.

“Free, yes, but you killed that man back in Memphis. His ghost may be following us. So you got to keep on going west as far as you can go.”

“You know it’s worse than that,” Liza said, thinking of the dead patrollers on the dark road near The Oaks as she touched her lips to her friend’s smooth cheek.

As if she could read her mind, the Cherokee woman said, “You mustn’t think about those things, they can hurt the growing child.”

“It’s not a child yet,” Liza said. “But I hope it will become one.” She drew back her hand and turned slightly, so that she could touch her belly.

“It will,” said the Cherokee woman. “Before you know it, it will be here.”

That same desiring warmth spread out through Liza’s belly and up into her chest. It was more than just wanting to love her friend this time, it was a desire for hope, too, and in its own way an unspoken prayer for the success of her journey. More than ever, so close to freedom beyond anything she had ever imagined, she wanted the small things to fall into place and make the large things possible.

“What should we do?” her companion said.

“Keep traveling,” Liza said.

“What about staying here? We could build a clay-house. We could live off the buffalo.”

“West,” Liza said.

“I just don’t know if I can go all the way,” her companion said.

“I want you to—” Liza stopped in mid-speech and drew back from her friend. The other woman sat up, listening to the same thing that had distracted Liza.

A great thundering noise rumbled across the prairie. Up they stood and listened to it again.

“A storm?” Liza said.

“Could be buffalo, I have heard of them traveling and making great sounds.”

Again the noise, like brakes of wagons magnified, shrieking in a hurry to stop. Or cart-drivers shrieking at their animals to start again. But it turned out to be worse than stampeding buffalo. The two women followed the echoing noise and within a few minutes stumbled into an encampment of Christ bellowers, where folks shouted their faith to the heavens.

“Jesus, Lord, I am so lonely!” the preacher called out around a blazing fire, and the dozens gathered around him shouted that same call up to the stars towards which the sparks whirled up on the wind, but fell back, falling short of heaven.

“Jesus, Lord, I am so thirsty!”

“Jesus, Lord, I am so hungry!”

“Jesus, Come down, Lord, and take me in Your arms!”

“So these are Christians?” Liza said. “I have never seen so many of them all together at prayer. They make a louder noise than the Jews, but their music is bland. The Jews are closer to the Africans, I think. I like that. They kept me as a slave, but I like the sound of them.”

Even as they chanted and shouted, these Christian folk stared at the two women, the only dark faces in the crowd. One man in particular, a dried-out string-bean of a devout whose skull seemed to be trying to break through the skin on his head and face, could not take his eyes off Liza. Remembering her father all to well, she knew the look. However this man appeared to be somewhat crippled. He had suffered a terrible back injury in an attempt to cross the mountains a few years before, he told her later over a bucket of stew (and lost his wife to the cold and snow as well).

Once he spoke to her, in his own oddly grotesque way, he reminded my mother of the Charleston doctor who had given her so much help in life, and she took on the job of caring for him (in exchange, of course, for a place in his wagon).

It did not take long before the Cherokee woman began to resent this.