Song of Slaves in the Desert by Alan Cheuse Page A

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 sun, 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
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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.
    “A hundred Africans to work in the rice fields,” I said, recalling to myself my reason for being here. “That is a large number of people to order about and care for.”
    “Our father, your uncle,” Jonathan said, “is a bit of genius when it comes to that.”
    And as if he were the director of some opera house back home he flicked the whip at the horse, we