Chapter Thirteen
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The place called Wassadougou—a green world, and Lilith suffered an obsidian-complected husband, rotund and unsmiling, whose southern features contrasted sharply with her own distinctively northern face—Semitic and almond-eyed, thin-lipped, an elongated jaw. He silently weighed her down so many nights that Lilith felt flattened even when great with child. His other wives chattered like monkeys. His many children treated her with disdain and sometimes outright cruelty. She hated them one and all. Her only friends were her own children, which meant that she lived for years alone in the midst of a crowded family compound, until the children grew old enough for serious conversation and discussion, most of which had to do with their ancestors and how proud they should be because of where they came from. The past was a glorious story, the present was a green and nattering hell. Large, biting, piercing insects assailed her, and in the trees devil creatures chattered and sometimes shat upon those who gathered below. At night she held the holy stone and stroked its inflected surface until her fingers became too tired to move. If only she could see a future better than what she had in mind, living until she died in this prison of green. If only she might have had her mother at her side!
Oh, Zainab, my mother, where do your bones lie? Oh, mother, mother, surely long gone now and never to comfort me again!
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 beneath 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.