Chapter Seventy
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Ever since the last encounter with her father her thoughts and feelings had become terribly confused, she noticed that her appetite waxed and waned, and some mornings before sunrise she felt a longing to sleep perhaps forever and on other mornings long before the moon had set she jumped up from her pallet, ready for the day that was still hours away.
Now and then Isaac came by to comfort her, especially after sundown when he could decide what he wanted to do on his own.
“What he do to you, Liza? What he do?”
His questions became more than insistent, they reverberated in her mind and made her already wandering imaginings worse than confused.
Isaac meanwhile swung pendulum-like between resignation and rage. And on one particular visit not long after the awful event, he swung further than ever before.
“I kill him,” he said, raising his arms as if grasping a declaration of his deed to come.
And Liza held him in her arms and said she did not want that.
“He is my father,” she said.
“I will cut him,” Isaac said. “I will drag him behind my horse.”
“He is my father. What do we do? What do I do? What do you do? I don’t know what to do!”
Isaac suddenly shoved her aside.
“I will kill him!” he shouted, standing tall in his rage.
“And they will tear you apart,” Liza said.
“Ah, ah, ah, ah!”
The boy charged the wall of the cabin and began banging his head against it.
“Stop!” Liza shouted at him. “Stop now!”
Isaac pulled away from the wall for a moment, blood having sprung from his skull.
“The man owns me, I am his creature, I am his animal! They owned my mama, they owned my papa!”
With a dramatic flourish, he turned back to the wall and resumed banging his skull against it, until exhausted and bloody about the face and neck he stumbled backward and then, regaining his balance, rushed out the door.
“Isaac!”
Liza followed him, terrified that he would race up to the big house and commit mayhem on her father. But he ran directly toward the rice ponds and from there, as far as she could see in the early morning light, into the woods beyond.
Slowly she returned in the direction of the cabins, but when she had almost reached her own, where she and dear Old Dou—long gone, gone now!—had lived through her childhood, she stopped, and here, one might say, at this point, where she felt helpless, hopeless, and on the verge of the sort of illness that had driven Isaac to such useless rage, the goddess touched her gently on the shoulder, and gave her a gentle push in the direction of a certain cabin other than her own. She stumbled toward it, in a daze, in a dream.
“Back again?”
The old witch woman greeted her at the door, in apron and heavy gown, as though she already knew she was coming and had dressed for a visitor. She took one look at the girl and told her to lie down. The cabin smelled of old sweat and dried blood, of animal stink, and the reek of certain natural compounds that must have come from the rice-ponds.
“Look at this,” the old woman said as she held up a ball of herb and bone, in fact, twirled it, over Liza’s head.
Liza stared at the thing, feeling her breath coming hard even as she lay back without exertion. For a moment she thought Old Dou had returned to help her, to save her. How she wished she could return to her infancy, when the old woman tended to her, hugged her to her great blooming chest. It was something she either remembered, or dreamed, that feeling of early life safe beyond the bonds of slavery, and she couldn’t say which.
“Breathe deeply,” the old woman said.
Liza willed herself back into the present moment. She felt her breath lapping in her lungs like waves from far offshore. Dots and wavering lines danced before her eyes. She heard the woman strike a match, and the phosphorous odor rose into her nose with a blooming stench that nearly pushed her head back against the wall.
She felt as though she had passed into another world, and the flesh on her neck rippled as the old woman took her hand, as if to keep her from floating away.
“Do you feel the change?” the old woman asked her.
“What change is that, mother?” Liza said.
“You know, I know, we all know. Do you feel it?”
“In my…?”
“Of course, this is what I talk about.”
Liza hesitated, then told her the truth.
“I’m afraid.”
“Because of it.”
“Yes.”
“We can do something. No creature from that wanton bastard ever wants to be born, not now, not in the future.”
“I did not choose it,” Liza said. “I did not choose to be born.”
“None of us do, my child. Whether we come into slavery or freedom, we do not choose it.”
“What can we do, Mother?”
She reached into the pocket of her apron and came up with a single grain of rice.
“Put this on your tongue, dear,” she said.
Liza, without hesitating, took the tiny offering and placed it on her tongue.
“Now you go,” the old woman said.
Liza swallowed, thinking to herself, this old woman, like Old Dou, is she making health or making wisdom, or are these one and the same? And even as she was thinking this, she felt her body, which moments seemed as though it might float away, taking on weight, great weight, and with only the lightest touch of the old woman at her shoulder, she lay down on the floor of the cabin and closed her eyes.
And sank beneath the floor, through the sandy soil beneath, and down through the sand into the tunnels of sea-water that washed in with the tide not all that far from where the cabins and plantation stood. She knew, she knew, it was a dream, but it seemed so real, or was the dream the real thing and all else that seemed so real, the pain and sorrow of her life so far, and all the travail that brought her to be born here after the long journey from Africa, was that the dream?
Down into the waters beneath the waters, where handsome Okolun suddenly leered at her through the bubbling current and reached out his hand to her, and she grabbed it, clenched it tightly—or did matters somehow turn around and he clenched her hand?—and sailed behind him as he rushed through the water with the powerful churning of a shark.
She took a wild ride, water streaming down her throat and curlicuing through her body and pushing from her anus, propelling her forward with the velocity of the god who rushed alongside.
“Daughter?” the god spoke in her mind even as he sailed, with an oddly calm expression on his face, lips closed, eyes straight ahead.
“Yes, Father?”
“I am your real father, yes.”
“Yes, you are.”
“That man who attacked your mother and now has attacked you, what is he? A belch in the belly of a god with a sense of humor. Can you laugh about it, is the question?”
“All these questions.”
“But can you, can you laugh? I went all the way home to Africa and have only just skipped back to see you, to see if you can laugh.” The god Himself giggled and made bubbles in the water. “Oh, I do hop and skip all about the world, all about the stars…It is a merry life, this infinity I inhabit…”
Liza wasn’t listening carefully, but struggled with the possibility of laughter in the face of her pain, wrestled with it, soared along beneath the water torturing herself with it, and nothing came, nothing, except the difficult question and the water rushing through her, light all around and then dark all around, and then light again, and her belly rustled and a tickle rose in her chest, a tickle rose, and the grain of rice in her lower parts turned over and doubled in size, some miracle in nature and finally, “Yes,” she said. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I can laugh, I can laugh!”
“Then I will tell you a joke,” the god said.
“Tell me,” she said.
“There is a man coming…”
“What?”
“A man…”
“Who?”
“This is for you to find.”
“What about him?”
“Oh, seek him out and you will know.”
“Seek him out?”
“You will come close, but do not be indifferent. Take a step toward him, and all will change for you.”
Liza turned her head aside, preferring to stare down into the dark water rather than gaze in that moment at the smug face of the god.
“No,” she said, “I don’t want to take a step toward a man. I do not want a man. I have had one man and that is one man too many. I will keep myself from men, because such creatures will destroy my life and make my children miserable down to several generations.”
It was the god’s turn to turn away.
“You are so difficult!” he said. “You make me, girl, so exasperated! Where is your hope, child? Where is your love of the future? Where is your love of yourself?”
“Sleeping,” Liza said. “Fast asleep.”
“Nah,” said Okolun, “nah, nah.”
“Oh, yes! Fast asleep!”
“Slow asleep is what you are. But you had better wake up, girl. Because your chance is coming, coming down the sea-road, and you don’t want to pass it up because it may not come again.”
“You say ‘nah’? I say it now back to you, nah, nah…”
“Oh, you are such a trouble!”
Liza heard herself scream out underwater—“Because I have known trouble, because I have lived trouble before I was born and when I was born and now in my young life!”
“Still yours to take,” the god said.
Suddenly he released her hand, and she immediately fell behind him in the rushing stream of his watery power.
“You are on your own now, girl, so wake up! Wake up! Yours to take up!”
Before she could reply Liza felt herself both slowing down and sinking at the same time. The god became only a dark blur in the water some distance ahead of her, and now some distance below her, and now was rising to meet her.
She opened her eyes, soaked through to her skin, the old woman hovering over her.
“Is it done?” the woman said in her creaking croak of a voice. “I think it is done.”
And then she croaked something, one last thing.
“This,” she said, “you forgot this.”
And she extended her hand, clenched, and opened her hand, and there was the stone, missing for some years, which had squirted out of her womb in a dream.