The Salt Roads Read online

  But I am determined that we keep going. Something is wrong with this Thais. Something has grown in her that is making her sick. If she dies, if her dying throws me out of her as Jeanne’s did, who knows where I’ll be tossed to? Then maybe I won’t get to find out what that susurrus is in the aether. I nudge Thais to keep walking. She’s strong and young, and she wants to see Aelia Capitolina badly too. So she keeps on for my sake, for hers.

  We were finally at the Church of the Sepulchre. It was near dark. People had come out to sit in the atrium around the church, to get some of the cool breezes of evening. Children were running around playing, old men gathered talking. No women—they’d be home preparing food. Judah was muttering about finding something to eat, but my belly was too painful to feel hunger. My head was pounding so hard I could barely hear the shouts of the children and the old men’s arguments. I was holding on to Judah’s arm for support, and I didn’t care how people stared.

  It was beautiful, the church, just like Antoniou had said. It was huge. They had lit the lamps, and it was outlined in flickering light. It rose up into the sky, piercing the dusk. I’d never seen anything like it in Alexandria. “It looks cool inside,” I whispered to Judah. It hurt my head to talk. I cried out and held my belly, curled myself around it.

  “Thais! What is it?” asked Judah. He crouched down around me, my friend did. He was so good to me. There were snakes writhing knots in my gut; crocodiles fighting in there.

  “Judah,” I said, “I think I’m dying.”

  “No, no, you’ll be okay.” I think he was crying. His voice sounded like it. “Come. Come inside the church. We’ll find somewhere for you to lie down.”

  He almost had to carry me in. I could barely walk. There must have been people gawping at us, but I couldn’t help from crying out with the pain. Judah dragged me up the steps. As though she were far away, I heard an old woman’s voice saying, “Is she your wife? What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know!” Judah wailed. “She’s been sick all day!”

  We were finally inside. Lamps everywhere. It was almost as bright as day. There were knives in my belly, tearing their way free. I let myself fall from Judah’s hands to the stone floor. It was warm from the day’s sun, not cool. I couldn’t care. I knotted myself around my belly and cried on the gods to stop the pain.

  “Stop it, young lady, this instant! You can’t speak the name of your pagan gods in here!” It was a woman’s voice, a different one than before. Younger.

  “Shush, Ruth,” said the old woman. “She’s in pain. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “Isis!” I begged. I could only think of Little Doe telling me how Isis helped women. I needed help. “Please!”

  “Isis,” said the old voice, “love goddess of Egypt and Nubia. A temple to Venus used to be right where we’re standing now.”

  “Well, it’s God’s home now,” the younger voice said grimly. “Praise be, Jesu has triumphed over their pagan witch.”

  I didn’t give a damn for their chatter. I was rolling on the floor now, Judah imploring me to be well, to get better, not to die. Something tore loose in my belly and I screamed. I felt hot liquid rush from between my legs.

  “Oh!” exclaimed the old woman. The young one called on Mother Mary. The old woman knelt painfully beside me. She took my shoulder and tried to stretch me out. I cursed her and curled up again.

  “Child,” she said, “you’re bleeding. Is it time for your courses?”

  “I think so. Oh, it hurts.”

  “Does it always come upon you like this?”

  “No!” I rocked with the pain. Felt another gush from my cunt. Judah was sobbing, kneeling beside me too. He stroked my hair.

  “When did you last bleed?” the woman asked.

  “She must leave, Kandace,” came the voice of the young one. “She’s defiling this holy space.” I ignored her. When did I last bleed? Through rolling pain, I cast my mind back. Not on the ship. Not during the Rose Festival . . .

  “If she’s ill, as Christians we must minister to her,” said the old woman.

  I grabbed her hand. “I haven’t bled in weeks and weeks,” I told her. “More than a month.”

  “Then I think that you are losing a child. That’s what’s wrong. Look at all that blood. You were pregnant.”

  “Well, she isn’t any longer,” said the young woman’s voice, “and she’s making a mess. And she needs a doctor,” she said. That part sounded like an afterthought to me. “Help me get her to my cell.”

  When they picked me up, the pain crashed over me, the worst yet. I know I screamed again. Then I knew nothing.

  Saint Mary of Egypt

  Mary came to Alexandria in Egypt at the age of twelve to pursue a life of prostitution, not because of need, but to gratify her insatiable physical desires. Some years later, she decided to embark on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on the occasion of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. She had no intention of completing the Pilgrimage; rather, she hoped that the trip would provide her with many opportunities to gratify her lust. She left Alexandria by ship, and paid for her passage by committing numerous lewd acts with the sailors. Once she had arrived in Jerusalem, she persisted in her wanton ways. On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, she joined the throngs of the faithful making their way to the church, in hopes of drawing even more souls into sin. But as she attempted to enter the church, she was stopped at the door by some invisible force. Thrice she tried to enter in, and thrice was prevented. She took herself to a corner of the churchyard to ponder, and was suddenly seized with remorse for her venal life. She began to cry bitter tears and beat at her breast, exclaiming at her own sin. Then she noticed a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of our Lord, in a sconce above the place where she was standing. Abandoning pride, Mary of Egypt prostrated herself before the image of the Virgin and beseeched her help in entering the church.

  —Adapted from various Catholic texts about the life of Saint Mary of Egypt, the “dusky” saint

  I tear loose from Thais, as the little dot of cells tears away from her too. I’m tumbling, no control. That would have been a child, that thing growing in Thais. As I am a child in this spirit world. I don’t learn fast enough. It didn’t learn fast enough how to stick in Thais’s belly.

  I spin about and try to see the pattern in the mist, but all I can do is be tossed. And suddenly there are voices, voices as I spin in the nothing. A face spins past me, there and gone. There’s someone here! What is happening? I keep tossing, whipping around. See the face once again. A woman. Big, with gentle eyes.

  “Sister,” says a voice from inside this nowhere place. The shock of it divides my sight like rivers branch. There is another face, and another, all whizzing by me too fast to see. They gaze at me, curious. There are more of them, then? It’s too much to understand. I am fragmenting, dissipating, like mist when the sun strikes it. The whispers I’ve been hearing are theirs.

  What is happening? I want to understand. I look with spirit’s eyes into the swirling aether.

  “Sister,” it comes again. A woman.

  “Who’s there?”

  The mists begin to curdle, to take shape. I am slowing now. They are the one slowing me. I can only bob in the flow, watch them appear. One is a biscuit-brown beauty, wreathed in pink mists that hide and reveal her, like so much lace. She lazily waves a cut-work fan, smiles at me. One is bent under the weight of her sorrows. Her earth-brown hands are knotted as roots and her eyes are sad, but her back is strong. Hands on hips, she waits calmly for whatever comes. The third comes surging at me on a vast gout of the aether. She is large beyond my imagining. Each breast is a mountain and her laugh is the crashing surf. She is the cool brown of rich riverbank mud. Her powerful tail sweeps like a crocodile’s.

  “Welcome, sister,” say the three voices, whispering painfully loud. No, not three only. For each woman has echoes of herself, all around her. Some are small, some large. All look like her. And wi
th my growing perceptions, I can see that each echo has its own echoes, and each echo’s echo its own, branching and dividing endlessly.

  “What are you?” I say to them.

  “Your tormentor. Your saviour,” they tell me. Time is only water in a bowl to them. I can see how they swirl it. They are here and elsewhere, acting in the world and in the aether, they and their echoes, even as they are speaking to me. They are a sour slave woman who knows hope is dead, holding a baby’s head as its mother pushes it out of her womb. They are a vain girl with soft, black hair, dancing on a Greek sailor’s prick. They are a ginger-haired woman, drunk on smoke and sex and staring into a pot of piss. And more than these, and more. I am dumbfounded.

  “That’s the broad view,” says the sorrowing one. “Look at us. Look closer.”

  The gargantuan fish woman is one of her smaller echoes now, and I am closer to them all. Closer. I can see into the fractals of their eyes. My own face gazes back at me from those infinite reflections, and it is all their faces.

  They are me.

  “Frèda,” the coquette names herself, toying with misty pink lace that looks strong enough to strangle.

  “Lasirèn,” bubbles the sea woman in Pidgin, cradling whole continents on her bosom.

  “Danto,” weeps the sad one, mourning for her losses. Her hard fists flex in anger. In her name I perceive echoes: Danto, D’hanto, D’hantor, D’hathor. Some few of the Haytian slaves were North African, and a small memory of Hathor’s love still clings to them.

  They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen story, fighting to destroy that cancerous trade in shiploads of African bodies that ever demands to be fed more sugar, more rum, more Nubian gold.

  The slave Thais would have borne a girl, to be raised in a whorehouse as another slave girl. Another African body borne away on the waves.

  “Je-Wouj,” I name myself to my sisters, myself. I hear my echoes, all our echoes, say it with me. I am Ezili Red-eye, the termagant enraged, with the power of millennia of Ginen hopes, lives, loves. “We can lance that chancre,” we say. I can direct my own pulse now. I see how to do it. I, we, rise, flow out of ebb, tread the wet roads of tears, of blood, of salt, break like waves into our infinite selves, and dash into battle.

  Beat Break/ Beat

  Break/

  Beat!

  One-

  . . .⇓

  Drop

  Blues sister

  soul

  Throwing W

  O

  R

  D

  S

  Sharp

  as vinegar to the tongue

  I slip into the head of a white woman, through the brine that wets her eyes. Coiffed and perfumed as Ezili Frèda, light-skinned Power of love and romance, I say in a voice like tinkling bells to the preening man beside me, “Then you will grant him clemency, my dear! I thought you might!”

  And a man goes free, to help plot a revolution.

  I climb into a bus alongside a tired working woman whose feet hurt. She finds a seat at the front, where her kind are not supposed to sit, and lowers herself into it with a sigh. Her kind are the black workers, the black poor. They are the ones who use the buses. The woman is arrested when she refuses to give up her seat to a white passenger. In the quiet protest that follows Rosa Parks’s simple act of refusal, black people bring the city’s bus system to a halt for over a year by refusing to use public transit. Ezili Danto can bear much pain, but sometimes she holds fast, refuses to be moved. The city outlaws segregation of public buses.

  Tossing bitter water

  With a shake of head, a twitch

  of eye.

  Slide slip, tongue slip

  RATTLECHAINBREAKWATER

  Break, waters break

  Slip spill

  Gush

  As my mother whale self, I swim in real seas that surround Saint Domingue. I swim down a cove, where I appear to a sad Mer fishing from a rock and tell her, “The sea roads. They’re drying up.” I tell her that she must find a way to fix it. Years later, she will think she has failed me, but I act in the world through such as her. Her every act of love, of healing, strikes a blow to the evil we fight.

  Propping sorrow

  Chin on palm, balanced on elbow

  Tottering

  Spit

  Split

  Blood singing

  Salt

  Roads ringing with the rush

  Rip tide, ebb tide, flow

  Beat

  BREAK/beat

  RATTLE

  DRINK

  Salt

  SUCK

  Salt

  Dance

  Dance

  Dance

  I almost didn’t feel it. Was weeding the fields, shuffling along with the others, pulling up every plant that wasn’t a cane stalk. A good day, for all that I was tired. Tipingee had come to see me the night before, and I still had the smell of her in my nose, and the clouds were keeping the sun from beating down on us too plenty. As I crouched and plucked, I found myself humming a tune my mother had taught me. The meaning of the words had left me long time since, but the little song was still there. Cool day, a skin-memory of Tipi’s hands on my body in the night, and my mother’s voice in my head. A good day.

  It’s only chance that the little glass whale bounced against my calf when it fell. Lasirèn’s token. Since the time when she had given it to me, I had tied it up into a knot in the hem of my dress, so it was always with me. It was tight, that knot, and I checked it every morning. But it came loose that day, and the glass whale fell out. Was just this small touch against my calf, and when I looked to see if a centipede or a lizard had jumped on me, out of the edge of my eye I saw the whale burying itself in the damp soil. Even then, I wasn’t sure what it was; little piece of thing disappeared too fast. Something made me feel my hem, then look at where the knot gaped open.

  Wai, my Lasirèn! I dropped to my knees one time and started digging in the dirt. Had to find it fast before the book-keeper saw that I wasn’t working. Stones I pulled up, and twigs, and slimy slugs. My heart was only pounding, pounding. Some of the Ginen were looking at me now, but they knew better than to stop working. The line of weed-pullers swept past me. I had to find it!

  I pushed both hands into the rank earth, deep as they would go. Felt my fingers bruising; didn’t care. Earthworms shrank, frightened, as I pulled them up out of the ground; I paid them no mind. I sifted the soil through my hands; nothing. Moved over a little and dug again. As I broke apart the clods of earth, the sun glinted off a bright something buried in them. It was my whale. I stood up and took my place in the line again. My fingers were trembling so much I could barely re-tie the knot. A few of the Ginen looked at me, curious, but nobody said nothing. I bent to my weeding again. Plucked and plucked until my hands stopped shaking and my chest wasn’t pounding.

  It’s Lasirèn who made this happen. I’d been ignoring her. She sent me to do her work, and I’d been fretting instead about my own business; about Tipi, and Patrice, and whether I was to be alone now. Lasirèn would cast me away unless I did what she asked of me.

  I kept my fingers weeding, set my mind working. That night by the sea, she had said to find out why her sea roads are blocked. How, though?

  But though I worried at the problem till daylean that evening, no answer came to me. I tromped back to my hut and scarce noticed the other Ginen doing the same; my mind was only running on how to clear Lasirèn’s roads of power so that she and the gods might use them to set us free.

  In my hut, by the light of the oil lamp, I crumbled dried mint leaves into pig fat from one of my calabashes. I laved my hands in the cool grease that smelled sweet of mint; into the cracks in my fingertips and my dry hand-backs. Then I rubbed my aching feet with the ointment, dirty as my foot bottoms were. A soothing thing. Mint makes your eyes see clear, too, if you drink a tea made from it. Calms the stomach and clears the brain.
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  As hundreds of light-skinned free women, I defy the blan law that tells us that coloured women must go barefoot. We march through the streets of Port-au-Prince, heads tall, hips swaying, our biscuit and tan beauty searing the eye and making the white men sweat. We chant, “nou led, nou là:” we’re ugly but we’re here. We chant it loudly, knowing that white men moan at nights in their wives’ beds, and soil the sheets with their spunk, thinking on our “ugliness.” Onto our bare feet we have knotted jewels, our jewels, for we are rich women. As we march, every one of us a Frèda, if only for that day, our feet sparkle in the Port-au-Prince sun with diamonds, emeralds, pearls. We are ugly, and we’re here.

  My eyes didn’t want to stay open. I was on my palette and asleep before the stars came out.