Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Author:Jesmyn Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526666734
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2023-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE MAN EATS HIS share at dinner. There are no scraps because he leaves none; he wipes his plates clean with bread, with his knife and fork and spoon. As he drinks, he burns brighter and brighter, turns red as the heart of a fire, but his hands and the edge of his scalp still gleam pale and yellow. The mistress reaches out over the corner of the table every so often, touches his forearm, his elbow; once, even, his face. How easy she is with her affection for him, how sure she is of its reach, its life, its return, because he touches her, too. She squints and laughs when his hand finds her face; her sallow cheek shines with the peach shimmer of the underside of a bird’s wing. Safi touched me just so when she kissed me, making a birdcage of her fingers, a careful enclosure of my visage. How I loved being her kept bird, clipped and settled: I preened for her, leaned into her, heart fluttering. How I wanted what this woman has: to touch Safi in the light of day, outside the nest of trees, the buzz of the hive. To be safe in love—but I could not.

Mama Aza was not safe, either. She had her perimeter guard, but she could not love him openly. Mama told me this in the after-work darkness, once.

“She said they tried to stop. That when her and her muster of women came up on him and his men, she turned her face away, her eyes down. She stopped looking, but she could feel his regard, she said, buzzing around her like a swarm of gnats. She had tried her whole life not to want nothing for herself, but now she wanted. She wanted to stand in the circle of his arms. She wanted to kneel with him in the cool feet of the trees and hunt antelope. She wanted to breathe like this”—Mama pulled my head down to her chest as we lay there with Nan’s children murmuring in their sleep—“head to heart. But they couldn’t. So they ran. It wasn’t until they was caught and marched to the boat that Mama found out I was in her, all her love and his, born to a tiny seed.”

I touched the skin over her sloshing heart.

“The king sent their families after them: Mama Aza’s sister-wives, and the guard’s perimeter brothers. The wives and guards tracked them. They had one night of freedom together, out under the sky, in a bed of their own making. One night of holding each other. They got up and ran the next day, but the wives could track big beasts and small, and they found them on their second night running. They circled them. Surrounded them. Mama Aza and the man she loved stood back to back, spears and swords out. She said she could feel the jump of his muscles against hers, every strike, every parry. She said she couldn’t help but cry

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