Chant of the Soil

“We danced at night under the stars to worship what was below our feet. Our bodies covered with the dirt that surrounded us. When the sun would rise, we would spit into our hands and breath across our palms, and then hold them up high, welcoming the dawn. This was the chant of the soil. This was our way.”

My great-grandmother taught me the chant and told me stories of her village in Africa, how they lived in harmony with their surroundings and in turn, everything else took care of itself.

I was a slave. My father was a slave, and his father before him was the first to be shackled and brought to this world to toil in the fields for fourteen hours a day. The tobacco plantation was large, with hundreds of us working the fields. The slave master had a way of controlling our numbers through food rations. His method was simple — he accounted for all the slaves who reported for duty and then gave food in accordance with the numbers tallied. The purpose was to starve out the weak and the elderly.

Theirs was a greedy culture and they did not understand our ways. The first bite of any of our evening meals was placed in a bowl so that the elders could eat, providing for all when the plantation refused to do so. At night, the children went to them to hear the tales of the old village, learning the chant and taking a solemn vow that we all felt was in vain — one that made us promise to keep our traditions alive until our blood returned to its native land.

She was feeble and old, but had dignity and strength. She caressed my hand when she spoke, telling me the history of how we came to this cursed place. A land dispute with a neighboring tribe created a war that lasted for ten years. They captured our fallen warriors, the ones who survived the battles, and sold them off to the white faced strangers. The women were procured through other means, mostly by abduction. Soon, she said, I would be forced to work in the fields with the others, but I must not forget that through my veins flowed the blood of the warriors. I must not forget the chant of the soil, it would keep us one with the earth and safeguard our people.

I came of age in the fields, when the slave master decided that I was strong and able enough to tend to the crops. I was a strong boy, the work didn’t bother me. It was the master’s whip that made it almost intolerable. I didn’t have a mind to do anything about it, accepting it, as I did all other things about my situation. It was the same with everyone else my age. We were raised to expect this.

But it all changed when a new slave master came. The house slaves listened to their conversations and reported that landowner was not happy. All the neighboring plantations had switched to growing cotton as the demand for tobacco shrank and the cotton market grew. But ours did not. The landowner was set in his ways and too stubborn to be reasoned with. The rations began to grow smaller and the new slave master demanded more, wielding his whip relentlessly to try to get us to work faster and produce more. We grew weak from the lack of food, but we never forgot the elders. When the master saw that our bodies were thin and our strength diminished, he sought to understand why.

They came in the middle of the night and forced us by torch-light to line up in front of the shacks. They searched them and found the loosely boarded up walls that separated the living quarters from the place of the elders. Makeshift extensions to our shacks that were built by our fathers when our numbers grew. The entry to these rooms were covered up by planks of wood nailed loosely together for easy removal at night.

The men kept us outside as the fire burned. We smelled wood and flesh and I saw my father cry that night for the first time. I also saw that he could do nothing to save my great grandmother. I saw all the things that a boy shouldn’t see — too many things to go back to the fields the next day.

I ran into the woods after they left. Within hours I heard the blood hounds in the distance, their barking grew louder, causing my pace to quicken at first, but later succumbing to exhaustion and desperation. When my legs could no longer bear the weight of my body, I fell and began to crawl, my arms taking up the struggle in a pointless effort to survive.

It was then that I heard the wind whisper, “lay still child. Remember the chant.”

I stopped moving and regained my breath. My heart was still racing but my mind began to clear. I grabbed the dirt underneath my palms and rubbed it on my face and body. The hounds were getting closer — I could now hear the men with the leashes cursing at the fact that they were being dragged through the mud to find me. My mind grew still and the sounds faded. I replaced them with a low rumbling from the bottom of my belly. I spoke the words, softly at first, and as I became one with the earth around me, the chant grew louder until it reached a steady rhythm. The soil around me danced and vibrated to to the beat of the inflections created by the words of my ancestor’s native tongue.

The next thing I heard was the sound of the dogs whimpering and the men screaming. After that, the earth lay still and there was silence. I came out of my trance exhausted and sleep overtook me. When I woke, I saw only the stars above me and a sliver of moonlight. I made my way back to through the trail I’d created without any vision. Instead I was guided by the earth, the ground moving slowly underneath my feet like little waves pushing me forward.

I saw them there, the dogs and their handlers, lying on the ground covered in dirt with tree branches around their throats. As the dawn broke, I spit into my hands and breathed across my palms, raising them up high and open to the sun.

The land was strong beneath my feet. It fed on their blood and now it guided me North… to freedom.