This is a riff on several of the possibilities discussed in the Jewish São Tomé thread; the first scene is OTL, the others follow from three of the PODs suggested in the comments.
________
I: 1496
I: 1496
Miriam, said the wind. Miriam…
Even after three years, María still listened to the wind. It spoke to her in her mother’s voice, called her by the name she’d been called as a child. She could no longer remember what her mother’s voice sounded like, except when the wind whispered it to her.
Three years, and she wasn’t a child anymore. No one was a child after three years here: three years on this island that God had forsaken, a place of fever, men with whips, a strange new God, the harsh accents of slaves. Three years since a king she’d never known, in a palace she would never see, declared the Jewish children forfeit for want of a head-tax their parents couldn’t pay.
María was twelve now, soon to be thirteen - a woman, according to the law her mother had called to her to keep. But in fact, she’d been a woman since the first days on the slave ship. She’d been one of the oldest of the stolen children, and the others had looked to her. She’d taught them their prayers when nobody was looking, nursed them here on the island when they fell sick from fever, buried them when her nursing failed. No one was still a child who had dug a grave.
She was free now; at least there was that. Dom Alvaro had come out to the sugar fields one day and told them: the new king had canceled the decree of the old. María, and the others who still lived, were slaves no more. But slave or free, they were still here. There was no going home; there was nothing but cutting sugar cane, logging on the mountain ramparts, and listening to Father João tell them they must forsake their God and honor another. María could look at the black men in the fields now and think, I am free, but she was as much in others’ hands as they were.
But there was memory, and there were others to share it.
There was a sound of footsteps behind her, and she saw Manuel: another of the oldest children, another survivor, a man. He’d brought the others here, to this natural clearing deep in the rain-forest, and he’d made sure no one saw them.
They sat the younger ones down in a circle and looked up past the canopy to the sky, where the first sliver of the new moon could be seen. “The new moon is how we know it’s the new year,” María said. “And the new year should be sweet. How should I make it sweet for you - with a story or a song?”
“A song! A song!” the children clamored.
She tried to think of one, and then remembered a poem her mother used to sing, a Ladino song four hundred years old; not a sweet one after all, but one that seemed to fit the occasion. My heart in the East, she began, and I at the farthest West: how can I taste what I eat or find it sweet, while Zion is in the cords of Edom and I taken from its arms…
“What does that mean?” one of the girls asked.
“Listen, and I will tell you…”
________
II: 1500
II: 1500
It was raining, but María no longer noticed. She was conscious of three things: pain, exhaustion and Ibekwe’s hand holding hers. A day and more now, light and dark, screaming in agony and crying in despair, and those had been the only things that were constant.
“It’s coming,” he said. “Only a little longer now.” He’d said that an hour ago, and an hour before, but she could feel that the child was in a different place. It would happen soon, if she could last that long.
She opened her eyes, tried to focus on the soft green light coming through the forest canopy. The scene swam in front of her. “We shouldn’t have stopped here,” she said. “Not here.”
He squeezed her hand. Constant. “There was no place else to stop. Your pains were coming. We wouldn’t have made it back to the village.”
“No, not there. But not here…” Her head jerked to the side as the child tried to move a little further. The hills began a mile or two away, a carpet of green rising into mist. But between here and there was the old sugar plantation, the reason why both of them had once been destined to be slaves. It was years now since the sugar cane rotted in the fields, since the king’s men left behind fields and slaves both, but still it stood, low buildings and fences made of boards that no one dared reuse. Even when the forest reclaimed its own, there would be too many ghosts there.
“Quiet, quiet,” he said, his hand still in hers, his other hand mopping her forehead with a scrap of cloth soaked in rainwater. “Push again. I can see the head. It’s almost out now.”
“A boy or a girl?” They’d agreed that he would name the child if it were a boy, and she would if it were a girl. She wanted a daughter more than anything. A Jewish girl to bear more Jewish girls, here in this land where they’d been abandoned.
“We’ll know soon. Chukwu will tell us soon.” Chukwu was what he called God. So did she, now, most of the time. There were grown men and women among the African slaves, and they knew better how to survive in this country; the Jews spoke their language now, and Hebrew when they prayed, and Ladino only when they dreamed.
Maria cried out again, and the child moved another fraction of an inch, but something felt different now. The baby wasn’t kicking any more, as if it were just as exhausted as she was. “Something’s wrong,” she said, terror overcoming pain; even in her homeland, with a thousand years of midwives’ knowledge at every childbed, women died when this happened.
Ibekwe looked, and he saw. He took his hand from hers, and the shock of the severed contact was as sharp as her birth pangs. A moment later and both his hands were deep inside her, moving the baby gently, helping her to push it out.
There was an emptiness inside her vast as when she’d been taken from her parents. An absence of child. An absence of pain. She realized that she’d closed her eyes again, and looked hesitantly at him.
His face told her before his lips did. “It’s dead, María.” He held the stillborn child in the crook of his arm, limp as a rag; a nut-brown girl with sparse black hair, her grey eyes unseeing. The baby was, María decided, beautiful.
“Rachel,” she said. That was what she’d decided to name the child, if it were a girl. And then: “We shouldn’t have stopped here.”
“No, we shouldn’t have. But you’re young and strong. There will be another, and it will live.”
She was crying. She didn’t know when she’d started crying. His hand took hers again, and she heard him whisper, words she hadn’t known he possessed, the Hebrew mourners’ prayer.
Yit gadal v’yit gadash sh’meh rabbo…
________
III: 1511
III: 1511
There was a town now, where the landing used to be; a real port where the Indiamen stopped to take on water, the slavers to do their vile trade, and the men-of-war to unload their prizes. It was a place of merchants and notaries, of counting-houses and churches, a place where the sugar planters spent more time with their bankers than in their fields. A place where people might come and say, here is Portugal brought from over the sea.
Night was falling in that place, and in a house at the edge of the town, María tended her stove. There were others with her: her husband Manuel, her daughter Rachel and son Nuno, a few of the other New Christians who’d come to share this day with them. New Christians, they were called, made anew when they were ripped from their parents’ arms and put on the slave ships at Lisbon harbor. They were Jews before they were Christians, and God willing, they would be Jews after.
Rachel had set the table with the best they had, the white cloth that María had spun, the silver they’d been able to scrape together during the eight years they’d been free. The others were seated now, exchanging greetings as if this were any other day, waiting.
“Draw the curtains,” María said, although they were already drawn. She went around to each one, checking that not a scrap of light could enter.
“No one can see,” Manuel chided. “Come and sit. Let us begin.”
Easy for you to say. Manuel had always been easier, even in the days of slavery; he’d never been as worried that his secrets might betray him. He laughed at María for that, sometimes. But her ways had stood her in good stead, hadn’t they? When she’d learned about that slave – Ibekwe, his name was – planning an uprising, she hadn’t told a soul, hadn’t hinted of it to anyone until she and Don Alvaro were alone. By keeping the secret, she’d been able to name her price: freedom for the Jews after ten years of service, freedom to stay as overseers in the sugar fields or to come to the town.
For Ibekwe, her secret had meant the gallows. For her… a house in Portugal-beyond-the-sea, with drawn curtains and a lamb’s bone on the plate. And people at the table who shouldn’t be kept waiting any longer.
She took the chicken off the fire and sat down with the others to begin the Seder. They forgot a few more words of it every year, but between them, they remembered enough from their childhood to tell the story as it should be told. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Nuno would ask in a few moments, and they would know the answer.
“We were slaves of the Pharaoh in Egypt,” Manuel would say, “but the Lord brought us out with his strong hand.” He would tell Nuno of the rigors of the tasks that Pharaoh had set, and the harshness of the taskmasters’ whips. But the Jews were free from that now, even those in this place, who’d been brought as slaves in the modern day.
And now, thanks to María, the Jews were the overseers, and who would free them from that?
“Now we are here, next year may we be in the land of Israel,” she heard Manuel murmur. “Now we are slaves, next year may we be free men…”
________
IV: 1493
IV: 1493
“Can you see it?” María’s father asked. They stood together by the ship’s railing at sunrise, looking south to what would now be their home.
She could. The island rose from the sea like an emerald jewel, spires of bare rock emerging from the forest in the highest places where they met the clouds.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, with all the gravity a girl of nine could muster. “Will we live on the mountain?”
Her father laughed. “Of course not. Think how far we’d have to go to do our washing.” His hand rested on her shoulder, and his voice became serious. “We’ll live by the sea with everyone else. The sugar planters will need me to make their tools, and I need to be near them.”
She nodded, satisfied with the answer. “Will I see the black men? And the lions?”
“No lions here. We may see the black men, if they come to trade.” Or if they come as slaves, but there’s no need now to burden her with that.
“Why don’t we go where the lions are?”
“Because Dom Manuel doesn’t want to settle the lions’ country. This is the land he gave us, so we can plant sugar and grow food for the Indiamen. This is the place where no one will make us leave, like we had to leave Spain. This is where we can wait until it’s time to return to Israel.”
But María wasn’t listening any more; she’d run off with Manuel, a child her own age, the one she laughed at because he had the same name as the king. They crowded the railing and pointed at the island together, picking out features, giving them names.
Her father looked at them, and at the sea beyond, and at the shoreline that was slowly taking the shape of a harbor.
“In the new land,” he said, “we will call you Miriam.”
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