hagar

From the beginning, I had no choice. She owned me; I was hers to do with as she wished. And now she wished for a son.

I’d heard talk that God had promised her a son. If she had believed it once, she no longer did, and we slaves never had. Nor were we disappointed. Our mistress Sarah was a petulant, mean woman, quick to strike and impossible to please. While we respected our master and wished him all posterity, we secretly enjoyed Sarah’s empty womb.

She had failed at the one thing a good wife had to do.

I never let her know what I was thinking. I was well-schooled in silence; I kept my thoughts to myself, and to Sarah I showed only the placid face of one who has no right to any thoughts of her own. She had no right to my thoughts, anyway; she owned only my body and my services.

And one day, those two rights collided.

I had seen her eyeing me thoughtfully for several weeks. She had even inquired after me solicitously when I was unwell at my time of month. When I returned from the red tent, she welcomed me back effusively. Was I suspicious? I should have been. I should have remembered that I was hers to dispose of as she pleased.

She summoned me to her quarters one day, about ten days after I had returned from the red tent. “Girl,” she told me -- I knew that she deliberately chose not to call me by my name -- “your master needs an heir. As I can no longer bear him a child, you are to do it for me.”

I stood silently, stunned.

“You are fertile now,” continued Sarah. “I have studied your courses. In these days, your womb is open and waiting. This night, you are to lie with your master. If God be good to me, you will conceive a son for Abraham.”

I could think of nothing to say. That old man -- my young flesh shrank away at the thought. Still -- he seemed kinder than Sarah. Perhaps he would not treat me harshly if I failed to please him or I failed to conceive.

“I want a son also,” she said. “My arms are empty. I have longed to be a mother. So the son you conceive will be my son as well.”

A child. She wanted me to bear a child. But not my child, hers. I was to be a vessel for her, a useful jar for carrying a child. And when I was empty again...I shuddered inside. I did not trust Sarah. And I had seen her discard empty jars before when they had outlived their usefulness in the household.

“Well, girl?” Sarah said sharply, at her most unpleasant. “Has God taken your tongue?”

“No, my lady,” I murmured.

“Do you understand what is required of you?”

“Yes, my lady.”

She looked at me sharply. But I knew suddenly that she would not beat me today. She could not. She could not risk a mark marring my young skin, for fear that I would not be attractive to the master and then he would not wish to lie with me. To get her own way, she could not touch me.

For that moment, I had power. And so I lifted my head, and I smiled at her. And then, silently, without asking her leave, I walked away from her.

And so Sarah got her way. I lay with Abraham that night, and the next, and the next after that. It was not unpleasant. He was old of years, and he was not the virile young man whom I had hoped to mate with, but he was a kind and gentle man, and he took care to call me by my name. Sarah herself treated me well for the next few weeks. I did not have to lift and carry anything heavier than a feather. It was almost amusing, her solicitude, and sometimes I longed to believe that, truly, she saw me as the daughter she did not have. I longed to believe that, when she urged me to lie down in the heat of the day, she wanted only my health and welfare.

As the moon crossed the sky, Sarah began to question me. She demanded that I tell her the most intimate details of my body. Did I feel this, could I tell that... and once, when I did not answer her quickly enough, she started to draw her hand, as if to punish me. But she halted, as if she thought better of it, and then told me unkindly to leave her sight.

The time for me to retire to the red tent came and went. She quizzed me every day when she saw me, but I had nothing to tell her. The signs appeared fortuitous. And, indeed, when another month had gone, and I did not go to the red tent, I knew that I had conceived.

“A son!” said Sarah in delight, when I told her. “I shall have a son!”

“My lady,” I said hesitantly, for the thought had occurred to me already, “it may not be a son. Perhaps...”

“No,” Sarah’s words cut across mine. “A son. God promised me a son. My husband is to be the father of many nations. A daughter would be useless.”

For a moment, in the bitterness of her voice, we were joined together. Females were useless, and we both knew that. No nation could ever descend from a woman. We had only one gift to offer, and that was our fertility. We had only one function, and that was to make men fathers.

“Well, my lady,” I said -- no sense dwelling on what we could not change, and women were at the bottom of the heap, and we were always going to be there. “I shall bear him a son. No daughter will come from my womb, only a strong, lusty boy who will lead nations.”

Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “Do you mock me, girl?”

Her words made no sense to me for a moment. Had she not obtained what she wanted? Did she not now look forward to the birth of a son? My son would lie in her arms, would look to her as Abraham’s wife. She would have all the pleasures of motherhood without suffering any of the pain. Not for my lady Sarah would be the sickness, the blood, the excruciating pains I had seen other women suffer in childbed. Sarah had me to suffer all that for her.

Then I thought of a river we had once crossed, a river flowing into the land, making it fertile and ready for growing. I was that river. I was fertile. I had proven it. And Sarah...Sarah was the desert. Old, dry, cracked, a desert where nothing bloomed. Even when she was young, she had never bloomed.

So I lifted my eyes, and I looked straight at her, and I said, “No, my lady. I do not mock you. I am only grateful that my master’s God has given me the gift of life so that I may bestow it upon you.”

I should never have said that. I should never have reminded her that I was younger, prettier, full of life. She might have been a great beauty then, but fertility was the only great prize of women, and I had it, and she didn’t.

She hit me with the flat of her hand across my face. My hands flew up to protect myself -- I could not help it -- and, in her terrible rage and frustration, she shook me as hard as she could. She might have been old, but she was still strong. She shook me so hard that my vision went blank and I fell to the floor, insensate.

When I became aware again, I heard her screaming at Abraham, accusing him of preferring me, accusing me of looking on her with disdain. I waited there on the floor, lying at her feet like a dog, and waited for him to come to my aid, to order Sarah to treat me with the kindness and gentleness due the woman who would bear his son. And I waited.

Then I heard him say, indifferently, “She’s your maid. She is in your power. Do what you want. This was your idea.”

Then he walked off. I knew that I could expect no help from that quarter.

“Get up, girl.” Her voice was low, deadly.

I lifted myself to my feet, feeling dizzy and sick, and aware of the aches in my body. I looked at her slowly and saw that she was watching me with glittering dark eyes.

“Do not think,” she said, “that you will have it easy these next months. You are my slave. You have work to do. You will not be lazy. You will not feign sickness; you will not clutch your belly and complain that you cannot work. And you will not answer me with your impertinence.

Do you understand?” Her voice rose. “

I will not tolerate it.”

I said nothing. A long silence drew out between us, and I wondered which one of us would be the first to speak.

I do not know how long we stood there, staring at each other, the old against the young, the withered against the beautiful, the barren against the fertile. But we stared, until finally she shoved me roughly out the door, and told me to do my work.

And so Sarah, never a kind mistress, never one with a word of gratitude, became harsh and demanding. Nothing I did was good enough. I was slow, lazy, stupid, and as I began to swell with the child she had made me bear, I was ugly and fat. If I served her slowly, I was dimwitted. If I obeyed her command quickly, I was insolent. She made unkind comments when my clothes no longer fit me. She noted that the men no longer looked at me; indeed, they gave me a wide berth, knowing whose son I bore. She reminded me daily that I was an alien in a strange land, given food and shelter only through her mercy.

The blows and the taunts became more frequent. Every day became a day of torture.

One day, I knew I must escape. I knew that I would die in the desert, but I knew also that to die would be preferable to living under the threat of blows every day. Sarah’s every look was one of hatred; Abraham’s few looks were those of indifference. I was nothing to them...just a clay vessel bearing a particularly special treasure at the moment. But once the child was born, I would be even less than that.

So I waited until the dark of the moon, and I carefully planned my departure. I secreted away a little food...what I could tie in my head scarf...and I filled a skin with precious water. I did not know where to go, but I knew the road that travellers often took to come to us, and I determined to follow that road away on my journey.

That last night, as I waited on Sarah, I barely heard her abuse. Her sharp words fell on my deaf ears, and the roughness of her touch on my arm did not register. When I left her that night, I knew that I would never see her again.

Of him, I did not even think.

So I ran away into the wilderness, taking the road to Shur. The sun beat down upon me, but I was young and strong, and I walked quickly. I reveled in my freedom, but even as I enjoyed walking as a free woman, I wondered what had happened that morning when Sarah had expected me to wait on her, and I had not appeared. How long had she delayed before she went in search of me? Had she panicked in fear, that I had been stolen away during the night by marauders? Did she worry that I had run away with one of the men?

Did she even think of me at all?

Or only of the child I carried?

At noon, when the sun was high, I stopped to rest by a spring in the wilderness. And then a man found me. I think he was a man, at least, although I had heard rumors that my master had entertained angels, and I did think, from the melodious tones of his voice, that this fellow sojourner might too be an angel. I did know that he had mysterious powers, for when he spoke to me, he called me by name.

“Hagar,” and when he said it, it did not sound ugly and foreign as it did when my mistress called me by name, “where have you come from?”

“I am running away from my mistress, Sarah,” I said. “She beat me and called me names, and I cannot endure it.”

And to my horror, I felt myself weeping.

“And Hagar, maid of Sarah,” he said, “where are you going, now that you are running away?”

“I do not know, sir,” I said. “I have no home. I have no family. I do not belong anywhere.”

He dipped into the spring and poured me a long, refreshing drink that reached into the recesses of my heart. We did not talk for a while, but merely rested in the shade while the sun journeyed through the sky above.

At last, he spoke. “Hagar, you must go back to your mistress and submit to her abusive treatment.”

“Oh, no, sir --”

“I see,” he continued kindly, “that you are pregnant. You carry a son in your womb. His name --” and he stopped, and I wondered what he would say to me next. “His name will be Ishmael,

and through him you will live on forever. Your descendants will be so numerous that you cannot count them all. The Lord has heard the whisperings of your heart, to matter to the world, to be someone in the eyes of the world. God has answered you.”

I was entranced by this, and momentarily I put aside his admonition that I should return to Sarah. “Are you a magician, sir? Can you see the days that are to come?”

He spoke on as if he had not heard me. “Your son Ishmael will be a wild man. He will turn his hand against everyone, and everyone in kind will turn against him.” This was disheartening, I thought, to know that I carried such a warrior within myself. “He will rise against all his kin.”

And then I knew who was speaking to me, who had talked to me kindly and offered me water and treated me gently. This man who spoke to me was the God to whom Abraham himself spoke. And now he had spoken to me, the slave, the disobedient runaway.

“I see, sir, that you are the God of Vision,” I said. “You see the future. You see the nature of my son, and he is not yet born.”

He took my hand in his. “Go back, Hagar,” he said again. “You cannot live here in the wilderness while you are pregnant. You must go back to Sarah. She does not know it, but she needs you. And she will take care of you until you are brought to bed. It is not good for you to be alone at such a time.”

And so I returned. I felt curiously refreshed and lighthearted as I returned to Sarah’s home. She said nothing to me to welcome me home, but neither did she beat me or punish me for running away. And, in the months that followed, she often mixed her sharp words with looks that told me how much she wished to carry a son of her own.

In due time, I was brought to bed. I gave birth to a son, Ishmael -- Abraham’s first son. And often, as I toiled during the day and watched my son grow, I thought of the man I had met at the spring, and I wondered what lay ahead for my son and all the descendants that would spring from him.