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The first time he met her, he was a fugitive, a man on the run for his life because he struck another man dead, because he was a filthy Jew and no upbringing in Pharaoh’s palace or accomplishments in his armies changed that fact. He came upon the land of the Midianites, land of a dark-faced and pastoral people; land of the shepherds, and he was afraid.
He saw her at the well in the middle of the desert, trying her utmost to draw water even as the other men refused to let her pass. One made an especially lewd comment and Moses immediately sprang to his feet, advanced towards him.
It was this foolhardiness that got you out of Egypt. But Moses did not care. He was delirious from pain and heat and thirst, he was in a land of foreigners, but he would not let an indefensible woman stand alone against a band of men so much stronger than her. Always looking out for the small ones, aren’t you?
He ignored the mocking, lilting voice inside his head, and ordered, “Leave the girl alone.”
Perhaps it was the intensity his delirium lent him or the unmistakable demeanor of a man raised in palaces. Maybe it was the surprise and curiosity of his light skin. Whatever the reason, they listened to him.
The girl looked at him, a veil covering her thick hair, nodded her thanks. Her eyes were unreadable, her skin the color of oak, and Moses noted with some apprehension that she had a lovely mouth.
He drew water for her and the other sheperdesses, helped them pull up their ropes. He was weak, close to passing out towards the end, though he pretended otherwise for the sake of the women and his own pride. The eldest one, the one with the pretty mouth and intent eyes, was observant. She noticed and lifted water to his mouth.
The sun melted into the horizon. Dusk painted the sky. Even after she was gone, Moses remembered the taste of water, the smooth brush of her fingers against his lip.
-
Jethro employed him.
The old Midianite was impressed with Moses’ chivalry by the well. All the sheperdesses were his daughters, Moses learned. That girl who’d lifted water to his lips was the eldest.
Moses tended to Jethro’s flocks. He let them graze on pasture, guided them from place to place, shaved them for the cold seasons, and watered them. The adopted son of the Pharaoh, the favorite of his most erudite wife, the shining star of his army, was now a common shepherd.
Better than a dead Jew in Egypt.
That Moses could agree with.
-
He saw her sometimes. Passing through the house, taking her flock from the harnesses he maintained, a desolate figure on the hill where she tended her sheep.
Moses watched her without realizing that he was watching. He caught himself, shook his head, and returned to shepherding. But it was tedious work, the land was flat plains and occasional hills and a round sun in the middle of it all, scattered huts, and his yearning increased.
She sat to the right of her father when they broke bread. Moses faced her, but she hadn’t looked him in the eye since the day they met. He resisted letting his glances linger too long, aware of Jethro’s watchful gaze.
They were polite when it came to shepherding. She took her flock from him every morning and brought it back every evening. She worked hardest with the flocks, shepherded even on the driest of days, fought through scores of men to get water, and managed finances with her father. She was quiet and dutiful, but there was an unmitigated strength in her steady gaze, the hard set of her shoulders, her elegant tapering spine. Moses had the deepest respect for her.
One day she smiled at him. That was a good day.
He did not lead himself on, however. He was too afraid of himself and what he would do to her. And he knew she deserved better than him.
So he saw her, but could not touch. Her name was Saffurah, but he had never tasted the name on his lips.
-
Her father was the one to propose marriage.
It was an objective offer, but one dripping with encouragement. Old Jethro clearly wanted Moses to marry his daughter, and Moses was tongue-tied with indecision.
He did not want to jeopardize his job and the idea of disrespecting Jethro disgusted him. But he didn’t know. He just didn’t know.
With as much deference as he could muster, he said that he would think about it and give an answer tomorrow.
Saffurah came to him that night. Moses was lying sleepless on his bed and started when the door tipped open, a single flame illuminating the darkness.
He breathed her name. She gave him a look he could never forget. Long, yellow beams of light painted her cheekbones and Moses was captivated by the sight.
She settled at the end of the bed, an impeccable distance away from him.
“Why don’t you want to marry me?” Her question was bland and unemotional, her liquid dark eyes frank.
He sighed and sat up, feeling acutely embarrassed when he realized he was bare from the waist up. She politely averted her eyes.
“I have no right to love you.”
She titled her head. “What have you done that makes you so unworthy?”
Moses sighed again. “Don’t you know, Saffurah?” The name still felt foreign to his lips. He watched to see her reaction, but she was inscrutable as ever. “There is a reason why I am not in Egypt. I am a criminal, a fugitive. I work for your father, not because of any special expertise, but because of his generosity, and I presume, your good word. You deserve better than me.”
“You are a good man. Upright, honest. You are intelligent, and if we were in a different world, you would expend your talent on a better profession. I know this because I have seen you. I know this because I know you.”
Her face had changed. The solid determination of her jawline and her hard, unabashed gaze. She was utterly willing to trust him. The completion of that beckoned, but he was terrified of her rejection.
“If I could tell you all my sins. . .”
“Then tell me,” she said, and it was the first time he heard her voice break. “Tell me, so I know if I can have you or not.”
He sighed deeply. Then he began his tale.
-
She accepted him. She forgave him. She did not argue or rationalize, she did not judge him for what he did, only listened.
By the end of his tale, when dawn was licking the horizon and the sun ascending over the mountains, she still wanted him.
It almost felt like salvation.
-
She was slow to love him.
Her mother was dead and it made her heart wary, guarded. She never said the words, but Moses could tell she loved him in different ways. Leaving a sweet for him in the morning, running errands without his knowledge so that his work load was lesser, taking care of him when he was sick. Little gestures that spoke volumes. He scolded her for doing extra work, but secretly he appreciated it. And she knew that.
She had his children. Beautiful babies with the caramel skin of their mother and their father’s smooth black hair. A daughter who was the spitting image of Saffurah, but had Moses’ red blush.
This was the woman he would spend the rest of his life with. He felt no regrets.
-
She was there for it all.
When he saw the bush combust in flame, the first person he went to afterward was Saffurah. The flames were fading yet in his eyes, his mind feverish with prophecy, and she was there cradling his head in her hands, being strong when he was weak.
He had to go back to Egypt. She did not question him; as a matter of fact, her eyes gleamed with pride.
“I always knew you would go back. But you will not leave without me.”
-
Aaron and Miriam did not like her.
His long-lost siblings, the older sister who followed him down the river, his fellow God-conscious prophets, did not like her.
He saw it in their hard eyes, felt it in the coolness that dampened the room whenever his wife appeared. They refused to talk to her and only talked around her. Saffurah had loyally stood beside him throughout it all. She had seen him perform the miracles in Pharaoh’s court, she had lived in the slums of Egypt with his people, she had watched him lift the sea from its shores and carry it with willpower alone. She was the mother of his children. More so than anything, she had rescued Moses from his vulnerability, made him stronger. She held a debt over him that he could never repay.
Moses asked them. He meant it to be condemnatory, an order, but it came out confused and hurt. “Why do you treat Saffurah as you do?”
His brother and sister exchanged looks. Miriam’s mouth pursed into that cynical smile he had become so familiar with. Lifetime of abuse, watching her mother die, and losing Moses for as long as she did made Miriam hard and almost irreverent. Ironic for a woman blessed by visions from God. Aaron just looked at the floor.
Finally, Miriam said, “She’s not a Jew, Moses. She’s a Nubian.”
“Midianite,” Moses corrected. “Her features are longer, her face narrower. Besides,” and he looked hard at Miriam.”Aasiya was a Nubian.”
Aasiya was Moses’ adopted mother, Pharaoh’s wife. When Miriam followed Moses down the river as a little girl, tracking his every movement to ensure he was not drowned or eaten by animals or abandoned, she’d reached the palace at the end. She saw Aasiya take in the mysterious infant in the basket and treat him as her own son. Miriam came into the palace as a lesser maid and raised Moses with Aasiya.
Without Aasiya’s care and protection, Moses would not be alive today. Pharaoh tortured her to death when Moses tried to lead his people out of Egypt.
“You did not marry Aasiya,” she said bluntly.
“She was a mother to me. She was part of my family, just as Saffurah is now.”
“The comparison is useless, anyway. We wanted you to marry a Jewish woman,” Aaron said earnestly.
A splotch of red painted Moses’ neck. “If I had married an Egyptian, would you have objected?”
They declined to comment.
-
Saffurah knew. She was not deluded and she was not oblivious. Most terrible of all, she accepted Miriam and Aaron’s latent contempt and made herself as unobtrusive as possible.
No fights, no silent treatment, no anger in their decades-long marriage. But now a sick tension swelled inside his stomach. How would he approach this? How would he ask her?
When he finally asked her why she tolerated it, why she never talked to him about it, her eyes hardened with disdain.
“Do you think I am not used to it?” she whispered in utter marvel.
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do,” she said and her next words shocked him into silence. “The Egyptians treated you no differently.”
-
It culminated.
Everyone knew it would, Moses only deluded himself into thinking things would become better, that one day Aaron would recognize Saffurah, that Miriam would love her sister-in-law and Saffurah would forgive Miriam.
None of that happened.
The same day Miriam and Aaron challenged his prophethood, asserted themselves as his equals, Saffurah was there. She was there at the wrong place at the wrong time.
She’d slipped in the tent to relay a message from one of his generals. When she saw how dire the situation was, all three siblings staring each other down, she slowly backed out from the tent. But Miriam had noticed her presence.
Miriam’s voice was like death. “And your marriage to this Cushite woman. Does it qualify you for prophethood? Should we follow someone who had the ill judgment to marry that? A godless, savage Ethiopian?”
Saffurah flinched, as if slapped. Moses saw a flicker of regret in his sister’s eye, but her jaw was firm and unapologetic. He roared at Miriam in fury, and she screamed a string of disparaging insults, vile words against Saffurah that he thought he’d never hear from the sister who raised him, who loved him, who waited for him to lead their people out of Egypt.
Everything after that happened so fast.
A mist entered the tent, white as cloud and thick as rain. Moses felt God’s voice speaking in his very bones, shaking the tough fibers of his skeleton. He saw Aaron bow his head in agonized deference. But he did not see Miriam. The white flooded his vision too soon, making him blind to the world around him.
And then he remembered Miriam howling in pain. All blood had rushed from Saffurah’s face and she stared at her sister-in-law with wide eyes and a dry mouth. The mist had begun to recede. People filtered into the tent to see what the commotion was about. Onlookers yelled and Aaron seemed faint. Moses was bewildered. Then he saw.
Miriam’s skin was white as snow.
-
God had visited this punishment on his favorite daughter, the mother of the Hebrews, his chosen prophetess. He had punished her because she disappointed him. He had punished her with a strange albinism, a leprosy. Miriam hated dark skin, why should she complain about turning white?
Moses begged on her behalf, changed a lifetime of shame into seven days.
It was during this brouhaha that Saffurah decided to leave.
-
She was forced into it. Miriam’s punishment increased the rancor of his people against his wife and family. They blamed the Cushite woman for coming between the trio of God’s blessed, for disturbing the peace. Many of them even refused to believe that Yahweh had punished Miriam, blaming the black witch for cursing their prophetess.
-
She left at dawn. He entered her tent before that. The dark was deep and intense. She was not sleeping.
They were silent for a long time. Then she spoke.
“One more thing before you go. I never not loved you. Don’t think that. I’m still in love with you and that’s precisely why my heart shatters to see you go. I won’t make excuses for myself. I won’t say I’m free of blame in this all. But before you leave my side, know that I go with you. In spirit, if not in person.”
Her last words were a devastating whisper. Moses knew how much it took for her to say this, a proud woman exposing her vulnerability to the man who’d promised to keep her safe, who had promised to safeguard her heart and not break it. It was in shards now, just as she’d said. It was in pieces because of him. Moses looked at his hands and hated himself.
“And I’ll–” she spoke haltingly, the tears threatening to pour forth. “I’ll do this still, I’ll help you still, I’ll be everything you ever needed of me–”
“Saffurah,” he whispered as the tears finally got the better of her, and she had to turn so he did not see the shame on her face. He watched her shoulders convulse in a sob, her slender and proud back hunch over in grief.
He was on his feet now even if he knew better, even if he knew that she did not crave his touch. Moses, ever impulsive Moses. When will you change? When will you learn?
He approached her briskly, his arms nearly around her, but she cried out like a wounded animal. “Don’t touch me.”
He stepped back. The pain of rejection broke a dam inside his soul, the one he’d been withholding and ignoring since news of Aasiya’s death, since Miriam and Aaron’s betrayal of him, since a wayward and impulsive teenage boy was chased out of the city of his blood, just another Jew. He felt numb.
She turned to him. Tears sparkled against her dusky skin. He saw and memorized her face. Thin nose, high forehead, cheekbones that could cut glass. Lips shaped like a bow. Dark, dark skin. Midianite. Cushite. What his own people, who knew hatred for their birth so well, could not bring themselves to accept.
She faced him. “Yahweh calls. You must obey him and lead your people into Canaan. It is your duty.”
His mouth unfurled and the tears he had tucked away inside his throat were finally on the verge of spilling. “I will never know my sons.”
But Saffurah was resolute. “It is how it must be. Sacrifices must be made for prophethood.” She looked at him and he saw a glimmer of sadness in her eye. “Your people will not accept your sons by me anyway.”
That was enough. He wept then, a heaving storm of tears, a crippling embarrassment for the man who led scores of his people out of Egypt, who parted the Red Sea and tranquilized Pharaoh’s armies. Vanquished by his wife. Vanquished by her leaving, by the knowledge that he crushed her heart when he had told her he’d treasure it.
He did not care. His grief was too potent.
He could not see. His vision was blurred, he cried into the darkness of his arm, but he felt her approach. He felt her warmth against his body, and he felt her tapering fingers and the fragrance of her skin when she eased next to him and let him sob against her breast.
He did not how long that period lasted. Days fading into evenings, interminable minutes. He’d later learn it was just one afternoon. But when he was finished crying, he saw her eyes, saw her lips move and say simply, “You belong to God.”
And then she was gone.