Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “…as we made our own way,” the Minister was saying, “a generation ago, or two, most of us, crossing the water from the Carib islands or from the Old Country…our fathers’ fathers’…”

  Our fathers’ fathers’? I knew little of the past, understanding only that my father’s grandfather, Isaac Pereira, had emigrated from Amsterdam, arriving in his new Carib island just about the time the Dutch had departed from New York and the English had taken over. With nothing in his hand except a small satchel of clothing and nothing in his pockets except a few gold pieces and a gold timepiece given to him by his father, he had come to take over a farm given over to him as part of an Old World debt. His sons took brides from Amsterdam. My father, Samuel, was born just before the successful colonial uprising against the English in America (and his older half-brother, my large uncle, just before, and a third brother, who stayed behind on the island while my father and uncle emigrated to the former English colonies up north). My father made his way to New York while his brother hurried to Carolina to make his fortune in farming. My father married my dear (alas, late) mother Margarita Monsanto, some time after the British returned to burn our new capital of Washington. Or such is how I understood all this.

  A snort! A burst of air distracted me from my wandering thoughts. I looked over at my uncle, his eyes closed, apparently asleep and ready to tilt over in my direction at any moment.

  He opened his eyes even as I regarded him, touching a finger to his nose, and closing his eyes again. My uncle at prayer. Massive but quiet, contemplative, near-sleep. Halevi had insisted to me during my instruction with him in our religion that we Jews prayed by saying our prayers, that is, saying the words which in themselves were near-magical. Yet prayers had never caught on for me, for one reason or another, undoubtedly my own lack. My uncle appeared to suffer from the same lack of ties to the traditions of our so-called tribe. He scarcely repeated a word from the service, listing one way or the other as sleep kept him in that perpetual tilt.

  What sort of a Jew was he? For that matter, what sort of a Jew was I? Neither of us seemed to have more affiliation with our religion than we did with family, blood relations. Strange it seemed to me that Christians, as much as I knew them, had actual principles and beliefs—the pact each made with their Jesus to accept him as their savior. What did I have? A vague feeling of association with others like me, most of whom seemed familiar in their lack of fervor and their sense of tribal life without necessarily believing in any supernatural being such as God. These Reformed Jews certainly seemed to me to be further along in the dissolution of our religion than most of us who did nothing but pay lip-service at ceremonies such as this only a few times a year.

  More noise burst from my uncle’s nose and lips, not a song but the last gasps of a snore.

  I took the time to study his face, the way, as Halevi had once explained to me in one of our lessons about art, a sculptor might study a stone. Chip away at the extraneous and you would find my father’s features in my uncle, and then add some slabs of flesh and let thicken, and you would have my uncle. Staring at this relative whom I had only recently discovered, I felt a certain longing for my home and, yes, my father, and my mind ranged toward him, the man who had engendered me.

  Behold what my father had accomplished—built a trading house, and constructed the very stone edifice in which I was born, a marble structure on the west side of Fifth Avenue, looking carved and polished where it stood between two larger Protestant brick palaces. A pair of stone lions guarded the entrance. A ten-foot-high wooden door nearly a foot thick provided entry, if you were permitted it. Once admitted, you found yourself in a foyer that led on one side to a large sitting room and on the other to a dining room with a grand twelve-foot ceiling and room enough to feed the crew of a sea-going trading vessel. This would one day become mine.

  “Cousin Nate?”

  But there I was, dreaming of home when the service ended, and Rebecca, with an inclination of her head, bid me to slip out of the bench and allow her to step into the aisle. I stuffed the pamphlet into my coat pocket and did as I needed to do.

  “Come now,” she said, taking me by the arm, and before I could protest she led me up the aisle to the very girl I had been staring at.

  Anna?

  “Cousin Anna,” she said, “how lovely to see you.”

  The girl, standing with two elderly folk I took to be her grandparents, smiled sweetly at Rebecca, and I followed her eyes as she took note of Rebecca’s prominent belly and then raised her gaze to meet my own.

  “Good morning,” she said, as though we had met a dozen years before and every now and then made our re-acquaintance.

  “Good morning,” I said, wondering if her nerves felt as hot as my own. I was sure I showed red in my face and pretended to be searching for something up in the stained glass of the windows.

  “You are both my cousins,” Rebecca said. And then with a laugh, “Though advantageously neither of you is related to the other.”

  Now it was Anna’s turn to blush as Rebecca introduced me and we shook hands and exchanged polite confidences, such as the fact that I had come from New York and that she was the oldest of four children, living on Society Street with her father who was a merchant.

  “And how long will you be staying in Charleston?” Anna asked me.

  “However long it takes me to conclude my business,” I said. “And so, my answer is, I do not yet know.” The room had grown hot with the presence of so many of us, but the sharp tropic tang of this girl’s perfume cut through the thickness of the must.

  “If you come back into town I hope we will have the chance to see you.”

  Oh, my blush ran hottest yet!

  “That would be lovely,” I said.

  “Our cousin can arrange it,” Anna said.

  “Of course,” I said, turning to Rebecca.

  “Tra-la, for now,” she said. “I see my in-laws are beckoning to me. We’ll all meet again before the great bye-and-bye in the sky. Anna, we will come visit you.”

  “I would enjoy that, Becky,” Anna said.

  “But now we must return to the country.”

  It was a long ride home, it was a short ride, I can’t recall which, my mind was so stuffed full of a number of things—and the warm air on my face, and the noise of the horse and carriage, and the sky so blue above, and my new family in the carriage along with me.

  Could I consider living here?

  Of course, I said to myself, and imagined meeting pretty dark-eyed Anna at dinner and paying court to her and taking long walks with her along the Battery, where arm and arm we would gaze out upon the water.

  We are probably very distant cousins, Anna, I imagined myself saying.

  And how would she respond?

  Nathaniel Pereira, I heard her say, what of Miriam? What of her? Are you so fickle that you find yourself daydreaming of me when that sweet girl back in Manhattan is pining away for you?

  Yes, yes, I suppose I am, I said, daydreaming, while the carriage bounced along, bringing me closer and closer to The Oaks, my temporary home on earth, I am that fickle, because I am young and youth is fickle and youth daydreams and flits from flower to flower like the happiest bee in summer.

  A flower, a face, drifted into my thoughts.

  Liza.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ________________________

  In My Margins

  A Hard Bargain

  How could it not have happened the first time he went to an auction? He was of the right age, and in the right frame of mind, that is to say, isolated, lonely, longing, and in a constant torment of desire. This state arrived even before dreams, and sometimes he could not dream without having first purged himself of the cool and nagging fluids over which he had little control in the making of.

  In the same ten years that coincided with his torturous and agonized adolescence, when his father built the plantation from scratch, Charleston saw a blossoming of the slave trade as few other Americ
an ports came to know, so for this boy, fresh from his coming of age ceremony, accompanying his father to an auction at the docks, the time was ripe for all that languished negatively in his soul to come forward into the light.

  For this he was reborn.

  Perhaps his father saw a certain anticipatory look in his eye, or perhaps he felt it incumbent upon him to make a brief speech to his son and had decided long in advance that he would do this. You can be the judge. Here is what he said, as the carriage rolled through the streets of Charleston (he might have said something just after they left the plantation, or somewhere along the dusty road into town, but he waited until what seemed to be almost the last minute. Why? Fear? Worry? Guilt? Who knew? But perhaps we might figure that out from what he said).

  “Son, I want to warn you that some things you witness this morning may shock you and repel you. There is no more raw a situation than the one you are about to see. (The older man spoke with a slight accent, a mixture of his forebears’ Dutch and his island English, of the second-generation variety.) Our business is rice, no more, no less. But on occasions such as this we have to open our eyes to the rest of life, and we may see some awful things, but sometimes awful is necessary for the success of our enterprise. Now you will hear people say things this morning that may sound terrible and strange. The way they speak about the Africans is neither true nor civilized. The Africans are not animals, do you understand? Slaves are people, but people who were not strong enough or brave enough to fight off their condition and keep their freedom. Our people were slaves in Egypt and Babylon. And might still be, if God had not intervened on our behalf. But He did not intervene until the last moment, when all who were not brave enough to strive forward had lost their hope. Imagine you are hurrying out of Egypt across the bed of the Red Sea and you hear the hiss and thunder of the boiling waves on either side. Do you stop and tremble? Do you allow your fear to enslave you? No, of course not, you hurry to hurry and finally you reach the farther shore. As you remember from studying the story of Moses [Had the young man studied it? He must have, but he simply did not remember, so caught up he was in the anticipation of the morning’s events.], freedom comes to those who take it, never to those who lie back and wait for it. Please remember, no matter what you hear or see, these Africans are neither inferior people nor anything like animals, though you will see them traded, bought and sold as though they were. [The young man held his breath at that statement, not knowing what to make of it.] They are people who have lost their way, who have lost their will to be free, and if not born to be slaves then find themselves destined to slavery for the rest of their lives, unless they fight to win their freedom. And here, so far from their homeland and without any means or money, they would be hard-pressed to fight for anything, anything at all. Now, son, I have asked myself why these questions come to my mind, and I say to you that because we are as a people a rather philosophical tribe such matters come to the fore when we are living our lives. And because we were a people who ourselves had once lived in bondage matters such as this slavery business often come to my mind. And as the questions occur I say in response what I have just said to you. When it is their turn to win their freedom it will come to them. And until then we all must live with the way things are right now, because that is their lot. Do I make myself clear? I know perhaps that I sometimes ramble. These are not easy matters to contemplate. Owning human souls makes for a great challenge for the owners. It brings out the best in us, and it can bring out the worst. These slaves have belonged to Africans, and English and Portuguese, and now they belong to us. It is our duty to everything we believe that we treat them fairly.”

  The young man heard his father’s words, but he did not pay much attention. A delicious and [what he at this point in his life did not have the words or experience enough to call] exotic feeling was building in his chest and hips. He listened to his father, but did not reply, because he could scarcely breathe. He saw a zigzag lightning-like pattern shimmering before his eyes, and even when he closed them the vision persisted.

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzz shimmering shimmering

  The black mermaid soon swam into his vision, barred from him by the zigzag emanations, waving over and above the wavering lines.

  And then she disappeared. And the lines kept rippling out to the outside perimeter of his eyes, and also went away.

  His knees went weak as he and his father descended from the carriage, hearing the voices and calls along the quay, smelling the tar and cigar smoke, the flowers of early spring, the brackish seawater in high tide, all of the way before him illuminated by a bright warm sun. The darkness he carried with him, something he could never explain, took on a certain bulk in his arms and even his stomach felt affected by the weight. By contrast with the sunlight it had a texture and heft all of its own.

  But until they reached the auction site on the quay he had little idea of what role this darkness would play in his life. Gulls cried out, screeched, veered and swung out over the water and back again, to the barques and sloops that lay at anchor. Three-masted schooners often docked here, carrying cargo from distant places, but these he paid little attention, focusing all of his awareness now on the long room with barred window openings just west of the quay. From within came shouts and squeals, bursts of song and sorrowful outcries of the variety you might expect to hear when mothers and children parted for what they took to be a long inevitable time.

  A large number of local gentlemen had gathered before the raised platform where a wooden shaft with chains attached stood in the center, the men talking among themselves as though waiting for the opening of a service of some kind or in anticipation of meal. The boy and his father stood a pace or two apart from this crowd, though now and then the older man acknowledged the greetings of the other gentlemen. To one or two he gestured at the boy and made known that this was his son.

  That son heard little of this now. He concentrated on the sounds from within the long barred room, standing almost on tip-toe in an attempt to try to listen. When a man in a coat and hat stepped up (as if out of nowhere) onto the platform the boy leaned his entire body in that direction. The man began to jabber and the boy paid little attention to what he said, straining, virtually up on his toes to see beyond the shoulders of the men bunched up in front of the block as a bulldog faced man, clearly a guard, in dark clothes and club in hand, went to open the door to the barracks.

  The shouting, weeping, crying that poured out through the door—he held his breath—this even before the guard, now aided by another man just as ugly, herded the interned Africans into a line just behind the block and plucked from the bunch a thick-necked fellow as dark as a moonless night and pushed him up a set of steps so that he stood above the crowd. The boy’s eyes burned in amazement as the auctioneer began to take bids on the African.

  “…stronger’n when he went into the Pest House, blessed with muscles galore, gentleman as you can see…”

  The man stared above the heads of the crowd, his eyes fixed on some point the boy could not, when he turned behind him to spy, discern.

  Voices shouting money figures boiled around him. The man was led away. Another took his place. And then another.

  His father grasped his shirt-sleeve.

  “We are looking for a helper and such for your mother. You keep an eye open now, son.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said.

  The crowd pressed tighter in as the first woman of the auction walked carefully up the steps, as if she were wearing a long gown on which she might trip rather than the rags that scarcely left any part of her generous tar-black body unexposed.

  “What do you think, son?”

  The boy wanted to speak but felt as though he had lost his tongue.

  His father leaned down and said, “A bit too old, probably untrainable…”

  The boy nodded, and felt the crowd pack closer as the sale of this woman speeded along.

  A younger woman, less sure of herself and much more
exposed, if that was possible and still be wearing clothes, stood tentatively on the block.

  A man nearby expelled from his lips a lascivious noise, something the boy had heard before only when men called to dogs or horses. Others took up the sound. The boy felt suddenly weak in the legs, as though he might fall down and become trampled under the feet of these large, bidding men.

  “Five hundred!” a man called out.

  “Look at her,” the auctioneer said, touching a short rod to the girl’s naked ribs. “Look!”

  Perhaps it was a dream, the boy thought later. His thoughts swirled about in his skull and his stomach twisted and untwisted. He looked and looked, and under cover of the press of the crowd—who also apparently pushed forward to look and look—he found his hands on his lower parts, and while the auctioneer called for bids and more bids rubbed himself until he felt some release from the state of frenzy that had overtaken him, and when he looked around at the crowd again—after the young woman had been removed from the block—he thought he saw one or two younger men who, like himself, might have just undergone the same twisting of body and soul.

  Another young woman walked up the steps chanting, and would not, despite the urging of the auctioneer, quiet down. What language, the boy had never heard. What was she shouting, almost singing to the crowd, no one, probably, could say, except perhaps the other slaves crowded now into the space between the back of the block and the walls of the barracks. The boy could not have ever seen her before, of course, and yet she looked familiar, and when, as sometimes happens when a person stands above a crowd and runs her eyes across their faces, her eyes for a moment met his he recalled the black mermaid who had saved his life, if that is what happened when the undertow pulled him into the waves not so long ago, and as the young woman went on chanting above the calls of the auctioneer the boy wrenched himself from the crowd and ignoring the shouts of his father ran toward the water and when he reached the brackish line of tidal wrack just below the tarry stanchions holding up the pier threw up the contents of his last meal and for a number of minutes retched drily, and in tormenting pain in stomach and bowels.