Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  These people are weak, he shouted to himself in a loud voice in his mind, who but the weak would ever let themselves be caught and bought and sold? I never would. I would escape! I would fight to the death!

  This is what I gleaned, this is what I heard, this is what I surmised, this is what I dreamed, this is what I imagine took place, given all, all that I have learned.

  His father took another view.

  “If you keep people,” he often said to Jonathan, “you must sometimes treat them as if they are your own children.”

  His father did not like to say “own.” He said “keep” instead, always, even if his son would sometimes call him out on that.

  “And treat your own children like slaves?”

  “Show me the respect I deserve,” his father said. “Do not speak to me in that rough manner. You are a gentleman, raised by a gentleman.”

  “Yes, sir, I am sorry,” his son said. “I do apologize.”

  That was how it went back and forth between them, father and son, patriarch and heir apparent.

  As to his relations with his mother, they were nothing. In his dark heart women were nothing to him, slave women were nothing, white women, Jewish women, a little better than nothing. Whatever happened between the gods as they discussed his fate, out of it came a hard bargain!

  Oh, what a fate, a fortune to look in the eye, to have such a grandfather as this!

  Chapter Thirty

  ________________________

  The Second Sabbath

  Any daydreams I might have called up about Anna and any plans I might have had in mind about Miriam fled like wisps of fog at the first appearance of morning sun when on the Gentile Sabbath as I lay in bed listening to the birdsong outside my window there came a knock on my door.

  “Yes?”

  “Massa?”

  Her voice! It chilled me as sharply as a pitcher of cold water dashed across my chest!

  And at the same time heated me up!

  “Massa Jonathan sends some trousers for you, sir.”

  “Leave them outside the door,” I said, wary of showing my eagerness for seeing her. I was in an excited state all of a sudden (again, again!), and it wasn’t something of which I was proud.

  “Yes, sir,” Liza said, but immediately opened the door and entered anyway, a broad smirk on her face. She tossed a pair of heavy trousers onto the foot of the bed and stood there looking beautiful in her green eyes and white smock.

  “You must not keep on doing this. You must respect my privacy, Liza. Please leave the room so that I can dress.”

  “These are for you, sir, from Massa Jonathan,” she said. “For your hunting trip today.”

  “It’s true, I did not pack for hunting in the woods,” I said. “Thank you, Liza. Now please leave me.”

  She stood a moment, lingering as she did the morning before, and showing me more of that strange emotion in her eyes, a look not brazen, but not appealing either, yet something in between. She left the room, hips swinging, leaving me behind to contemplate what was both wrong and right with nature as I knew it and myself tied up in a knot.

  Yet we had things to do on this other holiday. Within the hour, after coffee and a bite of Precious Sally’s best Sunday cake, a wonderful rich mixture of eggs and butter and certain secret spices—“Not giving away my secrets,” she said when I inquired, by way of praising her cooking—cousin Jonathan and I set out on horseback for the woods.

  I was seated on Promise. I knew not the name of his steed.

  The woods! The woods! Not a place where I was either yearning or prepared to be! Although the sun had scarcely risen above the height of the tall bushes the heat had already become intense, bordering on excessive.

  “You must live an exciting life up there in your New York City,” my cousin said as we rode along.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, straining to keep my seat upon the fast-moving beast.

  “As you have seen, we live our quiet life out here in the country and visit the city now and then, perhaps every other Sabbath. And I can do it only because I know that almost as soon as we arrive we are going to be returning home. While I know I must have shown a certain amount of pride when we took you around the city, I have to confess that I never stop at those places we showed you except when we have a guest such as yourself, which is rare. Most of the time I am here, with now and then a visit to the synagogue. When I was younger I did now and then visit the auction. Now my excursions occur mostly in my reading of history, something Father encouraged in me ever since I was a boy, and my outings to hunt and fish. Such as today’s.”

  “There is Rebecca, is there not?”

  “Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. She would be furious with me if she knew I had forgotten to mention her.”

  He laughed a deep laugh, and it had such dark bass notes to it, that it made me wonder why I had not heard him laugh that way before. The trail narrowed and we slowed our pace so to move single file, and so I gave myself over to the buzzing of the insects and the sound of our horses’ hooves upon the spongy track and the creaking of their bones and muscles, and my own wondering. What if we kept on riding, how far could we go? Past the river, west toward the mountains of Tennessee, whatever those mountains were called, and then keeping on to the west until we reached the Ohio territory ahead, where Indians roamed and men lived freely in the open or under leaning roofs to keep off the rain and snow?

  Out of the razzing of the insects and the shushing of the wind in the treetops I might possibly make out the thousand voices of strange tribes, whose ways and mores intrigued me much more than the people among whom I was born or those I met. I could hear their horses, tethered in large numbers outside their huts. I could hear, ever so faintly in the distance, the cries of their hounds. If one passed through these Indian lands, I wondered, what might be the chance of survival? And wasn’t there beyond them a great river that one had to cross, and mountains upon mountains, to reach the shining Pacific? Oh, I was dreaming, dreaming far ahead of myself, as it ultimately transpired! As I hope I have made clear, I saw myself as a Europe-man, ready for my Grand Tour that lay on the other side of the nearby Atlantic. (Not even thoughts about the family’s abode down in Curaçao, which came up now that I had met uncle and cousin, could bend the line I drew in my mind from New York across the Atlantic to points east. Do not distract me, Caribbean, for I am, within a few weeks or a month or two at most, was how I saw it, Europe-bound!)

  “This is the place,” my cousin said, disturbing my geographical reverie as we broke out from beneath the trees into a glade filled with sunlight with the river running gaily to the north of it. We dismounted and tied our horses to trees on the edge of the clearing and fetched water for them from the river in leather pouches. “This,” he said, “is where Rebecca would have us build our colony.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Our special place, as she calls it, a community where massas and slaves no longer exist and Jews and gentiles live in comity, and Indians, too, who worship only the wind in the sky.”

  “It sounds like a lovely plan,” I said. “How shall you do it?”

  “If it were a plan, we might begin,” my cousin said. “As for now, it’s only an idea mingled with a dream.” He took a deep breath, as if inhaling the very idea he was speaking of. And then spoke again in a voice quite different. “Her dream.”

  “And not yours also?”

  “I am more practical.” Something sparked in his eyes, and I believed him to be considering, considering the necessities of such a vision.

  “And yet you let her dream.”

  My cousin laughed in as dark a way as I had yet heard him.

  “Dreams, Cuz, are dreams…”

  (Looking back I recognize that this was the high point of our acquaintance, his talk of dreams, and my attempts to see such good things in him as his talk would imply.)

  Suddenly, overhead in the clear sky, a flock of pigeons erupted across the space, as if freed by the hand of some Manhatt
an boy who had been keeping them on a rooftop.

  A loud crash echoed through the glade and I dodged instinctively at the sound of it while the horses did nervous jigs about their tethers.

  This was cousin Jonathan, having fired his pistol into the air, watching a bird fall toward the treetops.

  “Very good,” I said. “Good shot.”

  “Will you try your eye, Cousin?” he said.

  “The birds are gone,” I said, looking to the sky.

  “They’ll be back,” he said.

  “Then of course I will.”

  “Are you a good shot?”

  I immediately thought about my pistol in the bureau drawer back in my room.

  “We have a number of moving targets in New York City,” I said, “beginning with our immigrant rats. But I have not yet tried my hand at such sport. But will you fetch that bird?”

  “For what?”

  “For our supper.”

  “No need, no need. Thousands like it will fly past at any moment. You just need take a shot at the sky and it will bring down another piece of supper. Or two more. Or three.”

  “Paradise,” I said. “Manna. Food falling from the skies, forever.”

  “We do have to shoot them,” Jonathan said. “So not Paradise exactly. But a workable Eden on earth, between our pistols and the crowds of nature.” He held the weapon out to me.

  “Would you like to try?”

  “The sky is empty of birds just now.”

  “They will return.”

  “Some other time, perhaps,” I said.

  My cousin bowed his head toward me and fit his pistol back into his waistband. He pointed to the creek.

  “And now to the water,” he said.

  From the fine sack he had carried with him at the saddle, he extracted two rods with line and hooks. He reached into a rough sack he also had carried with him and extracted some lively worms one of the slaves had dug up for us early in the day and hooked one and then handed me the other. Its wriggling presence made coolness on my palm and I watched it squirm a little before following my cousin’s instructions and skewering it on the hook. Within moments we cast our worms into the gently moving stream and sat quietly to await whatever came next.

  The hot morning sun inched above the treetops at our backs. Hawks circled overheard. In the distance dogs cried out, while I settled into the still business of fishing wherein such minute motions as the light current running against the line where it entered the water made patterns fascinating to the eye.

  “Ah,” my cousin said, sinking down to a place on the vine-covered ground, “this is Paradise.”

  “It is lovely,” I said, sinking along with him. “I have never fished much before this, Cousin. Except perhaps to throw bricks into the passing Hudson.”

  He laughed and stretched his booted feet out before him while holding his rod high.

  I followed suit, and then, as he lay the rod at his side, did the same, for the pleasure of quietly doing nothing and yet having the right to say you are doing something after all. He passed his flask to me, and I took a sip, and handed it back to him and watched him spend a moment or two with the same receptacle to his lips.

  A fish jumped in the creek, its silver sides catching the sun and winking it back at me.

  “In the best of all possible worlds,” my cousin said as he jiggled his pole so that the line danced at the water line, “we will live off the fish we catch and the slaves will be free and all will be well with all of us and the world.” He took a breath, slowly, as if inhaling a pipe. “A fine dream, is it not?”

  “A fine way to see things,” I said, pausing a moment to gaze down into the current. “Of course someone else will have to work the plantation.”

  “New Africans,” he said. “Each year we’ll bring in new slaves and gradually free them also. That is my wife’s idea.”

  “But the trade across the ocean has ended,” I reminded him.

  “We will restore it,” he said.

  “Our government will never do that.”

  “Our new government will,” he said.

  “A new government? And which is that?”

  “A confederacy of Southern states become a separate nation.”

  Now I should record my astonishment at his declaration, but I couldn’t say how I would have responded, because of a sudden my pole came alive in my hand.

  “Whoa! I have a bite!”

  “Indeed you do,” said my cousin, watching with delight as I raised and lowered the pole to the pull and tug of the creature on the end of my line. I eased it out of the water and watched it dance on its tail on the surface—a blue and green and yellow-gilded fish as long as my forearm—when we saw another creature bobbing about in the water just upstream.

  We both jumped back in astonishment as a dark-skinned man with a bald head that showed off the earth-color of his skull came stumbling out of the creek, water running off him in gushets, and collapsed in front of us.

  “My God!” I said, staring at the man who lay prone before us. “He is nearly drowned.” Suddenly the image of the young dark boy from New Jersey came to my mind, and I felt an acute instant of desperation at how he himself, wherever he might be in our region, must surely desire to run, to flee across water and follow a path that would take him back to freedom.

  “He was not swimming for pleasure, I am sure,” my cousin said. He stood there, hands on hips, regarding the fallen creature. “Damned fool is running south. He should have stayed north of the creek.”

  “Running?”

  “Yes, a way for slaves to exercise their limbs,” said Jonathan.

  “What?” I said.

  My cousin touched a finger to his lips.

  “Hush!” he said with a menacing sort of hiss.

  High above us a hawk circled, and smaller birds sang, as they had been singing, since sunrise. The fish flopped about on the creek-side, the water gurgled in the sun. And in the distance came the high whining song of those dogs we had been hearing for a while.

  “Ohhhh.”

  The slave just then reached up and grabbed his leg.

  Jonathan kicked at him, and tore at his own coat pocket where he had stowed his pistol.

  “Away!” he shouted at the slave, still kicking, as though trying to shy away a rampant dog.

  “Sorry, massa,” the slave said, clinging to his leg.

  “You are going to be sorrier still,” Jonathan said, cocking his pistol. “Release me!”

  “Cain’t,” the slave said with a moan.

  Jonathan drew back a step, dragging the clinging slave with him, and still threatening the man with the pistol.

  “I said release!”

  “No,” I said, wishing desperately that I had not left my own pistol behind.

  “I have him,” my cousin said, turning to me with a gleeful stare.

  He gestured with his pistol.

  “Get up,” he said to the man.

  “Getting’ up, massa,” the man said, releasing my cousin’s leg and slowly pushing himself to his feet. He stood trembling. Water had soaked his ragged clothes so that they clung to him like a second skin, accentuating his already thin appearance. He had a long bullet-shaped head and large front teeth, which chattered uncontrollably not from the water, which was quite warm, but from fear. Even at this distance I could smell the stench of it pouring off him.

  “He is confused,” I said. “Put the weapon aside.”

  “He certainly is,” my cousin said. “He is a fool to run.”

  “Tell him which way to go.”

  “What?”

  “Tell him which way to go. Give him a chance to run away.”

  My cousin shook his head.

  “He will not get far. The dogs are out looking for him.”

  “Give him a chance.”

  “He is someone’s property. Should I steal from another man?”

  “Think of him as a fish that got away. Let him go along.”

  My cousin stared m
e in the eye, as if appraising my whole self.

  “I will show you my good will,” he said, lowering his weapon and squinting at me, as though the bright light of morning had suddenly faded. “I will give you this as a sign of my good faith in our family and business relations.”

  Jonathan cleared his throat and looked down at the wretch before us.

  “You are running in the wrong direction,” he said. “Head west and when the river turns north keep it to your right and that will take you to the lake, and from there, west a long, long way to the mountains. Can you remember that?”

  “If I forgot all I got to do is listen…” The man looked over his shoulder and we all stood a moment listening to the sounds in the distance of howling dogs and the faint shouts of men.

  “Go!” a voice burst out.

  It was my voice.

  “Thank you, massa,” the man said, and he jumped to his feet.

  “One more moment!” Jonathan said.

  “Cousin, he must be on his way.”

  “He will need to do one thing more.”

  “And what is that?” I said, seeing the pain and torment on the dark face of the runaway.

  “He must needs bow down to me.”

  “What?”

  Jonathan turned to me and showed me that infernal grin that came before with his laugh. But he was not laughing now.

  “You want him to bow?”

  “To us,” he said, gesturing with the pistol.

  “And then you’ll let him go?”

  “I will. It makes no difference…”

  “You,” I said to the runaway. “Did you hear him?”

  The man nodded.

  “Bow down then,” I said. “Hurry.”

  “As if to a king,” Jonathan said.

  “Is this some horrendous—”

  “Bow,” Jonathan cut me off.

  The runaway man looked at him and then turned to me.

  I nodded.

  The man knelt and lowered himself to the ground before my cousin.

  My cousin raised his pistol and then lowered it to aim at the prostrate man’s head. A moment or two passed before Jonathan said, “Very well, then. Go.”