Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  The man jumped to his feet and, while Jonathan stood perfectly still and pretended to aim his weapon at him, dashed into the woods.

  Frankly, I could not find any words to say about what I had just witnessed.

  “Damnation!” Jonathan spit onto the ground.

  More moments passed, with the air filled with the barking and howls of approaching dogs.

  My cousin seemed to be about to say something to me when a pack of low-slung muscular animals came bursting out of the trees on the other side of the creek, howling as they came. A trio of horsemen followed. The dogs took a moment to run their snouts along the far shore before plunging into the water and surging toward our side and the horsemen behind did not pause as they ripped into the stream, emerging on our shore in a burst of spume and splash just behind the dogs.

  But with shouts and roars they reined up just before us while the dogs went rushing off into the woods.

  “Where’s he at?” called the wire-haired fellow atop the blue-tinged stallion.

  “Langerhans, how are you?” my cousin said. “We were sitting here quietly fishing and look now, you’ve scared all the fish away, I am sure.”

  “It’s the Sabbath, you should be home or at church,” Langerhans said, a nasty half-smile on his crooked face. “But then your kind don’t go to church on Sunday, do yiz?”

  “We went yesterday,” my cousin said, matching the horseman sneer for sneer. “On our own Sabbath. Think of it, man. Our country, broad and grand enough for each and every man to have a separate Sabbath.” A slight sneer turned his mouth as he spoke. “But you, you are not at prayer now either, are you?”

  “Listen, my Hebrew friend,” the patroller said, “I’ll be at prayer tonight thanking the Lord for the bounty on a runaway nigger, that’s for sure.”

  “Whose nigger is that?” Jonathan asked.

  “You ain’t seen him? Well, you couldn’t have missed him, could you, since he must have splashed up out of the creek worst than our dogs.”

  Langerhans leaned down along the mane of his horse and gave me his eye.

  “Yankee down from the nigger north, are you?”

  “We do not think of it that way, I have to tell you,” I said.

  “What you have to tell me,” the patroller said, “is which way the nigger ran. Oh, shit and barnstorms, the dogs’ll find him. We just have to find the dogs before they tear him to pieces. Before anything else, the nigger needs a whipping.”

  “So no funeral?” Jonathan said.

  “Not if we can help it.” The man smiled, and it appeared to be the same as his sneer. “Nigger’s someone’s property and we’re bound to protect it.”

  In the distance the dogs broke into a high melodic whine.

  “Well,” Langerhans said, “we got to be off. Give my regards to your father. Tell him anytime he’s got trouble with a nigger we’re ready to help out.”

  “We don’t happen to have any problems these days, do we?” Jonathan said to me.

  But before I could speak the three men turned their horses and trotted off into the woods in the direction of the dogs.

  “Well…” I said, wandering over to the creek-side, where the ground was torn up by the horses.

  “A not-so-pretty side of the way we live down here,” my cousin said.

  “Yet on our family’s property we have no runaways?”

  “No, sir. They love us and we love them. They respect us, and we are trying to teach them.” Again, that demonic sneer appeared on his face. “Why, they look upon me as royalty, as a king!”

  We heard the now distant dogs singing even higher in their frenzied whining, and we stared at each other and I did not like that look on my cousin’s face. I could not see the look on mine, but I felt it. Oh, I felt it! If I myself could have bolted and run, that would have been the time.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  ________________________

  The Promised Land

  The tall dark man had counted the moons. Ten of them had risen and set before one early morning the uglies herded them into small boats and sailed across a short stretch of water to another pier. It astonished her, the sadness of this last short trip! One of the Africans rolled over the side into the water and despite his manacles began to swim toward the rising sun. Before the shouting subsided he had sunk out of sight.

  This weighed on Lyaa like a stone, and between that and the weight of her unborn child, whom she was sure was the goddess herself waiting to be born again, she found herself slow to move and thus the object of shouts from the pale-skinned uglies. From the riverside to the long barracks where the Africans first were penned seemed like a great distance to her, walking as she did as if in water. Here now, she peered through the metal slats of the barracks wall, watching the pale-skins pass by in what seemed to be a market. Piles of fruit and vegetables lay on tables all across the yard. Bolts of bright-colored cloth and baskets, figures made of sticks and clay lay displayed as wares the strolling customers might choose among. Oh, how she would have loved to have strolled there, too, and touched and inspected and chosen pieces of colorful cloth to dress herself. She was dreaming awake in this fashion when someone touched her shoulder and she turned to see the white-haired man with the clear mask over his eyes staring at her belly.

  At the nod of his head another pale-skin came up to them and holding her by the manacles led her out of the pen into the sunlight and up onto a large raised wooden block. Even after all the time lying below decks on the long passage and the many moons under guard in the crowd of women and men alike on the other side of the river it still shamed and disturbed her to stand naked in the bright sunlight before a crowd of shouting pale-skinned men. One of them pointed at her with a stick and a man behind her used a stick to prod her into turning around.

  The voices grew louder, and she felt the sun bearing down on her head with the weight of a large stone.

  Let us fly away now, she urged the goddess, but when she took a deep breath and urged herself upward nothing happened, except the man next to her began speaking to the gathering crowd.

  He turned her again, and this made her dizzy. He turned her again, and she felt the sun weighing on her even more.

  He gently poked her in the belly with the stick, saying something that drew a laugh from the crowd, and she turned away, holding the pouch with the stone to her nether parts and wishing she could drink water or, again, fly high, or go to sleep and have a beautiful dream that would carry her away from all this turmoil.

  The man held the stick over her head and called out, and men in the crowd called back to him.

  He leered at her and touched her belly with his stick, raising a cheer from the crowd.

  She flailed her arms at him and spun away. A shout! The man slapped her on the shoulder. Lyaa felt her gorge rise, and turned in the sun spewing vomit over his shoes and falling onto the platform before all the light disappeared.

  Was she dreaming? What land was this? So far across the waters from home, so far from the heaven in which she had flown within the goddess’s body, and yet the light from that heaven poured down on her, and on the wagon in which she lay, and the noise of the creaking vehicle and the sound of the animal’s hooves on the road, the clicks and grunts of the driver—she leaned up on her elbows and caught a glimpse of his black neck and the back of his black head—even the sound seemed magnified by the light all around it. She took several deep breaths and closed her eyes, pressing her knuckles against them, and opening her eyes again. All that she had seen? Still here! Was this real or a dream? She asked Yemaya, but the goddess didn’t answer.

  And then, she noticed that she lay covered in a simple cloth garment, rough but roughly enough to dress herself in. After all that time down in the hold and up on deck living nearly naked she had nearly forgotten it was not the natural state of things. The man who drove the cart wore a white shirt that glowed in wavering lines in the heat of the burning sun. And then she noticed that a man rode on horseback alongside the wago
n, a man wearing a rough-cloth dark shirt and dark trousers, his face as white as the cart-driver’s shirt.

  She shivered, and heard herself sigh. The day grew hotter, even as the wagon bounced along beneath a canopy of trees. Another forest! But not the forest of home, no. Oh, Yemaya, please, goddess, You cannot have gone away and left me here! You would not, would You?

  Chapter Thirty-two

  ________________________

  Two Selections

  That night I returned to my room and, in a rather melancholy mood, stood at the window a while as though I might see into the dark across the fields and into the woods where that runaway black man had been hiding—though I was quite sure he had been captured, giving the excitement of the dogs who went after him—and then picked my way through a book case near the bed. The only thing there that caught my interest was a small volume of illustrated poems by a man named William Blake. But these I put aside for further study. Next I went to the bureau and took up the prayer pamphlet I had folded and pressed during my stay in the synagogue.

  Creed of the Reformed Society of Israelites

  Q. What are the fundamental Elements which form the basis of the Jewish faith?

  A. The thirteen following:

  1. The existence of God.—We believe that God exists, who created and sustains the universe.

  2. His unity.—We believe that God is ONE, and only one, without a second that can in any manner be compared to, or associated with him.

  Slowly, I read down the list of the other elements of the faith—His incorporeity, his eternity (“We believe that he is eternal, without beginning and without end…”), his direct superintendence (that he reigns alone over the universe without the intermediation of any other power…), his providence, the truth of prophecy, the prophecy of Moses (“the prince of prophets”), the delivery of the Law, the permanence of the Law, oh, and yes, the rewards and punishments for those who fulfill the law and those who transgress it, and the Coming of the Messiah—and last, the Resurrection of the dead.

  We believe that those who sleep in the dust will awake, and

  All who have died will return to life.

  I studied this yet again, finding this talk about death and resurrection rather odd for the Jews, since in New York this subject never arose. And then remembering something I had put aside while I had been unpacking I went to my bag and saw at the bottom the rumpled New York news sheet that I had used to wrap my mother’s portrait.

  I unfolded the sheet, held it up to my nose to catch an inky whiff of the city I had only recently left but which already seemed so distant that this artifact might have come from the ruins of some ancient exotic capital. The headlines I ignored—despite all of my old teacher Halevi’s promptings, I was never much one for news—but by the flickering light of the candle I read a poem that the editors in their wisdom had chosen to publish.

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I

  pondered, weak and weary,

  Over many a quaint and curious volume

  of forgotten lore—

  While I nodded, nearly napping,

  suddenly there came a tapping,

  As of some one gently rapping, rapping

  at my chamber door.

  “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered,

  “tapping at my chamber door—

  Only this and nothing more…

  This poem kept me rapt with the spirit of it, and a bit on the edge of nervousness after hearing of its speaker’s encounter with the harbinger of darkness and death.

  Open here I flung the shutter. When,

  With many a flirt and flutter

  In there stepped a stately Raven of the

  Saintly days of yore…

  “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!

  Prophet still, if bird or devil!…

  Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—

  Tell me—tell me, I implore!”

  Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

  All this knocking, rapping, tapping—and the apparition of that bird—set me to walking about my room—the knocking, rapping, tapping—and even after I put out the candle and climbed into the bed it kept my mind alert.

  Knocking—rapping—tapping…

  Try as I might I could not find sleep. Instead I imagined my father in his office—the king in his counting house—going over the books, counting and measuring shipments from Samarkand, barrels from Italy and China, gems from the volcanoes of Borneo—and then his homecoming each evening, when Aunt Isabelle would greet him at the door, the perfect housekeeper (assisted of course by Marzy). And they would take their supper and sip a glass of wine and talk about the business of the day.

  Oh, how these thoughts drew in me a such a longing to be home I nearly cried out in the dark!

  Slaves and dogs and fish and sun, birds and pistols! Wishing to imagine such things no further, eventually I fell into a troubled sleep. After what I could surmise as having been a short while, I awoke (in my dream?) to find myself standing before a black-winged creature with the head of snake and the body of a cat.

  A deep-voiced “Sir!” from out of the dark. I sat up with a start.

  “It’s Black Jack, massa.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you cry out, massa. Are you all right?”

  He stood there in the room, as much a part of the dark as he was of what little light there was from a faint moon glowing outside the window.

  “I cried out loud?”

  “You did, massa,” he said. “May I help?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “I was reading. I was dreaming. Black Jack, something to drink, please? Something soothing…”

  “Of course, massa,” he said. “I thought you might want something like that.” And with that he faded away into the darkness near the door. I could hear his footsteps down the hall, and fainter still on the stairs. Oh, houses at night! How they change from the places we inhabit during the day, as if when the sun goes down and the moon comes up we live in more than one plane at a time. I lay in the dark thinking about this and before I knew it I heard footsteps coming back up the stairs. A light tapping (tapping, tapping) at the door.

  “Come in, Black Jack,” I said.

  I felt the light breeze as the door opened and the figure entered the room, a form cast by the light of a candle, and for a flickering instant I felt a terrible rush of icy fear in my blood—a mare out the night had come to murder me!—

  And then I heard her voice.

  “Massa Pereira?”

  “Who—oh!”

  I jumped to my feet.

  “Yes, sir,” the girl Liza said. “Black Jack asked me to bring you this. He said you were having trouble falling asleep.”

  As she crossed the room first she was nothing more than a wavering of the dark, and then, as her pale (compared to the darkness) face caught the light of the candle-flame, I could finally make her out in a white smock holding the tray before her.

  “What is that?” I said, seeing the goblet on the tray.

  “His special potion for sleep,” she said.

  “A magic potion?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Drink and you shall be bewitched, massa.”

  I strained my eyes in the dark to see if I might catch a glimpse of her eyes, but she was nothing but a solid emblem of something somewhat lighter than the dark behind her, with no particular features for me to make out.

  “Then bewitched I shall be,” I said. “But first, one thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Stop calling me master, please?”

  “—”

  “Liza?”

  “Yes, massa?”

  “That is exactly what I’m talking about. No more of that.”

  “No, massa,” she said.

  “Liza!”

  “—”

  “Liza?”

  “But what do I call you then, massa?”

  “Nathaniel, call me Nathaniel. Or Nate.”

 
“I can’t do that. The old massa will be angry with me.”

  “Then let’s make an agreement,” I said, picking up the goblet and without hesitation taking a long swallow of the sweet pungent liquid that stopped me for a moment from breathing.

  “Massa?” she said.

  “No more of that,” I said in a raven-like croak.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, no, no, no. When we are alone, you call me Nate. When we are with the family, you can do your duty and address me as usual.”

  “Yes, massa.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, Nate,” she said. There was something as smooth and pungent in her voice as the liquid in my throat.

  We paused there, and I must say, in the spirit of candor, that in that instant, when I stood so close to her that I could hear her quiet breathing and mistake it for my own, the heat of our two bodies embossed the place in the dark where we faced each other.

  “Nate,” she said.

  “Ah,” I said, quite taken with the fact that she had used my name and the way she had spoken it.

  Tenderly, she took the goblet from my hand and turned to set it on the tray as I boldly allowed myself the gaze at her faint outline in the dark, ghostliness upon ghostliness.

  I stepped toward her.

  But she was already out the door and gone.

  I returned to my bed and lay there what I thought was a long time and then I was opening my eyes to bright dawn sun and the music of birds.