Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  His stay in New England had informed him a great deal on these questions. Here in Carolina, where his own forebears went back enough generations to put them at least a hundred years before the war for independence, there was never any question that it was commerce above and beneath all else, on which the well-being and satisfaction of society was built. All of his people had owned large plantations or ships or warehouses for storing what came in on the ships, and as a family over the generations they had amassed a fine legacy of land and houses and animals and human property.

  He was one of the few male members of his family who had decided that such commerce was not his fate (while the women, whose destiny was to enjoy the fruits of all the great commerce by practicing the arts of music or drawing or sewing or even poetry, never questioned it). His father expressed his disappointment upon hearing that one of his sons, the one, in fact, in whom he saw the greatest potential for working in the world of commerce, would choose to take up the art of medicine, but since it was, unlike the music or drawing and the other things the women practiced, an important art he acquiesced in his son’s choice of a future. But the man did understand why his son might choose to take another path in life. The buying and selling of the numerous bodies of Africans, for example, one of the aspects of his business, had over the years driven him deeper and deeper into an understanding of the human soul that caused him to question his own life and the life of his business. He had read on the question of human nature as presented by various philosophers—he was not at all an uneducated man and had, in fact, attended the same New England school where his wayward son, as he liked to think of the physician, had gone to medical college—and he had read and studied in the area of theology, which was one of the reasons he found church on Sunday so boring, always comparing the priests to those deep and profound thinkers on the subjects to whose level they hardly ever seemed capable of reaching themselves. The paradox of freedom remained the question at the heart of the matter. He accepted God and his laws, and yet he never could get over the problem that allowed for a man to make his own way in the world and still accept that he remained a creature whose every step was preordained by his Lord.

  Praise God! Praise the Lord! That was a mouthful, but necessary to set down on paper.

  And furthermore: most of his family was too obtuse to appreciate the fineness of such a problem, but his physician son was one with whom he could speak, and speak freely, especially after the doctor had finished his schooling. There had been a slave revolt in a small plantation to the south of Charleston, an incident in which the slaves had turned on the master and his family, killed them, and burned the house and all the barns and killed the animals before fleeing into the woods where, eventually, starving and afraid, they had been found by a large cohort of militia and unofficial outliers who brought them back to the home county seat where they were quickly tried and every one of them, mostly men, but also a few women, hanged.

  An isolated incident, but nonetheless the old patriarch talked about it with his physician son, asking him aloud what he had been asking himself in the quiet of his own mind, which was how the Africans could have allowed themselves to be taken into captivity in the first place—it just was not in his nature to understand this kind of submission—and how once indentured here in Carolina they could translate the question of how to achieve their freedom, if that was what they were seeking, into the brutalities of murder and destruction.

  “After all the years of reading and studying I have done on the question,” the father said to the doctor, “I can only conclude that men may be born free but that these Africans are not true men. Science has shown us, how they not only live closer to the animal but their brains are not at as high a stage as our own. You, son, have looked at human brains and at animal brains over the course of your schooling. Surely you have seen the difference?”

  “And what if, father,” the doctor said in what was one of their final discussions on the subject, before some agent in his father’s blood turned sour and weakened the nature of his body’s life-giving fluid, “I can tell you that I have never discerned a single important difference between the Caucasian brain and the African brain? What if I told you that?”

  The doctor’s father smiled—he had the most charming smile, as his wife, the doctor’s mother, and several other women over his lifetime, would attest—and his son knew that their discussion was about to end. The man’s smile always announced his decision to conclude whatever matter was at hand.

  “Based on all that I know,” he said, “that is, adding my experience on to what I have read in philosophy, I can only say that you have not looked hard enough, son. As to the act of observation itself it may be that just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder so does the possibility of freedom.”

  “Father, are you saying these people were born to become slaves rather than free men?”

  But his father had already turned away.

  All of this came to mind for the doctor, though his father was long dead and his brothers had taken over the family business, and he himself having drifted into the orbit of these Hebrews, whom he had befriended after they had called him one desperate night to attend, if he could, what turned out to be the last hours of the matriarch of the Pereira family. More death! This time it had been the withered Jewish crone who had been an infant in Holland and after her family’s passage to the Antilles had grown to womanhood in the islands. Oh, time! Oh, time! A few decades after the American Revolution, one of her sons had packed them all up and moved them to Charleston when it became clear that there might be greater fortunes to be made in South Carolina than on their small Carib isle. Another son went to New York. Pondering all this change and transformation made the doctor both lament to himself and celebrate the perseverance of this tribe. Yet he understood the decision of someone who wanted to set a course for a more prosperous shore. At her vigil, hopeless, of course, but one in which he tried all that he knew about medicine that might change the course of the old Hebrew woman’s decline, he encountered unfamiliar complexity in the person of Old Dou, the crone of darker hue who as an infant had arrived on a slave ship before anyone else in the household. (In the middle of a storm at sea she had slipped out from between her mother’s legs, and after her mother had died of dysentery some weeks later spent the rest of the voyage being passed along among the strongest of the remaining women, and some of the men.)

  So here she was, the African woman, the first time the doctor had spied her, hovering over her old mistress’s body, drawing her hands along the lines of her arteries and veins. When the doctor, about to apply leeches, asked what she was doing, she explained that she was using the power in her hands to smooth out the flow of the old woman’s blood.

  “Up north, not so many years ago,” the doctor said, drawing on some lore he had acquired during his medical training in Massachusetts, “someone might call what you are doing witchcraft.”

  Old Dou looked him hard in the eyes, not an act a slave made without serious decision at that time, and then laughed.

  “I am a witch, yes, and you are another.”

  The doctor ignored what she said about him and asked her to show him what she was doing and explain why. A few minutes passed while she talked about the blood river in the old woman’s body and how sun, moon, sky, and certain stars could change the course of the body’s flow, as directed in the hands of someone like herself.

  The doctor listened in fascination, but in the end he went along on his own way, employed his training, and bled the old woman. This seemed to have kept her alive for a few days, but then without more than a whisper, with the entire family gathered around her bed while the doctor and Old Dou stood off to one side, she expelled through her lips a single bubble of air and passed away.

  And what had all of this to do with the little girl child who lay murmuring in the basket in the single room of the shack behind the big house where Old Dou, her stature long ago elevated beyond that of the field hands, had been al
lowed to sleep and live? Well, it had all to do with the old African woman herself, who had, while Lyaza’s mother had passed from pregnancy to birth—and young girlhood, we have to say, to womanhood, in the throes of her murderous labor—listened to the tormented woman’s stories, sometimes garbled, sometimes lucid, about her passage, and her family back in the forest and back further still into the desert land where they had first come to awareness of themselves. Her (old African) religion helped her to understand the meanness, if not wickedness, of the slaveholder’s way of seeing, because she understood that all life on earth, from scorpions to mayflies and everything in between, every stone and rock, flowing stream, and cloud, and tree and plant, and certainly every living creature above that level of life, was filled with god, each one had a spirit, some smaller, others greater, and that it was no slander—as the slaveholders often depicted it—to think of us having descended from the large animals that lived in trees and foraged for food on the ground, and fought, and mated, and nursed and raised their children, and even laughed and played nearly as we still do, when sorrowful occasions pass us by, rather than saying only Africans came down in the world that way, and were not truly human, while the slaveholders, Christians almost all of them—with a few exceptions, such as the Pereiras—were made directly by their god, or passed down in a line from the angels above.

  See what this woman held in her hand just before the birth of that child! A stone, marked at some distant moment in the dark or light or invisible past! Where had it come from? Was it witchcraft? How did Old Dou find it? Had Lyaa handed it to her before she went into labor? Or did she find it, when it was forced out of the center of the mad, young girl’s body during childbirth, just before the new girl-child arrived into the light of a Carolina summer morning? The foundation stone, a pebble yet a boulder, mysteriously carried in the body, first mineral of earliest creation, now it saw the light again.

  The doctor held this stone up and studied it, before Old Dou asked him for it.

  “I’ll keep it for the girl ‘til she’s grown,” the African woman said. “It’s like hearing the true stories of the old country,” she said. “It is a piece of the old country, a piece of the first world on earth…”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  ________________________

  “Abraham Seixas”

  The Oaks

  Goosecreek

  South Carolina

  My dearest Miriam:

  Though it has been several weeks now since I saw you at the pier, I can still hear the music of the band and I can still picture your charming face before me, far below, down there in the crowd, yet still close to me. Of course I must admit from the moment that we lost sight of the Battery, life began to change for me in many other ways. We sailed down the Arthur Kill and put in at Perth Amboy, where I was overwhelmed with emotion, because there in that town my mother first took sick, and there we had our last good time together. After Perth Amboy, we headed south, hugging the coast, and after some days reaching the delightful port of Charleston, here in South Carolina.

  I cannot tell you how different it is here from New York. Beginning with the air itself, which is a not-so-delightful mixture of warm water and various natural perfumes. Here and all around a certain stillness has overtaken men, though surely only for the moment. The odor of the port, the odor of horses, these are familiar. But out in the country, which is where I write you from, the land is hot, damp, and marshy, and the sky is laden with large thunderheads that float above us, never stopping, like some grand oceangoing armada. Even inland about fifteen miles, water is everything. As I write to you I must pause and take a sip from the glass at my writing table. In the rice fields the “driver,” as the one who drives the labor force is called, must work the small dams that keep water from the creek out or, opened, let it in, to flow across the newly growing stalks of this precious grain. There is a rhythm to it which has been explained to me and over the past week or so I have seen a number of demonstrations, though I have not yet mastered it.

  Even though I am a Master.

  Will you be my Slave?

  A jest.

  Isaac is the slave who serves as the overseer in the rice fields. He is one of three “drivers,” working in the brickyard and the other fieldwork and wood-cutting cadres. He has been in charge of showing me how the rice-planting is done. Though we do not always get along, for a slave—but listen to me talk!—he is a proud, almost arrogant sort of fellow—yet I have found him to be the most knowledgeable person on the plantation when it comes to the agricultural questions.

  The overseer is usually a free man, but Uncle has put Isaac in charge because he commands the respect of all the others and is completely loyal to the family. I hear stories about cranky and rebellious slaves who must be severely disciplined in order to keep them in line. But on our plantation—well, look what I have written! “our”!—on Uncle’s plantation firmness and kindness seems to work just as well as physical punishment and the kind of disdain and spite that seems to rule in other places.

  For an example of the other sort I can tell you about what we witnessed when on a sojourn to town—Charleston—just the other day.

  We had come in to have lunch with the family of my cousin Jonathan’s wife Rebecca and it was a very agreeable time in their house on Society Street, only a few blocks from the water. The house is a three-story wood and white-washed-brick affair, with the face that it shows to the street wearing a rather blank brick stare. The entrance is reached by a walk through a gate to the left of the façade and a short path to the steps leading to a wide veranda that sweeps around the west side of the house and looks out on a lovely garden which is blocked from sight from the street by tall hedges and a rather majestic magnolia tree.

  On the veranda when we arrived was a large black woman—she could be the sister of Precious Sally who cooks at The Oaks plantation—sweeping the floor. She greeted us warmly, and invited us inside, where Rebecca’s mother and father were waiting in the front sitting room. The room reminded me a good deal of home, because it had curtains that cut out the light and noise of the street, and many family portraits on the walls, and several sets of silver candlesticks. Rebecca’s father, Louis Salvador, was the son of one of the first Jews to serve in the army of our Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. Her mother, born Elena Suares, was the child of two immigrants from the Indies.

  “We arrived with nothing,” she said. “And now we have everything.”

  And, indeed, if you count the pretty house and garden and the many sets of candlesticks, and dishes and paintings and silverware, and their children, with Rebecca the oldest and three younger brothers, Joseph, Louis, and Abraham, and their business—fine clothing for the town gentry—they do hold quite a store of wonderful possessions. Oh, yes, and this includes the woman who was sweeping the porch when we arrived, and a cook, and two male slaves who worked the yard here and inside the house and two others who worked in the store.

  Two of Rebecca’s brothers serve in the store with their father, an elderly man with long white curls dangling down on either side of his head, while the third is an attorney who was recently elected to the state legislature. This was Joseph, a tall, red-haired fellow with a wide nose that gave the appearance of having been flattened with the backside of a spoon. Sitting next to him on the veranda was his wife Jessica, a buxom woman with sand-colored hair, and two children, a boy and a girl, who reminded me of the way the two of us used to be. Also in attendance, a cousin of Rebecca’s, a dark haired girl, whom we met at the synagogue the Sabbath before.

  To entertain me at the gathering Rebecca’s father wanted his grandchildren to show off their talents.

  “Say the poem for our guest, darlings,” he urged them.

  “Oh, Father,” Rebecca said in protest, “do not force them.”

  “Of course they will recite,” her brother, the father of the children, said.

  At his bidding, they stood and turned to me, smiling, as if quite fam
iliar with the art of performance, and the boy announced, “This is a picture in words of one of our old people, Abraham Seixas.”

  “If he ever really existed,” Rebecca said.

  “Of course he did,” her father said. “I knew him.”

  “Of course, you knew him,” said his wife. “You knew everybody. Now let them just say the poem, darling, and be done with it.”

  “This is a poem,” my host said to me, “that will make you see a lot of who we are.” He gestured toward his grandchildren, as if he were about to conduct a band. “Children?”

  They stood, and the boy bowed toward us and announced the poem.

  “Abraham Seixas.”

  The pair began reciting.

  Abraham Seixas,

  All so gracious,

  Once again does offer

  His service pure

  For to secure

  Money in the coffer…

  “It’s a portrait,” my host said.

  “You told him that,” said his wife.

  “Children, go on,” said my host.

  “Father,” Rebecca said, “not this next part. It’s too…”

  “Rebecca,” said my cousin Jonathan, “respect your father.”