by Alan Cheuse
But then who am I to judge? the doctor said to himself. There appeared to be little harm in all this, just the embarrassing foolishness of it all. Also, he could not stay here and focus on it. Always it came time for the doctor to leave: he had to make his rounds and then return to town for his regular practice. Now and then he would allow himself to consider what Jonathan might be doing in his absence. The child herself, to look at her, enjoyed his attention. The doctor could only hope that all was innocent. And after Jonathan’s wife had a boy child, the doctor decided that that was that was that. The man now had offspring of his own and would tend in the natural direction of raising the boy.
This, however, did not happen, at least not in any way that the doctor could observe. As the girl’s body changed over time and she lurched into adolescence with the beginnings of breasts and jutting hips, she drew all of Jonathan’s visible attention even as his young son cleaved to his mother, estranged, because of his father’s behavior, from the paternal realm. The girl played on, oblivious to the nature of Jonathan’s interest, merely enjoying all the attention he gave her.
Old Dou, who had much earlier recognized his behavior as obsession, tried to stand between them.
This she could do while the girl remained a child. As she grew older, Lyaza found that she had the freedom to run about the grounds and play by herself in various nooks and crannies of the big house and the nearby outbuildings. Old Dou could not keep up with her.
Not so the plantation owner’s son. He ran with the girl, and ran some more, even after his own family duties became, with the birth of his own son, pressing, and even after, when his wife left him and returned home.
“Oh, sweety! Sweety-weety! Wait for me!”
You could hear him calling to the girl as they ran about the back of the house, around the barns and back to the house.
The older Master Pereira had a blind-spot when it came to Jonathan. He wasn’t a bad man, no, not at all. He also did not pay much attention to his family, having given himself over completely to the administering of those who administered his little rice-growing kingdom. He was unusual in that he kept the doctor on call for his family and for the property, which is to say, the slave people. Most plantation owners let the Africans tend to themselves until and unless some injury or illness grew well beyond the point of mere maintenance and repair.
“My watchword,” he declared once or twice over that sherry he and the doctor occasionally drank together, “is health, the health of our rice-farming, the health of our people…”
What did he mean by “people”? the doctor wondered the first time he heard that.
Did he mean his own family, his co-religionists—the tiniest of minorities in this countryside, though in town a fair number of his “people” congregated on the Sabbath and prayed in the beautiful if sparely decorated synagogue (he had been a guest there and observed its austere façade and interior).
The Jews, the few he knew, always impressed him with their business acumen and their concern for the quality of their wares. The master had grown up in the Caribbean, he explained to the doctor, and while his family had not owned any human goods—he called slaves that—he had observed a number of plantation owners and their operations. And here, in retrospect, as the doctor recalled this conversation in light of the worrisome—because it was worrisome, no matter how much he tried to discount it—behavior of the man’s son, things grew quite interesting.
“My people, you see,” the man said to him, “themselves lived in bondage in Babylon, and so knew the heady stuff of freedom when they achieved it. Unlike the Africans we now own, they did not have to travel far to labor for others with no recompense.”
“Egypt was not far?”
The doctor decided that he would engage the man, whom he normally spoke with only about the medical conditions of family members, and slave retinue. Why should he not? Such interesting views the man had.
“Not in terms of land and landscape. Quite similar to, say, Judea.”
“And so, Babylon the same?”
“Quite the same.”
“Whereas here, in our Carolina, the land differs greatly, yes, I see that. But your further argument?”
“These creatures are adrift,” the master said. “So far from home, they cannot, surely cannot find a moral compass or master the situations in which they find themselves.”
“And so we give them the comfort of food and the vocation of laboring and so bring them a certain order?”
“Well said,” the master said. “Have you been reading the same German authors as me? Von Herder and such?”
“No, no,” the doctor said, “I don’t read many Germans. I am just thinking about what you are thinking, and I decided that this must be your thought.”
“Yes, it is, as you heard, and heard correctly. We do bring this disorderly and dislocated group of people some order and tie them to a place.”
“Yes, sometimes literally tie them,” the doctor said with a laugh.
When at last he walked away from this conversation, which had begun as a discussion about one thing and ended about another, he felt a bit of shame about that laugh.
But then he wasn’t so much concerned about the maintenance of his own soul but focused all of his working energy, and a great deal of his thought, on the health and physical welfare of others. His flaws, and he had some, did he not? (he chided himself for an hour or so about that laugh), seemed few in comparison to all the good he did. Not that he focused much on what he did either. He simply performed his labor as he was trained to perform it, and so kept his patients as healthy as he possibly could. Some, of course, grew sick and died. It was a wise doctor who knew that he could do little to prevent the forward-teetering patient with an ailment well on its way to carrying him off. Mainly he tried to keep the majority of the people he saw—including the slaves—on the path to a balance of work and some comfort, even if, in the case of the slaves, it meant an often explosive few hours just before the Sabbath, the only time they truly had to themselves.
***
All of this—what he probably thought of as his philosophy, though he never called it such—he put into a notebook bound in cow-hide and whose pages he kept from everyone else, even his wife, which, by the time of his first encounter with the Africans on the auction block in town, meant no one. The invisible hand of an illness—the slaves called it The Visitor—swept over the county and his wife had died of it suddenly, one of those patients to whom he could only give comfort rather than aid. Since they had had no children—he was too busy, he convinced himself, delivering other people’s children to have time for another marriage of his own, let alone children—the notebook rested in a drawer in his house in town unnoticed by anyone except for himself, the writer of it.
How many such books, he wondered aloud, languished unknown or mostly unread in various desks and cabinets in Charleston alone? Here might be the hidden history of this difficult time in which he found himself alive, born into a system that educated and rewarded him, and turned others into chattel. He vowed to keep on writing, though no one would read his entries. At least in this way, he decided by his action, he would record his views on the strangeness and oddity of Carolina life, where he lived a variation of the motto of the Frenchman he read who declared that man is born free and lives everywhere in chains.
Some do, in South Carolina, he wrote, others do not. At least others don’t wear visible manacles. The poet William Blake calls them “mind-forg’d” manacles. But he was not writing about actual enslavement. Mental slavery made for fools and foot soldiers. Actual slavery was something else entirely. The way his own throat sometimes tightened as he approached the slave quarters where he practiced his art at the master’s behest gave him pause. He was wearing his own chains, yes, though you could not see them. Yet he had to admit, in an immediate paragraph, that he had freedoms no slave would ever know. The Africans in the early shipments, may have been born free, but all of them would die in chains. Almost en
tirely because of them, he, who was born into the bondage of a certain way of seeing his life and the life of those around him, might possibly become free.
About such matters he wrote and he wrote and he wrote. Hours would go by in which he bent to his labor of recording the histories—or stories, as he thought of them—of various slaves he had encountered, including, as it turned out, the family of the very child whose welfare he worried about. And he wrote about the owners as well, the good Christian people whom he attended to in town and on their plantations, and of the Jewish master with whom he sometimes had those intense philosophical conversations that made him feel as though he were approaching the very borders of discovery, only to draw back ever so close to the edge of seeing life in new fashion. Medicine goes to the cause of maladies, he decided, when he thought of his particular cast of mind, but not all of them are things we might cure.
***
For instance, the behavior of the master’s son. It grew more intense as the years passed, and the man took more liberties of time with the slave girl at the expense of his family. Old Dou told him that on trips to town he would search out small gifts for her, and when his wife found one of these hidden among his clothing wrapped in fine paper and packed into a box—this was a silk scarf made somewhere in the Orient, not something that any slave child, however adored, might imagine would become one of her own possessions—he became angry with her for spying on him. Word got around. Everyone in the congregation in Charleston heard about it. How this wife, his first, the dutiful docile daughter of distant Caribbean cousins, said nothing, until one day, finding herself at the edge of a fine despair, she asked the slave woman who kept their house for them to accompany her on a trip to town where, using money she had apparently been saving over the years, she purchased a place on a ship sailing for the island where she was born and departed. Once she had reached her birth home she wrote a letter to her husband in which she recorded the extreme suffering she had known because of his obsession and vowed never to return.
Jonathan seemed hardly to notice, his obsession having taken on proportions that finally made it difficult to go unremarked by his father.
“Dear boy,” the old man said, “you must not neglect our Abraham now that his mother has departed.”
But before he could raise the question of his son’s attention to the slave girl Jonathan spoke up.
“Father, please excuse me. I am going to town.”
He abruptly left the room, drove the carriage to town, and returned the next morning to announce that he and Rebecca, the daughter of family friends, were engaged and soon to be married. This was his way of declaring the matter closed, even before anyone could open it further. As he explained it to his new young wife his affection for the slaves was deep and complicated by the history of their own people who once were slaves themselves. He encouraged Rebecca in the education plans she made for the slaves even as he continued to proclaim in his actions his odd and obsessive feelings about Lyaza.
The doctor wrote about all this in his notebook, including how, on one morning, after being informed by the slave named Isaac that Old Dou lay in her cabin, dreadfully ill, he went to seek her out and found the girl weeping at the bedside of the older African woman while Jonathan hovered in a corner of the room.
“She very sick,” the girl said.
“Help her,” Jonathan said to the doctor.
“I will do all I can,” the doctor said.
“I hope so,” Jonathan said, though the look in his eye, a truly odd gleam that reminded the doctor of madmen he had treated while in his school days, seemed to say otherwise.
The girl appeared to be more immediately distraught, weeping, moaning at the bedside.
“Please take her out of here,” the doctor said to Jonathan, wanting them both to leave so that he might try to treat the old woman.
For that, he never forgave himself, although what happened next surely was inevitable, given the circumstances.
Jonathan took the wailing girl by the hand and led her out of the cabin and off into the fields.
“You sweety,” he said, “I will help you.”
The girl protested, looking at him as if she had never seen him before.
“Tweety-sweety,” he said.
“Stop!” she said to him.
He swatted her with the back of his hand, bullying her the way a man might bully his dog or his horse, and dragged her by the hand further away into the surrounding woods. When they reached a shaded glade off to one side of one of the cultivated fields and he drew her close to him she was whimpering like an injured animal.
“Sweety,” he said, “no crying now, no crying.”
She went limp in his arms, and he lowered her to the ground and without any hesitation stripped off her clothing and had his way with her.
As simply as that, all the years of his apparently confused adoration and hovering protection of the girl came down to this. When he had finished, he wiped himself with her skirt and tossed the rest of her clothing at her.
“Get dressed,” he said. “I have an appointment in town.”
He left her lying there, not looking back even once as he walked away across the fields.
For a while the girl lay there, mourning for herself. The young master had been rough with her and she was bleeding in a way that she had never bled before. This frightened her terribly, and so she pulled on her clothes and walked back toward the cabin. No sign of the man in the fields ahead of her, but she caught sight of a slave boy she knew and sat down in the field out of his sight until he passed by. When she returned to the cabin Old Dou lay where she had left her, breathing harder than ever before.
“Doctor,” she said.
The doctor looked her over, noticed bloodstains on her dress.
“What happened to you? Are you all right?”
“I all right,” the girl said. “Mama Dou?” (That was what she called the old African woman.)
Old Dou did not reply, merely lay there breathing so hard that Lyaza feared she might begin to cough or spit up flesh from within her chest. Her own pain and turmoil seemed like nothing alongside this.
“Can you sit here with her?” the doctor said. “I have made her as comfortable as I could.”
“Yes, massa,” Lyaza said.
“I will return in the morning,” the doctor said (worrying, without saying anything about it, that the old African woman might not last the night).
Lyaza sat beside Old Dou’s pallet while the woman laboriously took in air and pushed it out as noisily as an ungreased carriage wheel. The next two hours went by slowly. All her short life the girl had known this woman as her caretaker and the mother she never had. “You a new girl,” Old Dou always said to her. “New girl from the Carolina.” Dou told her the story of her birth, complete with the tale of the passage, but keeping it less awful than it actually was. “Time enough for you to know everything. Time enough.”
Was it now time?
“New girl?” The old woman breathed the words out roughly.
“Mama?”
“Your head whirling? Don’t let it be whirling.”
She urged calm for the girl, but her own voice, and breathing, suggested urgency.
“You all right?” she said.
Lyaza shook her head, but the old woman did not notice.
But she detected somehow the tears in the girl’s eyes.
“What, new girl?” she said.
Lyaza hesitated, and the woman said, “Do not be sad. We all go. Come and go. Yemaya…take us in her arms.”
The old woman slipped further away, like someone out at sea at the end of a long rope that kept growing longer.
“Yemaya,” she said, slipping, slipping.
“Ah, Yemaya,” the girl said.
“Yemaya,” the old woman said in a whisper floating atop her breath.
“Mother,” the girl said.
“New one,” the old woman said in a voice so soft that the girl had to lean her ear down to
the woman’s lips. Her chest, always soft with her pillow-like breasts, seemed hard, calcified. Her breath smelled sour, like bad onion.
“Mother,” the girl said again, pressing herself closer to the woman’s face.
“New…”
The girl wept through the old woman’s last breath.
Light had faded from the cabin. She was still weeping at dawn when the doctor returned.
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said as though he were addressing a girl from town. “What have we here?”
He knelt at the side of the old woman, lifting her hand and feeling for her pulse. Gently he placed the dead woman’s hand at her side and turned to ask a question of the slave girl. His eyes narrowed as he took in her figure, the blood that had darkened on her skirt.
The living old woman’s fist had been clenched, the dead old woman’s hand lay open, a stone resting in her cooling palm.
The doctor picked it up, turned it over, and then handed it to Lyaza.
“This must be yours to keep,” he said.
Chapter Forty-two
________________________
Man to Man
Another morning came, and Isaac was waiting for me at the back door.
“It’s time, mas’,” he said, escorting me out to the barn.
“How are you this morning?” I said.
“It’s a big morning, mas’, for the rice.”
“For the rice crop, I know, yes,” I said. “But what about you, Isaac?”
“Me, massa?”
He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in a foreign language.
“You.”
Isaac shrugged.
“What’s me?” he said.
I stared at him but said nothing and we mounted up and rode a while in silence.
I did not know what to say. It was all so odd, to be in the company again of a man who was not, according to the law, if not the law of nature, truly a man, with all the attendant rights and freedom. Might this have been what it was like to be in the company of an ancient Hebrew, a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt? This man seemed so placid, as if his people had not been brought here in chains, like animals, like imported goods, where mine had left behind lands where they had less than the rights they deserved and so arrived in America to find their full share of freedom.
