Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  I tried to keep all this in mind as I spoke to him, though I could not keep out of my mind the image of Liza gliding up to his cabin door in the dark and him coming out to greet her. I was not someone who could guard his feelings from obtruding, such as my father could, or my cousin Jonathan, so I am sure he must have heard some of my rough emotion in my voice.

  “Isaac, will you tell me, how old you are?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let me ask you a question, massa.”

  “What is your question?”

  “Would you talk to this horse?” he said.

  “Talk to the horse? I suppose I might talk at it, to keep it going or to make it feel as though I was its friend, that I wasn’t going to beat it.”

  “Then you can’t talk at me.”

  “I would like to talk with you, Isaac.”

  “Why? What’s the use of it?” He gave a shake of his head and turned his gaze to his horse. “Come on, boy,” he said.

  “You talk to your horse.”

  “Animal to animal,” he said. “This horse and me, we speak the same language.”

  “Damnation!” I said.

  “Is that a question, massa?”

  “An expression,” I said. “You are not fooling me, Isaac. You are obviously an intelligent fellow, or you could not be overseeing the rice planting as you do.”

  “Oh, massa from the North, I can oversee the rice because I am close to the rice. And close to the horse. I can tell you what the wind says, what the water says, and then I tell the rice what to do.”

  “You did tell me that the rice crop depends on the knowledge that you all brought over from Africa. You are a sly fellow, Isaac,” I said. “But do not be sly with me. I have come here to learn, and slyness does not help.”

  “Den I’se not be sly, massa,” he said.

  “Is that your slave voice, Isaac?”

  “Das right, mas’. It’s de voice I can’t leave behin’.”

  “But my cousin’s wife, your master’s daughter-in-law, has plans for that, as you know.”

  “She got plans, sho.’”

  “Speak plain English, please, sir.”

  Isaac slowed his horse to a stop. And I tried to halt mine, though it walked a few paces further along so that I had to look back at him over my shoulder.

  “Don’t call me that, massa,” Isaac said.

  “Call you what?”

  “You called me ‘sir.’ Don’t fool with me, Mr. Yankee Master.”

  “I am not fooling with you, Isaac. I can tell that you have a good mind. I can see that Rebecca’s teaching is working quite well.”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” Isaac said. “Quite well, yes.”

  “She is preparing you for freedom,” I said.

  “Is that what she is preparing us for? And what if she is just preparing us for being a better kind of slave?”

  “She has good intentions, as far as I can tell,” I said.

  “And does her husband, your cousin Jonathan, my master Jonathan, have good intentions?”

  “I cannot speak for him,” I said.

  “You don’t want to speak for him,” Isaac said. “Because he is a liar and a hypocritic.”

  “Isaac!”

  “Oh, yes, sorry, mas’. I’se know de slave can’t talk ’bout de mas’ dissa way. It be a bad way, and I’se sorry, I’se truly is.”

  “She’s taught you well, hasn’t she?”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Rebecca.”

  “She’s taught me almost nothing,” Isaac said, “except to put a fine point on all the things I’ve known since I was a child.”

  “She wants to help.”

  “She helps to make my condition more painful. I learned how to read, but not from her. When she wanted to teach me I had to pretend I knew nothing, and after a while she had me read certain things that prove to me that I am all the more hopeless and damned.”

  “How did you learn to read?”

  “You got to know everything about my life? Do I know everything about your life? How did you learn to read?”

  “I had a teacher, a man in New York.”

  “Well, massa, the doctor here in the county taught me.”

  “But about Rebecca…she is a good woman,” I said. “She had a vision—”

  “While her husband lurks around the shacks at night?”

  I lost all control then.

  “You do not have to lurk around, do you? You live in the cabins.”

  I pulled up my horse and he turned and reined in his animal.

  “What are you talking about, massa?”

  “No more ‘massa’,” I said.

  He reached over and held the reins of my horse.

  “What are you talking about, me not having to lurk around?”

  “Liza,” I said, nearly choking on her name.

  “You want to talk about Liza? She is like my sister. Or like a cousin. Yes, like a cousin.”

  He dropped the reins and pushed at my horse, his own mount stepping away a foot or so between us.

  “I see,” I said, but I did not see. And he knew that.

  “Do you?” he said. “Do you see? Massa? What do you see? Hard to see nigger slaves in the dark. Except when they got a light tone on their skin. Easier to see the high yellow, ain’t it? Easier to aim for. ’Cept some masters go for the real dark. They like to sink into the black of dark, they like to just disappear and get swallowed up in the black of the black, don’t they?”

  “I would not know,” I said.

  My horse gave its head a shake, anxious to move again.

  “You wouldn’t, eh? Well, you got some cousins who know, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  His horse gave a whinny and now both horses danced a little in place.

  “We got to move,” Isaac said. “You said what you wanted to say.”

  “I want to tell you one more thing, though,” I said.

  “What’s that? I mean, what’s that, massa?”

  “Stop that, please.”

  “What is it?” Isaac’s voice turned hard again.

  “I am not that kind of man.”

  “What kind of man is that?”

  “First of all, not the kind of man who would make another man his slave. And second, not the kind of man who would make a woman his slave.”

  “’Sat right, massa? Well, I’m glad you came down here from up North to learn some things. Because you got a lot to learn.”

  “I want to learn,” I said.

  “You will,” he said. “You will.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  ________________________

  In My Margins

  New Science

  This new science, anthropology, wedded to an old study, history, and theology. These studies, my studies, knotted to family and forebears, the road down which we came…and sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, having just dreamed of that erupting volcano, the first family, my family, fleeing from it as fast as they can walk, over the cooling lava plain…

  Chapter Forty-four

  ________________________

  Another Letter, Unsent

  The Oaks

  Goosecreek

  South Carolina

  Dear Miriam:

  I am still not much the letter writer, although I have recently composed a note to my father about some of the business matters that brought me here to this plantation, with acres and acres of woods and rice fields and barns and a pretty white house at the center of things where my uncle and aunt serve as the head of the family. But I have been wanting to write to you about this family, since it is so different from our small New York groups of blood relatives. Nights on this plantation give me plenty of time for reading and writing and reflection. I wanted to use the light of the lamp on the desk at which I sit to illuminate for you what yours truly has seen and learned. It is not exactly what I had in mind when I set out on my journey here, but it has taught me certain l
essons about the world and myself. I don’t know that if I had stayed in New York that I would not have learned these same lessons, but it might have taken a while longer for it to happen.

  There is a grace and languidness people effuse here…

  There is a city here nearby…Though some decades ago it served as the destination for numerous slave ships from Africa, with the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Charleston’s busyness subsided somewhat. From what I have observed in these days, despite active foot traffic, and the usual horses and carriages, the city takes up no more area than one of our many neighborhoods. Yet I do admit it has its beautiful places, such as the charming tree-covered park just at the southeastern point of the city, called the Battery, where the richest and the most high-born families live, where we witnessed that horrendous moment of the horse-whipping.

  Such a strange proximity of beauty and barbarism!

  As for my family, it is situated some miles from town, on a number of heavily treed acres, with, as I have already written, the rice fields and barns and such, and the deep creek that runs on the northern border of the property that carries boats from town to the small pier at the family brickyard…

  I have mentioned some of the slaves in my earlier letter to you. South Carolina, I am told, is more of an admixture than most of the rest of the South, except perhaps for New Orleans, this probably in part because of its access to the sea and the constant traffic of ships and sailors from all parts of the nation and the globe. Importing of African slaves made the city thrive, and now the sale—oh, yes, my dear, the very exchange of human beings for money!—of slaves from all about the South continues to bolster the local commerce…

  Liza appeared with the coffee pot, and for an instant no greater than the breadth of a moth’s eye, she glanced at me[—tiny jagged shock like lightning in a dark stormy early summer night sky, a thought I am not including in this letter—]and then she poured the liquid into my cup.

  Liza, every bit a dutiful house servant, moved once again to my side. [And that was perhaps the first time she came close enough so that I inhaled, along with the rich cacao flavor of the coffee blend, the perfume she scattered as she raised her arm to pour, another thought I will not include in this letter.]

  I cannot write this, I cannot tell her how I feel, I cannot dare to tell myself…

  Chapter Forty-five

  ________________________

  Night-blooming Flower

  With Old Dou gone, nothing stood in Jonathan’s way. A new girl, long in the tooth and with a pair of eyes each of which seemed different from the other, everyone called her Precious Sally, took over the kitchen, apparently suggested to the master by Black Jack, but she could not stand up to the master’s son, who worked his will on Lyaza whenever it came upon him. Like some dog in heat, he would find her in the cabin or in the kitchen of the big house (where if she was alone he would rush her into the pantry). Breathing his foul hot breath in her face, he would push her around and wrestle her into position, hiking her skirts so that he could penetrate her, from the front or from behind, making low rough noises, spew his fluid, and then immediately depart. Left to clean herself off in the darkness of the pantry, Lyaza felt more sorrow than shame. She knew if she told the doctor he might do something, but she withheld all this from him. The doctor would go to the master. The master would find an easy solution, and it would not come out well for her. Better to endure the torture than to be sold off to some other household, perhaps some household far south of here, where the stories that circulated among the slaves would have it that worse misery and brutality reigned. Where Old Dou had cared for her, that was home. The old woman was gone, but she could feel her, like the goddess, in the air.

  On the veranda there opened in the dark each warm night in season a night-blooming flower that gave off the most ferociously intense perfume. This rush of body and overbearing soul that went on between her and the young master over and over again reminded her for some reason of that night-blooming flower, something quite beautiful that in its fullness reeked a little of rotting meat.

  “He hurting you so much, ain’t he?” Precious Sally said to her one morning in the kitchen.

  Lyaza shrugged it off.

  “Not any more. I don’t feel nothing.”

  The air was delightfully warm, and as clear as it could ever be now that the season of pollen had shifted into summer’s end. Heaven must be close to a morning such as this. And yet she felt nothing.

  And then in the next moment she felt something twitch in her belly.

  “Dou,” she said, to the ghost of the old woman who, in her dreams sometimes, hovered over her head in the small cabin, “I do not want it, this seed.”

  The old woman—she saw her, hand in hand with Yemaya, dancing on a cloud—nodded, but did not speak. The goddess, through the lips of the old woman, gave her some instructions about which mushrooms to hunt and grind up with mare’s milk, that when rubbed into her privacy, would keep the man’s seed from taking root.

  You take this, Yemaya said, you will be a fine young girl again.

  Drinking the potion made of this recipe made her ferociously ill—and cleaned her out. Blood again, running from her nether inner parts.

  This happened to her twice.

  Sometimes after these events the girl lay there in the dark, worn down by cramps and prophecy, sobbing, so alone she might have been a seed herself, lost in some field as vast as the night sky that covered them all, so clear in late summer and early autumn. Camel, fox, turtle, monkey, dog, all these animals came alive as spaces between the stars, and not just the girl, but all her neighbors listened quietly on clear nights for the voices of these heavenly creatures, hoping for guidance, as the girl always was, hoping for secrets to fall into their laps. These old ways flourished, especially here on the plantation owned by the Hebrews, where traveling Christian ministers, always ready elsewhere to convert the pagan slave to the proper religion, never seemed to find their way.

  Several times a year, on feast days from the old religion from home, everyone who could stole off into the woods after dark and watched the ceremonies, the animal sacrifice—usually a goat but sometimes chickens—at the center of things. Two and three times a night this went on, in small groups each time, to keep the masters and overseers from becoming suspicious and wondering about the absence of activity out in the slave cabins. Lyaza stayed sometimes for two cycles of the sacrifice, the songs, and the prayers. Best of all times were the stormy nights, when thunder rumbled overhead, so that the men could play the drums they had constructed out of animal skin and old logs without fear of discovery.

  The BOOM, the BAM, the DON DON DON, echoing through the forested groves, men chanting, to Shango, god of storm and wind, women raising their voices to Yemaya, the goddess alive and well in the sap in the trees, in the dew on the grass, in the light of the half-moon, in the wind itself, BOOM BAM DON DON DON DON, the drumming linking the drummers in their pounding and the families they stood for here on earth and the noise echoing up amid the storming clouds until it reached the ears of the waiting gods, the BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM…echoing, echoing on into the dark above the forest, where only the sliver of the moon gave hope that the goddess still watched over them, perhaps, like them, still trying to become accustomed to life here on the ground of this new world and in the air above it. BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM…

  Yemaya, to whom I gave my blood, Yemaya, who kept the ocean moving under me, who rained on me, who watered my throat and hair, moistened my eyes and helped me to see when awake and dream when asleep, Yemaya, who put this living thing in my belly—for she had another one growing.

  Shango dancing, carrying his three-headed axe, singing, “Give it all, set it down, the man will do it…”

  Yemaya singing, “Shut the mouth, put down the axe, let her carry what she carries, all the way home.”

  “Home,” Sh
ango shouted, “she has no home.”

  Yemaya singing, “She had one, now she tries another, she will not yet find it but her child might.”

  Yes, she was carrying again, and the turmoil created in her head by the drums and animal screams was nothing compared to the turmoil in her heart. She was sure this child would live and so she would carry forever the visible mark of her shame, that she could not defend herself against the approaches of the master’s oldest son. A dark, oh, a dark time! And so when she heard the drumming she rushed off into the woods to lose herself in the beat and in the shifting of hips and stamping of feet, solicitations with long arms raised skyward, to the goddess who must know what she had done to her, because she knew everything.

  BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM and the BOOM and the BAM.

  Lightning kill me, kill the child

  Drum kill me, kill the child

  Lightning kill me, kill the child

  Drum kill me, kill the child…

  Chapter Forty-six

  ________________________

  The Flood

  Here on this morning, in deep morning light, Isaac and I emerged from the woods into the broad clearing where the earth appeared to shimmer and glisten, as though a million million droplets of dew—or manna?—had fallen from the sky. The sight was beautiful enough to take my mind momentarily off the sordid matters of plantation life and put myself to studying the organics of it.

  “We got to walk now,” Isaac said, and we dismounted, left the horses at the edge of the clearing, and walked into the rice field. We made our way along the berms that formed the border in lines that ran in rectangular fashion, from the woods where we had come from, to the south where another stand of trees stood guard, and to the north where the broad flat spaces filled with young stalks of plants came up against the waters of the wild swamp.