Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  Questions to my little Reader.

  What place do you live in?

  Is it a town or a city you live in?

  What is a town? What is a city?

  Which way is north? Which south?

  Which way is east? Which west?

  Have you ever been in any other town or city than the one you live in?

  If you have, what was the name of that town?

  In going to that town, which way did you go?

  What town lies next to the place in which you live, on the north?

  What town is next, on the east?

  What next, on the west?

  What next, on the south?

  What county do you live in?

  Do you know what a county is?

  What state do you live in?

  Which way is Boston from the place you live in?

  Which way is New York?

  Which way is Hartford?

  Which way is Philadelphia?

  Have you ever seen a river?

  Have you ever seen a mountain?

  If you have, what was it called?

  Describe a mountain?

  Did you ever see the sea, or ocean?

  What is the sea, land or water?

  Is the land smooth and level, like the water?

  Are towns built on the water, or on the land?

  Do animals such as horses and cows live on the water, or on the land?

  Did you ever catch any fish on the land?

  Where is the sky? Where are the stars?

  Did you know what the shape of the world is?

  Did you ever hear of England?

  Did you ever see anybody who has been in England?

  Do you know which way England lies?

  Did you ever hear of Asia?

  Do you know which way Asia lies?

  Did you ever hear of Africa, where negroes come from?

  Do you know which way it lies?

  The doctor’s little reader quickly learned her lessons in what lay where and how she should regard them. She learned her directions, and told him a story about catching fish on land—a silly dream she dreamed one night after reading with him. She did not know anyone who had been in England, but she had heard of Africa, yes, and she recalled quite vividly the stories old women back in the cabins told about the old country, the rivers, the forests, and she knew which way it lay. Back there, over her shoulder, where across the rice fields the ocean broke on the shore, and made a road of waves all the way back to the place where her grandmother had been born.

  Where is the sky? Where are the stars?

  She knew answers to these questions, too.

  The stars spread overhead on dark nights without a big moon, the stars made shapes—the boy sometimes pointed these out to her—and some of these pointed toward England and some to Africa and some to Philadelphia and New York. Each of these names seemed as foreign, and as familiar, as the next. Only the stars glittered with a fascinating and hypnotic light that made her wonder about everything in the world and everything above it—creeks, rivers, roads, trees, fields, farms, horses, people, African or not, each fit into a pattern like the pattern overhead in the dark on nights without a great moon. Though some nights just before sleep she wondered how she might steal a boat and sail back to Africa, she understood that once she returned she would have no place to go. Could she look for, and find, her grandmother? How far deep into the forests must she have returned? It might be easier to float up to the stars and turn upside down and use the glowing specks of light as stepping stones back to the night skies above the place where her ancestors were born.

  Such a vast place, Africa seemed in relation to all else on the globe in the book. And all a big ball, and all that ocean between her and Africa. It seemed easier to memorize a poem about it all than to contemplate leaving the plantation and returning to Africa.

  GEOGRAPHICAL RHYMES TO BE REPEATED BY THE PUPIL

  The world is round, and like a ball

  Seems swinging in the air,

  A sky extends around it all,

  And stars are shining there.

  Water and land upon the face

  Of this round world we see,

  The land is man’s safe dwelling place,

  But ships sail on the sea.

  Two mighty continents there are,

  And many islands too,

  And mountains, hills, and valleys there,

  With level plains we view.

  The oceans, like the broad blue sky,

  Extend around the sphere,

  While seas, and lakes, and rivers, lie

  Unfolded, bright, and clear.

  Around the earth on every side

  Where hills and plains are spread,

  The various tribes of men abide

  White, black, and copper red.

  And animals and plants there be

  Of various name and form,

  And in the bosom of the sea

  All sorts of fishes swarm.

  And now geography doth tell,

  Of these full many a story,

  And if you learn your lessons well,

  I’ll set them all before you.

  Ball…air…all…there…She loved the sound of the rhymes…sky…sphere…lie…clear…

  If there was any moment in her early life when she first thought about walking away, running, it must have been here. Mark it!

  Chapter Fifty-four

  ________________________

  A Visitor (2)

  It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea,

  That a maiden there lived whom you may know

  By the name of ANNABEL LEE;

  And this maiden she lived with no other thought

  Than to love and be loved by me…

  Up in my room that night I tried to calm myself by reading, but I could find little distraction in Poe, my eyes running over one stanza over and over. Here I was, when the knock came at my door, saying to myself, And whom might this be? The Raven?

  Liza stood at the door, alone, a thin cotton wrap flowing from her shoulders, dressed for settling in for the night in the big house, ready to help her mistress should some distress arise. She held a candle, her eyes catching the reflection of the flame, and that same flame guttering in the wake of our passage from the door—I drew her in and closed it immediately behind us—to the bed.

  “Massa,” she said, setting the candle-holder down on the night-table.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Massa Nate,” she said, lowering her head toward me in a parody of submission.

  “Stop it,” I said, touching a finger to her chin. Her skin felt so smooth and cool, I couldn’t help but follow with my hand.

  The lines of her—neck, throat, chest, her breasts—her gown fell away—she slipped her arms through the sleeves—

  I stood a moment, beginning to shed my own clothes.

  Breath of her—sweet oil, mint—hair of gardenia—breasts oiled with nutmeg and tincture of lemon—staircase of her ribs, full sweet belly—peeking into the navel that connected her to Africa and all the generations past, who loved each other, struggled with and fought with and sold each other—kissed my way down the smooth slope of her abdomen.

  “Oh, Nate,” she said, in a sweet voice, the kind you might use to speak to a loving child in a story, “come to me now.”

  The dark subsides into more dark. Night sounds again from outside the window, seeming now more familiar than exotic, more welcoming than lonely. You horses in the barn, nickering to each other in the sleeps you take alone, oh, you doves nestled together and cooing in dove-dreams in the rafters of the barns, oh, owls in the woods and mice in your dens, oh, alligators loving alligators in alligator-love out in the slimy mossy depths of the swamp waters, oh, all you captives in the cabins dreaming of freedom in the sleep of your enslavement, I take you in my arms because my reach has now so been increased I can hold so much more of the world!

  “
Nate?”

  Liza’s whisper, soft almost as a voice in a dream.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I am. Never been more awake, in this way.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “I must go.”

  “No, no, stay a while.”

  “It’s not good for me to stay here. Someone might see me leave the room.”

  “Tell them I commanded you to stay with me.”

  “They would assume that,” she said. “It is another matter.”

  “Tell me.”

  Dimly in the dark I could see her move her head from side to side.

  “Not to be told.”

  “Another secret? Another truth I thought to be true turns out to be something else than it seems?”

  “Many things are not what they seem. ‘I am black but O my soul is white!’”

  “What is that you say?”

  “A poet, William Blake said that. The doctor read that poem to us. And we read it ourselves. I can recite it to you.”

  “You can?”

  “Don’t you think I have a memory?”

  “Of course, of course, I do. Please do say it.”

  She said the poem, and I lay back on the pillow, astonished.

  “Striking, quite striking,” I said. “My own education has been deficient, because I do not know it.”

  She touched my arm.

  “I can recite other poems to you,” she said.

  “That makes me happy,” I said.

  “I may be a slave,” she said, “but when I read a poem I am free.”

  “One day you will be free. You all will be free.”

  “I have read this in a book the doctor gave me,” she said. “How all men are born slaves. Of one sort or another. Even the freest man must break loose of his father and mother, and his family’s laws and rules, and his country’s. Weren’t all the English just as much slaves as we who came from Africa? And didn’t they come here to free themselves?”

  “What else did you read in this book?”

  “The English stopped the ocean slave trade. And one day the Carolinians will choose to free us.”

  “And they will choose to lose their plantations? It would have to happen at gunpoint. As some of the legislators here have been arguing.”

  “The plantations are poorly run,” Liza said, naked, and speaking as if in debate in the legislature. “If it weren’t for slaves, they would fall apart. Look here at The Oaks, how your uncle must plead with your father to help him with money.”

  “And so he is a kind of slave, too, a slave to money.”

  “But he chooses this. A free man may choose to give over his will. But when he chooses to win it back he has the power.”

  “But for now, he is failing.”

  “That is what I see at the dinner table. That is what I hear from others of us who listen well.”

  “Which is a good thing,” I said. “Because otherwise I would not have come here. And we would not have—”

  She leaned forward in the dark and kissed me firmly but languidly on the mouth, and we sank down together into the dunes of pillows and the ripples of sheets. Yes, all our troubles, all our obstacles, from her being born into slavery to my errand to Charleston, all conspired so that we might come together in this moment that, with blessed hindsight, I see as the high point of all our enchanted moments together. Our loving, our talk, our thoughts mingling… This daughter of the tribe of Ham, and this son of the tribe of Abraham, bound together, these distant cousins! Cousins, after all!

  Chapter Fifty-five

  ________________________

  In My Margins

  What is a Journey?

  I began in Africa, on the slopes of a young volcano—before this I have no recollection—a creature moving slowly but surely on my own two feet, herding my child before me as overhead the ash began to rain down on us, and we kept moving, yes, moving across the swampy plain. We cried out to our gods, and our gods called out to us. One was fire, the other thunder. Some of us stopped on the plain where the ash stopped and some of us kept going, stopping only when we reached the forest and we lived in the desert for a long time and they lived there a long time in the forest, until hateful men who worshiped other gods came and swept us up in their nets and tied us with their ropes—oh, ropes made from plants we ourselves had grown!—and dragged us south and then north, then west, where we and our children built a city. The city baked in the heat, and one day we sailed down river to escape it, finding ourselves in the great forest, and stolen from there next we stood at ocean-side, our bodies chained to each other. How we survived that passage over water I do not know. Many many perished.

  And that is our history in a paragraph!

  Chapter Fifty-six

  ________________________

  Days…

  A week passed since that extraordinary night, and I went about my business of taking long days in the fields stooping with the field hands as they bent themselves over the burgeoning stalks of rice—trying to pay close attention to what Isaac, armed with a short hoe and a long knife, instructed me about, the nature of the plant, the particular features of the stalk, the buds of kernels. The rice was nearing maturity—I was beginning to acquire enough expertise to notice the plumping of the kernels and the subtle transformation of shading from pale white to light green to thickest green—but I was so hot in my coat, stripping it away, steeped in sweat like a river I might have waded in up to my chin, and my head swelled up with reckless thoughts.

  “Isaac,” I said, “how can you work like this? The heat is so abominable.”

  “Massa,” he said with a laugh, “I like this. It makes me think, when I close my eyes, I am home in Africa, where my fathers came from.”

  “Your fathers?”

  “My father’s father’s father. Otherwise, they been here a long time.”

  “But you still have your protection against the heat?”

  “I don’t have protection. Difference is, I know I have to work here. You go home after the rice harvest.”

  “You heard that I was staying until then?”

  “You hear things around the plantation,” Isaac said.

  We moved along, up to our ankles in salty-tinged water, the long row of rice plants.

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things, massa, things.”

  “You must hate me for what I do,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  “Hate you, massa?” Isaac gave me a quizzical look, and if I had not been disturbed about what I had just thought I had made known, it might have amused me, this slave arching an eyebrow and taking the measure of me as though we were talking together on the street in Manhattan instead of in a flooded rice field in South Carolina.

  “I don’t hate you, massa,” he said.

  “But you know what I am doing?” I said this: part confession, part query, a search for approval, and a small part braggadocio. I said this: because a man cannot live too long without company of a confidante, someone, a friend, against whose opinion he can test his actions. I had not understood this before I left New York and arrived in Charleston, but I certainly understood it now.

  “What you doing, massa? Walking in the water with Isaac.”

  “Don’t be coy, Isaac.”

  “I don’t know what that is—‘coy,’ massa—so I couldn’t be it.”

  “I thought you were able to read.”

  “Yes, but I never read that word.”

  “Let me be frank, Isaac, I have only been here a short time but I know that a pin doesn’t drop somewhere on the plantation that you people don’t hear it.”

  “Us people?”

  “You slaves.”

  “Uh-huh, massa,” he said. “Well, I suppose that’s true.” He stopped walking, and I stopped, and he plucked a rice stalk and held it up before his nose, testing it in the light. “You talking about—?” He stopped his work and raised his little hoe as t
hough it were a weapon.

  “You know, Isaac,” I said, “it is damned difficult for me to believe that I am having this conversation.”

  “With a slave?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well,” he said, “you got to think of slaves same way you think about any people. Some of us smart, some of us quick, some of us slow. Now that Ms. Rebecca helping us to read we can make a good conversation. You want to conversate about the Bible? I can conversate about how Moses led the Children of Israel out of the land of bondage and out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.” He cocked his head in the direction of the plantation house and said, “And how Samson brought down the temple.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh.

  “You are doing well to ‘conversate,’” I said.

  “You doing well in the field here,” he said. “And other places.”

  “You…you are not angry?”

  “Angry? Why should I be angry?”

  “Angry at me.”

  “Angry at you, massa?”

  I don’t think that any white man had ever spoken to him in this way, because he gave me a look that a man might give to a talking stone or a passing cloud that rained down coins.

  And then I said the next thing, the final thing, that could only have caused him great consternation. And me, also. Because I was as much delivering the news to myself as to him.