Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  The slaves had their own way of cooling off, with a break in their labors coming every hour or so when they would wade out into the creek up to their shoulders, or some even ducking their heads under while others joked about alligators catching them for supper if they didn’t catch them first. Once at midday they had time to rest, on some pallets that were put there for just this purpose, pallets soaked with sweat and worn thin by the daily grind of bodies splayed out upon them. (There were not enough to go around, and most of the slaves sprawled during this respite on the ground, under the shade of the trees at the edge of the glade, which in this season was no shade at all.)

  After a day such as this I found myself waiting for the right moment at dinner to ask for an interview.

  “You wish to speak to me?” my uncle said. “We are speaking now.”

  I tried not to look around at the other faces at the table, my aunt’s, Jonathan’s, Rebecca’s, and I avoided any recognition of white-haired, ramrod straight Black Jack who stood at his ready just behind my aunt’s place, or Precious Sally, at her customary stand near the rear door.

  “Might we speak in private?”

  Cousin Jonathan raised his lip and glared at me.

  “Something about the rice, no doubt,” he said.

  My uncle turned on him, in as sudden a way as a heavy man like himself could turn.

  “Have some respect for your cousin.”

  “Might we speak now, sir?”

  “Let me eat my dessert and we’ll retire then to the veranda.”

  I watched him devour two slices of Precious Sally’s best peach pie and swallow his coffee in one gulp, which gave me little time to rehearse the speech I planned to make to him.

  “It is so hot this evening, is it not it?” my aunt said.

  “It is,” Rebecca said.

  Jonathan continued to glare at me, ignoring his dessert.

  “Come on, mass’ Jonathan,” Precious Sally said from the doorway where she kept her watch. “Ain’t you going to eat my pie? It’s delicious.”

  “What about him?” Jonathan said.

  In the place before me my own dessert lay untouched.

  “I made it for you, mass’.”

  I couldn’t help but be distracted as Jonathan, looking dutifully scolded, reached grudgingly for his fork and attacked the pie.

  “Well, now,” said my uncle, his own plate now cleared. He got up and lumbered to the veranda, with me a few paces behind.

  Outside, in the swell of the early evening heat, my fear cooled me. I watched carefully as he lowered himself into his large wicker chair that creaked as he sat like an old bridge with heavy wagons crossing it.

  “Shall we have a little brandy then?” he said when he had settled.

  “Thank you, sir, but not for me.”

  “Don’t suppose it will do me any good, but then it can’t hurt either, can it?”

  He called for Jack, who almost instantly appeared, and told him to bring us some brandy.

  The light had faded, but the noise of the day still pushed against that border of sound that came with the night. I listened, waiting for Jack to return and depart again.

  “Now then,” my uncle said, raising his glass.

  “Uncle,” I said, raising my own glass and quickly swallowing, “I will not dance around the subject.” I cleared my throat and spoke again, as forthrightly as I could muster. “I wish to buy Liza.”

  He paused a moment, silent except for his breathing that was so intense I could hear it despite the rising sounds of night, and looked at me as though I had caught him in the eye with a bright lantern light.

  “Well, then, so you shall agree to my proposal? Have you written to your father? I don’t pretend that I kept track of everything that happens on this plantation, but I would know if you had sent out a letter.”

  “I have not yet written to him, Uncle,” I said.

  He wagged his head from side to side.

  “But it is good news that you have made up your mind. And as far as owning anyone, you will own all of that girl’s fifty or so uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters, and so forth. Though it is difficult, if you ever were so inclined as to figure just who is related to whom. I know there are Gentiles who keep good records about these matters, and I know that we Israelites are famous for keeping our genealogies, but that has never been of much concern to me.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief with which he dabbed at his forehead, giving the impression that he was an overweight dandy rather than a businessman.

  He was putting me off, playing with me, but I would no longer be toyed with in this manner.

  “Uncle,” I said as forthrightly as I could, “I don’t want them all. I just want her.”

  Now he appeared puzzled, using his great bulk to somehow sink down inside himself and keep from the question I had proposed.

  “Well, hum, there are so many difficulties…” He suffered a jagged cough, and appeared almost bewildered by that occurrence, and stuffed his cloth into his pocket and quickly poured himself another brandy.

  “Difficulties…?”

  “None that…I don’t wish…Nephew?” He raised his beefy arm and drank.

  “Yes, Uncle?”

  “We will own all of these slaves in common, you see? But I cannot sell you that girl. In fact, if you had decided to recommend to my brother that you believe this enterprise of ours to be a bad proposition, your aunt and I would sell all the slaves, except for a few, like Liza and Precious Sally and Black Jack. They would come to town with us and work for us in whatever house we might acquire there.”

  “So, Uncle, you are saying no to my proposal?”

  “Is it a proposal? Either it is or it isn’t.” His hands were trembling, which gave me the impression that he felt nearly overwhelmed by this difficulty. “Do you wish to become partners with me and your cousin in the plantation?”

  “That question I am still pondering, Uncle.”

  His eyes wandered off to the front lawn, where fireflies played across the hedges.

  “That is, as I say, a simple question. But you have complicated it enormously by your query about Liza.”

  “You are fond of her, Uncle?”

  “As I say, were we to sell all else and move to town, she would be one of the few we would keep.”

  Isaac came to mind, the picture of him soaked with sweat, bending above the rice stalks.

  “You would sell Isaac?”

  “Isaac? Oh, no, no, no, he had slipped from my mind.” An agitated look spread across his face. “No, we would keep him also.”

  I shook my head in dismay.

  “But you would not sell Liza?”

  Now his voice tightened, his drawl nearly disappearing from his speech, like the old cultivation water from the rice fields upon the opening of the drain ditches.

  “Nephew, how do I say this? She is like family to us.”

  “I am part of the family. So she would not be leaving the family if I bought her.”

  He took several deep breaths, and I watched him, and waited, listening to the now overbearing sounds of night.

  “Dear nephew,” he said, “Because you are so insistent I will consult with your cousin about this question. Though I doubt he will hold a view different from my own. He…is quite attached to that girl.”

  “Is that so?”

  My uncle ignored my impudence and focused again on the matter that mattered most to him.

  “Allow me to say this again. If you persuade your father, my brother, to invest in the plantation, you will in effect become the girl’s owner.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I wish to resolve our business. Young man, the future of our family depends on this, and I trust you will make the right decision. And when I say family, I hope you understand that it includes all of the slaves who work on this plantation.”

  “Uncle, I am still pondering all this. I hope that by the time of the rice harvest, everything will be clear
to me.”

  “Which will be soon. We have had good hot days, and Isaac tells me the kernels are plumping up beautifully.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it will be soon.”

  “Meanwhile, I will speak to my son about your proposal. Who knows that he may be more forgiving than I suspect.”

  He looked down into his glass, and after this gesture of refusal to meet my eye I looked out into the night.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  ________________________

  The Stranger

  She had first heard of this matter when attending to a dinner in the big house some months before his arrival.

  “I have written to him,” the master had said.

  “Good, then,” said the missus.

  “And he has written back.”

  “You did not tell me.”

  “I am telling you now,” the master said.

  “And what did he say?” put in Jonathan, leaning across the table with great seeming intensity in his father’s direction.

  “Ah, you have an interest in your New York uncle, whom you have never shown an interest in before?”

  “Father, we have never needed to before.”

  “We did not need to,” the missus said.

  “And now we do,” the master said.

  “Indeed we do,” said Jonathan.

  “A strange uncharitable family we are,” the master said.

  “Without survival,” Jonathan said, “there can be no base for charity.”

  In the kitchen Precious Sally explained to her that this was the New York part of the family that had not stayed south when first they came up from the islands.

  “They brothers,” she said. “But only half. Different mothers.”

  “Just like us,” Liza said.

  “All people alike,” Precious Sally said. “They just got different ways of living.”

  “Aside from the truth,” said Liza, speaking in the voice she had acquired after years and years of reading, a voice she rarely ever used except when she felt safe, and with only the few people she trusted, “that some are slaves and some are free, I would agree with you.”

  But on that morning some months later when Isaac told her that the New York cousin was coming into the port at Charleston, she discovered that all were not the same. This one, Nathaniel Pereira, tall, and without much of a smile, gave her an odd feeling in her belly, and she wondered why. A pale-skinned man with that dark hair, he was not at all handsome to her, and he walked so stiffly she wondered if he might just break apart. In one of the melodramatic novels she had taken to reading of late the heroine might have felt some fateful tie to the man such as he was. She coldly noticed his lack of gravity—it was more that he lacked a certain amount of weightiness—even when she compared him to Jonathan whom she detested and despised.

  Her father! A sneaking monster, a horror of a man! A snake, a devil in disguise!

  And now here comes this New Yorker—who, unbeknownst to him, was her cousin, of sorts! He seemed to have chosen to use his freedom at the service of remaining detached from the life around him. It was almost as if he were a white ghost, passing through the world but never becoming part of it. Liza knew with all her heart that if she were free she could never live this way.

  “Here, listen now, here is my plan,” her father said, talking, talking, while she lay there, burning, her heart no longer holding enough tears enough to weep.

  And when she had heard it, she said, “I will not.”

  And he said, “Yes, you will. I am your father and you will do as I say.”

  “I will not,” she said again, even more resolute than before.

  “Filthy whore, bitch, scum of a slave, you will do what I say or you will be hammered up on boards next to the barn!”

  ***

  Several nights after her first encounter with the New Yorker she returned to her cabin and found her father waiting for her with a fiendish grin on his face.

  “Go away,” she said.

  He reached up to pull her down and she danced out of his reach.

  “Come here,” he said. The stink of his whiskey breath offended her sorely, even where she stood from him at a distance.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “I am ordering you to come here. Do you want a beating?”

  “You cannot have me,” she said.

  “You bitch, I own you!”

  “But since I carried out your wishes with your cousin, I am spoiled goods. Even more than spoiled, since you first spoiled me.”

  “I will show what is spoiled and what is not. Come here, or I will tie you up and take you and leave you in the barn with the other animals.”

  She took a tentative step toward him, so that he might see how frightened she was. And then she stopped.

  “You do not want this now.”

  “Do not tell me what I want.”

  He sat up, preparing to stand.

  “Wait, please,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “I have lain with him.”

  “You have trapped him then?”

  “Yes,” Liza said, “but he has trapped me as well.”

  Now Jonathan pulled himself to his feet and stared into her eyes.

  “How has this puny New Yorker trapped you?”

  “He has given me a disease.”

  “What?”

  The lie lay smoothly on her tongue and it gave her pleasure to say it.

  “Yes, from the first time I went with him. Do you want to see the evidence, do you want to see my soiled rags.”

  “No, no, no, no,” he said in disgust. “So, he has ruined you?”

  “Yes, and it is terribly painful upon occasion,” she said.

  He dropped his gaze and turned aside.

  “If you are lying—”

  “I am not lying, I am suffering.”

  “Can the doctor cure you?”

  “Yes, he is treating me now, but it will take a while.”

  “I will not go near your filth,” her father said, “but you will tell me the moment he has made the cure and we will, I promise you, have at it again.”

  He brushed past her and hurried out of the cabin.

  Liza threw herself down on the pallet, crying and moaning until she was hoarse.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  ________________________

  A Palimpsest

  Not long now, massa,” Isaac said, another week or so later, holding up a handful of the rich and plumped kernels from the stalks at our feet, stalks that held their heads high, strong, in spite of the weight of the burgeoning kernels.

  “Good, good, Isaac,” I said. “The time is coming near, and that’s good.”

  I rode back from the rice fields in a daze and a dream, my mind going black in bright daylight with the hope and expectation of seeing Liza before the sun rose again on the next day. Who knew a man could live like this? No one I knew in New York ever expressed such a heart condition as mine.

  ***

  Mute at dinner—retiring early to my room—reading (Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!), dreaming into the dark—that was my round after returning from the fields. I felt as much a slave to my condition as the dark people who went home to their cabins and took some feeble pleasures before sleep and the next day’s round of hard labor. What did it matter that I could leave the plantation? That I might return to New York? Or perhaps even travel to London and Paris? A chain wrapped itself round my heart, and I could not stir myself to think about anything else except Liza.

  One night at dinner Rebecca brought up what under different circumstances for me might have seemed an innocuous matter. She mentioned that several of the women she was teaching talked now and then about witchcraft and how to make spells to bind a man to you. She joked that she would put a spell on Jonathan, and he put back to her that he would turn her in as a witch.

  “A Jewess witch,” he said. “That would make our dear Gentile neighbors rather sus
picious. Accused by her own husband, for putting a spell on him.”

  Rebecca rose to the height of her powers and said,

  “I put a spell on the rice.”

  “Please, now,” my uncle said, “this is foolish talk.”

  Jonathan enjoyed it.

  “Do you know the slave goddess, the one they pound drums to and sometimes make their sacrifices to in the woods at night? I spoke to her and asked if she would make the kernels big and plump.”

  “No, no,” said my aunt, “this is not a joking matter. Jonathan, I do not like you to joke that way. It is against our God.”

  “Oh,” Jonathan said, “who or what is our God? A clump of rules. We never see Him.”

  “He is everywhere,” my aunt said.

  Jonathan would not relent.

  “Is he there, Mother, when I make my water?”

  “Please!” she said.

  “Or when—”

  “Enough,” my uncle broke in. “I am weary. I am not feeling well. All this taxes me, in my soul.”

  “These men and their souls,” my aunt said. She looked over at Rebecca. “I should not expect more from them, but I always do. And it always hurts. This is the life they give us.” She looked directly at me. “Even you, who seem so polite and gentle for a man. Who knows what you are doing—”

  “Please,” my uncle said.

  “Please what? Please who?”

  My uncle raised a hand in the air. My aunt subsided back into her chair.

  Rebecca then tried to ease the situation.

  “Nathaniel, do you recall my cousin Anna?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, happy to change the music at the table, though given my present cast of mind I had only the faintest recollection of a girl in Charleston.