Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “Why you tell me, son? Something special? You go to town always, but you never come all the way here from the barns to tell me.”

  It was true, Isaac scarcely ever visited his father. He did not like to see a man crushed by life, a man always drunk on some kind of home brew or other, from waking up to going to sleep. He had not worked ever since Isaac could remember. And yet the master never bothered him. This gave Isaac too much to think about, so he did not think much about it at all.

  “What is in your mind?” The old man looked up at him from a pallet low on the cabin floor.

  Young Isaac took a deep breath. And then spoke.

  “Mama. How I miss her. And this girl, Liza, how I like her. And these white people and Hebrews, I hate them. The Christians, too. I hate them. You have lived your whole life already, father, but I am only half—”

  “Less than that, I hope,” his father broke in to say.

  “—if you say so, but I do not want to live it—”

  “Like me?”

  Isaac turned away, unable to look his father in the eye.

  “Yes.”

  “You want to live like this? Good, tell yourself that. Because you ain’t got no choice, anyway.”

  “I do,” his son broke in.

  “What’s your choice?” his father said. “Going to sleep just after sundown or going to sleep before the moon goes down?”

  “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

  His father rolled over on his side and talked to the wall.

  “You got a choice, wall? Lean one way on a Sunday, lean another way on a Monday?”

  As if the fantasy he had created for himself of slaughtering the entire family had never entered his mind, Isaac said, as slaves often did, “It ain’t so bad here, Daddy. It ain’t so bad. I hear of whippings other place, and a lot worse.”

  “Boy,” his father said, “worse has been here. You just sort of missed it by a little.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The older man reached for a cup of his liquor and took a swallow.

  “I loved your mother, Isaac,” he said.

  “Daddy, why are you talking about that now?”

  “I loved her I don’t know you ever can know…”

  “Daddy?”

  Young Isaac backed away as his father turned over on his belly and began to snore. All during the ride into town he thought of that, rather than stopping the carriage and dragging the young master out and beating him to death in the woods.

  But after the ride he thought of it again, and brooded.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  ________________________

  In My Margins

  Mysteries and Family Secrets

  Oh, Isaac, what you did not know will when you learn of it kill you!

  Run, hurry, hide! But you are a brave young fellow and so you won’t do that, will you?

  Chapter Sixty-six

  ________________________

  Stories

  And then death seemed to gather all about Isaac, like a cloud, like a cloak. He carried the scheme around with him in his mind, and though it faded out when he worked at day’s end he found it haunting him again, the revenge plot against the master’s son, the master’s son who would one day, sooner, no doubt, than later, become master himself, the revenge against the entire family itself before this happened.

  It did not help that as he now reckoned his own father was fading so quickly. In the cabin after sunset he would sit with the older man and gaze into his eyes, and he swore he could see a light flickering, as if his soul were like some candle about to gutter out in the wind.

  “Daddy,” he said, “tell me about when you came here.”

  “Why you want to know about that?”

  The older man shifted on the pallet as though caught up in a dream, except that he was wide awake.

  “I just want to know.”

  “Doesn’t do you good to know. Back in the old country my father might have been a king. What good that do you here, slave as you are?”

  “Was he a king? I did not know that.”

  “No, no, son. I was joking. He was…a slave,” the older man said. “The story he told me, hunters took me from him, but living with him I was not free there either. I will be free soon.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I am going to be free.”

  The darkness settled around them, flowing from outside in, as though it were a liquid to be poured, a substance that flowed, on which the lightest objects might float. An ailing angry man, his angry son, the pair of them surrounded by the dark that grew deeper and deeper, it made a picture you scarcely ever see, real life among our people, an aspect of the pose and emotion of all manner of people since our ancestors—everyone’s ancestors!—first came down out of the trees to walk about and forage, oh, never to return to those heights.

  After his father fell asleep Isaac left the cabin and wandered over to visit Liza.

  The dark had settled over the quarters so deeply and indelibly it seemed impossible that light would ever return. It surprised him to find Liza in her own small cabin, illuminated by a steady-burning fire, holding a book in her hands.

  “What you doing?” he said.

  She looked up at him, inclined her head toward the fire.

  “Reading.”

  He knew books, there was a room in the big house full of them, though he had never touched one, let alone opened one. Ever since the doctor began teaching Liza, and it began when she was a little girl, there was always one book or another lying around. He just had never felt the desire to pick one up and start reading. Though he usually liked it when she read to him.

  “What’s that one?” he said, pointing to the volume that lay open on the floor of her cabin.

  “A good story about a good boy living with bad people. Would you like to hear it?”

  Isaac shrugged, held up his hands. (When did the shrug first appear as part of human behavior? Did an animal shrug? Or was it something that happened on the ground, walking away from that exploding volcano? Or much later? When?)

  She picked up the book and turned to the front of it. She moved her lips, she sounded, mostly correctly, these words (and it took her a much longer time to do this than it would take you or me, much longer):

  “‘Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could by possibility have occurred…’”

  “What is that, what is that?” Isaac paced back and forth in the small cabin, unable to settle down and listen.

  “‘The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,- a troublesome practice’”—Liza went on reading, with all sorts of troublesome pronunciation and emphases, but read she did nevertheless—“‘but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer space of time than three minutes and a quarter…’”

  “Who is Nature? What
is pauper? Workhouse like a plantation?”

  Liza answered his questions as best she could and then continued reading for awhile. When she had finished she shut the book and held it to her chest.

  “What is that?” Isaac said again.

  Liza opened the book and looked to the small type across from the title page.

  “That was London, that is what it was. That was London.”

  “How do I know?” Isaac said. “London, what? I never been there and neither have you. So how you know?”

  “The words make it happen.”

  Isaac, seeming perplexed at first, now took a different tack.

  “How you know how to do that? What do you do? You stealing something to do that? Why you keep on doing it?”

  Liza took a deep breath and allowed herself a smile.

  “Because it makes me free.”

  ***

  Isaac might as well have been wearing chains the way he clanked around in his mixture of anger and resentment. His father was sinking. And whenever he saw the master, his urge to slaughter him and the entire family rose up in his gorge and fire spread through his chest up into his throat.

  One day Old Walla-Walla caught him lashing at one of the horses and grabbed his arm.

  “What do you think are you doing?” the old man said, holding him in a crushing trap of arms.

  Isaac went limp.

  He did not know. He was scarcely aware that he had been mistreating the animal. He had just picked up the whip and went at him, in blind fury, in the rush of terrible rage. Damn, damn, damn! Only after the old man stopped him did he hear the animal squealing, hoarsely, in pain. It took hours for them to calm the beast down and treat its wounds.

  On another occasion, after a day of watching Liza at some distance at work in and around the house, he turned up at her cabin and found her reading again.

  “Hello, Isaac,” she said without looking up.

  “More books?”

  “Yes.”

  “This one good?”

  Now she looked at him.

  “I am not sure. It is very hard for me to understand.”

  “Read to me,” he said, lowering himself onto the pallet next to her.

  She gave him a half-smile, and began to read.

  Every one loved Elizabeth. The passionate and almost reverential attachment with which all regarded her became, while I shared it, my pride and my delight.

  “This about love,” Isaac said.

  Liza nodded, and kept on reading.

  On the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my mother had said playfully—“I have a pretty present for my Victor—to-morrow he shall have it.” And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally, and looked upon Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me—my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only…

  “I thought this was about love, but this about the slaves,” Isaac said.

  “I suppose so,” Liza said. “Or perhaps not.”

  “The big folks know you take these from the house?”

  Isaac tried to show his concern by touching her on the arm, but she pushed his hand away.

  “The doctor gives me books,” she said. “I told you that.”

  “Doctor, he ain’t been around,” Isaac said. “Some folks say he sick.”

  Now Liza looked interested.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Nowhere in particular,” Isaac said. “I just heard it.”

  “What kind of sick?”

  Liza set the book down, spine up—Frankenstein was the name on it—and reached over for Isaac.

  “Heart trouble, what I heard,” Isaac said.

  “Cousin,” she said, “when—?”

  “What you call me?”

  “Cousin. Like in the book, Isaac. It is a close name, something of affection.”

  “Affection? Hungh!” He snorted like a horse. “This reading playing some tricks on you, Liza. Times, I do not know what you are talking about.”

  Liza tried to ignore his discomfort.

  “Tell me about the doctor, what else you heard?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I will ask folk but for now I hear only nothing more.”

  He settled in next to her on the pallet, boyish, despite his bulk.

  “Read to me?”

  “All right.”

  She picked up the book and tried her way through another chapter, while Isaac, though tired from the day’s labors, remained awake and alert.

  How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips…

  She explained this to him as she read, and he gave it his best attention.

  “Aiiee, this monster got yellow skin and black lips. I do not want to meet him in the woods in the dark.”

  “Do not walk there and you will not meet him.”

  “How come no one ever told me about him before this?”

  “It is a secret.”

  “Our doctor make him?’

  “No, Doctor Frankenstein made him.”

  “He live in Charleston?”

  “He lives in this story.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What I just said.”

  She gave him a playful shove, which turned out to be harder than she had intended, and he went rolling over onto the dirt floor.

  “Were you listening?”

  “I was listening.”

  He brushed himself off and crawled back onto the pallet.

  “Keep on reading.” He snorted again like a horse. “Monsters! I ain’t afraid! Here they got black skin and yellow lips…So what’s afraid of that?”

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  ________________________

  In My Margins

  Isaac

  Hurry! Run! Hide!

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  ________________________

  Isaac’s New Plan

  Isaac meandered.

  First he went to the barn and checked on the horses, and then he took a stroll out under the trees, gazing up into a sky as clear of clouds and so beautifully ultramarine that it might have been an ocean itself.

  Ocean, ocean—could he have deep water on his mind?

  Half the day passed before he returned to his father’s cabin, which shows that a man enslaved can sometimes find ways to waste time if he has been enslaved long enough. The woods, the creek, the fields, the creek again. Beside the waters he sat down and rested his back against a tree, listening to the quiet rush of the stream.

  And yes, he dreamed. But of what, on awaking, he could not recall. It grew quite hot and he took off his shirt and marveled at how the drops of water pooled on his chest. Now he imagined more wildly while awake than he had while sleeping.

  What if his skin turned pale and he stood up, a white man in rags, shirtless, and decided that he would wander to town.

  Take his time. Dawdle. No one to shout at him about returning to work.

  In town, he would check in at the shipping office.

  A ship to England where all those authors lived?

  Yes, he would pay with his white money and shop quickly at some of the nearby
stores and return with a wardrobe adequate for his journey.

  And then board.

  And sail!

  Away, away across the ocean, the waves rolling beneath the ship, the ship moving in a direct line across the heaving water toward London.

  But why not return to the old country?

  No, no, too many slavers there still. He heard the stories.

  The stories.

  He lay there beside the creek, eyes closed now, listening to vagrant murmurs from the current and the leaves above his head.

  Thoughts of his father drifted through his mind.

  And how did he himself compare to this man?

  He had now reached this age, and he had nothing, no wife, no child. Only the work to which he was bound by (invisible but nonetheless strong strong) manacles. Some friends, a slender thread tying him to Liza. Animals he liked. Now and then a woman.

  At least his father had a son.

  Father worked himself into drunken lassitude.

  He himself, thinking of running, running, but where?

  Anywhere.

  If he could only…

  If he could…

  Put these Jews and Christians all behind him and ascend into the sky with the great gods who would grow wings on him if he dared to try…

  Wings…flying into the ultramarine ocean of sky, sky of ocean not far away. Over to London, perhaps even to Africa! Dozing, musing. He slept.

  And awoke, the sun now much lower in the sky. And such a certain stillness in the air that made it difficult for him to imagine that anything else was going on anywhere else on the plantation, in the county, in town, in the ocean or sky, in the entire world as he knew it.

  Except that he probably should move along toward pretending to work. It set a bad example when an overseer oversaw as little as he did. Nevertheless, the Jews did not seem to care. Except for the young master, who seemed happy with nobody, nobody seemed unhappy with him. With a yawn and a sigh he picked himself up and headed back toward the cabins, seeing no one, passing no one.

  Now the sky was turning darker than the earlier blue, giving him unaccountable thoughts about his own color and how he might, or the gods might, change it, lighten him or darken him, however they would have it.