Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “Is there anything more?” I said.

  “Even more,” she said.

  “What might that possibly be?”

  The sun had risen to a true extent, and I imagined beneath it the rolling ocean that had carried ship after ship from African shores to our own, here near Charleston, and to other southern ports where this national horror and the deep bloodstain upon our nation first began. It was clear to me now in a way that no legislative debates or newspaper reports or even, as perhaps would happen, the narratives of future historians might tell of it, that how it bent bodies to the pleasure and finances of the owners was nothing, nothing, compared to the way it bent souls.

  “Yes. When I came back that second night—”

  “At his orders.”

  “No. I acted out of my own free will.”

  “And are you acting now?”

  “As in a play? I have heard of plays, Nathaniel, but I have never seen one.”

  “You should see one,” I said. “They are good stories, performed upon a stage for all the audience to see. Consider my story. Stealing away my cousin who literally, in a most unromantic fashion, belongs to another man, this slave, also my cousin, with whom I have committed incest—oh, it would make a good play, I think.”

  Quick as some lithe snake that snaps around and takes its poor unthinking prey, without a second’s delay, Liza slapped me in the face.

  “It was my only chance,” she said while I held a hand to my stinging cheek.

  “And am I nothing but a stepping-stone to you,” I said.

  “At first, yes,” she said, touching a hand to my cheek.

  I drew back, disturbed, yes, even disgusted.

  “You are nothing but a temptress,” I said. “Eve, tempting me to crime.”

  “You enjoyed the temptation.”

  “Yes, worse yet, I enjoyed the crime.”

  “Will you still help me now?”

  “I don’t know that I have a choice.”

  “You can leave us here and return to The Oaks.”

  “If I knew the way.”

  “I can point you in the right direction.”

  “Yes, as you pointed me toward my crime. With your directions, I would probably lose myself fairly quickly in these bogs and be eaten by alligators.”

  “You are sweet enough meat for them,” Liza said.

  “Don’t be so scandalous as to joke about all this. We are in terrible danger.”

  “I am, the boy is, not you.”

  “I am aiding and abetting.”

  “Your cousin will not take such offense if you return now. Say that I kidnapped you at gunpoint.”

  “With my own pistol that you stole from me?”

  “It is a good story. It might make a good play.”

  I ignored her attempt at humor.

  “He will see through it,” I said. “He sent you to me. He knows what must have happened. And so he will know that you turned me against him and the rest of the family.”

  “A family of slaveholders,” Liza said.

  “If they are to be condemned, then the entire South is to be condemned.”

  “And should it not be?”

  “The wives? The children?”

  “Wives hold slaves along with their husbands.”

  “What of the children?”

  “Innocent, until they reach their majority.”

  “Liza…” I sighed.

  “Yes, Nate?”

  She had inched so close to me by then her warm acid night-breath bathed my face in the foul truth of its scent, a perfect match for the foul taste in my own mouth. Though I had questions for her, her proximity made it impossible for me to ask. I encircled her in my arms and held her close. She trembled, as tough as she seemed.

  One kiss—our awful breaths combining—and then another. And then we fell back, exhausted, like two halves of some broken animal, against the tree.

  “Our last gasp,” I said, “our pathetic last gasp of freedom. They will be sending dogs after us. And there is a lot of the South that lies between us and the North. Liza, I am afraid that I know the city, not the woods. I will not be much help to you in this from now on.”

  “Nate,” she said after a while, “I have a plan.”

  She began to speak. Towards the end of her describing it to me my eyes wandered over to the edge of a stand of ferny trees to see the slave boy hunkered down there, as they say in these parts, awake and alert. I wondered how long he had been watching.

  “Jersey Boy,” I called over to him.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “When Liza has finished explaining her plan to me, will you tell us your own story? We have a long day today and tomorrow and tomorrow. I hope you will tell us.”

  Chapter Seventy-nine

  ________________________

  The Jersey Boy’s Tale

  I was born free,” the boy said, while the light of the morning sun drifted down through the pines. “Up there in Perth Amboy. In a little shack behind a big house on Water Street. Early as I can remember in my life, I used to lie there listening to the waves slapping against the rocks below, and I would dream of ships and the flow of water. From the top turret of the big house, where I climbed some time after I grew a little you could see over Staten Island right out past the bay into the ocean, the great ocean where ships from all parts of the world came sailing.

  “My Ma, free-born herself, she worked in the kitchen of the big house. Most days and nights I’d sit in a corner of the kitchen, enjoying the smells of the food, and Ma or the wash girl who did the dishes, offering me a morsel now and then. Fish. Meat. Carrots. Corn. All the fresh flavors, and sometimes dessert, cake with rum. I’d be sitting in my corner while Ma was rushing about serving the folks in the dining room and I could hear the noisy music of their talking and smell the rosy stink of the cigars the men were lighting up and puffing on. That rum would take my thoughts and melt them down and I’d flow away, dreaming of my Pa and sailing ships and the way the gulls swooped across the beach and dove toward the rocks to crack open oyster shells they’d picked off the beach.

  “I liked it there on the sand and sneaked down as often as I could to run along the water line and pick up shells and stones.

  “‘One, two, lucky stone!’

  “I’d throw one hard out over the water, sometimes getting it to skip real good.

  “‘One, two, lucky stone!’

  “Once I thought, hey, what if I could ride a stone out over the water, and just keep skipping till I got someplace else?

  “‘One, two, lucky stone!’

  “There was some other boys, free boys like me, but born to slave mothers who got bought or somehow otherwise came up from the South to New Jersey. We ran together on the sand, ran like these horses we rode away on, dashed up to the waves and back again, and I can still taste that salt in my mouth, deep salty, not like this stinging taste of the water in this swamp.

  “Sometimes we built castles in the sand. Once we made a jail and put the little sand crabs inside, saying these are the prisoners. Another boy said the crabs was our slaves. Why, we could keep them, but we couldn’t make them do nothing. They wouldn’t build nothing. They just tried to dig their way out of the jail. Not good slaves.

  “I was thinking, give them a chance, give the slaves a chance. I was thinking, slaves got a Ma, slaves feel hurt, slaves want to be free, look at them dig.

  “But because that was all they did, one of the boys says, ‘Let’s drown ’em,’ and he took water in his hands and poured it over the crabs. But they liked it, they swam around, and all of them was digging in the wet sand, disappearing into it.

  “‘Slaves, they get away,’ the boy is shouting. And the others are calling out, ‘Yay, catch them slaves!’ ‘Catch them!’

  “I went to make to catch them, but used my hand to smash open the wall of the jail.

  “And they got away! They got away!

  “I would walk back up the hill feeling happy for the crabs! T
hey got away!

  “All the time we played there on that beach, it was a wonderment, that’s how my Ma called it, when I told her what we did.

  “I wish I could have told my Pa. But I never did know him. Ma told me every now and then he was a tall handsome man from Spain who worked on the repair of ship’s sails right down near the ferry slip. I remember seeing him once only, late at night, when I was a little boy, when he came to the shack smelling of tar and whiskey and cigar smoke, and Ma went out with him and I began to cry.

  “‘Hush now,’ she said, poking her face back into my part of the shack. ‘Hush, you hear. That’s your father, and you don’t want to make him unhappy.’

  “No, I didn’t want to do that. Never.

  “So when the lady of the house, Mrs. Christian, came out to the kitchen one day and took me up and into her room, saying, ‘Charles (that’s my name), do you know how to read?’ I said ‘No, ma’am.’

  “I wasn’t much for that, because something told it was a lot of work. But she said if I learned it would make my Ma and Pa happy so I said I would try.

  “She learned me my letters, and how to read on the Bible. ‘And Moses went and spake these words unto all Israel…’ See, I remember what I read. ‘And he said unto them, I am an hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go out and come in; also the Lord hath said unto me, Thou shalt not go over this Jordan…’ And if you think that is all I know, what about, ‘Amaziah was twenty-and-five years told when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-and-nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Jehoaddan of Jerusalem…’ or ‘And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled, and his sleep brake from him…’

  “You heard enough? What about, ‘The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars…’

  “If I knew what the ‘horns of the altars’ was…

  “Yay, so I could read, and sometimes now at her parties Mrs. Christian asked me to come out and read to the guests.

  “And that is how I know who among her guests was mean and who was friendly, the tugging at my ears, the pinching.

  “A lot of time went past. I know it, because when I started thinking about who I was and where I was I only came up to a low ink mark on the back of the kitchen door and when this bad thing happened to me I was a number of marks taller. And that took time.

  “The bad thing?

  “It was the man with the loud voice and the white hair and the wild eyes, dressed like a rich man, though he had a smell about him, something like the beach where the fish stank but worse. I don’t know anybody else smelled it, except me. Now he came to the Christian house, traveling, he was, in from some place such as a city in the north or a city just to the west, wherever he was from, I don’t know, I never heard him say a word about where he come from, his city, his Ma and Pa, almost as if he came from nowhere, and that was where he was going, except he made a stop along the way to the house.

  “I suppose he had been there before, because he knew my name, and he knew the Christians. It happened I was in the kitchen, helping my Ma carry out a tray, when he saw me, and next thing I know he was pinching my cheek and saying how much I looked like a little nephew of his.

  “‘He is dark like you, perhaps not as dark, but dark enough. And his eyes are aslant like yours, rather like a Musulman’s.’

  “I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “‘Have you ever seen a Musulman?’ he asked me.

  “I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “‘You are a smarty boy. I heard you read.’”

  “‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  “‘You are a gift to the world.’

  “Yes, sir.”

  “‘And a great boon to the household here. Do you have a mother?’

  “‘She works in the kitchen, sir.’

  “‘Big black woman?’

  “‘Yes, sir.’

  “‘You both are a boon to the Christians.’ His eyes narrowed and he took a big breath, breathing that smell on me when he breathed out. ‘I have a packet for the Christians,’ he said, ‘out in my carriage. Can you come help me lift it, boy?’

  “‘Yes, sir,’ I said, because what did I know?

  “I told Ma and she didn’t pay attention because she was working with the meal so hard, and I followed the man down the steps out front and down to the street and he told me we had to go in his carriage to the pier where the packet was on a boat.

  “Some of my friends were walking up from the beach, white boys, born free as free, lucky ones.

  “‘Hey, Charles!’ ‘Charles, what you doing?’ They called out to me.

  “‘Tell them you are helping me,’ the man said.

  I was a good lad.

  “‘I’m doing some help!’ I called back to my friends.

  “‘Git a penny for it!’ one of them shouted as the man pushed me up onto the carriage seat.

  “I loved riding high up above the street, and loved watching the houses pass by, and seeing the ships come up over the top of the hill and then we rode down to the water and we climbed down.

  “‘Do you like ships?’ the man said to me.

  “‘Oh, I do,’ I said.

  “‘We’ll fetch that packet now,’ he said.

  “I went along, riding with him up to the piers, and next thing that happens is we are climbing aboard the ship where we met you, sir, and going down into his cabin, where he tells me to wait.

  “I didn’t know what to do except do what he asked. I was no slave, but I was a polite boy, because Ma raised me that way.

  “So I waited, leaning against a wall of the cabin, sitting on the bed, standing up, looking out the porthole, seeing the bay. The boat was rolling from side to side, and I wondered why, some waves come in from the far part of the bay, I figured, because I had seen the bay in storms a lot since I first remembered running on the beach. When the land started moving, I shook my head, couldn’t figure it.

  “We cleared the tip of Staten Island before I understood what was happening, and by then it was too late, there was nothing I could do.”

  (At this point in the boy’s story I shivered with a round of chills, recalling, as the sun moved around the sky, how tired I was and physically drawn by the events of the night before.)

  “I was sitting on the bunk with my head in my hands crying when the man came back to the cabin. He carried a sack with tack and fruit and sat down next to me and handed me the sack.

  “‘Where the bee sups,’ he said.

  “‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, taking a piece of tack from the sack and chewing on it.

  “After a few minutes, the man jumps up and says, ‘Come to me, you little black gumbo,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you comfort.’

  “I went on crying.

  “‘Yes, yes, weep your tears,’ he said, ‘weep your little nigger tears, crocodile tears, jungle tears, and I will feed you candy.’

  “I didn’t know what he was talking about, maybe he didn’t know either. But he came over and sat next to me and put his arms around me—and threw me on my back on the bed.

  “I gave him a fight, same way I’d give a fight to some big boy in town who jumped on me from behind, trying to hurt me. But this was something I never knew, what he did, pulling my trousers down and stripping off my underclothes, throwing me on my back again when I tried to push up, push away.

  “‘Gumbo, Sambo,’ he said, whistling, gurgling through his teeth like some kind of animal in the woods.

  “He kept pushing against me just when he leaned over and snuck his head down there, and he tried to eat me up, and his biting hurt and I screamed, and he pushed his hand over my mouth and kept on eating, except he didn’t chew me and swallow me, he just chewed, and he didn’t stop until I was choking, and coughed up nasty yellow slug in his hand.

  “‘You!’ H
e made a sound like a man has taken a long drink of water.

  “Over and over again that night—it happened again and again. Once I pushed him away and he slapped me. After that he did whatever he wanted, like a child discovers he can get free sugar candy whenever he wants. Next morning I didn’t feel so good, in my heart, in my everything. And it wasn’t just me, it was the ocean. I ran on the sand, I dug my holes in the sand, I dug for those crabs, but I had never been on the water before, so I didn’t know if it was the rolling ship or what he was doing to me that was making me feel so bad.

  “I suppose it was both, water and awful man, and his breath smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before, until I went out here into the swamps.

  (I was truly shaking by then, shaking and shaking, the story producing in me a fever such as I had never known. And the light had faded and it would soon be time to move.)

  “We got off the boat in Charleston and he took me to his rooms in a hotel, and he made me serve him like a slave. He had these meetings to tend to and he always took me with him. Sometimes the other men there stared at me, stared at him, but he didn’t pay no mind, except when now and then he would grab me by the back of my neck and pull me up so that I had to stand on my toes, and he’d say, in a big voice, ‘The question is property, gentleman, property, property. Can a tree think? Can a horse pray? Does a nigger have a soul? I ask you that, I ask you…’

  “Every day it was like that, every night he attacked me, treating me like a dog. There was a time or two when I could have run off but I couldn’t get my feet to move, and where could I get my feet to go? I didn’t know anybody where I was, didn’t even know where I was until later. He just kept me with him, like his pet dog.

  “Now, through all this, I saw lots of slave people on the street, and one day when I was alone in the room in the hotel I leaned down and called to a strong-looking man, ‘Hey, hello?’

  “And he looked around, looked up, saw me waving to him, begging him with my hands and eyes, but he kept on walking.

  “Darn, it near broke my soul to see him walk away without helping me. But a little while later, when the man was still out at one of those meetings, came a knock at the door, and it was a hotel maid, and behind her stood the black man I called to on the street.