Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “I cannot,” I said. “I must return to my father and make a report to him.”

  “Will you ever return to Charleston?”

  Anna fluttered her long dark eyelashes and tilted her head toward me in an interrogatory fashion.

  Slaves—men and women—had died, died every day, barns and houses went up in flames, and even as we were speaking fugitives hurried through the wilderness, hoping to find freedom on the other side of dark forests, tall mountains, flooding rivers. And attractive young girls hoped to make their dreams of romance and family come true, despite all of everything else. I had one waiting for me in New York. This much I had learned about life.

  Chapter Eighty-four

  ________________________

  The Last Rising Sun

  A dreary Manhattan morning, the harbor filled with noise and rain. At the house Jacobus greeted me with a shaking of feathers, a phrase, and a squawk. My reunion with my father was not as pleasant. He wondered at my depleted physical state, at which time I unleashed on him all of my fury at the misery and murder the Southern branch of our family had brought into the world. He listened all too calmly—a trait, in the midst of my surprising (to me) rage, he pointed out was quite useful in business—and then explained that he had little idea that his brother and nephew oversaw such suffering.

  “Little idea? Father, sir, they were keeping slaves. Did you expect the slaves to be cheerful about their servitude?”

  “Nathaniel,” he said, looking me in the eye, “I had no idea—”

  “Or little?” I broke in.

  “Or little,” he said, “that the conditions would be such as you witnessed. I had to have you confirm this for me.”

  “And so I have confirmed it?” I said.

  “Yes, you have,” he said.

  “Father, you sent me down there knowing what it was I would find?”

  “I was not fully certain.”

  “But in the main you were.”

  “I was.”

  “Sir,” I said, “do you know what you have done to my life?”

  It was all I could do not to assault him, so angry I was at his apparent naïveté—and my own. It was all I could do not to burst out with the name of the woman who had changed my life. But to speak about Liza would have been to have demeaned her. I kept her private to my thoughts, even as my Father took some care to ensure my full recovery, ordering Marzy to be attentive to all of my needs, which of course our dear old retainer did always without needing any orders. She fed me well, she kept the rooms clean, with as much fine sunlight pouring in as the weather would allow, and because in an odd way it appeared as though she understood the nature of my continual sorrowful demeanor she kept a polite distance all the time she worked around me, which seemed to me to be some kind of tacit recognition that I was no longer the child she had helped to raise but instead the man I was supposed to have become.

  I could not keep my concentration on any prose I might try, the picture of Liza coming between me and anything I attempted to give myself over to—Liza, Liza, Liza—during the day, and at night I raved about her to myself before I fell asleep, and for weeks after my return to the city I dreamed of her as well.

  Yet I could not speak of her with anyone.

  When my old teacher Halevi happened to pay me a visit—urged on, I am quite sure, by my father, to make some assessment of my mental state—I did raise the questions that had haunted me ever since my southern journey, the matter of human bondage and the practice of it by my own family. He wanted only to speak in abstractions, bringing up the question of Evil as if my cousin Jonathan found himself caught in the thrall of some higher power rather than giving in to particular temptations of body and mind. He must have reported to my father that I seemed gloomy and caught myself in some higher stages of desolation, because a day did not go by before my progenitor informed me that if I felt well enough to travel I could leave immediately on my tour.

  So it happened that less than a month after my return to New York I sailed to Liverpool to begin my long-sought-after travels, which turned out to be so much less interesting than I had ever imagined, an endless series of castles, museums, coffee houses, taverns, and cathedrals, and here and there a synagogue or two. During this time away I suffered from bouts of loneliness and some regret (the latter arising whenever my thoughts turned to Liza, which they did more frequently than I would have desired, because they were so painful). I had plenty of company in a group of fellow New Yorkers who roamed the continent, but in my self-pitying state I often wanted only to be alone with my misery.

  I returned from the Continent the next year to work with my father in the family business, marry my Miriam, and produce several children. (Jacobus, poor Carib bird, died around the time of the birth of my first son.) I can only exult in that during those years I worked hard to make a good life for all and at my father’s funeral, which came midway between that time and now, I felt a deep sadness at his demise but also a certain pride in that I had continued his good work at the business. With Halevi at my side I prayed for the strength to continue on in life. (Alas, poor Halevi himself had only about a year to live, having suffered a debilitating weakness in his chest from which he never recovered.)

  I despise myself for revealing what follows, but then what is a manuscript about one’s self without honest revelation about one’s life and thoughts. While the children grew, and my father sank into a state of ill health from which he did not recover and I took more and more of a hand in the business, my mind went often to the picture of Liza, our final nights together. I sometimes imagined her somewhere in Ohio or even, God help me, in New York State, where she was living a quiet life, free at last from all servitude of any kind. But then I wondered, if she had found her freedom and must be living relatively close by, why it was she never tried to contact me. Had she given birth to our child or had it died? Why if the child had lived would she keep me from my offspring? Thus I sent myself into the kind of sulk that is all the worse because one cannot ever speak of it while life goes on around one. Had she died in that swamp? Had she been captured and reenslaved? All of such thoughts of mine became exacerbated when news of the formation of the Confederacy reached us in New York. They became further inflamed when the South fired the first shots of the war only a few miles from the shore of that self-same city of Charleston.

  Miriam, no fool herself, could read it in my face the evening I came home after having joined our local Ellsworth’s Zouaves.

  “What has happened, Nathaniel?” she asked me.

  “We are at war with the Confederacy,” I said.

  She stared at me, as only a woman who has borne your children can.

  “And I have enlisted in a military outfit.”

  She was unbelieving.

  “Have you no sense, sir? You are a husband and father, you are the head of the family business.”

  I took her by the hand—she was quite unresponsive, allowing herself to be led to the sofa in our drawing room where I sat her down, still holding her hand, and sat next to her.

  “Miriam, I see this as my duty. I have volunteered to go into battle with them.”

  This, for a moment, remained beyond her understanding. Certainly I understood her consternation. Without knowing how all these many years I kept Liza in my mind how could she understand the decision I had made?

  Suddenly she ripped her hand from mine.

  “You will go to war?”

  “It is my duty,” I said.

  The look in her eyes was both frightening and magnificent, the way some lion tamer must look while cracking a whip over his cats.

  “Your duty is to—”

  “I cannot,” I said.

  Now her speech gained in volume and intensity all at once.

  “This is because your uncle and cousin behaved so horribly over a decade ago? This makes no sense to me. I know that slavery is wrong, Nathaniel, but your duty is to me and your children and the family business.”

  I sat the
re, stone-like, because I had to and because I could. I spoke of duty, but without revealing the torments of loving and losing Liza I could not make my complete case for going to war. Hundreds of men my age in New York and New England were volunteering, I was sure, for the fight against the Confederacy, men with deep philosophical and religious persuasions. How many of them had known Lizas? Few of them, I was sure. And if they did, they would volunteer all the more, twice, or five times, or fifty times, more, until they had given everything for the sake of a slave they had loved—still loved!—in this horrendous struggle between bondage and freedom.

  I sat very still while Miriam unleashed a tirade against me, and I sat very still long after she had left the room.

  ***

  And so I went off to war, carrying with me this manuscript, mostly complete, which I have worked to finish while on training maneuvers on the Mall at the capitol. And now, in Virginia, on this frankly terrifying evening before our first battle I have kept on with it as a means for trying to hold myself steady. Tonight I have added to and subtracted from here and there, hoping against hope that I have given the best account I could make of our life in all its flaws and pleasures. How fitting it seems to me that I should have recalled the final scene of chaos and turmoil and death at The Oaks against the dark backdrop of this encampment, with men singing quietly as once those plantation slaves had done, singing until when in the middle of the night many of us, my own tent-mates included, figured that we had better try for sleep rather than dare to meet the dawn without it.

  That dawn, I feared, would be for some of us the last rising sun we would see. But no sleep came to me, and I lay as if already dead, until I picked up this pen one last time for the evening—or near morning as it is now—and as it happened to me so often over the many long years now gone since I last saw Liza I pictured her face, her eyes, her lips, tried to recall the press of her body against mine, and wondered wondered wondered where she might be if she were alive at all—but always hoping, as I hoped now that this battle morning had nearly dawned upon us, that she lived free.

  And then, in the deep darkness of the night past midnight, a sign!

  As I was standing outside my tent, thinking what I hoped were not last thoughts about family, about all of you my beloveds who may be reading this, someone called out to me.

  “Mister Nathaniel!”

  I turned to see a lanky young black man in plain blue shirt and trousers, holding up a large water bucket in his hand.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “I know you don’t recognize me,” he said.

  I studied his black face, somewhat indistinct in the darkness, and even as I felt the press of the coming battle I took another moment, and that helped.

  Yes!

  “You!” I said. (I could not at that moment recall his name.)

  “Yes, sir,” he said, smiling in the lightening dark, his bucket at his side.

  “You escaped,” I said.

  “I got away,” he said.

  I shook my head and took a breath.

  “You saved my life,” I told him.

  “You helped me save mine,” he said. “But other folks died that day, that’s sure,” he said, confirming for me what took place between Jonathan and Isaac.

  “It was tragic,” I said.

  “Was Biblical, almost, my mother said when I got home to tell her,” he said.

  “Do you still live in New Jersey?”

  “Well, I did, until I came down here. I’ve got a job up there, nothing much except it brings in food for my wife and little boy, and helps me help my mother who is still living there too. But with this war, I’ve been trying to enlist. They just keep handing me things like this water bucket and tell me the time is coming soon for me to join.”

  “The time is coming soon,” I told him.

  “Meanwhile, would you like a drink, sir?” he said, proffering his bucket.

  “Yes, in a moment, thank you…”

  I ducked back into my tent and returned with my cup so that he might pour me some water.

  I drank deeply, and it tasted to me sweeter than wine, nearly ambrosial, and somehow cooler than ice.

  “Will you drink?” I said.

  “Oh, I drunk plenty,” he said, “I drunk plenty.”

  The young free man and I shook hands, and he took his bucket off into the dark, leaving me to meditate on my fate.

  Should I not survive the war and my dear wife Miriam reads this manuscript I hope she will forgive me. However I do fully expect to see many other sunrises, in war and in peace. As someone who knows that he stands on the right side of this struggle between freedom and slavery, I can only hope that the one God, the God of Abraham and Isaac, will protect me in battle and bless me in the aftermath of whatever terrible acts I may have to perform.

  Chapter Eighty-five

  ________________________

  Hurry, Run!

  And when the sun set on that terrifying day in the swamp Liza had to make her decision about whether to remain with my ailing father or light out. So she closed her eyes and called on the goddess for guidance. When she opened them she saw glowing through the stunted pines a half-moon, with a bright star just above it, all to the west.

  “Is it you, Yemaya?” she said in a whisper. “Star! Half-moon! Yemaya? Have you taken to the sky and turned it into a sea?”

  At first, nothing but stillness reigned in the wake of her call. Gradually, sounds began to emerge in the darkening swamp, the last buzzings of insects, the whirr of bird wings, growls and whimperings of some animals unknown. She feared that she might hear dogs, but nothing in the rising noises of the oncoming night resembled the particular barking and howls of canines in pursuit.

  She took a deep breath, sighed, glanced down at my father, who lay shivering on the sodden ground. As she raised her eyes again to the bluish-purple sky, a voice spoke to her, as if descending from the configuration of half-moon and star.

  “Run!”

  Or, “Come!”

  Or, “Go!”

  (As she recollected it, the voice remained slightly unclear, but the order remained direct. Run, come to me, go, go!)

  “Is it you?” she asked. “Oh, my goddess, Yemaya! Are you still here? All these years, days, hours, I thought you had gone home to Africa!”

  No voice came in response, but she knew what she had heard just before the vast silence settled over things again. She hesitated another moment, taking a deep breath, and sighing deeply. Though she had planned from the start to use my father for whatever she needed in order to make her escape, in the end she felt some affection for him, if not anywhere near the love he felt for her, the man who helped free her, a certain amount of deep and real affection. In fact, she had surprised herself with the emotion in her voice when she spoke to him about their ties even as she knew she was still using him to make her escape. The emotion rippled down her body, chest to her feet, turning them to lead and making it difficult for to take a step in any direction.

  Oh, this life, she lamented to herself, where one cannot truly love without being truly free! Or be truly free without love!

  Such thoughts weighed on her so heavily that she could not move.

  And then she heard the dogs. Dogs! Hounds! The hounds of hell!

  (Free people sometimes suffer the pangs of conscience. Slaves suffer from pursuit by vicious dogs!)

  One moment the goddess leaned on the sliver of a moon and in the next stood by her side tugging at her sleeve.

  “Come,” she said. “Go!”

  Liza hesitated only a moment more before leaving my father, supine and feverish, in the care of the young runaway boy from New Jersey and without looking back walked deeper into the swamp in what she gauged to be a westerly direction. Only after the moon disappeared altogether and the stars appeared determined to light her way did she stop to rest, but only for a short while. The swamp made for odd echoes and reverberations. Now she heard only the faintest howling of dogs, distant howling,
but apparent, as if those dogs might have inhabited some of the stars directly above or to the east.

  She walked and walked, her pace tempered by the need, especially in the now nearly final dark under the gnarled and obdurate branches, to keep to the narrow path that stretched into obscurity between the fetid water of the swamp and the boles of the bushes and trees. One misstep and she might slip into the water. She erred toward the trees and now and then took scratches and at least one bump on her left ear, leaning to the wood as she did.

  At sunrise—misty first light steeped in residue from seeping trees—she sat down at the base of a tree and tried to sleep. Except that she could not keep her heart still, her fear of what might lie ahead driving that sweet organ to beating near-past its capacity. Winged insects as large as her hand buzzed past her. Every tiny crawling thing also conspired to keep her awake. Nevertheless, she dozed, head bobbing like a heavy flower on a drooping stem. And, with the sun as high as it would get that first day on the run alone through the swamp, she descended into deepest sleep and dreamed, yes, of what life must have been like before she was born, putting together a vision—if that was how dreams get made—out of bits and pieces of stories from the cabins and lessons from the doctor. In the dream a large white cloud settled over green forest, as though the earth itself had exhaled it and then the cloud began to sink of its own weight. Mama, she heard herself say, I have come for the stone. An arm sand-colored and slender reached out toward her.

  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr—grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rough, rough, rough, rough!

  She suddenly awoke to find herself face to face with a growling, barking alligator, wide-jawed, its pinkish-black tongue dangling between its jaws with the stiffness yet elasticity that the man’s organ sometimes approximates. Its two sharp snap-drawn eyes showed her something so deadly it could almost be a smile. And here sat Yemaya on the back of the beast. Could it be true? Or had she crossed over the line into madness? What did she see in front of her? Did this goddess still exist?