Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “Stop this!” Eliza, terribly upset, raised her voice.

  “Please,” the young woman said, her eyes filled with tears. “I am a slave and I long to be free…”

  “I as well,” said one of the other devotees.

  Eliza left them kneeling there and fled from the hall, never to give another talk again.

  Years passed, like one long day of fog and sun. Now if you know our city, you know how often you can find yourself climbing a hill, and another, and another beyond it. Picture Eliza tugging me along as she goes, the toddling boy, along with her, up and up, until I could eventually hold my head up high and walk along with her, she with her cape and parasol, me (when still that young) in my buckskin knickers (because my heroic aspiration at that early age was to become a buffalo soldier, a goal I still remember clearly, though these days it brings a smile to my face).

  And then came the years of braving sailing expeditions on the Bay with her husband, the man whom I came to see as my father, when she worked hard to give no sign of, as she later confessed to me, her deep aversion to the surge of tides and beat and splash of waves. Passage over water infused her with a certain dread, something she had first noticed when hidden in that boat that carried her across the Mississippi what was now some years ago. It called to mind the Atlantic crossing her mother’s mother made, and her mind near drowned when weighed down by the memories and thoughts of the myriad Africans, her closest relatives and total strangers, who had come that way before. She loved to watch the ocean, but to sail?

  Her dread arose on Sunday morning when her husband took her for what he called an easy sail along the north shore of the bay. At first she agreed with him about the easy part, steering out of the busy harbor around the oceangoing ships flying flags from around the world, and then skimming past the wooded islands, looking toward the gentle mountain that rose to the west, between them and the great ocean, this did soothe her, she had to admit. Her worries and nightmares of murderous passages over water flew away on the salty wind. Only when they tacked across the outgoing tide at the gateway to the ocean did her fears tighten her chest and send lightning down her limbs.

  “Turn around!” she called over the wind.

  “My dear,” he said, turning to her as he held the wheel steady.

  A pair of birds rushed past in desperate flight. Eliza heard a splash and caught a glimpse of a fish tail, and a sleek long snout and a fish tail again.

  Yemaya? She wondered, could the goddess of fabled times be following them? She hoped she would keep them safe!

  Her heart surged.

  “So beautiful!” she called back to him.

  “Dolphins rising!” her husband said. “Come, we’ll follow them.”

  “No, no, not to the ocean, no!”

  He shook his head as if at a confused child.

  “You are afraid, you, and I thought you, afraid? Never…”

  “Turn back,” she said, reaching for his arm.

  Reluctantly, he turned them around, and they sailed past rocky cliffs until again the city came into view.

  “I am not afraid,” she said, “it is just…the tides…”

  “My dear, I know the tides,” her husband said.

  Still, she could not repress the dread. It became confirmed for her one Sunday about a year later when, off alone on his sailboat, tacking across the Bay through the ocean tides, a surge came up and dumped her husband and dear benefactor into the waters from which he did not emerge alive.

  Several years went by after his death, and then Eliza remarried, this time to a journalist who wrote editorials for the daily newspaper. A rather rotund man with a black, dagger-like goatee who enjoyed dispensing jokey wisdom to anyone in his company, he seemed an odd choice for Eliza to have made. She stood several inches taller than him although they were a bit more equal in age than she and her first husband. And unlike the first, who enjoyed (to a fault, as it turned out) the pleasures of the Bay, this fellow enjoyed the train and the horse and wagon, and took my mother, and sometimes included me, on trips around the state, down to Los Angeles, and over to visit the redwoods and into the great woods to the east. I enjoyed his company, but what passed between us did not resonate as paternal.

  Chapter Eighty-eight

  ________________________

  Eliza Stone (& Son) (cont.)

  Meanwhile, at a great distance to the east, the drums of war beat for years and years—and a death on the battlefield, which my mother would never know about, touched my life, though I myself would not learn about it for years and years. Of course, she now and then read a news dispatch in one local newspaper or another. The Union marched into the South and battled the army of the slaveholders, which now and then gave back as good as it got, but eventually, as she saw it, got precisely what it deserved. Even at this distance she could imagine, if she let herself, blue-coated soldiers rampaging across the landscape of plantation and swamp. The violence of war made her feel somewhat uneasy, however justified this war might seem to her. She had put great distance, both physical and temporal, between herself and the South where she had spent her first two decades of life. But now and then, long after the war had ended, she circled back and down in her thoughts to those plantation days and the angry tortures, physical and mental, of her enslavement. Even as I grew older she constantly revisited in memory those to me quite ancient days and suffered again the agonies of a life without liberty.

  “I am sorry to say I am not as free as I had hoped,” she told me once while we were out for a walk across the top of Russian Hill—I tried to see her as often as I could even when I was attending school on the other side of the bay, because by this time she had lost yet another husband—that editorial writer—in this case to the fault in his heart which gave out, oh, mix of love and death! while they were locked in a marital embrace—“not with the way my mind keeps going back to old days of torture and menace even in just the everyday life I tried to live. You are a free soul,” she reminded me as we looked out at blue-white sky and the white-tufted waters of the bay, “you are free to make your life or wreck it on the rocks. The country fought a war”—ah, that war, that murderous war!—“so you could be this way. Whatever you do you are free to do it. Choose wisely, good son, choose wisely.”

  The next time she made almost the exact same speech to me we were sipping tea and looking out over the bay from her vantage point of our house on Macondray Lane, the house left to her by her dutiful and adoring late second husband, her newspaper man.

  Some parents lose interest when their children grow older, others become more and more attentive to them and seek their company. My mother was the latter sort of mother. The older I got, the more she talked to me of her life, and what she found within it.

  “Some nights when I can’t sleep,” she told me, “I sit here, watching the lights of ships in the bay, thinking back to the passage of my people from Africa to South Carolina, that awful journey, and nothing it seems can take me off that mark, that black place in memory. Then, as some kind of miracle, Ish, I recall Nate’s face, and how in his eyes I saw the possibility of freedom. That is the gift he gave me, that young man from New York City. I wish only that I had not had to leave him behind…” (Ay, the further in time she left him behind, the more affection she believed she felt for him!) Here, she made a huge sigh, and in that expiration of breath and sound only much later could I fill in the details of desperation and love and aspiration and fear, among other emotions, that had driven her to this point in her life, where she could sit and ponder the past which had nearly destroyed her. I did not know my father, and in a visceral way, never would, so I could only listen and wonder as she continued to speak.

  “I have done many things in my life that a reasonable feeling person might easily regret. Whatever I did, I did to make my freedom. I know it must seem that I have had to be a terribly hard person in order to survive. And that is true, for the most part. From anything that seemed as though it might deter me from my plan I kept my di
stance. But I am not so hard that now and then, as in this moment, or I wouldn’t be speaking of it, that I don’t think of Nate. Poor man. Rich man but poor. He was in love with me. I used him, I admit that freely. I’m sure he went on to make a good life for himself. He had all the advantages…though I do wonder precisely what he made of himself once he returned to his native New York.…”

  She began to cry, and I sat there, feeling chained to my chair, when after a while she wiped at her tears and gazed out at the water.

  “I am sorry, Ish. Do you think I am a bad woman for keeping you from your father?” she said. “Do you think I am evil? Let me tell you, I hope that you never, well, you could never find yourself as I did, born into slavery, and so you will never ever understand, and blessedly so, that you would do anything—anything—to become free.”

  Her tears ran freely again, and it took her a while to calm herself.

  She said, “I never think about my father, that hateful disgusting man, except that I wanted to tell you about him. I do think of Isaac, poor Isaac. Where is he now? Where is he?” Light and cloud passed across the waters of the Bay. She gazed out at this everyday wonder, dreaming with eyes open about who knew what. Then she said:

  “Of course I think sometimes about what would have happened if I hadn’t left Nate behind. As sick as he was, the dogs would have caught up with us. How the patrollers would have torn me away from him and returned me to the Pereiras. How my father would have…oh! And what Nate might have done! Oh! Yemaya, I know I did the right thing!”

  She kept her eyes on the water, as if dreaming while awake. Yemaya! It had been some time since she had uttered the name of the goddess who had given her such good protection in life. Yemaya, she vowed, I am sorry, I will not forget you!

  So I think it was then, when I was at a relatively late age, that the idea of finding my father, the man of whom she spoke with such affection, became something of an obsession for me.

  ***

  I did not pay much attention when yet another man came into her life, this fellow a successful portrait artist originally from Holland named Jan Argus, who met her at a dinner one night and volunteered to paint her. They became quite close, though they never married, and the first portrait Jan made of her still hangs on the wall of my Manhattan apartment. (But I don’t mean to get ahead of myself in recounting this story.) Jan and I became friends of sorts. He loved to hear about my interests and my studies—by that time I was attending Cal and taking courses in everything under the sun that could teach you about life on earth, early and late.

  “Do your studies in the work of Darwin show you how to make sense of our story?”

  “Our story?”

  “The story of the world.”

  “We are only just beginning to talk about it,” I said. “The clergymen are not happy about it.”

  “No, no,” said Argus, “they would not be, would they? But if their god cannot withstand the discovery of some millions of years of life, why, then what kind of a god is it anyway in whom they believe? I ask you.”

  “And I tell you, not a very powerful god at all.”

  Such were the conversations one could have back then, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of where we are now, when I was first trying to make sense of what he called “our story.” Argus and I would walk and talk, and now and then he would invite me to his studio in a former barn that he rented for scarcely anything from one of his wealthy Nob Hill patrons. There I met on several occasions an astonishingly beautiful Island girl who was posing for him with or without various Hawaiian garments, a girl whom I first knew as “Holly,” before we married and she introduced me to the proper pronunciation of island things.

  Yes, that is how much time went by. I evolved from infant to baby to boy to young man before that morning when Eliza awoke late and as she was moving from the bed to the bath happened to step past a mirror in the master bedroom of our house and then stepped back. Something in her image caught her eye. Her rich brown face that Jan Argus had captured so beautifully in his portrait had turned suddenly ashy and she appeared to herself as a different woman.

  Quickly she removed her clothes and noticed that the ashy patina covered her breasts and belly, too, as well as the tops of her thighs. She turned to see her back over her shoulder but the light would not allow her to see herself clearly from behind. She kept this view to herself and never mentioned it to Jan.

  More time passed, months, years, and in bits and pieces and sometimes in longer stories she told me over many cups of tea on many afternoons, Eliza delivered to me the history of her family, and her own life, such as it had been before arriving in the Promised Land of California. I think she missed her students, and I also believe, though she never would admit to it, she missed the audiences which had once filled every seat in large theaters who had come to hear her talk.

  ***

  Was this a dream or was it real? That was how Eliza put this next story into a frame.

  Of a Sunday morning in August, she and Argus had been out walking on the far western edge of the city, where the cliffs overlooked the churning ocean, the beautiful, hypnotic, but deadly ocean, and he had stopped to relieve himself along the trail. She kept on walking, focusing on the large veil of fog that cloaked the sky in the direction of the Farallons. It served her as a kind of wall on which she began to project the stereopticon-like images out of her mind where thought met memory, in other words, those things never far from her everyday thoughts. That ocean—it gave her a sound show while she pictured again the ship that carried her grandmother to Carolina. Soon she imagined she heard shouts and the crack of whips and the groans and songs of all the African people, her cousins and kin, who arrived in chains and lived in chains. She heard laughter, of goddesses and gods and human beings, the crunch of thunder, the rush of water flooding the fields, the grunts and snores of men she had known, the touch of the doctor’s hand, curative, the grasp of her father’s brutal fingers, maniacal, spitting and caressing, kissing, fending off but not too well the inevitable thrusts of his monstrous desires, his falling away of gasp and grunt, striated breathing while she lay scarcely alive, breath turned to noxious gas, body turned to water, heart beating but not caring.

  What was freedom if these visions came with it?

  A fever-like shudder passed along her chest and limbs.

  Did she want to go on like this, every day, every day? For this was it she pulled the trigger of that pistol, for this was it she killed not once but twice?

  She walked directly up to the edge, where nothing but ice-plants and their roots held the cliff solid beneath her feet. The wind whipped about her, carrying sounds cloud and chaos she imagined soared over the Hawaiian Islands roaring all the way from Asia where she longed to go but knew she never would.

  Why not?

  Because of time.

  What is time?

  The roots that hold together the cliff on which we stand.

  She held out her arms as though they were wings, and stood against the pouring wind, balanced between falling forward and falling back.

  Time? Perhaps not the roots but instead the wind, the resounding wind.

  She called out that name she had spoken only intermittently in these California days—“Yemaya! Oh, goddess, forgive me my thoughts about your watery abode!”

  ***

  “Darling?”

  Argus, her Dutchman, came up behind her and took her by the shoulders.

  “Step back, my soul, so dangerous here!”

  She turned and studied his face, looked into his eyes, feeling that chest-surge again, and thinking, Who is he? And, Well, he is good to me.

  Oh, she had lived! So, oh, she would live a bit more!

  Chapter Eighty-nine

  ________________________

  Eliza Stone & Son (cont.)

  She lived long enough to see me graduated with honors from Cal, where in my studies I found new science that fed into a dream of mine that recurred around that ti
me, a dream of our early ancestors that I had wondered about ever since my mother first told me my first stories when I was a child. In my dream an erupting volcano on the horizon of a long plain stirred inhabitants to hurry away from its billowing cloud of fire and smoke and ash. That event took place before the time of human memory, if I believed my mother (supported by some evidence about prehistoric life presented to me by some of my most radical instructors at Cal, who made it their business to try and reconstruct actual events contained within “the adult bed-time story,” as one of them put it, we found in the Bible (in which the Mosaic signs from God of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night may well be a long-lost memory of that same volcano)). For a while that event took place weekly in my dreams. Perhaps, I had to admit, it had always been a dream of mine and I had only recently begun to wake with it as a memory.

  But now something shifted in our family life soon after my commencement, as my mother ended, for whatever reason, her companionship of her Dutch painter—he moved to Los Angeles, and except for a dwindling number of post cards each year we never heard from him again—and she became a woman sure enough of herself to live alone and enjoy the solitude. These things happened, as I soon discovered when my Hawaiian Holly and I recognized that we, too, had to part ways.

  Once again Eliza and I took to having many a meal together—at least once a week—during which time I began to make notes in a leather-bound volume out of which would grow my narrative, based on her facts, about her lineage going all the way back to Timbuktu and even before, and about her life at The Oaks, a narrative that I hoped would one day find its way into the hands and then the hearts of whatever children I might foster myself.

  Still, I had my good high hopes for separating truth from legend, and history from speculation—that was just my inclination both as I had been as a student and now as a citizen of the world (which is how I saw myself once I graduated). Long I mulled over these stories—mull, mull, mull, the whirring of my unsatisfied mind at work—and kept her talking. Was it possible ever to know what actually happened in my mother’s life?