Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  Her stories nourished me. Though now and then I gave back to her, especially on one of these occasions when I read to her a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, which I had found in a small volume that I purchased from a curious shop across the Bay.

  “I hope you will enjoy this, Mother,” I said, “what I am now going to read to you.”

  “Read it, Son, and we will find out what I think.”

  “It’s as much how you will feel as think about it, Mother,” I said.

  She gave me a commanding look, arching her eyebrows and leaning back in her chair.

  “Read, then.”

  I opened the book to the verse that had so boldly caught my best attention.

  WHERE are we going? Where are we going,

  Where are we going, Rubee?

  Lord of peoples, lord of lands,

  Look across these shining sands,

  Through the furnace of the noon,

  Through the white light of the moon.

  Strong the Ghiblee wind is blowing,

  Strange and large the world is growing!

  Speak and tell us where we are going,

  Where are we going, Rubee?

  “And that is what?” my mother said. “Show me the book. Ah, it is a song, as the poet calls it, a song sung by slaves in the desert. And the poet overheard this singing? Ah, a song from the old days. Ishmael, I have to confess, because we have been talking about those times…even if you hadn’t been asking me about them all these past few years, oh, I would have been thinking about them. Yes, I would. Yes, I would…a day does not go by that I do not think of them, those old days. And do you know, I still remember the first poem I ever read. The doctor had me learn it by heart, and it still remains in my heart. Would you like me to recite it for you?”

  “I would love to hear it, Mother.”

  She then spoke it thusly:

  “The world is round, and like a ball

  Seems swinging in the air,

  A sky extends around it all,

  And stars are shining there.

  Water and land upon the face

  Of this round world we see,

  The land is man’s safe dwelling place,

  But ships sail on the sea.

  Two mighty continents there are,

  And many islands too,

  And mountains, hills, and valleys there,

  With level plains we view.

  The oceans, like the broad blue sky,

  Extend around the sphere,

  While seas, and lakes, and rivers, lie

  Unfolded, bright, and clear.

  Around the earth on every side

  Where hills and plains are spread,

  The various tribes of men abide

  White, black, and copper red.

  And animals and plants there be

  Of various name and form,

  And in the bosom of the sea

  All sorts of fishes swarm.

  And now geography doth tell,

  Of these full many a story,

  And if you learn your lessons well,

  I’ll set them all before you.”

  When she finished, she had tears in her eyes.

  “Have I learned my lessons well? Have I? Have I?”

  Eliza had two doctors, a Harvard Medical School graduate who had grown up in the Central Valley (who for her conjured up memories of her Carolina benefactor) and a Chinese herbalist who had come by boat across the Pacific only a few years before she arrived overland from the East. During a long winter and spring she suffered aches and pains but neither of them could find evidence of any serious illness. Then there came a cold afternoon in August (again) with fog and wind passing over us, as summer in our city chilled its citizens to the bone. My mother, ebullient that very same morning, felt suddenly quite exhausted and took to her bed, her vital light fluttering as if the wind from off the bay had pierced the very wall of her room, believing, or so she confessed to me, that the first sign of her decline she had somehow inexplicably detected when she looked at her ashy-tinged image in the mirror on that foggy afternoon long ago. Illness or no illness, even now her bones remained arched and triumphant, holding her face in beauty and agelessness.

  Whereas in childhood she spoke to me in a strong high voice, now all of her speech had degraded to a whisper, the wisp of a whisper, in stops and starts, with many many breaths between.

  “Remember how this began, with the stone,” she said to me, beginning her story again from the beginning, telling me (again) of her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s, back to Timbuktu and so on back before then until it took that event, the exploding volcano on the African plain, to send the earliest family in our line of human beings trekking toward another home. I had tried in my studies at Cal to have imagined this event, the three of them, father, mother, and small female child, hand in hand, moving forward as the ash falls on their heads.

  A million years ago? A conservative estimate, one of my advanced professors might say. No, no, no, no, much more than that. (But don’t tell my pastor I said so, he might say in a joke.) But move forward they did, and so lived long enough for the young girl to find a surviving mate, and the great unfolding chain of children growing into childbearing adults—the old story about Cain leaving Eden to go into exile in the Land of Nod and there finding a mate may be an echo of the earlier eruption that evicted our first parents from their African Eden—proliferates through the ages, a novel event yet one duplicated by millions of other families by the time recorded history begins.

  My mother asked me to find her purse and to extract from it that same stone with which she began all of her stories and reveries and tales and recollections.

  “You still have it?”

  She nodded. Yes.

  “I have always carried it with me,” she said in a whisper.

  “The original? Over all those how many hundreds of years? Hundreds? Thousands! How can that be?”

  She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, and the heavens beyond the roof.

  “It may have been a thousand years,” she said. “Or more. Much more.”

  I found it and held it in the palm of my hand.

  “A miracle,” I said.

  She shook her head, nearly all breath and thus all words having left her.

  “What now?” I said.

  She gestured for me to keep it.

  She nodded. Her eyes lighted up, as she saw me, and—who could know?—saw the past and the future one atop the other, in a palimpsest of time.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I said, taking the relic, if it was the same one she had told me about, the stone her ancestors had carried and given to her for safekeeping, the stone marked with signs now undecipherable that once made up a story in themselves. Had that child, perhaps, walking steadily across that volcanic plain with her parents, ash rain falling about her head and shoulders, bent for an instant and snatched that object—icon?—from the ground and passed it along, years later, to her children, and these to theirs, until one day an artisan took up a new tool and carved it into a pleasing design?

  After taking a moment to study its shape and markings, I touched it to my forehead and pressed hard. It felt cool, and then warm, and then hot, as though it were passing through my skin and skull-bone into my very brain! The longer I sat there with it the pictures of Eliza and all of the words in all of the stories she had told me fell into a certain order, which in that astonishing blooming moment showed me her life and a world in all its turmoil and beauty and striving and hope and misery and worry and woe and chanting and song! Birth, love, death, rebirth! All crackled in me like lightning leaping from one storm cloud to another, then like lightning leaping from a storm cloud to the earth.

  I heard a noise outside the window, not seeing lightning but instead spying a sea-bird gliding past. I looked back down at Eliza.

  She had been watching me.

  “Ishmael,” she said.

  “Yes, Mother?”

  I kneeled besid
e her and kissed her on the cheek—her cooling cheek. I drew back and saw that something fluttered in her eye, like the wing of some bird or butterfly.

  “I am not a bad person, am I?”

  “No, no, no, Mother, you are not.”

  “I have tried to be good. Though I have done terrible things in my life…”

  “You have been a fine mother to me, a wonderful mother.”

  “Considering…”

  “Considering? Yes, considering the struggle you had to make, the struggles. Oh, Ma…”

  I kissed her again, and found that her cheek had cooled even more.

  Oh, my gods, I said to myself, oh, my gods! All of them, because she had taught me to be lavish with my hopes and prayers and not spend them all on a single narrow faith.

  She spoke then one last time, locking upon me that gaze of hers in which I saw worlds within worlds within worlds.

  “I never thought I would reach this moment. At last, at last, at last…I…am…a free woman.”

  Chapter Ninety

  ________________________

  A Son Appears

  But I was not yet a free man, and had only a few inklings of what I might become when I saw the sign for the first time. There it was, set into the brick façade of a building on a little lane just off Wall Street, the sign I had been looking for.

  PEREIRA AND SONS, IMPORT-EXPORT

  I had pictured this sign in my mind ever since I boarded the train in San Francisco and headed east, the sign bearing the name that I had thought about on and off for a number of years.

  How many times had I rehearsed my entrance! Touching a hand to my head and a finger to my tie, adjusting my vest, pulling my coat just so (with my other hand in my pocket feeling the smoothness and the striations of that relic of a stone, by all rational standards a legacy seemingly impossible to have been transmitted down along all these centuries, yet here it was, cool and smooth to my touch), I stepped into the office, where I would say to a welcoming receptionist that I had come to see Mr. Nathaniel Pereira.

  There was no one to greet me. The large room smelled of tobacco smoke and eastern spices and the chill remnant of a morning in March and the faintest touch of tar. On the walls hung photographs of sailing ships in various harbors, one of which I recognized as our own, another which I believed was Honolulu, and others I could not recognize except for the exotic composition of the smaller boats—junks, canoes, mainly—that surrounded the larger vessels.

  My eye came to rest on the photographic portrait just at the end of the row of pictures of ships.

  The uniformed man, in middle-age, of medium height, posed, unsmiling, in front of a row of tents which stretched to the horizon.

  My chest tightened.

  “May I help you?”

  The voice struck me also in a physical way, and I turned to the man, a fellow the same height and same face as the officer in the photograph, without the cast of age. But when I tried to speak I merely let out a cough.

  “Sir?” the man said. “I am Emmanuel Pereira, may I be of some assistance?”

  I took a step toward him, then stopped, trying to catch my breath. I had rehearsed this part also.

  “Y-yes,” I said, “I am happy to meet you.” I paused and took another breath. And another. “I am your brother.”

  Emmanuel took a moment, inclining his head a tad toward me, taking in my color and my clothes, my long straight hair, the blue-green of my eyes.

  “Well, well,” he said at last. “I…Father had always hoped…”

  “He told you about me?”

  “He wrote a recollection of his life. He wrote about…your mother…”

  “You use the past tense, sir. That means that he is deceased?”

  Emmanuel nodded, slowly, sadly, tilting his body a little to the right.

  “Yes, I am afraid that is so. A long while ago. He volunteered at the start of the war, and he died in his very first battle.” A flicker of emotion passed across his face. “Our mother is likewise deceased. After a long illness.”

  Something weighty, like a ship’s anchor, seemed to fall within me the entire length of my body.

  “And mine as well.” I extended him a hand. “And so, my condolences to us all…”

  Emmanuel took my hand. “But, well, my…brother!”

  “Ishmael,” I said, taking his hand. “Ishmael Stone.”

  We embraced firmly, in manly fashion. My brother smelled of the salt air of the harbor and tar from the planks—clearly he was an import-export sort of fellow, and if he looked nothing like me at first, well, then, I figured, it had to be because I just had not looked long and hard enough at him. (Who knew, what after my transcontinental train trip, what I smelled like!)

  “Ishmael,” he said when in the next few moments we stood back from each other. “The name is Biblical.”

  “Yes,” I said, the rest of the words tumbling from my lips, “but not what you think. My mother may have been born a slave, but she was from childhood a voracious reader, taught by a caring doctor who attended to the slaves on the plantation where she grew up. On her way west, in the part of her trip that she made by wagon—and how that happened I can tell you one day if you are interested, I can tell you all about her journey, because so much of it was extraordinary, and dangerous, and in many ways miraculous—well, but she found a copy of a book, a novel about whaling—”

  “A novel about whaling?”

  “Yes, and the narrator, because there is a narrator, one of the sailors on this ship that goes on a truly dangerous voyage, is named Ishmael. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is how the book opens. I’ve long since read it myself, of course.”

  “So, Ishmael,” my brother said, “well, I must read that book too.”

  “It is a fine book,” I said. “And a truly momentous American story.”

  “Reading is not my first interest,” my brother said. “Business and family always stand in the way. But I always have hopes for the time for it.”

  “Good,” I said “Good, good.”

  We began to talk, and he took me home with him that evening and I met the rest of the family, wife, children, step-mother. I could scarcely breathe for the sentiment I felt on meeting them and getting to know them. Whereas growing up in San Francisco where not many with my shade of skin walked the streets and so I felt constantly goggled at and pointed to, here in New York where many descendants of slaves and freemen both resided, I could only draw attention to myself by shouting in the street—which I did not do, of course—or by walking into a family gathering for the first time where someone announced that I was a long-lost brother-in-law or brother or uncle or all of these. They lavished much initial affection on me, and I tried to reciprocate as best I could, only child that I was.

  Emmanuel raised a glass to me at dinner that first night.

  “To my long-lost half-brother,” he said. And then he stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “No, no, no, to my long-lost, and now found, brother!”

  With tears in my eyes I reciprocated. And then added:

  “To our father.”

  “To father—grandfather—all…” Family voices in celebration rang through the air.

  “And to my mother,” I said. “Whom I only wish you might have known.”

  “To your mother!” Again the voices in tribute rang through the air.

  I had lived alone since my mother’s death, and traveled alone, but now my singular state was fast disappearing. The next day I met two more long-lost brothers of mine, one of them a physician and the other also a partner in the family business.

  They took me in, fed me, clasped my hands, kissed me on the cheeks, gave me a bed. After all of my mother’s stories about life on the plantation I felt now that the Pereiras had somehow saved me from regarding family life as a pit of desolation and woe and enslavement and murder. I was, though, only beginning to learn about this side of where I came from, beginning with the end.

  On a long walk along the wharves in the deep salt steep
of a Sunday afternoon my brother Emmanuel described to me our father’s demise.

  “In the first wave of battle, apparently, at Bull Run.”

  I sighed, breathed in, breathed out.

  “I am very sorry that I will not be able to meet him.”

  “I am, too,” my brother said.

  “The funeral must have been difficult for all,” I said.

  “Yes, yes.”

  He described to me the woe spread all around, and the weeping and wailing. And the wake that followed.

  “It is, I believe,” Emmanuel said, “so much worse for us Jews than for the Gentiles. They believe in an afterlife, whereas we do not.” He sighed deeply and touched a hand to my shoulder. “Were you raised as a Jew or a Gentile?”

  “Such as I was raised,” I said, “I would have to call myself an enlightened pagan, if I am at all enlightened.”

  “Our father was not all that much for his religion.”

  “Jews believe in doing good deeds, do they not?”