Song of Slaves in the Desert (30 page)

What is a Journey?

I began in Africa, on the slopes of a young volcano—before this I have no recollection—a creature moving slowly but surely on my own two feet, herding my child before me as overhead the ash began to rain down on us, and we kept moving, yes, moving across the swampy plain. We cried out to our gods, and our gods called out to us. One was fire, the other thunder. Some of us stopped on the plain where the ash stopped and some of us kept going, stopping only when we reached the forest and we lived in the desert for a long time and they lived there a long time in the forest, until hateful men who worshiped other gods came and swept us up in their nets and tied us with their ropes—oh, ropes made from plants we ourselves had grown!—and dragged us south and then north, then west, where we and our children built a city. The city baked in the heat, and one day we sailed down river to escape it, finding ourselves in the great forest, and stolen from there next we stood at ocean-side, our bodies chained to each other. How we survived that passage over water I do not know. Many many perished.

And that is our history in a paragraph!

A week passed since that extraordinary night, and I went about my business of taking long days in the fields stooping with the field hands as they bent themselves over the burgeoning stalks of rice—trying to pay close attention to what Isaac, armed with a short hoe and a long knife, instructed me about, the nature of the plant, the particular features of the stalk, the buds of kernels. The rice was nearing maturity—I was beginning to acquire enough expertise to notice the plumping of the kernels and the subtle transformation of shading from pale white to light green to thickest green—but I was so hot in my coat, stripping it away, steeped in sweat like a river I might have waded in up to my chin, and my head swelled up with reckless thoughts.

“Isaac,” I said, “how can you work like this? The heat is so abominable.”

“Massa,” he said with a laugh, “I like this. It makes me think, when I close my eyes, I am home in Africa, where my fathers came from.”

“Your fathers?”

“My father’s father’s father. Otherwise, they been here a long time.”

“But you still have your protection against the heat?”

“I don’t have protection. Difference is, I know I have to work here. You go home after the rice harvest.”

“You heard that I was staying until then?”

“You hear things around the plantation,” Isaac said.

We moved along, up to our ankles in salty-tinged water, the long row of rice plants.

“What kind of things?”

“Things, massa, things.”

“You must hate me for what I do,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Hate you, massa?” Isaac gave me a quizzical look, and if I had not been disturbed about what I had just thought I had made known, it might have amused me, this slave arching an eyebrow and taking the measure of me as though we were talking together on the street in Manhattan instead of in a flooded rice field in South Carolina.

“I don’t hate you, massa,” he said.

“But you know what I am doing?” I said this: part confession, part query, a search for approval, and a small part braggadocio. I said this: because a man cannot live too long without company of a confidante, someone, a friend, against whose opinion he can test his actions. I had not understood this before I left New York and arrived in Charleston, but I certainly understood it now.

“What you doing, massa? Walking in the water with Isaac.”

“Don’t be coy, Isaac.”

“I don’t know what that is—‘coy,’ massa—so I couldn’t be it.”

“I thought you were able to read.”

“Yes, but I never read that word.”

“Let me be frank, Isaac, I have only been here a short time but I know that a pin doesn’t drop somewhere on the plantation that you people don’t hear it.”

“Us people?”

“You slaves.”

“Uh-huh, massa,” he said. “Well, I suppose that’s true.” He stopped walking, and I stopped, and he plucked a rice stalk and held it up before his nose, testing it in the light. “You talking about—?” He stopped his work and raised his little hoe as though it were a weapon.

“You know, Isaac,” I said, “it is damned difficult for me to believe that I am having this conversation.”

“With a slave?”

He shook his head.

“Well,” he said, “you got to think of slaves same way you think about any people. Some of us smart, some of us quick, some of us slow. Now that Ms. Rebecca helping us to read we can make a good conversation. You want to conversate about the Bible? I can conversate about how Moses led the Children of Israel out of the land of bondage and out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.” He cocked his head in the direction of the plantation house and said, “And how Samson brought down the temple.”

Now it was my turn to laugh.

“You are doing well to ‘conversate,’” I said.

“You doing well in the field here,” he said. “And other places.”

“You…you are not angry?”

“Angry? Why should I be angry?”

“Angry at me.”

“Angry at you, massa?”

I don’t think that any white man had ever spoken to him in this way, because he gave me a look that a man might give to a talking stone or a passing cloud that rained down coins.

And then I said the next thing, the final thing, that could only have caused him great consternation. And me, also. Because I was as much delivering the news to myself as to him.

“Isaac,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, “I…I am in love with her.”

The night of that same day Liza burst into my bedroom.

“How dare you!” she said, throwing her fists at me as I stood up to meet her.

I caught her by the wrists and we spun around, almost as if in a kind of dance.

“How dare I? I did not know a slave could say such things!”

“You didn’t? You didn’t? Well, despite my life of slavery I am free—I am free to hate you!”

She tore one of her hands free and banged me in the nose. The pain pulled me back and I clasped both hands to my face.

“Nate, Nate,” she said in a sudden worried cry, “Are you all right? Are you?”

Hands still covering my aching face, I stumbled back against the bedroom wall.

“No,” I said, “no, I’m not.”

My voice sounded thick. Glancing down behind my hands I could see the blood dripping onto my shoes.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Liza said, and guided me in her arms to the bed.

“I…I’ll fetch some water. Wait!”

“Wait? Wait? My blood cannot wait.”

“Here,” she said, and snatched a pillow from the bed and shoved it at me. I caught it in one hand and pressed the billowy thing to my face. She left the room while I sat on the edge of the bed, breathing hoarsely but steadily, feeling the blood run out of my battered nose and down my shirt front.

In a moment she was back. Her eyes were wild, her duster spattered with my blood.

Clutching the cloths she had just fetched and dipping them into the water from my drinking jug she dabbed at my nose, and then bid me press the wet cloths against it.

“Lie back,” she said.

I obeyed, but gagged on the blood that ran down the back of my throat.

I sat up again.

“Back,” she said.

“Are you the massa?” I said. “It is choking me.”

She approached me again, dabbed, pressed. After awhile, in which we both remained silent except for our breathing, the blood stopped flowing.

“Why did you say that?” Liza asked.

I pulled the cloths away from my face.

“What did I say?”

“You know what you said.”

I shook my head, this motion somehow stirring up the pain, if not the blood, almost in an instant.

“You told Isaac you loved me.”

I sighed, and swallowed, and tasted the bitter iron of my own blood.

“I said that, yes.”

“So stupid.”

“Me? Stupid?”

She shook her head, frightened all of a sudden by her own aggressiveness toward me.

“I said it,” I said, “because it is true.”

“It is not.” Her voice was hoarse and raspy.

“Oh, but it is, sad to say. And wonderful, too.”

I tossed the bloody cloths onto the bed and reached for her hand.

She pulled it away.

I reached again.

“You’re still bleeding,” she said. I felt the hot stinging in my nostrils, still wet with the flow.

She picked up the cloths, refolded them so that the clean side showed, and pressed that against my face, at the same time pushing me back so that my head lay against the bloody discarded pillow.

“I hate you,” she said.

“You don’t,” I said.

“I do, I do. You have ruined everything.”

“And how have I done that? What did you have before…?” I stopped myself, amazed at the stupidity and cruelty of such a remark.

“Yes, you’re right, massa. Dis nigger woman, what she have befo’ de man from New Yawk, he come along?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling my shame as more intense pain in the center of my face.

“What did I have? Oh, what did I have?”

It was her turn to hold her face and moan.

“Liza,” I said, “I did not mean to—”

“Leave me be!”

“Sorry.”

“Yes, you’re sorry. You’re sorry.”

With a huge sigh, she heaved herself to her feet and stood unsteadily before me.

“I can’t come here anymore. I have been wanting to tell you this, and now I must tell you this.”

“Is it so awful for you? I hadn’t understood that it was, Liza. I thought…I thought that you felt something the same as I did.”

I reached for her hand, but she pulled back.

“Please,” I said, “don’t turn me into a beggar.” I patted the bed alongside me. “Come sit, please.”

“Oh, massa,” she said. “De massa call.”

“Stop it.”

She burned a look at me that gave me more pain than her fist that crushed my nose.

“What massa want?”

“Stop it, please.”

“No,” she said, her voice returning to normal. “Tell me what you want?”

“I want you,” I said. “I want you to sit here beside me.”

“You want me?” She burned me again with that gaze. “You want me?” She shook herself as though a cold wind had just passed over her body. “You can have me. Oh, yes, you got me. Massa, anything you want.”

And with an angry jerking motion, she tore at her frock, ripping buttons as she pulled.

Now she stood before me, naked to the waist, her chest heaving.

“Here,” she said, bowing toward me, then descending to her knees and pulling at my boots. “Now.” Off she pulled a boot, throwing it against the wall, then another.

“Stop it,” I said, pushing at her as next she tried to interfere with my buttons.

“Massa want me to stop?”

“Yes, stop.”

She ceased her frenzied tearing and fell back onto the floor, hugging her knees to her chest.

“Yes, massa,” she said, and began to sob most terribly.

“Liza,” I said, not knowing what to say beyond her name. I eased myself down onto the floor beside her and took her in my arms.

“You say you love me,” she said. “Don’t you know that is the cruelest most awful thing to tell a woman like me?”

“But I do love you.”

She ignored what I said.

“And do you know why it is so cruel?”

“No,” I said in a whisper near her ear. “Tell me.”

“Because I am not free to refuse you. And I am not free to accept you, either. I am just a lonely piece of chattel, do you understand? A Jew-slave, as they call us in town. I am like Promise, the horse you ride here. A Jew-horse he is, too.”

Turning in my arms, she breathed close to my face. The pain of my bleeding nose was nothing compared to the ache I felt in my chest.

“Perhaps it is time to go,” I said, pushing myself against the bed and standing up.

“So it’s a lie?”

“What is?”

“You say you love me, and you’ll send me away?”

“It is too painful,” I said.

“Yes, isn’t it? Oh, I hate her, that bitch-cousin of yours! I hate her profoundly!”

As hot as it was in the room, Liza then gave a shiver and crossed her arms across her breasts.

“You hate Rebecca? Why?” I said. “She has been so good to all of you.”

“That is the reason I hate her! And I hate the doctor, too!”

I had to shake my head.

“You hate these good people? Why?”

“It was terrible of them to be good to us. Before I learned to read, before I read all these things I read, I didn’t know how much I was hurting.”

“Liza,” I said, and once again took her in my arms.

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t be good to me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll hate you, too!”

She pressed herself against me, trembling wildly. In an instant we threw ourselves on the bed, God’s Jew-slaves, both of us, doing the bidding of our bodies that He had created out of dust and clay.

The first time it happened just after she had been reading and talking about what she had read with the doctor—a novel about, of all things, the South Pacific, about sailors stranded on an island with natives who reminded her of some of the African stories she had heard in the cabins. He had made his rounds, and then left for town. She returned to the kitchen to prepare for Precious Sally’s evening meal, her mind filled with that South Sea story, and with another part of her mind marveling at how reading could carry you away out of your present life, out of slavery, even, at least while you were reading the story.

A knock on the wall, and Isaac came into the room.

“How are you today, Liza?”

“Fine,” she said. “We just been reading together.”

“What you reading?”

And she told him, and he agreed that it sounded like a fine story, something he might like, and though he was a little behind her in his ability to read he said he would try it.

“It’s so funny, Isaac,” she said. “I read the words, and it gives me such a fine feeling beyond them. It is something we should do all the time.”

“I hope to do better at my reading,” Isaac said.

“You should,” Liza said. “I swear, it’s how we get free even if we’re still chained to this place.”

“Yes, yes,” Isaac said. “I will try it, because I do feel chained. Even by these Hebrews I feel chained like their old ancestors, just like the Israelites in Egypt.”

Liza stood at the cutting board, preparing vegetables for the meal.

“You been reading, you been reading your Bible.”

“I have,” Isaac said. “I surely have.”

“The religion in the Bible?”

“Yes?”

“It’s only one kind of freedom. These novels the doctor’s been giving me.”

“The ones you talking about?”

“And other ones,” Liza said. “Lots of others.”

“They ain’t about religion.”

“Some are, some aren’t. But they all make me free in my mind in so many more different kinds of ways than the Bible makes me free. Brother, I am beginning to love them more than I can say in words.”

“That’s what you were saying.”

Liza giggled.

“In words, yes. Now that’s a joke!”

That was when
he
came into the kitchen.

“What are you doing here?” he said to Isaac.

The whiskey fumes spread out on his breath like morning mist.

“Fetching some water to Liza,” he said.

“Get out. Fetch something else somewhere else. Get to the barns!”

“Massa,” Isaac said, retreating out the door.

Jonathan moved toward her and Liza retreated—unfortunately—toward the pantry.

“You whore!” he shouted at her, shoving her through the open door. “Fornicating with that boy,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Fornicator,” he said, swatting her with the back of his hand.

Fear roared through her blood and she tried to squeeze past him but he shoved her back inside the pantry and pulled the door closed behind him.

“No, please,” she said, in a voice that reminded her, even as her fear rose in her blood, of how she spoke in dreams.

He batted her with his fist and she stumbled back against the shelves. Sacks of sugar and grain slipped down around her feet. In a nightmare of motion he pulled at his trousers, pushed her down, and planted himself on top of her, hip to hip. As he began to fumble at her with his fingers, she writhed in desperation, unable to free herself from his weight. He took himself in hand in preparation for coming into her, and she slapped at his face.

He grabbed her wrist, and they fought for a moment, her blood still racing, before she felt herself giving way beneath the heavy press of him. Her blood turned to tears, now coursing through her body like rain-water.