Song of Slaves in the Desert (2 page)

“I can make shapes and designs,” her father said, “but I am not good at telling stories.”

“I want a tale,” the restless girl said, speaking in a voice her father found slightly intimidating because of its new impersonal tone. “And I want a story.”

“Is there a difference?” her father said.

“Yes,” the girl said.

“What is it?” said her father.

“I don’t know,” the girl said.

Zainab pulled herself upright and sat waiting for her father to speak.

“A tale, perhaps,” her father said, “tells about people you do not know. A story tells you about people you do.”

“I want both,” the girl said.

The jar-maker cleared his throat, trying to rise above his awful feelings of despair and desperation at the thought of their plight. To be sold to a stranger to fill a temporary gap in the sheik’s finances? He felt suddenly a deep sense of pity for his master, that the man should find himself so desperate that he would break the bond between the two of them that the jar-maker had always fulfilled.

The air grew restless. Somewhere out in the star-lit dark a bird called and in the farther dark another bird answered. Suddenly the breeze rose, rustling the reeds and grass around them.

“Tell me,” Zainab said.

With her urging he began to speak, telling a story he had heard from his own father, who once told him that he had heard it from his father, who had heard it from his father, about a young man who scratched at rocks with a piece of metal, inscribing three horizontal lines and one vertical on the side of a large boulder near the great rift in the earth near where he was born. The boy had a good life, beloved of his parents, his father who was a farmer, his mother who gathered herbs, and—

“Why do you stop?” his daughter asked.

The jar-maker was listening. Beyond the farther dark, where the last birds called, something made a sharp barking noise.

“What?” said the weaver, who also had been giving her attention to the story, and now listened along with him for something else in the night.

The weaver stood up and reconnoitered their little campground.

“The animal is gone,” he said. “I did not tie it well enough. In fact, I did not tie it at all.”

“Do not worry,” his wife said. “Now we have one less mouth to feed.”

In the distance more barking.

“Is that the donkey?” his wife said.

“A jackal,” the jar-maker said.

“Will the fire be enough to keep it away?”

“It will have to be,” the jar-maker said.

“Papa?” Zainab said from where she lay.

“Yes, the story, I know.” Again, he cleared his throat. And he knelt back down near her, and talked on, until the girl had fallen asleep, his wife sagged against his shoulder, and the fire had dwindled to a few swirls of sparks that whirled about now and then in the light breeze.

He eased his wife onto the ground and lay down next to her, settling into an old and familiar comfort, despite the roughness of their bed and the fear in his mind. Here, where the late stars gradually asserted themselves in the sky, burning brighter and brighter as the fire diminished, he saw patterns he had not noticed before while living in the city, shapes and forms, also, though the law of God forbade such things as these. An animal head. A hunter’s arm, holding a bow. A belt holding at the waist of a figure so large it stretched across a quarter of the night sky. But, oh, God was so strong, all-powerful, it was blasphemy to make any figure because figures suggested the possibility of grasping an awareness of God’s face and being. And he grew ashamed, and then worried, and then repentant, and then disturbed, and then angry, and then calmed himself by taking out from his bag the small stone with the old markings and turning it over and over in his hands as he recited a prayer he knew, calming and calming himself with its repetition until he fell asleep.

He awoke at the bark of a jackal. The fire had died. Stars flickered brightly high above but gave no heat. An insect made a chirring noise nearby. In the marsh waters a fish, or snake, splashed like a stone hitting the water. Did fish sleep at night? The jar-maker wondered at the thought. His wife and children lay as quietly as creatures in the grave. Ay! Who wants thoughts such as that? They were merely sleeping, and, with God’s help, he would save them. Perhaps he did not pray as often as he should, putting so much time and care into his work as he did. But he never did anything against God. No, no, no. And if he was not free, why, then how could any man say he was truly free, because all men belonged to God? The sheik, for whom he had labored, also belonged to a Master, as did all the citizens, free and slave, in the town. Each of us has his own degree of enslavement, and all of us ultimately call ourselves the creatures of God.

His wife sat up.

“What is it?” she said.

The jar-maker listened attentively to the faint sounds in the dark.

“Nothing. Jackals, wild dogs. They won’t come near. Go back to sleep.”

He leaned to his left, feeling around for a stick large enough to club any invading beasts. He stood, and ranged out from the fireside, his eyes on the dark ground. Oh, if only there was wood! But then he remembered a small knife that he used as a tool and kept in his sack of essential belongings. He was bent over, on his knees, feeling around in the sack when they heard the camels.

Some time ago, before our nation split in two and the opposing territories, north and south, initiated a great war over the question of freedom, yours truly, Nathaniel Pereira, climbed the plank on a Manhattan winter morning to board a south-bound yawl called the
Godbolt
. My father had charged me with a mission of some family business of the import-export variety. Earnest young man that I was, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a handsomely bent nose (which Marzy, our family servant, often joked with me about when I was a child) and just the beginnings of a beard on my pink cheeks, I could then little imagine how much such a journey would change my life and the lives of others in the family.

I awoke that special morning, before dawn, somewhat divided within myself and feeling my nerves. It had been a night of odd dreams about an army of Jews on horseback racing across a windy desert—yes, Jews, Jews, Jews, though I have never been a terribly observant member of my faith—and next came a dream-visitation, not uncommon to me in those days, by my dear late mother, who whispered imperatively about wearing a hat to keep away the cold and the importance of living as a Jew. After saying to the air the elemental prayer we Hebrews make each morning—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”—and, as was my wont, reading a psalm aloud—for the poetry, as my dear old mop-haired fish-eyed master of a teacher George Washington Halevi always suggested (this one being Psalm 32, which I chose, as I usually did, at random, and begins “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered…”)—I lay abed a while despite the urgency of the day.

Sluggard, arise!
I heard Halevi’s voice in my mind.

To further prepare me for my inheritance—the care of the family business—my father had hired him as a tutor who worked with me on mathematics and history, philosophy, and Scripture. George Washington Halevi, whose own grandfather had been one of the few Jews who had fought in the Revolutionary War. His grandmother had been a farm girl from a Bronx estate, who attended to a soldier wounded in the Battle of New York. They produced his hybrid father, and his father had wed a Jewess from Rhode Island who produced him. Instead of going to Europe to study for the rabbinate, Halevi had attended Harvard College and was given the only divinity degree our people had received in the New World. Neither a full Hebrew in his own mind nor a Protestant of any standing, Halevi was a curious mixture of Old World and New, Jew and Gentile. A smart fellow then, with only a few difficulties, he was, first, so shy that he could scarcely talk to me about my subjects without trying to withdraw into the woodwork. Second, his breath smelled like manure. And, third, he sometimes stuttered in a terrible way.

Though his manner of speaking in public was less than pleasing, when he settled into himself and found the reassurance to speak, his voice dropped to a whisper and listening to him was like riding a winter sled down a nicely sloped snow-covered hill.

“Master Nathaniel,” he would say in that hoarse rasping way of his (and I laughed to myself as I lay abed recalling it), “to-to-today we will consider the P-P-Principia of Sir Isaac Newton.” Or, “My question for you to consider is the origin of the stars.” Or, “F-free will, Nathaniel, d-d-does it exist?” On this latter topic, we would talk for hours, because in my childish stubbornness I could never agree with his position.

“If God wants us to do something, we do it,” I said, hearing myself speak as though I were some wise sage instead of a slender boy with freckles, one slightly drooping eye, and legs so full of life that they would not stop quaking the more excited I became in our discussions.

“The pagan philosophers say that we have a choice.”

“Do I have a choice this moment to speak or not speak?”

“You do.”

“But if I don’t, you will tell my father and he will be quite angry with me.”

“The choice remains.”

“Bad student or dutiful student?”

“Bad or good.”

“Our Hebrew God says what?”

“Nothing on the subject of free will. Obey and please Him, d-d-disobey and he will be quite angry.”

“Angry, but will He punish me?”

“Sometimes He does, sometimes He doesn’t.”

“An odd master,” I said, wise before my time—or by mere momentary accident.

“Y-yes,” my tutor said. “A quixotic plight we have, we Jews. Only the Christians have it worse.”

“They do?”

“Many of them believe their wills are bound to either evil or good. With no choice for them.”

“Like slaves to their God?”

“They bend their wills to His.”

“And we don’t?”

“We don’t bend. We choose.”

“Choose to give up our will? And is that freedom?”

My tutor shook his head.

“Let me consider this.”

But I pursued it further just then.

“When our republic broke from the British Crown, we chose to do so. And gained our freedom. Therefore freedom was not bending our wills to the throne but breaking away from it.”

“Bravo, young Nathaniel,” my tutor said. “You have made a good point, sir. A good point.”

The day I asked him about whether or not he thought my pretty talking parrot Jacobus had a soul, he was also quite pleased. We spoke a little while of that, and then swerved back to his favorite topic, leaving me to ponder the question of the bird soul in my private thoughts.

“We have no literature here in this country of ours,” he said. “The ground is seeded, but it has not yet bloomed. We have no time, as in history. And how can you have a story without history for it to blossom in? Read Shakespeare. We have not yet spawned our own.”

“This doesn’t sound good,” I said.

“It is neither good nor bad,” he said. “Think of it in this manner. We Jews do not yet have our savior, but one day the savior will come.”

Though there was one American book he put forward. Which is how eventually I came into possession of a volume that I took to like a fish to water—the autobiography of our great Benjamin Franklin. Some boys worship their fathers, some worship themselves. I gave all my admiration to young Ben and hoped to live a life like his and emulate his rise from nothing to something.

Such thoughts inspired me that fateful early morning some time after my formal tutoring had ended, and I threw myself out of the bed, dressed, and descended, carrying my bags, to the street level kitchen as quietly as I could for fear of waking my Aunt Isabelle, my late mother’s sister, who had become as much of a mother to me as any woman not my mother could.

Red-head Marzy, our gimpy Old New York Dutch maid from a penniless family, was, of course, already awake and greeted me in the kitchen with the porridge.

“I hope you have a good journey, sir,” she said, her narrow eyes downcast. I thought it was perhaps because of her feeling some illness, or some guilt at having missed a chore. Lord knows how little she was paid, but I knew how much she had to do!

“Thank you, Marzy,” I said.

“Oh, sir!” she said, and burst into a thunderstorm of tears and nose-blowing.

“Oh, sir! Oh, sir!”

This screech of a voice belonged to Jacobus, whom my father had brought home to me from the Indies in the time after my mother died. (My immediate progenitor had been born there, to parents who had emigrated from Holland to make a fortune on the island of Curaçao, and when he reached his majority, after marrying my mother, another Antilles Jew, had emigrated to New York City. His half-brother, of whom much more in a moment or so, had felt a similar inclination to settle in our Promised Land but sailed up only as far north as Charleston, which was and still is, despite its wanton rebelliousness, at this writing, part of our South. How sad, and at the same time provident, that he could not make the other few days’ journey north, because where he disembarked changed everything.)

A louder noise up above, and I understood by the sound on the steps that it was my father coming down to meet me.

“Good morning, sir,” I said.

“Good morning to you, Nathaniel.”

He was a trim, bent-shouldered man, about an inch shorter than my own height of six feet, with shaggy gray hair and eyes just then still red with sleep that made me wonder if some brass band in his dreams might have serenaded him as he mused about sending me off to do his business in the world, which I was about to do on this out-of-the-ordinary day.

“Quite a morning,” he said as if reading my thoughts, while Marzy set his coffee on the table.

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, yes sir!”

He blinked into the light streaming in from the east side of our back kitchen.

“Hush, Jacobus.” And then to me: “A good day to travel, it appears.”

I nodded, and tried to put aside my anger. The week before, the two of us had sat in his study and quarreled, and this morning I was still bitter, for after having concluded my tutorials a month ago I was ready to set out on my grand tour before settling in as a junior partner in the family business of import-export. Instead my father informed me that first I must undertake a voyage to Charleston to make some inquiries into the affairs of his half-brother, who owned a plantation there.

“A good fellow he is,” my father had said, his accent, the product of his childhood in the Caribbean (and the faintest hint of his father’s Dutch) set ever so slightly at an angle to our New York speech. “Though I have not seen him these many decades since we were boys together in Antigua. He writes to tell me that aside from now weighing as much as two Hebrew men of normal size he is in good health. And awaiting your arrival.”

“Awaiting my arrival, father?” I had said.

“Yes, he is.”

“And so you have been corresponding with him about this for some weeks now?”

“This happens to be so.”

I shook my head. “I wish I had known, Father. I am terribly disappointed. What matter could be so important that I have to travel down to Charleston instead of sailing off on my tour?”

“Your tour, Nathaniel, will come. But family comes first, however distant they may have been in earlier relations. My brother needs some looking to. I do not mean to set your mind against him but he fears that his only son may not be entirely capable of taking over the plantation. There is some question of the boy’s—now man’s—temperament. I had hopes that I might resolve this matter by letter and so have not spoken about it with you until now. Alas, my dear boy, things have not resolved. My brother has appealed to my familial responsibility. Which is why you must make the voyage to Charleston before the voyage to Europe. I need some advice about this matter. Should we or should we not invest in his enterprise so that we might offer both support and direction? That is the question.”

“Are we going to become tobacco merchants, or sell whatever it is he grows down there?”

“No, Nathaniel, not tobacco. Rice. Southern rice to feed the belly of the northern nation. A thousand acres of fields and rice-growing ponds.” He paused and blinked into the sunlight as though he had only just discovered it had dawned. “And a hundred slaves.”

“Slaves? Father, I know nothing about rice. And less about slaves.” At this moment I cleared my throat and tried to assume a vocal posture of certainty. “I certainly do not want to learn about either.”

“You will learn. You are old enough now to learn some things about business.”

“And young enough to know nothing, Father,” I said.

“I like humility in a man,” Father said. He smiled, which produced in me a feeling of warm good will. “You will know what to tell me soon enough about whether or not we should invest in my half-brother’s enterprise. He is a large man in many ways, this fellow of our blood. I do not know him very well, though am sure he would help me if I needed help. He has asked us for assistance that we cannot give without some investigation. It is my impression that we are his last resort. And you, young man, are mine. Will you help me?”

“Of course, Father,” I said. “But after this, Europe?” I said. “My tour?”

“Son, I promise you, assist us first in this matter and I will send you immediately thereafter. Remember, your mother was always a kind person. For her, family came first…”

“Yes, Father.”

“There is one more thing.”

“Yes, Father?”

He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, took out a small pistol, and offered it to me.

“Father?”

“Remember, the world is not always kind. A man needs protection while traveling,” he said. “The weapon is at the moment unloaded. Tomorrow I will buy you bullets. You are a man now, going about your father’s business. Carry this weapon always on your person. You may see some things down there in the South…well, never mind.” For a moment I stared at it and then took it from him.

He next reached into his pocket and took out his gold timepiece, as if to establish that it was time for one thing and now it was time for another.

“Your grandfather’s watch,” he said. “Which he consulted often while sitting in his office and looking out at the Carib palms. And which was next mine, and now yours. It is your watch, son, and from now on you will have to wind it.”