Song of Slaves in the Desert (32 page)

She had first heard of this matter when attending to a dinner in the big house some months before his arrival.

“I have written to him,” the master had said.

“Good, then,” said the missus.

“And he has written back.”

“You did not tell me.”

“I am telling you now,” the master said.

“And what did he say?” put in Jonathan, leaning across the table with great seeming intensity in his father’s direction.

“Ah, you have an interest in your New York uncle, whom you have never shown an interest in before?”

“Father, we have never needed to before.”

“We did not need to,” the missus said.

“And now we do,” the master said.

“Indeed we do,” said Jonathan.

“A strange uncharitable family we are,” the master said.

“Without survival,” Jonathan said, “there can be no base for charity.”

In the kitchen Precious Sally explained to her that this was the New York part of the family that had not stayed south when first they came up from the islands.

“They brothers,” she said. “But only half. Different mothers.”

“Just like us,” Liza said.

“All people alike,” Precious Sally said. “They just got different ways of living.”

“Aside from the truth,” said Liza, speaking in the voice she had acquired after years and years of reading, a voice she rarely ever used except when she felt safe, and with only the few people she trusted, “that some are slaves and some are free, I would agree with you.”

But on that morning some months later when Isaac told her that the New York cousin was coming into the port at Charleston, she discovered that all were not the same. This one, Nathaniel Pereira, tall, and without much of a smile, gave her an odd feeling in her belly, and she wondered why. A pale-skinned man with that dark hair, he was not at all handsome to her, and he walked so stiffly she wondered if he might just break apart. In one of the melodramatic novels she had taken to reading of late the heroine might have felt some fateful tie to the man such as he was. She coldly noticed his lack of gravity—it was more that he lacked a certain amount of weightiness—even when she compared him to Jonathan whom she detested and despised.

Her father! A sneaking monster, a horror of a man! A snake, a devil in disguise!

And now here comes this New Yorker—who, unbeknownst to him, was her cousin, of sorts! He seemed to have chosen to use his freedom at the service of remaining detached from the life around him. It was almost as if he were a white ghost, passing through the world but never becoming part of it. Liza knew with all her heart that if she were free she could never live this way.

“Here, listen now, here is my plan,” her father said, talking, talking, while she lay there, burning, her heart no longer holding enough tears enough to weep.

And when she had heard it, she said, “I will not.”

And he said, “Yes, you will. I am your father and you will do as I say.”

“I will not,” she said again, even more resolute than before.

“Filthy whore, bitch, scum of a slave, you will do what I say or you will be hammered up on boards next to the barn!”

***

Several nights after her first encounter with the New Yorker she returned to her cabin and found her father waiting for her with a fiendish grin on his face.

“Go away,” she said.

He reached up to pull her down and she danced out of his reach.

“Come here,” he said. The stink of his whiskey breath offended her sorely, even where she stood from him at a distance.

“I won’t,” she said.

“I am ordering you to come here. Do you want a beating?”

“You cannot have me,” she said.

“You bitch, I own you!”

“But since I carried out your wishes with your cousin, I am spoiled goods. Even more than spoiled, since you first spoiled me.”

“I will show what is spoiled and what is not. Come here, or I will tie you up and take you and leave you in the barn with the other animals.”

She took a tentative step toward him, so that he might see how frightened she was. And then she stopped.

“You do not want this now.”

“Do not tell me what I want.”

He sat up, preparing to stand.

“Wait, please,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

“And what might that be?”

“I have lain with him.”

“You have trapped him then?”

“Yes,” Liza said, “but he has trapped me as well.”

Now Jonathan pulled himself to his feet and stared into her eyes.

“How has this puny New Yorker trapped you?”

“He has given me a disease.”

“What?”

The lie lay smoothly on her tongue and it gave her pleasure to say it.

“Yes, from the first time I went with him. Do you want to see the evidence, do you want to see my soiled rags.”

“No, no, no, no,” he said in disgust. “So, he has ruined you?”

“Yes, and it is terribly painful upon occasion,” she said.

He dropped his gaze and turned aside.

“If you are lying—”

“I am not lying, I am suffering.”

“Can the doctor cure you?”

“Yes, he is treating me now, but it will take a while.”

“I will not go near your filth,” her father said, “but you will tell me the moment he has made the cure and we will, I promise you, have at it again.”

He brushed past her and hurried out of the cabin.

Liza threw herself down on the pallet, crying and moaning until she was hoarse.

Not long now, massa,” Isaac said, another week or so later, holding up a handful of the rich and plumped kernels from the stalks at our feet, stalks that held their heads high, strong, in spite of the weight of the burgeoning kernels.

“Good, good, Isaac,” I said. “The time is coming near, and that’s good.”

I rode back from the rice fields in a daze and a dream, my mind going black in bright daylight with the hope and expectation of seeing Liza before the sun rose again on the next day. Who knew a man could live like this? No one I knew in New York ever expressed such a heart condition as mine.

***

Mute at dinner—retiring early to my room—reading (Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!), dreaming into the dark—that was my round after returning from the fields. I felt as much a slave to my condition as the dark people who went home to their cabins and took some feeble pleasures before sleep and the next day’s round of hard labor. What did it matter that I could leave the plantation? That I might return to New York? Or perhaps even travel to London and Paris? A chain wrapped itself round my heart, and I could not stir myself to think about anything else except Liza.

One night at dinner Rebecca brought up what under different circumstances for me might have seemed an innocuous matter. She mentioned that several of the women she was teaching talked now and then about witchcraft and how to make spells to bind a man to you. She joked that she would put a spell on Jonathan, and he put back to her that he would turn her in as a witch.

“A Jewess witch,” he said. “That would make our dear Gentile neighbors rather suspicious. Accused by her own husband, for putting a spell on him.”

Rebecca rose to the height of her powers and said,

“I put a spell on the rice.”

“Please, now,” my uncle said, “this is foolish talk.”

Jonathan enjoyed it.

“Do you know the slave goddess, the one they pound drums to and sometimes make their sacrifices to in the woods at night? I spoke to her and asked if she would make the kernels big and plump.”

“No, no,” said my aunt, “this is not a joking matter. Jonathan, I do not like you to joke that way. It is against our God.”

“Oh,” Jonathan said, “who or what is our God? A clump of rules. We never see Him.”

“He is everywhere,” my aunt said.

Jonathan would not relent.

“Is he there, Mother, when I make my water?”

“Please!” she said.

“Or when—”

“Enough,” my uncle broke in. “I am weary. I am not feeling well. All this taxes me, in my soul.”

“These men and their souls,” my aunt said. She looked over at Rebecca. “I should not expect more from them, but I always do. And it always hurts. This is the life they give us.” She looked directly at me. “Even you, who seem so polite and gentle for a man. Who knows what you are doing—”

“Please,” my uncle said.

“Please what? Please who?”

My uncle raised a hand in the air. My aunt subsided back into her chair.

Rebecca then tried to ease the situation.

“Nathaniel, do you recall my cousin Anna?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, happy to change the music at the table, though given my present cast of mind I had only the faintest recollection of a girl in Charleston.

“Talking of witches, perhaps she may put a spell on you.”

“This is quite enough now,” my aunt said.

Rebecca shook her head, smiled, and said no more.

***

Dear Father [I wrote later that evening before bed], Soon the rice crop will be ready to be harvested, an event that I am using as the marker for my own decision about what we ought to do about the prospect of investing in The Oaks. Though I have not come to a formal conclusion I can assure you that my belief is firm—we should not tie ourselves to any enterprise that depends on the enslavement of other Human Beings…

I wrote further, offering observations about the family and the weather and what little I had heard about political events in the state.

And I tore it up.

I picked up my pen and stared at it, then set it down, and got up and went to the window, the only place down here I truly called my own, where night thoughts beckoned and I could wonder in freedom about all the entanglements in which I was caught—my father, my family, my New York, and here in South Carolina, my Liza.

I felt like a fly in a web, wriggling and wriggling until I made myself all the more entangled.

A breeze stirred, an unusual occurrence, and then I heard the sound of a horse, and a shout. What was I to make of this? Was it a slave trying an escape? Was it one of the patrollers come to rouse us to some duty in which we did not believe?

A few moments later and I heard footsteps in the hall, and my uncle’s and Jonathan’s voices raised in discussion. A few moments later came a knock at my door.

“Cousin?” Jonathan said.

“Yes?” I spoke.

“I hope I haven’t awakened you,” Jonathan said. “We have just heard of a meeting in town we must attend. Be ready to ride in with us early tomorrow morning.”

“Of course,” I said, “but what sort of meeting?”

“One that should be both inspiring and maddening. I can’t say more.”

“I will be ready,” I said.

***

At moon-rise, another knock, one I had been counting on.

“Quickly,” I said.

“You seem distressed,” Liza said.

“Jonathan was here only a short while ago.”

“Don’t worry, he didn’t see me.”

“Can you be sure?”

“I am sure,” she said. “Sometime he has to attend to his wife.” Liza undressed and climbed into the bed with me with a nonchalance suggesting that she had been
my
wife for a thousand years or more.

I took a few breaths, calming myself.

“What did he say to you?” she asked.

“My cousin has invited me to a meeting in town.”

“What sort of meeting?”

“The same question I asked,” I said. “He would not say.”

“I will leave early,” she said.

“You always do,” I said.

“We don’t want to be caught,” she said.

“But I am your massa.”

“Yes, you are.”

“And so it should not matter, should it?”

“But it does, Nate,” she said, giving me all of her mouth.

Moon, and moon, and more moon, and we settled back, and the faintest fingers of a breeze brushed our bodies, and then evaporated.

Moon-set. A wave of sadness overwhelmed me at the sight of this sandy-skinned beauty lying beside me, and then she opened her eyes—so dim it was in the room, on the verge of dawn but not yet dawn—and looked at me as though assessing what it might mean if she were not here and what it meant that she was.

“It worries me,” she said. “We cannot do this again—”

“What, my love?” I cut her off.

“We must be more cautious,” she said.

“I do not care anymore about being safe,” I said, “and neither should you.”

“Oh, Nate, Nate, when you are a slave there is nothing else to be afraid of. But when, as you are, you are free, there is a great deal to fear. I fear for you.”

Philosophy—and sympathy!—from an African! From a slave-girl!

She got up to dress, and I tossed about in my bed, as though sleep were a rough sea and I were a small boat. What if Miriam…? What if even that Anna, who even now must be asleep in her bed in town? Yes, now I remembered her, dark eyes, dark hair. But Liza, Liza!

Yes, she had gone before him, but he was not one to give up until the very last, yet the thread that tied him to these old country people was spinning out and spinning out ever thinner and thinner. Leaving the girl behind was one thing, after all, she was like anyone else, holding her fate in her own brown fist and thinking that someone else, a god like me, held her the same way. Oh, that has been going on so long, even a long time for a god to contemplate, I must say, going on ever since we first made these creatures and watched them go their own way so afraid of every which way and turn that they had to believe that we were guiding them. Give it up, I say, take your fist and seize what you need, do not, I say do not, and these may be my last words to you, because just as some billion years ago, or whatever time is to you and earth, these continents Africa and the New World were still joined together, just as they were one, not even twins but two heads and hearts in the same body, the plates beneath—I can’t imagine what you believe as I tell you this, but we always knew about the shift and jolts and creakings and tearings of these massive shelves beneath the upper world—these plates shifted, and the continents ripped away from each other—imagine the earthly pain! The noise! The winds! The storms! The eruptions! The slides of fiery ash and mud!—and the New World went its own way, leaving Africa behind. Don’t these people see they have the same chance now, the chance to turn their servitude into freedom? This, my farewell message to all of you, beastly owner and worried vassal, as I put the New World behind me and return to a home that loves to receive me in proper fashion. Carolina, farewell, oh, my Africa, beaches and deserts and forests and rivers and trees and mountains and skies skies skies—

In less than the time it took me to say this, I have returned, kneeling beneath the ocean just off the African shore, planting my undersea garden, ready to emerge and play with anyone who worships me, to give guidance, but never, never, never to chain anyone to a single truth! Hello, Africa, I am home!