Song of Slaves in the Desert (28 page)

I remembered the terrified man crossing the creek not so long ago.

“Unless they run.”

“You got to be something stupid just to try and run.” Silence settled over us for a little while, silence, tempered by the racketing of the wagon and the sound of the horse. Then she said, “Or awful smart, and do it the right way.”

“What way would that be?”

“Not that way,” Liza said, as we noticed a group of horsemen coming our way from the direction of town.

“No, not that way,” I said as Langerhans and two of his cohorts on horseback flew past us at a gallop, the leader inclining his head toward us as we passed. I did not quite understand, though, what I had said.

Liza grew silent and stared at the sky above the treetops, lighter than the light blue above the barns where we had begun our journey. It must be the sea, I said to myself, the sea makes the sky turn as light as an egg-shell.

***

When we arrived in Charleston we went immediately to a hotel where I took a room. Liza quickly departed for the market and I made a visit to the shipping office and inquired in desultory fashion about departure dates of boats sailing to New York. When I mentioned there might be two passengers, an inquisitive clerk asked me for our names. He stared at me as though he could somehow read the plan I held in my mind. I told him nothing more and returned and went upstairs to the room. I took up a post at the window to await for Liza’s return. Outside the street was filled with carriages and towns-folk, white and slaves, walking along as if with great purpose to their lives. In my own life, meanwhile, I saw no purpose beyond the next hour, waiting as I was with a deep expectation about the woman who would return. As to my voyage home, I thought almost nothing of it now, and felt deeply powerful in my decision. This was what it was like, I took pride in, to be a free man who could freely decide his own fate.

Time passed. My father’s pocket-watch ticked away. I was contemplating going out for a walk to the ocean-side of town when there came a knock at the door, and Liza entered the room, followed by two young slave-boys, bearing large tubs of steaming water.

“Massa,” she said, after the young slaves had set down their burdens and left the room. “Time for a bath.”

“A good idea,” I said. But as dusty from the road as I was, I stood there a moment, until she came up to me and began to tug at my coat.

Not since I was a boy and bathed by my mother had I ever undressed in front of a woman in the broad light of day. It was both embarrassing and titillating to me, as Liza helped me off with my shirt, and knelt to work at removing my boots and my trousers. I was intensely excited but at the same had wandering thoughts as I studied the top of her head, the intricate intersections of wiry hairs making patterns that only another person could have braided. Who did this for her? Precious Sally? Another girl from the cabins?

“Now,” she said, and touched me as she stood up and led me to the large porcelain tub in the far corner of the room into which the slave-boys poured the water.

I climbed in, flinching at the heat, and then relaxing into it.

I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again Liza had already removed her cambric, and then her skirt and stood before me, a living sculpture in sandstone, before climbing into the tub alongside me.

“The road was dusty,” I said as she laved me with a cloth.

“Your dust I can wash away,” she said.

“I’ll wash you,” I said.

“Not this you can’t wash off,” she said, holding her darker arm next to mine.

“Well, you can’t wash the Jew out of me, either.”

“That is not my worry. I am not even a Jew. Just a Jew-slave.”

“You’re my slave,” I said, taking her liquid body in my liquid arms.

“Uh-uh,” she said, “I belong…”

“Hush,” I said, kissing her wet lips with mine.

“Naw,” she said, just after, “I was saying, in my heart? I don’t belong to anyone.”

I pulled back my arms and picked up the cloth and began daubing at her breasts.

“And these are not mine?”

“No,” she said.

“To whom do they belong?”

“In my heart?”

“In your heart.”

“Nobody.”

“And this?” I said, dabbing the cloth at the precious place between her legs.

“Nobody,” she said.

“I wish I was nobody,” I said.

“What?” she said, and then she laughed, and we embraced again, and then stood up, splashing water everywhere, as we stepped out of the tub and rubbed each other down with towel cloths before rushing to the bed.

***

What followed I cannot say except that you can imagine it, the naïve boy and the wounded slave girl, what transformations of love they made.

And the talk that followed.

“Nate,” Liza said in a whisper, her warm words in my ear. “What if you could buy me? Would you buy me?”

“I have already thought about that,” I said. “Indeed, I would. That way we would never be apart. I will make an offer to uncle as soon as we return.”

“But you have to understand he will refuse. Your cousin…will force him to refuse.”

“What interest does he have in keeping you?”

“He is a…stubborn man. He will not give me up, not to you.”

I accepted her view as truth.

“Liza,” I said, “here is what I will do,” making a great revelation to myself as well as her. “When I return to New York I will advise my father to buy into the plantation. That is why he sent me, to advise him on this question. This means I will own you after all. And once I own you, I will set you free.”

“Nate, the family will never agree to that. They would rather lose the plantation rather than set me free.”

“They are mad, then. Why would they take such a course?”

Liza shook her head, but remained silent.

At that point I should have asked another question. But instead I became caught up in the intrigue of the moment.

“Then I will steal you,” I said. “What if I bought us passage on a ship north and we left from here next week?”

“We could not,” she said, engaged again in our speculations. “You must have papers for your slaves. A bill of sale.”

“I…” I took a deep breath. “I could forge one.”

“Do you even know how to begin such a thing, Nate?”

“No,” I said. “But I can find out.”

“And if you owned me you would truly set me free?”

“We would be free souls together, Liza. I swear.”

She rolled close to me, and more time went by.

After what seemed like some hours I consulted my watch, only to find that it had stopped, for lack of winding.

You have got a cast like a nigger,” my cousin said to me on our return while Liza was climbing down from the carriage.

I looked over at her but she gave no impression that she had heard what he said.

“I bathed this morning, but now I have to bathe all over again.”

“Did she help you with your bath?” my cousin said, with Liza still within earshot. He did not give me a chance to reply before adding, “And now that blush on you makes you look even more nigger-like. Or maybe like a redskin. Or a Jew!”

“You don’t have to speak that way, Cousin,” I said.

“I beg your pardon, Cuz. You and my wife must speak more about this.”

And he leaned toward me and I smelled the liquor on his breath and things sharpened a little in my understanding.

“And so have you decided,” he said, “about staying or leaving?”

I watched as Liza made her way to the big house, picturing her shifting hips beneath the bright clothes she wore.

“I am going to stay a while,” I said. “At least through the rice harvest,” surprising myself again with my certainty. I watched my cousin’s eyes following her.

“You have given this some serious thought, and it makes me happy,” he said. But the look on his face did not affect happiness, not at all.

All this I attributed to his drinking.

My uncle, however, behaved rather jovially at the lunch table and I did not believe it had anything to do with drink. That so many things were about to erupt I had no inkling.

“I’m pleased to hear that you will be staying on a while longer, nephew,” he said.

“It pleases me, too, Nathaniel,” my aunt said.

Rebecca echoed her sentiment.

“I hope this means you will help me with our teaching.”

“Certainly,” I said. “I believe that is important.”

“Important for…” Jonathan stopped, glanced around the room. Precious Sally, standing at her usual post in the doorway, made a sound in her throat, but said nothing, of course.

“Important for the slaves,” I said. “To be free and illiterate, that is not true freedom.”

“Yes, yes,” my cousin said. “To be free like me, able to read, that is true freedom.”

“It is, Jonathan,” Rebecca said.

“Yes, I am glad to be free to read this,” he said, pulling a letter from his coat pocket and holding it up to the light.

“Do not—” my uncle said.

“I want him to hear it,” Jonathan cut him off. “He is part of the family…our wonderfully large family…”

“Very well then,” my uncle said, and slumped back in his chair.

“This note arrived early this morning.”

“Yes,” I said, ignoring what I took to be his prescience about my purposes there. And Liza’s. Did he suspect us? Of course, he suspected us. Or perhaps he had even ordered her to…? Fortunately for my mental state at the moment, he cut off my thoughts as he waved the letter in front of us.

And then began to read.

“‘Christians of Charleston! Awake! While you have been sleeping certain Forces have gathered in the countryside, teaching slaves to study murder. A certain Jew has been showing them a Plan! Under the oaks a travesty is brewing! Tend to your possessions, tend to your Souls! The True Way is to follow Jesus! Step off the Path and you are Lost! Watch for my next Bulletin!’ Signed ‘Your Brother in Christ.’”

Rebecca burst into tears.

“They want to scare me. This is not fair. I discovered years ago that our good doctor friend from time to time has also been teaching Africans to read. Then why should
I
stop? I will not stop. I will go on with my instruction.”

“Of course, you will,” Jonathan said. “But we do have to be aware there are certain parties opposed to it.”

“It is none of their business,” Rebecca said.

“They are making it their business,” Jonathan said.

“I will not stop. That is the end of it.”

“Yet it might be the end of us,” my cousin said.

“Nonsense,” I said, thinking back to the inquisitive shipping clerk. “This is the doing of some befuddled individual and surely not the majority view in the city.”

“I believe that is so,” my uncle said. “They are good to us here.”

“They are not good. They are merely tolerant,” my aunt said. “I was afraid this might happen.”

“It is nothing of the kind,” my uncle said.

Rebecca wept again.

“You never liked me,” she said to my aunt.

“This is not true,” my uncle said. “She does like you. She loves you, child.”

“When you go, she will be mean to me,” Rebecca said.

My aunt stood up and went to the doorway.

“When he goes, I am moving to town.”

“And how will you live, Mother?” Jonathan said.

“I will establish myself as a sole trader. I will open a business.”

“What business?” my uncle said. “What business do you know?”

“I will sell lace, perhaps. I will sell dresses.”

“What do you know about dresses?”

“What do you know about rice farming? Everything you have here comes from the Africans.”

“Then perhaps I shall depart this world at an early date,” my uncle said, “and give you the opportunity to work sooner as a sole trader.”

“Is that what you wish?” my aunt said.

“No, no, no, no. I do not wish that. But if I did leave early, you can sell The Oaks, and sell the slaves and have enough money to move to town and establish yourself in business.”

“And me? Where would that leave me?”

My cousin’s voice turned almost to a childish whine.

“Working with your mother,” my uncle said.

“This is the only work I know,” my cousin said. “Here, at The Oaks.” He paused, as if contemplating some important fact. “But if we had to sell all this, I suppose…”

Rebecca began crying all the louder.

“Rebecca, please,” Jonathan said.

Rebecca stood up and pointed her finger at Jonathan.

“I am a lady in distress. To think you’d sell all these people!”

“You are not a lady,” my aunt said, “none of us is a lady. In fact, you’re much more like a child, with your childish notions of teaching these slaves to read.”

“Be quiet, Mother, please,” Jonathan said. “Rebecca is doing a fine thing.”

“I am pleased you say so,” Rebecca said. “Of late I haven’t been sure what you thought of my work.”

My aunt, her mother-in-law, ignored her remark.

She said directly to Jonathan: “And are you doing a fine thing too? Cavorting with the—”

“That will be enough,” my uncle said, making it seem as though speaking were as much a chore as lifting. “All this talk about my departure is quite premature and it is putting a terrible strain on my old corpus and I want to end it right now. Do you hear me, Jonathan?”

“Yes, sir,” my cousin said.

“Mother?”

Silence for a moment. Then she made a reluctant, “Yes.”

“Daughter?”

“I will be silent,” Rebecca said.

“Thank you,” my uncle said. And then he turned to me.

“Nephew?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He has nothing to do with this,” Rebecca said.

“Is he teaching them, too?” My aunt turned to me and made a smile close to a leer—it was sickening to see this woman do such a thing with her mouth.

“Are you?”

I did not know what to say.

“Mother, please,” my uncle said.

“You sound like him,” my aunt said, pointing to Jonathan.

“I am his son,” Jonathan said.

“And whose sons are yours?” my aunt said to him. “Or daughters!”

At which point Rebecca made a wailing noise, like something you feared as a child you might hear at night in the dark.

Bam!

My uncle slammed the heel of his hand on the table, rattling dishes.

“I will not have this kind of talk at my table,” he said. “I will not!”

All of her offensiveness disappearing in an instant, my aunt now began to cry.

“Mother,” Jonathan said, “if you are going to become a sole trader you must not give in to tears.”

My uncle turned to him with a fury I had not seen before.

“Your mother will not speak to you anymore about these matters and you—you will not speak to your mother in this fashion.”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” my cousin said, suddenly remorseful.

Rebecca went on crying even as my aunt’s weeping subsided.

I noticed just then that the slaves had left the room.

How I wish I had followed them, to the barns or the fields, wherever they had fled, because the next minute brought the sound of men and horses outside the house and then someone striding up the front steps of the veranda and knocking loudly at the door.

“Nevermore!” I said.

“What is that?” my cousin asked.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“Ask Black Jack,” my uncle said.

I paid him no mind and left the room and went to the front door.

Which I opened and felt the shock of seeing once again the silver-haired man in the top-hat who had boarded the boat in Perth Amboy and beat the horse and slave in town. Behind him just beyond the house waited men on horseback, Langerhans and his crew, and one or two others whom I did not recognize.

“You again?” he said. “These then are your people?”

“May I ask you what your business is, sir?”

“That is precisely the question I have come to ask here, and as it turns out I have come to ask it of you.”

Behind me I heard my uncle stirring.

“Who is it, Nate?”

“A man from New Jersey,” I said.

“New Jersey?”

My uncle came lumbering up to the door.

“Not truly from New Jersey,” the man said. “That is where this fellow and I met, but I have been associated with other states and other places.”

“This fellow is my nephew,” my uncle said. “Now what is your business here?”

The man looked past me at my suddenly alert and agitated uncle.

“May I come in?”

“I will come out,” my uncle said, and gave me a little shove to move me out onto the veranda so that he might follow.

The man stepped aside, looked back at his companions, and signaled them with his hand to remain where they were.

“And now, sir?” my uncle directed the man to the table and chairs to the left of the door. “Will you sit?”

“Thank you,” the man said. “But we are in a hurry. Unless perhaps you can answer our question.”

“And that would be, sir?”

My uncle looked at me, as if I understood what he was thinking.

“My slave has run off,” the man from Jersey said. “Have you seen a little nigger about twelve, dark as night, wearing red trousers? This fellow here, your…?”

“My nephew?”

“Ah, hah! Yes, your nephew. He has seen him.”

“Have you?” my uncle turned to me.

“Not recently,” I said. “I first saw him on the ship. We were passengers on the same ship.”

My uncle cleared his throat and inclined toward the man.

“Why did you come here to inquire? Was he seen heading in this direction?”

“A good question, a very good question,” the man said. “I was directed by these colleagues of mine…” He gestured toward Langerhans and the patrollers. “The good folks in Charleston said you all might know something about runaways.”

“Did they?” My uncle pushed his belly forward and stepped closer. “What else might they have said?”

“I’ve never been a man to waltz around the truth, have I?” He looked directly at me. “Have I, son?”

“I would not know,” I said.

“You know something of me. You may know enough to know that I will tell you now what I learned in town. I’ll tell you that I learned in town that here on this plantation some odd things have occurred. That you brothers of the Jewish creed, in collusion with a certain medical man, have been teaching slaves how to read and write. And—”

“First,” my uncle broke in, “that is not any of your interest. And second—”

“First,” the man said, “it goes against the nature of things that the Africans should try to acquire the skills of a higher breed. And second—”

“First,” my uncle said, “there is no evidence that Africans are what you infer is a ‘lower breed’ than white men. And second—”

“First, there is evidence that those of the tribe of Israel are a breed apart,” the man said, his finger poking the air, and his eyes all-ablaze, “and second—”

Now I was growing angry.

“Second what?”

“Second, it is clear I am gaining no traction talking to you here. Now you will excuse me, because I have to go and catch my little nigger.”

At this point Jonathan, who had been listening in the doorway, stepped out onto the porch holding the offensive missive in his hand.

“Did you write this letter?”

“Sir,” the man said, “I don’t know what letter you’re referring to.”

“This letter,” Jonathan said, and began to read from it again.

“Stop!” My uncle waved his hand. “I will not allow these things to be spoken in my house.”

“I respect that, sir,” said the white-haired man.

“You are a strange man,” Jonathan said, crumbling the letter in his fist. “A strange man from—” He turned to me. “From where?”

“New Jersey, I believe,” I said.

“Wherever you are from, it is now time for you to leave the house, please, sir,” Jonathan said.

“I will be going,” said the man, “and though I’m in a hurry I at least expected that I might have been invited in so that I could at least decline the invitation. But that would have been a Christian thing to do, to offer such an invitation, and you—”

“We are not Christian, no,” Jonathan said. “Now please leave, sir.”

“I will leave, and frankly I hope never to return. Because if I do it will be most unfortunate.”

“Are you threatening us, sir?”

“I am merely stating a fact. If you see my nigger, I expect you will hold on to him for me.”

“I doubt if he has run this way,” Jonathan said.

“It is your reputation, sir,” the man said, brushing a hand along his thick white hair. “There are only a certain number of places where he can run.”

“If I were your slave,” I spoke up, “I would run anywhere I could.”

The man turned to me, his eyes glowing near-yellow in his head.