Song of Slaves in the Desert (26 page)

And how did you enjoy the flooding of the rice plants?” my uncle said to me that night when the first course of our evening meal was set before us.

(My uncle, about whom more in a moment, was sitting in front of a full plate of food—meat, rice—a bountiful meal produced by Precious Sally the slave cook—but he was not eating.)

“Enjoy, Uncle? I found it quite enlightening.”

“Isaac is a good guide, is he not?”

“Oh, yes, yes, he is.”

“Quite a good fellow, that Isaac,” my uncle said.

“Good?” said my aunt. “How do you know he is good?”

“He does good work,” my uncle said.

“And work is everything?” My aunt seemed quite annoyed.

“We have to keep an eye on it,” my uncle said. “The price of rice is down, the cost of shipping goes up. We have to pay good money for flour and meat to feed the…” He broke off, and suddenly dropped his eyes and rested his head on his chin.

“You were saying?” My aunt spoke as if she actually wanted to know what he spoke about.

My uncle looked up, seemingly startled to find himself where he had been just a moment before. He stared directly at me.

“To feed the niggers, you were saying,” my cousin said.

“Please,” said Rebecca. She nodded her head toward Abraham, who sat silently observing the family exchange.

Turning to Jonathan, my uncle said, “I do not like that word.”

“Africans, then,” my cousin said.

My uncle seemed to have regained all of the vigor which momentarily he had appeared to have lost.

“Africans? Southern-born? I truly do not know the exact figures. We should do a census. So many have been born, so many have died. Now Isaac’s father, he was African-born, yes?”

“Yes,” my cousin said.

“Is he alive or dead?” My uncle spoke as though he expected an immediate reply.

“I do not know,” my cousin said.

“Let us find out,” my uncle said.

“Jonathan,” my aunt said, “you will do this?”

“A census?” my uncle said. “An accounting? Let Isaac do it. Better a slave, who will find out all the truth than one of us, to whom they will lie if they believe they must.”

Rebecca, Jonathan’s wife, cleared her throat and said, “Isaac reads and writes now.”

“Yes, that is marvelous,” my cousin Jonathan said. “Isaac is a reader and writer.” By his tone I could not tell whether or not he thought this was a good thing or a bad thing.

“He could do a census, that is what I mean,” said Rebecca.

My uncle leaned across the table and said to me, “Isaac took you to the fields today, did he not?”

“He did, sir. It was quite interesting.”

“You will find the harvest quite interesting, too.”

I then spoke up, declaring from my heart.

“Uncle, I am going to miss the harvest.”

Everyone at the table turned his attention to me.

“You’re mistaken,” my uncle said. “The harvest comes in the next two months.”

I stared at the food heaped high on my plate and when I looked up I noticed that Precious Sally was watching me from the doorway. Not wanting to insult her, I carved myself a bit of meat and began to chew. It tasted dry and slightly earthy, as though it had been dropped in the mud. The rest of the family settled back to eating while I spit the meat back out on my plate.

“I am returning to New York on the next ship out,” I said.

“What?”

My uncle sputtered and showered the place before him with his spittle.

“Surely you’re joking,” my cousin said.

“I am not joking,” I said. “I am leaving as soon as I can.”

“Nephew,” my uncle said, “dear Nathaniel, you must not think of leaving. We need you to stay and report to your father.”

Jonathan pursed his lips and took a swallow of wine.

“It is our peculiar institution,” he said. “He does not want to be a part of it.”

“No, I do not,” I said. “I am not condemning it. I just do not want to be part of it, no.”

“Oh, so you will return to New York and tell your father that you cannot bear the thought of investing in an enterprise such as ours?”

“My father will do whatever it is he wants to do,” I said. “I make no decisions for him.”

“But you are here to report for him,” Jonathan said. “Leaving so precipitously, my cousin, will say a lot to him.”

“It will say more about me than about you,” I said. “I am just not much for farming. I am a city boy, Cousin. I am weary of the country.”

My uncle made a sputtering noise with his lips and his head swayed from side to side, and for a moment I worried that I might have caused him to suffer a seizure.

My aunt thought the same. She reached over to touch him on the face and said his name.

“I do not want you to worry,” she went on. “We are going to find a way.”

“Yes, yes,” he responded. “I am merely surprised, and distraught. Nothing more. But that is sufficient, is it not?” He pulled at his collar. “The heat, the heat. Do you suffer too much from this damnable heat, nephew?”

I would have spoken, if I had something else to say. But my cousin put in his opinion.

“Father,” Jonathan said. “He mentioned nothing of the heat.”

“Then it is other things. The isolation. Sir?” He pointed a finger at me. “I promise you more of town. You are a city person, you need more of it to survive. So!” He patted the palm of his hand against the table. “Yes, yes, we all go to town once a week, at least, to dinners, to the synagogue, of course. And on that subject, Rebecca, dear daughter-in-law, please tell your cousin by marriage what you were recently telling me.”

Rebecca, who remained silent throughout these exchanges, touched the tip of her napkin to her lips and said, “Cousin Nathaniel, I was hoping that you would join me in the conduct of my work with the slaves.”

“Perfect,” my uncle said, “perfect, perfect, perfect. You, sir, will have a hand in the making of citizens out of the stuff of slaves.”

“It is certainly an admirable project,” I could not help but say.

“Then you will consider staying to work on it?”

“I will consider it, yes,” I said, feeling myself turn on a pivot.

“An admirable idea,” my cousin said. “You can only help the poor slaves by staying.”

“I think it sounds just lovely,” my aunt said.

“I’m so glad to hear this,” Rebecca said.

“But dear daughter-in-law, there was something else, was there not?” my uncle said.

“Oh, yes,” Rebecca said, and it was quite odd, because for a moment she appeared to be blushing.

“Nathaniel, you recall my cousin Anna?”

“I do.”

I was trying to be polite, but Rebecca took this as enthusiasm.

“She is a lovely young woman,” my aunt said.

“She seemed quite lovely,” I said.

“Her parents give a lovely spring party every year,” my aunt said.

Rebecca leaned closer to me and said, “We are all wondering, Anna is wondering, I am wondering, if you would come as her guest to this event.”

Black Jack moved in and out of the room, carrying trays, fetching trays, while Precious Sally remained in the doorway, nodding her sage head. Liza, who sometimes helped with the preparation of meals, was nowhere to be seen. My growing obsession with her seemed suddenly vile and ignorant and unjust. Rebecca’s idea was quite tempting. This slavery question has been vexing me so. My sentiments have me spinning around and around and around so that I am dizzy with indecision. In how many ways could the world pull a young fellow like me? I supposed that I was soon going to find out.

The night came and again I retired early, abjuring the after-dinner talk with the family. My thoughts were topsy-turvy, jogging to and fro. Be that as it may, as I climbed the stairs to my room, I believed I had finally made up my mind. I knew clearly that I had to leave. I simply could no longer understand how anyone could live under these circumstances, in this fool’s paradise built on the backs of the indentured.

I sat down at the desk and wrote to my father, hoping to have the letter delivered to town the next morning and posted to New York, and as I wrote I found myself imagining that I might even find a ship going north that same tomorrow morning and deliver the letter by my own hand.

And yet I could not, when I put out the candle and lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, find an easy passage to the temporary oblivion of sleep. As much as the problems I turned over in my mind disturbed me they also kept me alert. Back and forth, back and forth I trundled in my mind, as a figure plagued by madness might shift from one point on stage to another and back again, and back again.

I reignited the lamp and by the steady flame in the still air read some pages of a book from my uncle’s library.

Anything to distract me from my worrisome woes!

“A Descent into the Maelstrom.”

This story took me quite rapidly along with it, as I began to read, the story within the story, that is. “We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak…”

The characters in the story within the story climb the mountain called Helseggen, and I climb with them, even as the narrator reaches the vertiginous moment when he looks down from the heights at the sea.

“I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer’s account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive…”

I no sooner looked upon the sea with this agitated narrator within the story when I heard the knocking at my door.

Still in a stupor, in a reading dream, I lowered my feet to the floor and stood up.

The knocking, tapping, sounded again.

“Yes?”

With chilled blood in my veins I half-imagined to find a giant raven standing there.

I went to the door and opened it.

“Massa,” Liza said.

“No, no, no, no,” I said, suffering a jump in my blood into my throat and down along both upper limbs, and then down further. “I would prefer that you do not call me that,” I said. I was agitated from reading the story, I told myself.

Liza looked furtively behind her.

“May I come in, massa?”

I nodded, and she stepped inside, trailing an invisible cloud of scent. Earth after rain, wood-smoke, wood-flower—her perfumes charmed me with their natural airs.

“It is late, Liza,” I said. “Is there trouble?”

She shook her head.

“They have all gone to bed. I’ve been walking up and down the hall, trying to…to make the courage to knock on your door.”

At which point she burst into tears.

“Oh, massa!”

“Please?” I said.

She shook from her misery, and wailed on.

“Tell me,” I said, “what is the difficulty? You act as though you’re being pursued.”

“I am,” she said, and threw herself down upon the bed, which she herself had prepared for me so many nights since my arrival.

“Please tell me,” I said, still keeping my distance and trying to pretend that we were together in a well-lighted downstairs room with many people passing in and out instead of alone together in the dark in my room and on my bed.

“Water, please,” she said.

Immediately, I poured her a cup of water from the pitcher near my bedside, a pitcher that she herself had fetched and often refilled.

She sat up and sipped from my cup.

“Thank you, massa,” she said.

“Nate,” I said. “Call me Nate.”

“Nate,” she said. “Thank you, Nate.”

Still quite in possession of my own mind, I noted the effect the saying of my name on her lips produced in me.

“So now, Liza,” I said, “will you please explain to me what circumstances have brought you here to me at this hour of the night?”

For a small part of a second, she laughed, or I thought she laughed, but then it turned out to be the awkward intake of breath and noise that began another round of tears.

Which she suddenly cut short, jerking herself erect and pushing her head back against the headboard.

“He is after me,” she said in a deep and hurried whisper.

“Who is after you?”

I leaned closer, and found myself, with legs already weak, naturally giving in to gravity, sitting lightly near the foot of the bed, and allowing my eyes to focus on her face. Even in the dark her eyes showed a ferocity and a fear at the same time that I could not fully comprehend. And her hands meanwhile she clasped together, almost as if in prayer, and kneaded them nervously on her breast.

“I cannot go into it, it is too distressing,” she said.

“But you must tell me,” I said. “Obviously you came here to ask for help and I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth of the situation.”

“It is too awful to tell,” she said, making liquid sounds with her lips, as she if were still drinking from the cup.

“Take a moment,” I said. “Compose yourself.”

I took a moment myself, also, getting up from the bed and going to the window, and once again staring, staring, as I had been doing on so many nights since my arrival, into the native country dark. It was late, and so few fireflies flared up their winking lights around the field, but in the dark, as if over water, the distant sounds of the animals from the barns and from the woods beyond them, flared up, and subsided, flared up, and subsided.

“Now, Liza,” I said, turning back to her, “please tell me your story.”

“Later, Nate,” she said in a whisper, finally taking hold of my name.

“Later?” I said. “Speak up, I can hardly hear you.”

“Later,” she said.

“Later than what?” I said, venturing near the bed and leaning close so that I could make out whatever it was she was going to say.

She reached for my hand and pulled me down close to her, so that I collapsed of my own weight onto the space she made next to her by rolling to her side.

“Liza, I—”

Yes, I tried to speak, but she was upon me, tugging me close, and pushing her soft lips upon mine, so that I opened my own to hers.

Cinnamon and bonfire, a bouquet of blood and wine, and the sour-sweet taste of desire long fermenting in the throat, and deeper—all this I tasted, as we pressed against each other, as though each wished to press hard enough to pass through the body of the other.

“Liza,” I said, halting our long kiss just for the sake of saying her name.

“Nate, Nate, Nate,” she said, the words falling on my head like petals from a night-blooming tree. “Do you wish to know me?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do. Do you wish to know me, with your own free will?”

“What is that?” she said, in a voice quite perplexed.

“You choose this, not as a slave but as a free woman?”

“But I am not free.”

“I do not own you, Liza. Do you choose this?”

“But I am the master’s property.”

“No one ordered you here, did he?”

Her slight hesitation to answer my question gave me pause.

“Did Uncle tell you to come here?”

“No!” she said in an outraged whisper. “He would have me whipped if he knew.”

“Whipped? He has people whipped?”

“It has happened, yes.”

“Who would dare to order such a thing? Who would dare to carry it out?”

Liza remained silent.

“They have never whipped you, have they?”

“No, no, no, not me. Oh, you would know it if you saw.”

“Jews employing the lash used on them by the Egyptians! I hope I never live to see such a thing.”

“If you stay here long enough, you will.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Liza, that I suggested my uncle sent you here to coerce me, to tempt me to stay.”

I kissed her again, tasting the bouquet of her lips, with the added tincture of desire now flavoring the spittle that we mingled in our mouths.

As when an apple, still tethered to a branch by the slimmest clasp, begins to shake in the first brisk autumn wind and its stem incurs a fatal tear, I found myself, pressed against her, on the verge of falling.

She made a mewing sound beneath me, and in the dark I wondered if woman had turned into cat.

This was all so new to me that all I knew was that I should behave, the way a man did, as though it were not new to me.

“Massa,” she said.

“Please,” I said.

“Nate. Nate.”

“Yes, Liza?”

“Before this happened, you were a free man.”

“Yes?”

“And you are still free?”

“I am.”

“Though now you own a slave.”

“What do you say?”

“I am yours, Nate.”

Time went by, cocks crowed in the yard also, and the faintest scrim of a false dawn showed over the tops of the trees beyond the barns. When it became light enough to see Liza’s skin next to mine it was time to figure our way out of this dilemma. Instead, we lingered, luxurious in the aftermath of our mated desires.

“Now tell me the truth,” I said, “why is it you came to me in the night? Who was pursuing you?”

Liza laughed, and touched a finger to her full lips, which stood out in a sort of inverted rendering of dark against light as the light filled in the hollows of her face made by night.

“I was pursuing myself,” she said. “I was pursuing you.”

“So it was not my old uncle?”

She laughed again, this time slightly hysterical.

“I didn’t say, massa, it was anybody.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Yes, massa, I won’t.”

With mock-ferocity I loomed above her, pinning her arms to the bed.

“You will not.”

“No, I won’t, not anymore.”

“Isaac?” I said. “Is it Isaac?”

At the thought seeing the two of them meet at his cabin door I scarcely could control my anger.

“Why, if he—”

“Not Isaac, never Isaac,” she said. “He is my brother. He—”

I stopped her, because the thought came to me with a mental jolt.

“Jonathan? Cousin Jonathan?”

She sat up at once and all warmth left her voice. If it was possible to see this cacao-colored woman turned pale, I saw it then.

Silently, Liza took to her feet and picked up her clothes. In the night I had seen only a burst of flesh here, a breast, a thigh, her neck elongated in the passion of our coming together. Now in the early dawn she stood luxuriously naked in the instant before she covered herself cloth by cloth. I had never seen a woman fully unclad, and so I gathered it all in—breasts, thighs, pelvis, where her flesh curved as though it were carved from brown stone or light mahogany—while she covered what I saw almost as soon as I saw it.

“I trust it was not Jonathan. He is married,” I said in my own naïve way. “And he may be my cousin but he is old enough to be your father.”

She said nothing except, “Can you help me?”

“Help you to escape him?”

Almost fully dressed now, she turned to me as she worked her buttons closed and nodded.

“Yes.”

“I am planning to leave for home almost at once,” I said. “I can’t…I have to return to New York.”

“You got to stay a little longer.”

“I have made up my mind.”

“Just a little longer?”

I shook my head, more in confusion than anything else.

“I had planned to go to town and check the sailing schedule for boats to New York.”

“Take me with you.”

“What? I cannot—”

“Take me to town,” she said. “Take me with you to town.”

I sighed deeply, feeling myself still sinking into that same abyss I’d first fallen into before the rising of dawn.

“Can we do that?”

“I can arrange it,” she said. “I got some…some…powers here in the house.”

“They treat you well,” I said, “or so I thought until you told me about Jonathan. Liza, has he ever…?”

Now it was her turn to sigh, a strange thing to do given all the circumstances, scarcely any of which I knew at that moment.

So that when she stole out of my room just as the first rays of the sun caught the tops of the trees beyond the barns I lay back on my bed, puzzled, satisfied, shaken—bewitched, and boiling about in my own woes and desires, more certain and yet more confused than ever. Did I yet know who I was? Did I know why I had traveled here? I believed I now had the answers in my heart. But these did not match the answers in my mind.