Song of Slaves in the Desert (29 page)

“I thought you were a more judicious fellow. If I did not know you were from New York, I’d think you wanted to challenge me to a duel.”

He then bowed slightly toward me, and twirled around on his heel, his cape following, and departed from the veranda. Within moments he remounted his horse and without another word the man and his crew, with one last glance back at us from Langerhans, went galloping away up the road.

“Wherever he has departed to, the young slave is fortunate,” my uncle said, “to be free of that creature’s clutches.” He turned to me and asked how I had come to know the man and I explained how I had encountered him, though I omitted most of the stranger elements that had passed between us.

“Travel sometimes makes for curious companions,” he said.

As if to put a concluding point on this entire incident, around the corner of the house Isaac came riding, leading my old Promise behind him, his presence reminding me that for many long minutes while we talked with the white-haired man the slaves seemed to have faded away.

“You coming to the fields, massa?” he called out to me. And so then making a bow of my own I left the veranda and mounted my horse. I had only just begun to ride, when I heard a voice from the veranda and looked back to see Liza standing there in her apron.

My heart leaped, more animal than our steeds.

They named her Liza, a version of her mother’s and grandmother’s names, and this girl, a pale creature compared to most of the other slaves—you’d say she was the color of almonds—stood out from everyone else even as she tried to stand close. Her great-grandmother had disappeared somewhere near an African river, her grandmother went mad but still gave birth before she died, and her mother succumbed in the birth throes, victim to what felt like a curse upon all the women.

Liza hoped to escape that curse.

Her father—everyone except
his
father seemed to know about her paternity, from the house slaves to all who lived in the back cabins and worked in the rice fields—put her to work in the main house when she was still a child, and there Liza flourished, learned under the tutelage of a black stump of a woman named Precious Sally, to help in the kitchen and to cook simple meals, if not at first for the aging master and his family, at least for the other house slaves. The doctor checked on her every time he visited the plantation, extremely worried that her father—he took him to be that dangerously mad—might at some point try to take her up the way he had her mother. He talked to the slave child, asked her certain questions that might have led her to reveal certain matters if in fact they had occurred.

But nothing.

This gave the doctor pause, and he was, at least momentarily, pleased that no harm had come to this girl.

Yet.

Because, he surmised, her father suffered from a terrible mental difficulty, and, the doctor believed, it was only a matter of time before the man would turn his attention in the worst way to his beautiful almond-colored daughter. For a while though, the man seemed to ignore her.

Meanwhile, the girl was growing, and much to the dismay of some of the field slaves who saw it, she now and then turned cart-wheels on the lawn of the main house on her way to work in the kitchen. Cooking. Baking. Cleaning. Gathering the spices.

At this point the doctor intervened and gave her periodic instruction in how to read. At least twice a week, and sometimes more, the physician would appear at the kitchen door, as though he himself were one of the slaves, forbidden to enter through the front door, with books in his arms. He taught her the alphabet from an early age. The way she sounded each letter seemed to him a small miracle, and she mastered this quickly. Oh, and doesn’t this make all the difference! He sighed to himself. Give the young bird a little shove from the nest and it instinctively spreads its wings and however clumsily flies to safety. And the human child? She sounds her letters, and soon will be able to fly on her own, yes. Scientific-minded fellow that he was, the doctor encouraged her to read to him from geography books first, such as some that he bought in town.

INTRODUCTORY LESSON

Questions to my little Reader.

What place do you live in?

Is it a town or a city you live in?

What is a town? What is a city?

Which way is north? Which south?

Which way is east? Which west?

Have you ever been in any other town or city than the one you live in?

If you have, what was the name of that town?

In going to that town, which way did you go?

What town lies next to the place in which you live, on the north?

What town is next, on the east?

What next, on the west?

What next, on the south?

What county do you live in?

Do you know what a county is?

What state do you live in?

Which way is Boston from the place you live in?

Which way is New York?

Which way is Hartford?

Which way is Philadelphia?

Have you ever seen a river?

Have you ever seen a mountain?

If you have, what was it called?

Describe a mountain?

Did you ever see the sea, or ocean?

What is the sea, land or water?

Is the land smooth and level, like the water?

Are towns built on the water, or on the land?

Do animals such as horses and cows live on the water, or on the land?

Did you ever catch any fish on the land?

Where is the sky? Where are the stars?

Did you know what the shape of the world is?

Did you ever hear of England?

Did you ever see anybody who has been in England?

Do you know which way England lies?

Did you ever hear of Asia?

Do you know which way Asia lies?

Did you ever hear of Africa, where negroes come from?

Do you know which way it lies?

The doctor’s little reader quickly learned her lessons in what lay where and how she should regard them. She learned her directions, and told him a story about catching fish on land—a silly dream she dreamed one night after reading with him. She did not know anyone who had been in England, but she had heard of Africa, yes, and she recalled quite vividly the stories old women back in the cabins told about the old country, the rivers, the forests, and she knew which way it lay. Back there, over her shoulder, where across the rice fields the ocean broke on the shore, and made a road of waves all the way back to the place where her grandmother had been born.

Where is the sky? Where are the stars?

She knew answers to these questions, too.

The stars spread overhead on dark nights without a big moon, the stars made shapes—the boy sometimes pointed these out to her—and some of these pointed toward England and some to Africa and some to Philadelphia and New York. Each of these names seemed as foreign, and as familiar, as the next. Only the stars glittered with a fascinating and hypnotic light that made her wonder about everything in the world and everything above it—creeks, rivers, roads, trees, fields, farms, horses, people, African or not, each fit into a pattern like the pattern overhead in the dark on nights without a great moon. Though some nights just before sleep she wondered how she might steal a boat and sail back to Africa, she understood that once she returned she would have no place to go. Could she look for, and find, her grandmother? How far deep into the forests must she have returned? It might be easier to float up to the stars and turn upside down and use the glowing specks of light as stepping stones back to the night skies above the place where her ancestors were born.

Such a vast place, Africa seemed in relation to all else on the globe in the book. And all a big ball, and all that ocean between her and Africa. It seemed easier to memorize a poem about it all than to contemplate leaving the plantation and returning to Africa.

GEOGRAPHICAL RHYMES TO BE REPEATED BY THE PUPIL

The world is round, and like a ball

Seems swinging in the air,

A sky extends around it all,

And stars are shining there.

Water and land upon the face

Of this round world we see,

The land is man’s safe dwelling place,

But ships sail on the sea.

Two mighty continents there are,

And many islands too,

And mountains, hills, and valleys there,

With level plains we view.

The oceans, like the broad blue sky,

Extend around the sphere,

While seas, and lakes, and rivers, lie

Unfolded, bright, and clear.

Around the earth on every side

Where hills and plains are spread,

The various tribes of men abide

White, black, and copper red.

And animals and plants there be

Of various name and form,

And in the bosom of the sea

All sorts of fishes swarm.

And now geography doth tell,

Of these full many a story,

And if you learn your lessons well,

I’ll set them all before you.

Ball…air…all…there…
She loved the sound of the rhymes
…sky…sphere…lie…clear…

If there was any moment in her early life when she first thought about walking away, running, it must have been here. Mark it!

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of ANNABEL LEE;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me…

Up in my room that night I tried to calm myself by reading, but I could find little distraction in Poe, my eyes running over one stanza over and over. Here I was, when the knock came at my door, saying to myself,
And whom might this be? The Raven?

Liza stood at the door, alone, a thin cotton wrap flowing from her shoulders, dressed for settling in for the night in the big house, ready to help her mistress should some distress arise. She held a candle, her eyes catching the reflection of the flame, and that same flame guttering in the wake of our passage from the door—I drew her in and closed it immediately behind us—to the bed.

“Massa,” she said, setting the candle-holder down on the night-table.

“Please,” I said.

“Massa Nate,” she said, lowering her head toward me in a parody of submission.

“Stop it,” I said, touching a finger to her chin. Her skin felt so smooth and cool, I couldn’t help but follow with my hand.

The lines of her—neck, throat, chest, her breasts—her gown fell away—she slipped her arms through the sleeves—

I stood a moment, beginning to shed my own clothes.

Breath of her—sweet oil, mint—hair of gardenia—breasts oiled with nutmeg and tincture of lemon—staircase of her ribs, full sweet belly—peeking into the navel that connected her to Africa and all the generations past, who loved each other, struggled with and fought with and sold each other—kissed my way down the smooth slope of her abdomen.

“Oh, Nate,” she said, in a sweet voice, the kind you might use to speak to a loving child in a story, “come to me now.”

The dark subsides into more dark. Night sounds again from outside the window, seeming now more familiar than exotic, more welcoming than lonely. You horses in the barn, nickering to each other in the sleeps you take alone, oh, you doves nestled together and cooing in dove-dreams in the rafters of the barns, oh, owls in the woods and mice in your dens, oh, alligators loving alligators in alligator-love out in the slimy mossy depths of the swamp waters, oh, all you captives in the cabins dreaming of freedom in the sleep of your enslavement, I take you in my arms because my reach has now so been increased I can hold so much more of the world!

“Nate?”

Liza’s whisper, soft almost as a voice in a dream.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am. Never been more awake, in this way.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“I am sorry.”

“I must go.”

“No, no, stay a while.”

“It’s not good for me to stay here. Someone might see me leave the room.”

“Tell them I commanded you to stay with me.”

“They would assume that,” she said. “It is another matter.”

“Tell me.”

Dimly in the dark I could see her move her head from side to side.

“Not to be told.”

“Another secret? Another truth I thought to be true turns out to be something else than it seems?”

“Many things are not what they seem. ‘I am black but O my soul is white!’”

“What is that you say?”

“A poet, William Blake said that. The doctor read that poem to us. And we read it ourselves. I can recite it to you.”

“You can?”

“Don’t you think I have a memory?”

“Of course, of course, I do. Please do say it.”

She said the poem, and I lay back on the pillow, astonished.

“Striking, quite striking,” I said. “My own education has been deficient, because I do not know it.”

She touched my arm.

“I can recite other poems to you,” she said.

“That makes me happy,” I said.

“I may be a slave,” she said, “but when I read a poem I am free.”

“One day you will be free. You all will be free.”

“I have read this in a book the doctor gave me,” she said. “How all men are born slaves. Of one sort or another. Even the freest man must break loose of his father and mother, and his family’s laws and rules, and his country’s. Weren’t all the English just as much slaves as we who came from Africa? And didn’t they come here to free themselves?”

“What else did you read in this book?”

“The English stopped the ocean slave trade. And one day the Carolinians will choose to free us.”

“And they will choose to lose their plantations? It would have to happen at gunpoint. As some of the legislators here have been arguing.”

“The plantations are poorly run,” Liza said, naked, and speaking as if in debate in the legislature. “If it weren’t for slaves, they would fall apart. Look here at The Oaks, how your uncle must plead with your father to help him with money.”

“And so he is a kind of slave, too, a slave to money.”

“But he chooses this. A free man may choose to give over his will. But when he chooses to win it back he has the power.”

“But for now, he is failing.”

“That is what I see at the dinner table. That is what I hear from others of us who listen well.”

“Which is a good thing,” I said. “Because otherwise I would not have come here. And we would not have—”

She leaned forward in the dark and kissed me firmly but languidly on the mouth, and we sank down together into the dunes of pillows and the ripples of sheets. Yes, all our troubles, all our obstacles, from her being born into slavery to my errand to Charleston, all conspired so that we might come together in this moment that, with blessed hindsight, I see as the high point of all our enchanted moments together. Our loving, our talk, our thoughts mingling… This daughter of the tribe of Ham, and this son of the tribe of Abraham, bound together, these distant cousins! Cousins, after all!