Song of Slaves in the Desert (33 page)

Have we forgotten about Isaac? We must not let him drop from our thoughts. He came close, very close, and not just once, alas, to murder and to discovering his true self.

The first time occurred just after the first time Liza found herself with child, and there was no doubt as to whose child it was. Early one evening Isaac accompanied her into one of the farthest distant cabins, a shambling old ramshackle place among places already quite old, where an ash-gray witch woman lived, an ancient creature who could have been the older sister of the late Old Dou, with a beautiful thin-jawed face that might have been carved out of wood from a distant thick forest. She had the reputation in the cabins of dealing in herbs both white and black that she had learned to administer when she was a young girl in the old country.

Either because she had mystical foreknowledge or because she was a wise student, even in her oldest age, or perhaps because of it, of human behavior, she greeted them both as if she had been expecting them.

“It is not too late,” she said.

Liza, just inside the door, tried to back away, but Isaac held her arm.

“You know?” he said to the witch woman.

“Look at her,” the witch woman said. “Young, as beautiful as the rice kernel in its almost to full blooming condition, who can not see?”

Now Liza became interested, and stepped right up to the woman, so close that she could smell the rank weed odor of her intimate parts, mouth and other places.

“But not too late for me?” Liza said.

“No, no,” the witch woman said. “You have long travels to make before you sleep. This is only a beginning.”

“You can help me?”

The witch woman held up a twig on which had sprouted several thorns. Without warning, she pressed it to Liza’s throat, pricking her.

“I already did,” she said, tossing the twig aside as Liza slumped to the floor like an old curtain detached from its rod.

“What did you do?” Isaac stepped up to her, but had to turn his head aside at the odor of her breath.

“What you came for,” the Witch Woman said. “Put her on the bed and let her sleep. When she awakes, all will be over.”

With an agility quite surprising given her age, she attended to the sleeping girl, stripping off her clothes and applying various poultices to various parts of her body even as she dripped some sort of portion from a large spoon into the girl’s open mouth.

“Now go outside,” she ordered Isaac.

He lingered outside a while, fretting about his dear friend, sister-cousin, however it was he thought of her. Here at the back of the cabins few people passed by and he could barely hear the shouts let alone the murmurings of the plantation folk going about their taking of the evening meal. Now and then a burst of noise or a burst of music reached his ears, but mostly it was quiet, quiet enough so that he could listen to the voice inside him that wondered about this life, this world, the fate of the girl inside the cabin, what little hope he might have for the future, his aging father’s condition—he had some sort of illness that kept him out of the fields and most of the time flat on his back in his cabin—the faint memory he had of his mother, poor woman.

He pulled himself back from those thoughts, focused his mind, as he was doing more and more as he became more and more adept at the tasks associated with rice farming, on the state of the crop, at the prospect of good weather, thinking then of what powers made weather, wondering whether it was God—as the master would have it, steeped as he was in the lore of his religion—or the gods of old Africa, whom many in the cabins still spoke of and spoke to, or the Jesus he had heard about when he spoke with slaves from other plantations. Now this Jesus, who was some sort of son of Moses, the Jews’ hero, was supposed to be the Son of God, and Isaac could believe that, except that he knew too much about Okolun and the other great spirits who gathered around Yemaya and made the world a much more lively place than the way the Christians would have it. Those folks, he heard, didn’t like drinking and dancing, not to mention doing the thing with each other, male and female, not that he had done that yet, but he certainly knew of it, it was all around him, part of the life of the fields and streams, the rivers, and the ocean he observed whenever he went to town. The Christians, if they had their way, would change the music, take out the drums, make only feeble moans to a God he simply did not understand, a God without flavor, without thirst, without the drive to make the world over every year the way he and his fellow slaves made the fields over, planted, cultivated, harvested, and then planted another crop. Not that the Jews were much better. Look where the Jew got Liza—with an inflated belly and a great sorrow in her big sweet young girl’s heart.

The cabin door opened and the witch woman peered out.

“Bring me the water, boy,” she said to Isaac. Fortunately he found some in a small wooden basin in a corner of the room. He stared as the old woman washed the younger woman.

The woman seemed to forget that he was present.

After a time, the witch woman asked Liza, “Do you want to see the outcome?” pointing to the small roll of sheets where the aborted child lay enshrouded.

“Never!” Liza said, still naked on the bedding. “Never, never!”

Isaac, too shy, even in the faint light of the cabin, to stare for very long at the naked girl, turned his eyes toward that small bundle on the floor in the corner of the hut. A tall boy, it hurt his back to lean over and peer down at it, to squint deeply into the dim light. What he saw did not seem worth the effort—a reddish-blue stump of flesh, ears slightly pointed, tiny eyes closed forever. He shook his head and pushed it out of his mind, or tried to, moving back closer to the old woman and Liza, as the woman began to sing and hum some old country song for the girl, as if the music might heal her, or at least calm her down.

So strange—he told Liza a long time afterward—how happy he felt. Just plain happy, happy, happy! Staring down at that still-born child, he wanted to take wing and fly.

The girl remained a bit feverish, and he walked her to her cabin and put her to bed. Still, he felt as though he had learned something he could not yet quite put into thoughts in his mind. But he felt nonetheless quite happy. In that same mood the next morning he went to his duties in the stables, beginning his work day—even now, after all that had happened the night before—still in darkness. He worked first on the horses, his daily duties taking him deep into the barns where such heady odors arose from the manure piles that now and then he felt somehow drunk on the fumes. As he walked from the barns to the big house his gait wavered, his arms tingled, and his head went around and around in confusion, so he might as well have been drunk.

Then it came to him. He had thought up a simple plan. Here is how he enacted it in his mind. An old Yoruba man they called Walla-Walla oversaw the business of the stables, having taken over the job after Isaac’s father years ago, around the time Isaac’s mother died in giving birth to him, collapsed into a daily bucket of dangerous brew. Isaac, a hard worker who always finished the day’s duties before the end of the day, would easily elude his surveillance, sauntering from the stables toward the big house with a large bridle slung over his shoulder, as though he had business with it just ahead.

Once at the house, he would gain entry by the back door, where perhaps Liza herself might be working—though not today, so the plan would not work today—and yet he longed to strike out now, now, because of the immediacy of the event that brought his blood to a boil and kept him sizzling in his veins through the day—yes, then she would open the door to him, and with a pat on the shoulder he would slip past her into the dining room and the sitting room beyond where he would find the master in conversation with the missus, and he would throw down the bridle at the master’s feet, pull him from his chair, and knock him to the floor. He would keep one foot on the big man’s chest and study his face, and study it, as if to see if there were some resemblance. The Jewish man’s eyes would cry out for mercy. Mercy! Mercy? Out would come the knife Isaac’s father had given up to him long ago for trimming rope in the barn and—this seemed like justice, as much as he could imagine it, justice!—with one swift thrust he would stick the master in the throat, and gouge at him until he lost so much blood he could not survive.

And he would do the same to the missus.

And why not?

She lived with the man who fathered the child, she raised the child who grew to the man who did all of them such misery and wrong. The thought of the missus, in a white dress covered all in blood, twisted in his belly and he stood tall, breathing deeply, waiting for the nausea to pass.

He would next mount the stairs to the wing of the house where the young master’s family lived, and slaughter them, like birds in a coop. He was sweating now, and licking his lips, even as the faintest wave of nausea still crawled up and down his chest and belly. But he would slaughter them, yes.

And then he would wait for the son. The hot blood pooling at his feet might cool, and the light fade at the end of the day. But he would wait. And after a while the young master would come in the door, call out to his parents in greeting, and step into the parlor. Isaac would take him around the neck with one arm and gouge out his eyes and then slit his throat and leave him for dead on the bloody floor.

Oh, what a thing it would be next! He would call all the people together, and they would celebrate, light fires and cook a meal, and dance and sing. He would take Liza in his arms and she would dance with him, and they would steal away to her cabin before too long and he would take up the water basin and wash away this blood, and take her in his arms again, this time not to dance but to make a night of love.

And in the last dark of the night he would venture out into yard and call out that it was time, and they would all, every single man, woman, and child on the plantation, steal away into the woods, and head for the Big Swamp. He could see it now, a town growing under their hands, and fields of vegetables and fruit, not an easy life, making their own cloth and clothes, raising their own bulls and cows and horses. But it would be their life, their own life, and it would be precious, because it was first watered with blood.

Oh, Isaac, poor Isaac!

“Boy!”

Old Walla-Walla, in those days, before Isaac took over, still a fixture in the stable, came up behind him slapped his fist at the bridle and nearly knocked him down, so unbalanced he was in his vision of revenge, murder, and blood.

“You think the horses going to feed themselves? Back to work, boy, back to work.”

He shook off the mayhem in his mind and went back to work. He worked, he mucked. Time enough went by so that Liza seemed to have forgotten much of her pain and turmoil surrounding the young master’s brutality. She rose each morning and went to work in the house, looking like her pretty young self, which was what she was, and crossing paths now and then with the man, but more often again than not with his wife. No looks passed between them let alone words.

In the odorous stables, in his mind, young Isaac could not stop the boiling in his mind.

When old Walla-Walla told him one morning to hitch up the carriage and drive the young master to town he devised yet another plan. It was so firm in his mind that after he had finished getting the carriage ready he went back among the cabins to where his old father lay, drunk already since dawn.

“What are you doing?” his father said with a moan and a groan.

“I’m going to town,” he told the older man, to look at him, a broader-faced and slightly darker version of himself.

“Why you tell me, son? Something special? You go to town always, but you never come all the way here from the barns to tell me.”

It was true, Isaac scarcely ever visited his father. He did not like to see a man crushed by life, a man always drunk on some kind of home brew or other, from waking up to going to sleep. He had not worked ever since Isaac could remember. And yet the master never bothered him. This gave Isaac too much to think about, so he did not think much about it at all.

“What is in your mind?” The old man looked up at him from a pallet low on the cabin floor.

Young Isaac took a deep breath. And then spoke.

“Mama. How I miss her. And this girl, Liza, how I like her. And these white people and Hebrews, I hate them. The Christians, too. I hate them. You have lived your whole life already, father, but I am only half—”

“Less than that, I hope,” his father broke in to say.

“—if you say so, but I do not want to live it—”

“Like me?”

Isaac turned away, unable to look his father in the eye.

“Yes.”

“You want to live like this? Good, tell yourself that. Because you ain’t got no choice, anyway.”

“I do,” his son broke in.

“What’s your choice?” his father said. “Going to sleep just after sundown or going to sleep before the moon goes down?”

“Daddy, what are you talking about?”

His father rolled over on his side and talked to the wall.

“You got a choice, wall? Lean one way on a Sunday, lean another way on a Monday?”

As if the fantasy he had created for himself of slaughtering the entire family had never entered his mind, Isaac said, as slaves often did, “It ain’t so bad here, Daddy. It ain’t so bad. I hear of whippings other place, and a lot worse.”

“Boy,” his father said, “worse has been here. You just sort of missed it by a little.”

“What are you talking about?”

The older man reached for a cup of his liquor and took a swallow.

“I loved your mother, Isaac,” he said.

“Daddy, why are you talking about that now?”

“I loved her I don’t know you ever can know…”

“Daddy?”

Young Isaac backed away as his father turned over on his belly and began to snore. All during the ride into town he thought of that, rather than stopping the carriage and dragging the young master out and beating him to death in the woods.