Song of Slaves in the Desert (10 page)

It is He who created you from a single person, and made his mate of like nature, in order that he might live with her in love. When they are united, she bears a light burden and carries it about unnoticed. When she grows heavy, they both pray to Allah their Lord, saying: “If you give us a goodly child, we vow we shall ever be grateful.” (Koran, 7:189)

What then are the origins of woman? All the stories have her born of man’s clay or man’s rib. But she gives birth to men, rather than men giving birth to her. Can all the oldest stories be wrong?

The new science says we first came out of water, and our ancestors, odd fish from the salt sea, flopped onto shore on stubby fins like legs and with rudimentary lungs breathed the sulfurous air before retreating to the ocean. And, oh, we liked the air! More and more often we stumbled ashore and stayed longer and longer, so that eventually some of our old folks stayed behind when the tide withdrew, making a life free of the vagaries of the tides and subject to the new light of the sun and the cool reflections of the moon.

But clay? But ape? But man?

All these stories whirling about on the fumes of a newly explosive land, where after the heat settled and the chemistry of place set in tiny green plants clung to the rocks and small insects whirred through air warmed by fire. First clay? First ape? Did we all come from clay and then did woman break free of man’s clay and become a creature of her own? Or did the salt sea creature with lungs one morning a million million years ago ascend a tree as fish and descend some millions of years later as ape?

What are the origins of woman?

The first upright female wondered, turning her liquid eye to the moon, and breathed a sound of surprise.

What are the origins of man?

The first upright male turned his blinking eye to the sun, and looked away, down at his shadow.

My first Carolina country morning awakening! And if I had been opening my eyes after a good sleep in Eden I could not have been more astonished and pleased—the air, just cool enough to make me feel as though I should arise, the light, milky with early morning fog, the odors, such a mix of flowers and trees and grasses my New York nose could scarcely begin to engage with them beyond the awareness of a wonderful new perfume.

The odors!

Now do not take this in the wrong way. New York had its own olfactory wonders, from the tarry beams on the river piers to the bittersweet smell of wood burning in fireplaces on the first cold autumn morning. And imagine crossing the Spuyten Duyvil into the Bronx farmlands without feeling yourself pushing aside a curtain of green wind. And the meaty stench of the horse apples in the gutters or the sweet stink of a dying dog in the roadway, its entrails laid open to the sun. Or if you would stand at the foot of our Battery and breathe in the perfect salt-sea sting of the incoming ocean tide, the breeze that carried it parting your hair toward the land behind you, you know the varied pleasures of our New York air.

But this curtain of oxygen—oh, I also learned my chemistry with master Halevi—in which I lay entangled weighed everything and nothing and like the depths of the ocean which I have heard has made a comfortable resting place for sailors who give up fighting sleep beneath the waves it pressed me to the bed—while at the same time allowed a medium in which my mind could take flight. Wasn’t this how it might have been—and would be—if I had—when I would—set sail for Europe on my tour?

In a sleep-drenched state, picturing large thunderheads sailing toward us from the south, their stately top-heavy presences looming like figures from a dream, watching over me, smiling faces painted on their upfurling undersides, eyes winking, mouths wide in laughter, and from a long way away over the heaving water the boom and belch of their voices, disconnected from their bodies but by the breadth and length of their thunderous rolls making clear their relation to the soaring clouds—and at my elbow, a girl, just my age, her hair flowing the wind off the waves, one hand pressed tightly on my arm, the other holding to the rail—not-Miriam—and the wind snatches away my hat and we laugh as we watch it flop and roll into the ocean and the girl, not-Miriam, turns to me, face uplifted, and says my name—

A knock at my door.

“Yes?”

I sat up, still half-drowsy, and after a blinking moment, swung my feet to the floor.

“Massa Pereira?”

A woman’s voice, sultry and soft, inviting, yet with a certain tone of servitude.

“Just a moment.”

I stood up and pulled my nightshirt over my head. As I was doing so I heard the door open and I immediately covered myself with the shirt.

There was the slave girl, standing in the doorway, looking at the floor.

“Excuse me,” I began, “do you always walk in on a man in his room?”

“I’m sorry, Massa Pereira, but your uncle said it was urgent. He would like to speak with you in the sunroom.”

She stood there, as if waiting for my reply, her eyes still averted.

“You might have waited a moment.”

Now she looked up at me, just a glance, and then down again.

“Yes, sir,” she said, but did not move.

“I thought you were my cousin’s wife.”

She looked up at me, and then down again.

“Miss Rebecca,” she said, “yes, massa. No, I am not.”

Again, I caught the tiniest flicker in her eye.

“No, no, of course I know that. I meant that I thought it was she who was knocking.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“And your name is…?”

“Liza, sir.”

“Liza, I want to tell you how much I admire the clarity of your speech.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“You have no slave accent.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Has my cousin’s wife tutored you in speech as well as reading?”

“She has, sir. And the doctor.”

“The doctor?”

“The doctor who attends us, sir.”

“Well, he has done a very good job.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and I could not help but wonder if that flicker in her eye meant that she was ready to laugh.

***

My uncle waited for me downstairs in the company of the tall young African man, who had driven the carriage in from town.

“This is Isaac,” my uncle introduced him to me as one of the overseers for the plantation.

“We met yesterday, Uncle,” I said. “Isaac drove the carriage from town.”

“Of course,” my uncle said, while Isaac cast an appraising eye on me, as if he were figuring out right then and there the mettle of my branch of the family, which gave me the opportunity to take a look at him—a fairly young man, early to rise to the responsibility, I surmised, of overseership.

“He’ll be showing you around the plantation and explaining matters to you.”

“Good,” I said. “As soon as I have my breakfast I’ll be ready for my tour.”

Isaac looked at my uncle, who shook his head.

“With the Sabbath coming up you should move along.”

“Very well then, Uncle. We will go.”

“That’s the spirit, boy,” my uncle said. “Isaac, he is all yours.”

What a strange world, I thought, to say such a thing when Isaac belonged to him.

Though he did not show it. In fact, one of the first things he explained to me as we went out the rear door of the main house was that the way my uncle ran things on this plantation was out of the ordinary.

“You’ll rarely, sir, see your African man working as overseer. Usually the job is reserved for a white man, someone tough as nails.”

“But you are an African man—”

“And tough as nails.”

It was his joke, but though I laughed, he did not.

The joke came at my expense as he led me behind the house to the stables.

“Is this barn the first stop on the tour?” I said.

Isaac squinted at me in the early morning mist.

“We mount up here,” he said.

“I do not ride,” I said. “City boy, and all of that, you know?”

“Master Jonathan has taken the carriage to town,” Isaac said.

I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll try.”

Something flickered in the corner of my eye. Distracted, I turned and caught a glimpse of the slave girl hurrying from the house to one of the out-buildings.

“Keep your mind on the horse,” Isaac said. I was afraid he would laugh, but he remained solemn in his demeanor.

After several tries, I mounted up and we went on our way, into a morning filled with busyness and news.

The big horse was called Promise and Isaac sat alongside me on a large black stallion whose name he did not say. He urged our mounts into motion and we went riding slowly away from the house. Promise, as big as he was, seemed a gentle beast, though I remained a bit wary of him.

Yet I was warier still of my mission to this place.

“May I ask you some questions?”

Isaac seemed to nod his head ever so slightly as we rode along. This I took to be positive.

“Is my uncle good to you?” I said.

“Not a question, sir. He is very good.”

Recalling the auction block, I said, “I cannot imagine he would ever sell you away.”

“No, sir. But sometimes that happens.”

“I cannot imagine it.”

“Things is different down here, sir,” he said, and stared over the head of his horse at the trail ahead.

What kind of a life did this man have, I wondered as we rode along, in which someone might sell him in an auction? Was he born here in Carolina or had he been born elsewhere? From the way he walked and gestured, I assumed he was a native of Carolina soil, especially because his face showed such features as might have been the result of having had an Indian mother or father, a long straight nose and high cheekbones, and deep-set gray eyes. Most un-African, I thought to myself, because it seemed almost as though he were a handsome white man whose skin had darkened somehow in the night. Also most un-African about him was the way he stared me hard in the eye, almost as though he knew something about me, something he did not admire.

“Isaac?” I called to him. “Do you have any Indian blood in you?”

That manner of his—he turned, and turned away, pretending that he hadn’t heard me. Meanwhile we kept up our pace along the trail, and I kept on wondering. His mother? Perhaps some Indian whom my uncle had bought as a slave and introduced to one of the African men in the barracks, a woman whose family had lived in the woods and swamps long before we Europeans arrived, and traveling up and along the coast, enjoying a carefree (if sometimes difficult) life of fishing and hunting to keep themselves fed. For how long had they and their ancestors done this? Yes, I kept on wondering about this. Far, far back in time, back at least to the time when my own ancestors were wandering in the desert, having angered God enough to make Him order us into an exile of forty years—

And their god or gods? Who were they? Where were they? I pictured them as idols or invisible amid the storm clouds that passed over our heads on hot days in spring and summer seasons. I asked him a question about religion. And he was quick to reply.

“Miss Rebecca,” he said, “she’s teaching us about religion.”

“And do you find it interesting?”

“I do, massa, I do.”

“In Africa, your people had a certain type of religion. I studied something of it with my tutor when I was a boy. Animism, he called it. The worship of spirits living in trees and rivers and such.”

“I don’t know, massa, I never learned that. Just the Hebrew.”

“Can you read Hebrew?”

“I can recognize a few words, massa,” he said. “Aleph,” he said. “Bet…”

“That’s more than I can read of it,” I said.

I let our conversation fall away, dwelling in my amazement that this fellow, a little darker than me, but with more Hebrew, might be put up for public sale. With this in mind, it seemed appropriate that the mist still hovered over the rice fields as we made our way toward them. Though I had traveled a similar route the day before on the carriage, sitting high up here on my horse with nothing above but the sky gave me a different sense of the land and its extension. The animal’s rolling gait, the screen of fog, with new sun touching on high clouds above us, all of it conspired to make a picture for me of beauty, strangeness, and possibility. Why the latter, I could not have said just then, but it was a feeling that stole over me, a feeling of hope in the face of duty.

The scene we encountered gave my fantasy more fuel.

In the mist a dozen or so dark men and women (though some of these were children, male and female, whose smaller stature led me to conclude they were all women) worked in the rows of the rice fields, stooping to their particular tasks of planting the individual stalks each in a small bed of mud. Aside from the clomp and click of our horses’ hooves, the sounds here came from birds fluttering overhead and calling to one another—and an audible chant from the workers in the rows of rice plants.

Rize is…nize…

Nize is…rize…

…the men’s voices low and rumbling, like thunder in advance of lightning, the women’s voices sparkling, high, like the twitter of the birds, and the children added to the twitter of the upper registers of sound.

Nize is…

Rize is…

“Nice music,” I said.

“Oh, yes, nice music, massa, ain’t it?” Isaac said.

“I’d think it would give them some incentive to keep working, to keep moving. The rhythm of it would push them along.”

“Yes, massa,” Isaac said. “It pushes, yes. And I push them.”

“Isaac, please, I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘massa.’ I find it rather odd.”

“But that is who you are, sir. The massa.”

“I am only my uncle’s nephew.”

“But soon to be a massa.”

“How do you know that? What do you know?”

Perhaps he would have answered me, perhaps not. But at that moment a cry broke past the boundary of sound and the slaves began shouting and throwing up their hands, pointing.

“Excuse me, sir,” Isaac said, and dismounted and waded out into the water where he took charge of the noisy gang that had formed in one corner of the field. A few moments later he returned, followed by an agitated group of men and women holding up a young girl in their arms.

“What is it?” I said. “Is she hurt?”

He took a blanket from the back of saddle and placed it on the ground. The slaves lowered the young woman onto the blanket and gathered around her while she began to writhe and moan.

“Is there something I can do?”

Isaac looked up at me.

“Are you a doctor, young master?”

I shook my head.

“Shouldn’t we take her to the house?”

“The midwife right here. Planting rice alongside her. Keeping watch.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yes, yes, so you just sit there on that horse. Unless you care to ride back to the house by yourself.”

“I will wait,” I said, and leaned forward in the saddle and watched. From my perch I had in fact a better view than if I were standing at the outside of the circle of women. What did I know about life? It was only then did I begin to understand what was happening, as the women attended to their patient, employing cloths from Isaac’s saddlebags and poultices and such they had been carrying along apparently for just such an event as this.

“Oh, Lord!” the writhing woman’s cry went up.

The women around her used their hands on her, muttering, mumbling, chanting.

“Rize is,” I thought I heard. Or were they some other words?

“Gawdamighty!”

“Careful, careful,” Isaac said, looking down at them from his place in the circle of slaves.

“Isaac?” I said, looking down at him from my perch atop the horse.

The woman, eyes shut tight and jaw clenched, and breathing in rhythm as the others raised the hem of her raggedy field dress to reveal a brown belly swollen beyond any limit I had ever imagined, her lighter-shaded legs spread wide to reveal an orifice darkening like the track of a slice into one of our Marzy’s red cakes and opening wider than any I had ever dreamed.

For a moment, the air went out of me and I clung to the horses’ mane, fearing that I might fall. When I recovered to myself, I sat silently, watching, listening. Minutes went by, possibly more than minutes. The woman writhed on the ground in the center of the circle of women, breathing hard, breathing hard, breathing hard, and then resting, resting, and then breathing again, breathing again. She moved her lips, and I heard sounds, but it didn’t seem as though the sounds I heard came from those lips.

Baby come soon,

Git a name…

“An’ breathe…” A woman called up to the trees.

“An’ breathe…”

Isaac stood at the edge of the circle, watching me, watching the trees, rarely glancing down at the woman in the center.

“What’s her name?” I called to him.

He shook his head and gave me a look of great contempt.

“Lucy’s Delilah,” he said, almost as though he were spitting on the ground.

I ignored his disrespect, merely nodded, glanced up at the sun, and looked back to the circle.

Baby come soon…

One woman had applied a cloth to the laboring woman’s forehead, another rubbed her feet, while a third held her hand and breathed along with her.

Aha, aha, aha, aha, aha…

Over and over.

After a while, I dismounted and held the reins, but when a scream went up from the circle I let them drop and rushed to the crowd. Isaac stepped in front of me.

“That horse going to wander,” he told me.

“Of course,” I said, turning back to pick up the reins. Something moved in the tall weeds at the side of the trail—a long green snake I rushed to catch a further glimpse of. Behind me a hush fell upon the crowd and I could hear creatures—birds—singing in the trees at the edge of the clearing. It made me dizzy to look up at the clear blue of the sky, almost as if I were about to fall—somehow, suddenly—upwards, losing all of my weight and gravity that held me upright on the ground.

The horse gave a snort, recalling me to my purpose, and I strode after it, about ten paces along the trail before I tried for the reins.

“Ho, Promise,” I said. “Come here, Promise.”

And finally I caught him.

At that moment a cry of triumph went up from the crowd down the trail and I turned to see one of the older women holding aloft a small pale bundle, which at first I thought were wrappings or bandages used in the birth.

Coming back up the trail alongside Isaac, I said, “It’s not African, it’s white.”

“It will darken, don’t you worry,” he replied.

With some difficulty I remounted.

“I’ll fetch the carriage,” I said.

“A wagon will do,” Isaac said. “Yes, you go on, ride back and send a wagon.”

The woman cried out again, and a second small bundle appeared over the heads of the women.

“A twin!” I said.

“The afterbirth,” Isaac said to me. “We keep that dry now, and bury it later. There’s a ceremony.” He turned a hand palm up. “Massa? Will you ride?”

And so I obeyed the order of the slave-overseer and turned my horse back toward the house.

Except it did not want to go in that direction. A few yards down the road the animal took a turn much against my will, for though I yanked the reins and kicked the beast’s sides it walked onto a side trail and despite my protestations and threats—“Turn, Promise! Come on you beast! Promise, I’m going to whip you!”—carried me through the trees where low-hanging moss brushed my head and shoulders, and at one point a vine I took to be a snake nearly frightened me to death before we emerged into a clearing at the side of the wide creek, just behind the brickyard.

A group of about six male slaves labored at the side of the building, hauling finished bricks to make a stack of them at the end of a small wooden pier built out into the water where the sloop from Charleston would arrive at some point, sooner than later I had to assume from their urgency, to take the shipment away.

Some of the men looked up at me as we approached, and one of them waved—the foreman, I supposed, from the way that he kept his head a little higher than the rest.

“Yes, sir?” he called to me.

“No matter,” I returned his greeting and sat a while atop my horse as though this were what I had come for, to study the work of these men forced into labor, instead of being carried along by the beast with its own will.

Unlike the slaves in the rice field, they stood to face the heat of the day. The sweat that ran down their necks and backs might have watered all the rice, so copiously it streamed. I watched in fascination as they mixed their compound for the bricks and added the straw to hold the finished block together, and then lay them on a large rectangular pallet with handles on both sides which took four of them to lift—making a sharp cry in unison that made my horse start—and guide onto the space they had set aside for the drying.

“Now—hush!”

And raised it to the pallet.

“Now—push!”

And carry the pallet over.

Then, as if he had been waiting to witness this display, my horse turned and began walking me back through the trees, putting the brickyard far behind us as we joined the main trail.

Isaac had already been back to the house and passed us on the trail coming the other way, seated up on a wagon.

“You awful slow, massa!” he called to me as we passed in the dust.

I knew that, I knew that. There were things here I had never imagined going on in ways I never could have suspected, which feelings were heightened for me all the more when I considered that this child whose birth I had witnessed had come into the world as a piece of chattel.