Song of Slaves in the Desert (15 page)

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooohgh! The feeling! I have been away from these shores for so long! The people carried their bodies here, they carried their blood in their veins, they carried their memories of the past life in the forest and deserts, along the seashores and up the rivers. They carried me, too! Oooooh, yeah!

I came with them. Because without me, what are they? Sacks of skin, stalks of bones, hearts and livers breathing, fluids flowing? Ooooh, yeah! But I am what lies behind the eyes, I am what lurks in the part behind the dreaming! I am the bigger thing than anything they know! I am what seizes the heart when love comes, and makes life seem so sweet! Even when it grinds the bones and sears the flesh! I am the I am, and that is nothing to sneeze at, if that is what you say when you want to say how surprised you are at the turns life takes, the zigzag of it all! I am here, I was there, and am there, too, but here now also, and in the laughing in the lungs, in the moisture in the mucus in the lungs and in the dreaming part too, daydream and night-journey, all in the all, oh, do say you love me, is all you have to do and I am yours and you are mine!

My mother had just appeared to me in a dream when early the next morning I was awakened by a knock at the bedroom door. I roused myself to answer the knock and found the slave Liza standing there, posed in a not very submissive way, hands on her hips, an almost scolding pout to her lips.

“Time for the Sabbath ride, massa,” she said and seemed about to say something more when my aunt called her name from down the hall and she turned and without a word to me walked away.

As it happened, I had no time at all to linger. Drugged by the country air, I suppose, I had overslept, and the family was waiting for me downstairs, where I hurriedly appeared, my face dripping from the fresh water I had splashed on myself, my stomach an empty knot.

“Please, massa,” Precious Sally said, handing me a mug of coffee as we went out the door. I scarcely had time to thank her as we went out the door.

“I am sorry if I make us late,” I said to my uncle and aunt. “I have not slept this long since I was a child.”

“No matter, sir,” my uncle said, raising a beefy hand toward the carriage where Isaac stood, holding the horse’s reins. “We always give ourselves plenty of time before the service, coming as we do from afar.”

“Do many other Jewish families live on plantations?” I said as we climbed into the carriage. I sat up front with Jonathan while his parents and young son and wife sat behind us, squeezed together like chattel on the way to market. (Yes, the thought did occur to me!)

“A few,” my uncle said, “though most live in town. The town is better for business, of course. We had a business there when we first arrived here.”

“The import and export?” I said, mentioning the only business I knew really well.

“Import, yes, export, some,” he said as Jonathan flicked his whip and the horse pulled us away from the house. “We had shares in some ships bringing Africans to Charleston. This produced enough money for us to buy the plantation and our own force of Africans.”

I did not know what to say, speaking about slaves.

“They seem a healthy bunch,” I finally let out, my thoughts called back to Liza in my doorway earlier that morning.

“Either them or their parents tested by the passage and by nearly a month in the Pest House,” my cousin said. “And looked after by the doctor.”

“The Pest House?” I said.

“The quarantine that separates the living from the dead.”

“Don’t be disgusting,” Rebecca said. “I hate it when you sink so low as to speak in that manner.”

“It’s the truth,” my cousin said to his wife. “Don’t you like to know the truth?”

“Not that truth,” she said, and turned her face away from husband. “Do
you
know what is the truth? Can you look the truth in the eye? You may not want to.”

“Children,” my uncle said. We all hushed up, and Rebecca began to hum a tune.

The horse pushed along. Soon country yielded to city and within what seemed like a few minutes we turned the corner at Coming Street and pulled up before the same trim stone building I had seen on my little tour upon arrival.

We stepped down and a smiling black man took charge of the carriage while we climbed the steps, my uncle and aunt and cousins greeting others who entered along with us.

Here something strange began. At home, where my father and I attended synagogue together on the Sabbath—a custom honored more in the breach than in practice after my mother died—I took certain things for granted: such as prayers in Hebrew from a thick old-perfumed book, which I had not made much of an effort to learn, even though prodded by my tutor Halevi; and the separation of the sexes, the women up in the balcony, the men below; and the cantor singing whiny and sinuous melodies that echoed of the exotic East. Here I was handed a slim pamphlet that smelled more of new ink than old hands as my uncle, after easing his bulk onto one of the benches to the rear of the hall, bade us all sit together, wife and daughter-in-law and son and nephew alike. (I had the mixed pleasure of being squeezed in between Rebecca and Abraham.)

The choir commenced to sing a prayer in English, with the same melody as Rebecca had hummed over the noise of the carriage on our way to town. The congregation sang, muttered, mumbled, chanted, swallowed the words.

Next a trim man in a dark suit mounted the dais and said a prayer about harmony and peace.

I raised my chin in a question and Rebecca said to me in a whisper, “The Officiating Minister.”

“No rabbi?” I whispered back.

“We are Reformed, and newly so,” said Rebecca.

I gave a shrug as a hymn in Hebrew rang through the hall, and then a version in English. Instead of following the words in the pamphlet, I gazed around the place, enjoying the morning light that flowed in from the high stained glass windows. I took note of white-haired men and women in beautiful lace shawls, fidgeting children, and some girls and fellows my age. There was one girl, in fact, who turned her dark eyes toward me as I glanced at her and then we both looked away. When I looked back, she was staring at the stained glass window, as if the study of it might yield some fascinating information.

“Ah,” Rebecca said in a whisper.

“Yes?” I said.

“What?” Abraham said.

“Someone for you?” Rebecca said.

“For me?” I said.

“Her name is Anna,” she said. “She is my second cousin.”

“Who is?” I said.

“You know exactly whom I am talking about.” And despite the seriousness of the service and the music, she puckered her lips and laughed at me through them.

I looked down at the pamphlet, turned pages and then looked at the front again at the Articles of Faith of Reformed Society of Israelites, giving myself a way to forget my immediate embarrassment. Ten of them! I didn’t know that I could articulate more than one. But here I read these carefully while the service continued on around me, as though I needed nothing more than these first articles to survive in the moment.

I. I believe with a perfect faith, that God Almighty (blessed be his name!) is the Creator and Governor of all creation; and that he alone has made, does make, and will make all things.

II. I believe with a perfect faith, that the Creator (blessed be his name!) is the only ONE IN UNITY; to which there is no resemblance; that He alone has been, is, and will be God.

III. I believe with a perfect faith, that the Creator (blessed be his name!) is not corporeal, nor to be comprehended by any understanding capable of comprehending only what is corporeal; and that there is nothing like him in the universe…

I looked up and caught that girl looking over at me, and I looked back at the pamphlet while all around rose the sound of voices gathered in prayer.

IV. I believe with a perfect faith, that the Creator (blessed be his name!) is the only true object of adoration, and that no other being whatsoever ought to be worshipped…

One more article, I said to myself, and I’ll look at her again.

Which I did.

Our eyes met and she might have smiled as I looked quickly away.

V. I believe with a perfect faith, that the laws of God, as delivered by Moses in the ten commandments, are the only true foundations of piety towards the Almighty and of morality among men…

One more, I told myself. But then I looked up again.

“I saw you,” Rebecca said again in a whisper.

I didn’t dare look at the girl again, and so turned back to my reading. Voices rose around me, louder now.

Hear O Israel,

The Lord our God,

The Lord is One…

Yes, well, now this was familiar, and as the prayers rolled on I longed heartily to be back in my old room, with the airs of Marzy’s cooking drifting up the stairwell and Father humming while he clenched his pipe in his teeth and outside my window a New York robin might be singing to announce that spring was near.

I believe with a perfect faith…oh, what did I believe, outside of these memories that drew up such desire in me? What perfect faith did I possess that I could listen with perfect attention as the Officiating Minister read from the Torah—

“Now after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel…”

I believed…I believed…that I was hungry, and that that I was tired of all this talk about Africans in the family’s possession, and I hoped to complete this family chore down here as quickly as I could so that I could return to Manhattan and leave for my tour and then return a year later to join my father in his business and to pay a visit to dear Miriam’s house and speak to her father and ask for her hand in marriage, and enjoy our engagement and then the wedding, in the synagogue, with flowers and music and a honeymoon out on Long Island in the warm season, where birds sang and the gentle waves of the Sound lapped at the shoreline and we were free of all of life’s calls and demands, at least for a time.

“…as we made our own way,” the Minister was saying, “a generation ago, or two, most of us, crossing the water from the Carib islands or from the Old Country…our fathers’ fathers’…”

Our fathers’ fathers’? I knew little of the past, understanding only that my father’s grandfather, Isaac Pereira, had emigrated from Amsterdam, arriving in his new Carib island just about the time the Dutch had departed from New York and the English had taken over. With nothing in his hand except a small satchel of clothing and nothing in his pockets except a few gold pieces and a gold timepiece given to him by his father, he had come to take over a farm given over to him as part of an Old World debt. His sons took brides from Amsterdam. My father, Samuel, was born just before the successful colonial uprising against the English in America (and his older half-brother, my large uncle, just before, and a third brother, who stayed behind on the island while my father and uncle emigrated to the former English colonies up north). My father made his way to New York while his brother hurried to Carolina to make his fortune in farming. My father married my dear (alas, late) mother Margarita Monsanto, some time after the British returned to burn our new capital of Washington. Or such is how I understood all this.

A snort! A burst of air distracted me from my wandering thoughts. I looked over at my uncle, his eyes closed, apparently asleep and ready to tilt over in my direction at any moment.

He opened his eyes even as I regarded him, touching a finger to his nose, and closing his eyes again. My uncle at prayer. Massive but quiet, contemplative, near-sleep. Halevi had insisted to me during my instruction with him in our religion that we Jews prayed by saying our prayers, that is, saying the words which in themselves were near-magical. Yet prayers had never caught on for me, for one reason or another, undoubtedly my own lack. My uncle appeared to suffer from the same lack of ties to the traditions of our so-called tribe. He scarcely repeated a word from the service, listing one way or the other as sleep kept him in that perpetual tilt.

What sort of a Jew was he? For that matter, what sort of a Jew was I? Neither of us seemed to have more affiliation with our religion than we did with family, blood relations. Strange it seemed to me that Christians, as much as I knew them, had actual principles and beliefs—the pact each made with their Jesus to accept him as their savior. What did I have? A vague feeling of association with others like me, most of whom seemed familiar in their lack of fervor and their sense of tribal life without necessarily believing in any supernatural being such as God. These Reformed Jews certainly seemed to me to be further along in the dissolution of our religion than most of us who did nothing but pay lip-service at ceremonies such as this only a few times a year.

More noise burst from my uncle’s nose and lips, not a song but the last gasps of a snore.

I took the time to study his face, the way, as Halevi had once explained to me in one of our lessons about art, a sculptor might study a stone. Chip away at the extraneous and you would find my father’s features in my uncle, and then add some slabs of flesh and let thicken, and you would have my uncle. Staring at this relative whom I had only recently discovered, I felt a certain longing for my home and, yes, my father, and my mind ranged toward him, the man who had engendered me.

Behold what my father had accomplished—built a trading house, and constructed the very stone edifice in which I was born, a marble structure on the west side of Fifth Avenue, looking carved and polished where it stood between two larger Protestant brick palaces. A pair of stone lions guarded the entrance. A ten-foot-high wooden door nearly a foot thick provided entry, if you were permitted it. Once admitted, you found yourself in a foyer that led on one side to a large sitting room and on the other to a dining room with a grand twelve-foot ceiling and room enough to feed the crew of a sea-going trading vessel. This would one day become mine.

“Cousin Nate?”

But there I was, dreaming of home when the service ended, and Rebecca, with an inclination of her head, bid me to slip out of the bench and allow her to step into the aisle. I stuffed the pamphlet into my coat pocket and did as I needed to do.

“Come now,” she said, taking me by the arm, and before I could protest she led me up the aisle to the very girl I had been staring at.

Anna?

“Cousin Anna,” she said, “how lovely to see you.”

The girl, standing with two elderly folk I took to be her grandparents, smiled sweetly at Rebecca, and I followed her eyes as she took note of Rebecca’s prominent belly and then raised her gaze to meet my own.

“Good morning,” she said, as though we had met a dozen years before and every now and then made our re-acquaintance.

“Good morning,” I said, wondering if her nerves felt as hot as my own. I was sure I showed red in my face and pretended to be searching for something up in the stained glass of the windows.