Song of Slaves in the Desert (20 page)

Massa sleeps in de feather bed

Nigger sleeps on de floor,

When we’uns go to Heaven,

Dey’ll be no slaves no mo’…

That evening I retired early and while the moon rose outside my window I slipped into sleep on the wings of the fantasy that my father would invest in this enterprise and I would thus set everyone free. As I pursued this line further, imagining myself saying to Liza that now she might linger awhile in the house as a free woman I heard a knocking, a tapping, a rapping.

Was it only a dream? A raven?

I started up in bed at the sound of a door closing—or was it opening?—and wandered into the hall, seeing a shadowy figure a few paces ahead of me, who then descended the back stairs.

I went to the top of the stairs, paused, and then descended.

The door to the back rooms opened, and I pursued the person who had opened it. Not until out under the night sky did I see the figure of my cousin Rebecca like a ghost illuminated by a half-full moon, and that she—worse gods!—was following someone herself.

Her prey—and again I walked a bit too quickly and reduced the distance between both of them and myself to a proximity dangerously close—turned out to be her husband, my cousin Jonathan. Oblivious—or, who knows the truth, utterly uncaring—as to whether or not anyone saw him, and his wife following him and in this rather comic than sinister procession me following both of them, he proceeded in the direction of the cabins. The hour was late, and in the quarters where the slaves resided, in those small structures made of porous timber and mud plastered in the chinks between the crudely carved out boards someone was singing, a song all the more outstanding in its lyric because of the quiet that surrounded all else.

My old missus promise me

Shoo a la a day,

When she die she set me free

Shoo a la a day

Across the small lane that separated the row of cabins another group of men huddled together in harmonies.

Massa sleeps in de feather bed

Nigger sleeps on de floor,

When we’uns go to Heaven,

Dey’ll be no slaves no mo’…

My cousin Jonathan went up to the door of a cabin near the edge of the encampment and without hesitating stepped inside.

His wife, my dear cousin by marriage, Rebecca, who often made this trip herself in daylight to help some of their charges learn to read, stood there a moment, lost in the presumably dark act that her husband had performed—and then, as she turned, turned himself, which meant that I turned, though, because of her hurry to return to the main house—I could hear this in her steps—I turned toward the barn and stepped just inside to allow her to pass me as she made her way to the rear of the house and, presumably, up the back stairs and up to the upper hall where she returned to her room.

I was left, under that half moon, breathing in the rich dung odors of the animals, in the barn, asking myself not only what I had just witnessed but why I had made myself to witness it—but then Rebecca could just as easily ask herself the same questions. The only thing I did not know was how many times before my cousin Jonathan had taken his little journey from the house to the cabins, and just how many times his wife had followed him as witness to what could only be deeds darker than a night in the country without a moon. Neither of them appeared to hesitate in the way that a novice at this business would hesitate.

I stepped out of the barn, about to make my way back to the house, when I saw yet another shadow pass along the path to the cabins. I ducked back inside the entrance of the barn and squinted through the dark, trying to make out whose figure this was walking along, later than even these other late walkers I had been stalking. Imagine my heartbeat when I recognized Liza!

Of a sudden a breeze came up, the fields making a rustling noise, as though some god were breathing across the high grass and small trees. I waited until Liza passed the barn and went on toward the cabins. I followed her almost all the way, until by the light of a fading cook fire, I saw yet someone else appear against the dark. Isaac meet Liza with an embrace, and I watched, until I could see them no more in that same dark.

Lyaa, in the throes of labor, writhed and screamed, calling out names of goddesses and gods, crying for help. Normally, it would have only been Old Dou, the African woman who ran everything for the family as an army sergeant might run a company, to assist but the doctor happened to be making his rounds that day so when he heard the news, he briskly walked to the cabin where she lay suffering that torment women undergo, and then forget, so that the human species can continue on earth.

“That’s a way,” Old Dou said as a foreman might speak to a struggling novice laborer in the fields.

“Take a breath, girl,” the doctor said. “Take a breath, and then push from under your belly and out.”

Old Dou, standing at his side and because she was more round than tall looking up at him as they both lay hands on the laboring woman, spoke quietly, the doctor less so. He was used to taking a forceful role in such medical matters as childbirth—the people he treated appreciated a physician with a firm hand.

“She don’t understand you,” Old Dou said. “Even I talk to her sometimes she don’t understand me. Look at her eyes.”

“She’s in a state,” the doctor said.

“She been this way ever since she arrived. It happens to folks on the passage, they just lose their minds, sail right past them, is how I see it, and they never be good anymore. Except, like she is, good enough to give up a new baby to the world.”

“Not just yet…” He raised the woman’s skirt and took a clinical look at the widening divide between her legs.

“Soon,” Old Dou said, and she began to weep.

She shocked the doctor with this show of emotion.

“What is wrong with you, Dou?” he said.

“I see one coming, but I see one going, too,” the woman said.

“I do not see any sign of trouble,” the doctor said.

“Only because you can’t see it,” Old Dou said.

“What do you see?” The doctor kept his eye on the patient, listening to her breathing along with the cries and shouts of pain.

“One coming—see?”

The infant’s head began to breech.

“Here we go,” the doctor said, preparing to reach for the child and help it arrive.

“But look,” Old Dou said, meaning, look at the woman’s face, notice the sudden decrease of breath, feel the decrease in the blood-pulse at her wrists and neck. “Going, going.”

“All right,” the doctor said. “Here, you have done this many times before, you take the child.” He saw it now as a question of pacing, the child rising into the world as the mother sank into the dark clouds beneath which awaited her death.

“All too young,” he said.

“Oh, she’s old,” Dou said. “That passage, it makes you old. Either it kills you or you live a long while.”

“She came through alive,” the doctor said.

“Naw, naw,” Old Dou said, bold and brave and wise enough to know when she knew more than this medical man of the modern world who had trained at the best college in the world. “The death begin on the passage in her mother’s womb, and it’s just finishing with her now. That’s where death is, death is in life, nowhere else.”

“Hush a moment,” said the doctor, “we need to pay close attention.”

Here came the child! Coughing, and then crying, breathing into this new world!

The doctor wanted to laugh, but, as he watched the mother sink, he also wanted to cry—and his training prevented him from doing either. This young woman who had survived the ocean passage, now she set out on another journey, crossing over from this world to wherever it is, if anywhere, we go when we die. These slave women broke his heart, and challenged his ability to believe that everything had a practical answer. They gave birth, and then they died, more, so many more, than other—which is to say, white—women. Was it simply the brutal nature of their lives? Or were they cursed? And if so, why? Why them? Why them?

He was deep in a mood, mulling all this over while wrapping the body as Old Dou cuddled the newborn, when into the cabin stepped the plantation owner’s son.

“I…was overseeing some work in the barns and I heard about the screams,” Jonathan said. He did not give a second glance to the corpse of the mother covered with a sheet but rather walked directly up to the newborn child.

“You are a sweety little thing,” he said in a made-up high-pitched voice. “Sweety-weety, yes, you are, so sweet and weety, weety and sweet.”

The doctor had never much liked Jonathan, but as he watched the man coo and coo over the new-born he wondered if he might be mistaken about the young master.

“Sweety-weety, weety-sweety,” Jonathan went on. On and on and on, until Old Dou wrapped the child in a cloth and carried her out the door.

Jonathan followed.

“Sweety-weety,” he said in that same high-pitched voice, “weety-sweety…”

The doctor had never seen this man, or any man, behave with such silliness, or was it madness or devotion over a child not his own. At first it cheered the doctor and then made him sick to his stomach as he wondered what good—or evil—would come of this.

***

A little girl, and they called her Lyaza. Her mother left her the imprint of her beautiful face, dark eyes just the right distance apart, perfect lips, the nose a masterpiece in shape and form, all of this the color of sand on that ocean beach from which she first departed her native continent.

The doctor, who would become a strong presence in Lyaza’s life, and in her own child’s life as the years passed, checked her over, beyond the perfect face—looking to the functions of her various parts as best he could surmise, breathing, the flow of her blood, digestion and evacuation, liveliness and laughter.

“Well, Old Dou,” he said, “Lyaza’s a strong and pretty baby, and though it’s going to take time for the family to recover its investment, this one is going to give back much more than her mother could. The mother, being…” His voice trailed off, and he tapped a finger to his forehead.

Old Dou nodded, but she did not smile. It was one thing to belong to someone, and to have to show obedience to any of all of these white people. It was another to give in to any emotion that might suggest you were happy about any of it. Smiling, jokes, singing, dancing, all that belonged to the private lives of the slave cohort on this plantation, and you might figure on all plantations. Here, at least [the only place I know about in an intimate way, having heard these stories from my mother year after year after year], the Africans tried to live lives like any other people, when they took to themselves. And of course the sound of that happiness—the singing, shouting, joking, dancing—sometimes broke out into the air for anyone in the big house or anyone passing by to hear. Faces that might be downcast in the big house often bloomed like flowers in the privacy of the quarters. Charged with energy, limbs that dragged in the fields stepped lively and hopped and kicked to celebrate the vitality of the life-blood flowing through them. Song came later, after the girl, taken in by Old Dou, joined in the music, in her simple way, so that the old house slave cooed and hummed and sang for her as she often did, especially in the early days of her growing years.

The doctor enjoyed that side of the African woman. If he found himself a little too stiff to allow his soul to sing along with the music the slaves made, still he knew it was a good thing they did. The other side of Old Dou gave him pause. The woman who gathered herbs to treat people in the cabins, who threw chicken bones on a mat and read news in them about the future, a time which, invariably, she surmised would be worse than things were now, the woman who looked up at clouds and saw wispy signs in the air, in other words, the woman whose mind and soul belonged to Old Africa rather than to the rational ways he hoped would make up the future of the country they both lived in, this woman made for doubts in his mind. A physician, trained in Massachusetts, who returned to his native grounds after the cold winters of the north began to seep into his bones, the doctor took her to be a competent if overly mystical house slave worthy enough to be trusted with the family’s treasured belongings, and discreet enough to keep her countenance cool if not indifferent when the usual flows and ebbs of family life in the big house sometimes rose to the level of distress and disarray. It wasn’t the Hebrew aspect of the family’s nature that intrigued him. Up north he had met and sometimes befriended people of this persuasion when called upon to practice his profession. No, at this point, even after the son’s odd tweety-weety performance in the presence of the newborn, it wasn’t yet any of the family—Pereira or his wife and child—who gave him pause for reflection. Old Dou was the one person in the household who most intrigued him, because of her consistent calm and her demonstrations of competence and control. It made him wonder about the nature of the Africans themselves, that this grand woman should have emerged from the raucous, sometimes lazy, always scheming cohort of her brethren, who, as he saw it then, had allowed themselves to be taken as slaves and shipped here to the country that freedom had founded.

His stay in New England had informed him a great deal on these questions. Here in Carolina, where his own forebears went back enough generations to put them at least a hundred years before the war for independence, there was never any question that it was commerce above and beneath all else, on which the well-being and satisfaction of society was built. All of his people had owned large plantations or ships or warehouses for storing what came in on the ships, and as a family over the generations they had amassed a fine legacy of land and houses and animals and human property.

He was one of the few male members of his family who had decided that such commerce was not his fate (while the women, whose destiny was to enjoy the fruits of all the great commerce by practicing the arts of music or drawing or sewing or even poetry, never questioned it). His father expressed his disappointment upon hearing that one of his sons, the one, in fact, in whom he saw the greatest potential for working in the world of commerce, would choose to take up the art of medicine, but since it was, unlike the music or drawing and the other things the women practiced, an important art he acquiesced in his son’s choice of a future. But the man did understand why his son might choose to take another path in life. The buying and selling of the numerous bodies of Africans, for example, one of the aspects of his business, had over the years driven him deeper and deeper into an understanding of the human soul that caused him to question his own life and the life of his business. He had read on the question of human nature as presented by various philosophers—he was not at all an uneducated man and had, in fact, attended the same New England school where his wayward son, as he liked to think of the physician, had gone to medical college—and he had read and studied in the area of theology, which was one of the reasons he found church on Sunday so boring, always comparing the priests to those deep and profound thinkers on the subjects to whose level they hardly ever seemed capable of reaching themselves. The paradox of freedom remained the question at the heart of the matter. He accepted God and his laws, and yet he never could get over the problem that allowed for a man to make his own way in the world and still accept that he remained a creature whose every step was preordained by his Lord.

Praise God! Praise the Lord! That was a mouthful, but necessary to set down on paper.

And furthermore: most of his family was too obtuse to appreciate the fineness of such a problem, but his physician son was one with whom he could speak, and speak freely, especially after the doctor had finished his schooling. There had been a slave revolt in a small plantation to the south of Charleston, an incident in which the slaves had turned on the master and his family, killed them, and burned the house and all the barns and killed the animals before fleeing into the woods where, eventually, starving and afraid, they had been found by a large cohort of militia and unofficial outliers who brought them back to the home county seat where they were quickly tried and every one of them, mostly men, but also a few women, hanged.

An isolated incident, but nonetheless the old patriarch talked about it with his physician son, asking him aloud what he had been asking himself in the quiet of his own mind, which was how the Africans could have allowed themselves to be taken into captivity in the first place—it just was not in his nature to understand this kind of submission—and how once indentured here in Carolina they could translate the question of how to achieve their freedom, if that was what they were seeking, into the brutalities of murder and destruction.

“After all the years of reading and studying I have done on the question,” the father said to the doctor, “I can only conclude that men may be born free but that these Africans are not true men. Science has shown us, how they not only live closer to the animal but their brains are not at as high a stage as our own. You, son, have looked at human brains and at animal brains over the course of your schooling. Surely you have seen the difference?”

“And what if, father,” the doctor said in what was one of their final discussions on the subject, before some agent in his father’s blood turned sour and weakened the nature of his body’s life-giving fluid, “I can tell you that I have never discerned a single important difference between the Caucasian brain and the African brain? What if I told you that?”

The doctor’s father smiled—he had the most charming smile, as his wife, the doctor’s mother, and several other women over his lifetime, would attest—and his son knew that their discussion was about to end. The man’s smile always announced his decision to conclude whatever matter was at hand.

“Based on all that I know,” he said, “that is, adding my experience on to what I have read in philosophy, I can only say that you have not looked hard enough, son. As to the act of observation itself it may be that just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder so does the possibility of freedom.”

“Father, are you saying these people were born to become slaves rather than free men?”