Song of Slaves in the Desert (22 page)

“Yes, they are human,” Jonathan said, as if he were talking to himself and himself alone.

“Jonathan, what are you saying?” I could hear the anger in Rebecca’s voice.

“Nothing, I am saying nothing. Ignore me, Rebecca. I was speaking loosely.”

“Many hold the same view,” said my uncle. “Just as they think that way of us.”

“Yes, Jonathan,” Rebecca said, “do you wish others to think of you in this fashion?”

“Frankly, I don’t care what others think. As long as I am free.” He glanced over at me, catching me in my fascination with all this going on before me. “What do you think, Cousin?”

“About what?”

“What do you think about slaves? Are they human? Or are they another species? Or perhaps even akin to inert articles, such as furniture. I could, if I like, sit upon a slave and he would not complain as I am his master.” Deep in his throat he made a sound, something like a laugh, but slightly more sinister, as if since knowing that no one else would find his comments comical that he would have to laugh all on his own.

“Jonathan!” Rebecca stood up from the table.

“Please sit, darling,” Jonathan said. “We are having an interesting discussion.”

He gestured, and she slowly seated herself again. “Cuz?”

“I don’t know enough about slaves,” I said. “From a distance, they appear to be perfectly human.”

“Or imperfectly,” my uncle said.

“Yes,” I said in agreement. “No better, no worse, than the rest of us.”

“Just unlucky at birth?” My cousin seemed almost to be taunting me.

“As you say, no more and no less than other people.”

“But other people are not slaves,” said Jonathan.

“Jonathan,” Rebecca said, “other people might say the same of us.”

“That Jews are not lucky or that Jews are not human?”

“We once were born slaves and now we are free,” Rebecca said. “It proves to me that those born black slaves may one day gain their freedom.”

“Easy to say for someone who grew up in town,” Jonathan said. “But where would our plantation be without their labor?”

“Then there should be no plantation,” Rebecca said. “What do you think, Anna?” she asked of her cousin.

Anna looked at me, of all people, as if I might give her direction. But I said nothing.

“Children,” our host’s wife said, “don’t quarrel. It is not good for the married life.” She then turned to her son and asked about recent events in Columbia.

Rebecca’s brother talked about the Jews in the legislature and how much the Gentile members depended on them.

“Because we defend our way of life here,” he said. “And we were once slaves ourselves…”

“More evidence for the peculiar,” Rebecca said.

“Why do you talk that way?” Her mother shook her head. “It is a miracle, Rebecca, that you found a man as good as Jonathan, when you talk like such a…a…”

“Sport?” I said.

“Sport? And what is that?”

“A changeling,” I said. “Rebecca’s ideas are ahead of her time. Ahead of our time.”

“She is a bold girl,” Jonathan said, “and I admire her.”

“Thank you, my darling,” Rebecca said.

Now, dear Miriam, I have to tell you that two strange things occurred during the course of this visit, neither of which I have yet described. The first such thing happened after I asked where I might wash up before leaving for our drive back to The Oaks and Rebecca directed me to a water closet toward the rear of the house.

“Can you find your way back, Cousin?” she said, rather playfully.

“I believe I can,” I said.

She then left me to close the door to the little room. After making my toilet I wandered on my return to the front of the house, passing a small sitting room from which I heard voices.

“You are not feeling well?” A woman spoke, whose voice I did not immediately recognize.

“I cannot go on,” I heard a woman say. This was my cousin Rebecca, speaking in a voice so tormented that I nearly did not recognize it. Whatever playfulness she might have feigned while speaking to me had disappeared.

“What choice do you have?” This, I now understood, was her cousin Anna.

“None,” Rebecca said.

“That is right,” Anna said.

“I…I spoke to Mother.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said, this is our lot. And I should not complain anymore, it would not be good for my child.”

“The father of whom…”

“Yes?”

“…is the father of whom?”

“You make a joke, Anna, and I wish that I could laugh.”

“I am sorry, Cousin. I do not care to make you feel any worse than you already do. It would not be good for your child.”

“My child…” Rebecca’s voice dropped away, almost to the inaudible. I leaned closer and listened hard.

“I wish that I had no child coming.”

“Rebecca!”

“I do sometimes wish that.”

“Please, please,” her cousin said. “Let us speak of other things.”

Rebecca seemed to recover herself almost at once.

“Do you mean…?”

“Yes, I do.”

“He seems like a gentleman.”

“I do like the way he carries himself.”

“And you would like for him to carry you away to New York?”

Even as I felt myself begin to blush I heard the rustling of skirts and hurried away from the door, thinking back to her walk through the dark on the way to the cabins while continuing on to the front of the house where the rest of the party waited for me. Rebecca and Anna soon returned as well and we made our farewells.

And now I must tell you of the second incident, something that you will find awful and revolting, and so I suggest that you set this letter down and put it aside if you fear being horrified and affronted. I apologize in advance for the awful picture it gives, something that soundly jarred the stillness I mentioned when I first began this missive.

As we were driving along the Battery (for who cannot resist a last turn along this wonderful avenue, with the park of trees on one side and the ocean on the other side of the sea wall), we saw a commotion up ahead. A carriage had just run off the road, apparently because of some fault and distraction of the horse, and sat up on the grass, with the animal, a huge chestnut gelding, now docile in front of it, head bent, nibbling at the local flowers. Just as we approached, the driver, a man dressed all in black with top hat and silvery-white hair down to his shoulders (I instantly recognized him as a man who had boarded our ship in Perth Amboy on our way south) leaped down from his seat, raised his arm high and beat at the horse with his whip.

The animal lifted its head and whinnied in pain.

Whup! Again, the man slashed at the beast across the eyes.

“Dumb!” he cried out. “You, dumb!”

Again he slashed, and the horse whined, and tried to pull away, carriage and all, but the man had grabbed at its traces with his free hand and kept slashing with the other.

From the stoop of a house across the park, where he had been sweeping the pavement, a slave came running, waving his broom and shouting.

“Stop!” Jonathan called out.

At first I thought he meant to shout this to the man beating the horse, but when he called out again I understood that he meant for the slave to halt.

But the black man kept on running, and without a pause, reached the man and horse, and pulled the whip from the man’s hand.

The man reached down for the whip, and the slave shoved him away. As the man stumbled back onto the green the slave rushed to the bewildered horse, taking up his reins and running a hand across his mane.

Which gave the silver-haired man in black time to pick himself up and grab his instrument and advance to the slave, slashing the African across the back of the neck. Still holding the reins of the horse, the slave turned again.

Whup! The whipper slashed again. Blood spurted from the black man’s head, and he dropped the reins and grabbed his hands to his neck.

Whup! The slave staggered, the horse gave a whinny and walked away, leaving the black man to take yet another slash, this time across his hands and face.

“Enough, sir!” shouted my cousin, standing on the carriage box. “Enough!”

The whipper turned, and gave us all a broad smile, showing us his bright teeth, and, seeming to recognize me, making a little bow before turning to give the slave—amazing that the poor wretch still stood upright—one more slash of the whip before the black man fell to his knees, and then fell further, face forward upon the grass.

Another man came running across the green wearing nothing but trousers, a white shirt, and suspenders.

“Dastard!” he called out.

Upon reaching the horse, he took up the reins and looked down at the fallen slave.

“You have done injury to my property! I shall have you in court, sir! Do you understand me?”

The two men began to quarrel, and Jonathan sat down again on the box and coaxed our horse into moving.

“Stop,” I said, “we must stay and assist him.”

“It is not our business,” Jonathan said.

“We are witnesses,” I said, looking back to where the two men stood arguing over the fallen slave—blood gathered about his head—while the horse had taken to nibbling again as the grass. “I know that man.”

“You know him? We will be impugned,” Jonathan said.

“Why?”

“Because we are Jews,” he said.

“We are men first,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” said my cousin, laughing again that same strange laugh as he urged our horse to pick up speed. I myself wanted to race away, oh, I wanted to put all of this strange land behind me. [For a number of reasons, of course, I did not send this letter.]

In the short time I have spent at The Oaks I have learned a number of interesting things about life here, beginning with the hierarchy of the slaves. In the house Black Jack ruled, like a ship’s captain, and Precious Sally, though she had many privileges, stood just below him in rank. Then came Liza, who served my aunt as a personal maid, and attended to such other chores in the house as Black Jack and Precious Sally called upon her to do, which apparently gave her the freedom to move about the house and grounds at all hours. Like members of the family itself, all of them were always present, passing in and out of the rooms, particularly at mealtime, but certainly visible and moving about the house most other times of day.

And it was clear, from the way they carried themselves, that they held positions of authority, even though it was just as apparent that they remained servile to the wishes of my uncle and aunt, and Jonathan and Rebecca, and even young Abraham. They hardly ever spoke, except when spoken to, and never ever raised their voices the way a normal person might, if engaged in a serious conversation with someone about a moment of apparent importance, not even when Abraham raised his.

Although sometimes they found their patience tried.

As when, say, I heard my aunt, who was speaking to Liza while unaware that I was sitting on the veranda reading just outside the door, say to her in a tone usually reserved in our New York society for coachmen speaking to their horses or parents to recalcitrant children.

“Now you know how I like to see this silver?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And do you see your reflection in the knife?”

“Not clearly, ma’am.”

“And should you see your reflection in the candlesticks just as bright as day?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then, girl, polish them again and bring it back to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Or when Abraham rudely shouted down the stairs for his boots, which were somewhere in the house after having been repaired.

“Ma?” he called out.

Black Jack went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to him, that, young massa, his mother had gone out. Abraham sent a curse down the steps suitable more for a grouchy old man than a young boy.

Black Jack demurred, and fetched his boots.

Nor did Black Jack raise his voice when my cousin Jonathan, who, by now I had come to recognize, seemed to vacillate between two temperaments when it came to slaves, burst into the house one afternoon—I was sitting on the veranda, reading reports of the last five years’ rice harvest supplied to me by my uncle—and shouted for the house man.

“You ignorant bastard, that horse has not been watered! I asked you to tell Isaac, did I not?” My cousin slammed something onto the floor—his riding whip or a hat, I couldn’t see, just heard the thwupping noise as it hit—and charged outside again.

“Damned stupid nigger,” he said, catching my eye. “How am I going to run this place one day with nothing but these damned stupid niggers…”

He stomped off toward the barns.

(All the while in this, Black Jack kept his calm. More than that, back inside the house I heard him humming to himself.)

But if the house slaves were treated with a mixture of disdain and the grudging respect born of necessity, the slaves who commanded the field niggers, as my cousin called them, held a place in trust about as high as the house slaves, while the field niggers—and there were eighty or ninety of them, by my uncle’s count—were regarded as something just above the animals.

Thus it was quite strange—though just how strange I did not know until later—when of a Saturday afternoon on the veranda Rebecca gathered her group together for Bible study. She had chosen Black Jack, Precious Sally, the girl Liza, Isaac (whom I took to be Liza’s paramour), and four or five young men who worked the fields.

Some of the house slaves possessed their own Bibles, having once belonged to Gentile families and thus instructed in the Christian way. For those who didn’t have a Bible, Rebecca had copied out the text for discussion, Exodus 3, verses one through five.

She handed these to those who needed them and then said to all of us gathered there:

“Today the subject of our discussion is the story of how the Hebrew people were rescued by God from their bondage in Egypt. Here were the Israelites having been sold into slavery, and their leader Moses is given a sign.” She turned to me and asked if I would like to read.

“Me?” I had rested my eyes on Liza’s sandy brow and so was distracted.

“You are the guest,” she said, handing me a Bible with the place marked.

“Thank you, you are being very kind, Rebecca.”

I glanced at the slaves, who were regarding us as though we were a Saturday afternoon entertainment. Holding the Book before me, I swallowed hard, cleared my throat.

“‘Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far edge of the wilderness and he came to the mountain of God, to Horeb…’”

“Where’s ’at?” one of the field slaves asked another, who shrugged and pretended he was still listening intently.

Rebecca shot him a school-teacherly-like glance, and signaled me to continue my reading.

“‘And a messenger of God appeared to him in a blazing fire from out of a bush. And he looked and behold: A bush was burning but the bush was not consumed. Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this incredible sight. Why does not the bush burn up?” And when God saw that he had turned aside to look God called to him from out of the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And he answered, “Here am I.” And He said, “Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”’”

“Thank you, Cousin,” Rebecca said, taking the Bible from my hand. “Who would like to read next?”

Isaac, his jaw tilted up in a pose of challenge, gave a nod of his dark head.

“Go on,” Rebecca said.

The slave lifted his copy of the Bible and began to read in a clear steady voice with scarcely an error in his pronunciation. My eyes remained on Liza, her near-pale skin and her own blue-green eyes, and my mind began to drift. This was more attention to the Bible than I had given it since I was a boy and tutored by my Halevi. After Isaac finished his passage, Rebecca asked several of the field hands to try, and these were much less agile at their reading.

I was beginning to get bored, when Rebecca interrupted one of the young men, a heavy boy, his skin dark as swamp water in the shade, as he was stumbling about with the page.

“Jacob, do you understand what you’re reading?”

“Yes, missus,” he said.

“Can you explain it to the rest of us?”

“No, missus,” he said.

“Then you don’t truly understand it, do you?”

“It’s a lot of story ’bout freedom,” he said. “But I don’t know no none of it.”

“One day you will.”

“That’s what the Jesus folks say,” one of the other hands spoke up.

“What do they say?” Rebecca asked him.

“They say, we die, and then we free.” He made a loud noise with his lips and everyone smiled in his direction.

“And what do we say?” Rebecca nodded for him to keep speaking.

“Jews say, we free until we die.”

“Life is everything, yes,” Rebecca said.

“And one day…”

The boy spoke up in a manner that I had never heard a slave employ.

“And one day?” Rebecca urged him on.

Now he appeared to be slightly embarrassed by all the attention we were giving him. But he spoke anyway.

“And one day we’ll be free in this life, in this world.”

“And the key to this door?”

The boy smiled, showing a mouth empty except for three or four wooden teeth.

“The Book,” he said.

“The Book, yes,” Rebecca said. “This Book, and all books. Reading will make you free.”

At which point she passed her copy of the book to Liza, who picked up where the darker boy had left off.

“Exodus, thirteen, verses fourteen through sixteen,” Liza announced. “‘And when, in the future,’” she began, “‘your child asks you and says, “What is this happening here?” you shall say to your child [she looked up, and she stared directly at me but neither smiled nor acknowledged me in any other way], “With a strong hand God brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage. When Pharaoh’s [she said “ph-haro” and Rebecca corrected her] heart was hardened against letting us leave, God killed every first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of human to the first-born of beast. Therefore I now sacrifice to God every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first-born among my sons.” And so it shall be for a sign upon your hand and for frontlets between your eyes that with a strong hand God brought us out from Egypt…’”

I watched her all the while she read, noticing the way her lips scarcely moved, and the grace with which she held the Book. It was a remarkable event that I was witness to, the readings by these slaves on the subject of recovering the freedom of a people who had been in chains in Egypt. That it was my own people who had won their freedom charged the reading with seriousness, and that it was part of my family that owned these slaves who were reading about freedom made the event even more remarkable to me. And that I spent most of this hour studying the face and neck and collarbone and slender chest and arms of Liza made it a most memorable event as well.

As the hour ended I said to her as quietly as I could, “My cousin Rebecca has taught you well.”

She gave me a quick smile and said, “I have another teacher, also, a doctor.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to do or say, wondering, wondering, if Liza were
my
slave, would I set her free?