Song of Slaves in the Desert (23 page)

The child Lyaza grew, and the doctor, who had been a fairly young man when she was born, found himself noticing certain signs in his own life that demonstrated to him that he, too, was growing older. As the child turned handsprings in front of Old Dou’s cabin, the doctor heard the noise of his own clacking joints. The child ate the simple meals provided for her by Old Dou and the field hands as though she were more breathing air than taking in food while his own digestion fell on hard times. He lost weight, his stomach growled and sometimes howled. When the girl reached a certain age she was allowed by Old Dou to wander about the house during the day and eat the scraps from the family’s table. Sometimes a guest at that table, the doctor admired the way the girl ate anything Dou or the cook handed to her.

This girl gave off light, life, stars in her eyes!

The doctor, who was married but without issue, felt her as a mild magnetic force. He watched her play, and when he stopped in at Old Dou’s cabin once or twice a month to see how the child was faring, he sometimes watched her with her eyes closed in sleep, dreaming of who knows what kind of freedoms that might set her apart from the daily round of the plantation. At times like this he recalled what when he first saw it he recognized as aberrant behavior, the young master’s baby-babbling over the infant girl. This little thing, wraith-like and so charming, also wandered through his thoughts in idle hours. So innocent she was of her condition, it gave him pause to consider how even a slave might seem to herself somehow free if she was not aware of her own perpetually indentured state. Perhaps all of us live this way, he considered, wrapped in chains and yet thinking ourselves free. And was that a kind of freedom after all, or just an illusion of living without chains?

Free men are often the worst, he decided, noticing with his clinical eye over the course of several months of visits to The Oaks that the plantation owner’s son appeared to have kept his attachment to the slave girl, which by this time the doctor found to be quite bizarre, prowling about the house, trying to look innocent even as he tracked little Lyaza, who often played alongside Dou while the woman worked. Over the course of several years his great interest, in the doctor’s eyes, clearly took an aberrant turn. It seemed to come out of nowhere, though the doctor knew that whatever physical abnormality he might discover in a patient, there was usually a cause buried somewhere deep in the man’s history. Although sometimes, as it might possibly could be with Jonathan Pereira, the illness remained inexplicable. Illness! Thus the doctor named it, based on his observations, but an illness that revealed itself as more spiritual or mental than physical. Here was a man so caught up in the movements and sounds of this child that he seemed no more free than metal splinters in the field of a magnet. Whenever the doctor saw them together Jonathan fluttered about the child in such an embarrassing thrall of attraction that the doctor could only look away, if not leave the room, whenever he saw him at his game.

Just as he had in that moment of her birth, when Jonathan babbled over the girl’s head, “Weety-sweety, sweety-weety…”

Was it that he had happened by accident to have been present at her birth and somehow felt a special link to her?

The doctor considered that as a possibility. But without speaking to Jonathan, always too busy anyway either with work or with his silly prattling over the slave child, he could not say for sure. Who knew what he wanted? That was the doctor’s sense of things at first. Did the young man himself know what he wanted? The odd light in his eye, the slight quavering of his tongue when he opened his mouth to breathe, the hitch in his motion before he approached the girl as if with some purpose before suddenly halting just short of her and turning away to stare at some distant point on the ceiling or through the window—these hints at his state gave the doctor pause. He feared that he knew more about what the man wanted than the man did himself.

And so, against his better judgment as a physician who believed his profession meant observing and deducing, not introducing himself into the situation at hand, whenever he was present he tried to intervene, coming between the girl and the man as best he could without crossing the line into rudeness.

“Perhaps Lyaza would like to show me her doll collection,” he would say, allowing the slave child to lead him to where her makeshift play-toys lay in rows behind the pallet where she slept.

There they would sit and she would babble on about which doll had what name and what her duty was around the plantation.

The owner’s son stood over them, as if on guard.

“Oh, little weety-sweety, sweety-weety, show the doctor your dolls…”

It was embarrassing to hear a grown man behave this way.

“Sweety-weety, little weety-sweety…”

The man, behaving in such foolish fashion, sounded more like someone caught in some net of his own unknown devising—the doctor really had no name he could put on it—than a grown man tending to one of his own properties.

But then who am I to judge?
the doctor said to himself. There appeared to be little harm in all this, just the embarrassing foolishness of it all. Also, he could not stay here and focus on it. Always it came time for the doctor to leave: he had to make his rounds and then return to town for his regular practice. Now and then he would allow himself to consider what Jonathan might be doing in his absence. The child herself, to look at her, enjoyed his attention. The doctor could only hope that all was innocent. And after Jonathan’s wife had a boy child, the doctor decided that that was that was that. The man now had offspring of his own and would tend in the natural direction of raising the boy.

This, however, did not happen, at least not in any way that the doctor could observe. As the girl’s body changed over time and she lurched into adolescence with the beginnings of breasts and jutting hips, she drew all of Jonathan’s visible attention even as his young son cleaved to his mother, estranged, because of his father’s behavior, from the paternal realm. The girl played on, oblivious to the nature of Jonathan’s interest, merely enjoying all the attention he gave her.

Old Dou, who had much earlier recognized his behavior as obsession, tried to stand between them.

This she could do while the girl remained a child. As she grew older, Lyaza found that she had the freedom to run about the grounds and play by herself in various nooks and crannies of the big house and the nearby outbuildings. Old Dou could not keep up with her.

Not so the plantation owner’s son. He ran with the girl, and ran some more, even after his own family duties became, with the birth of his own son, pressing, and even after, when his wife left him and returned home.

“Oh, sweety! Sweety-weety! Wait for me!”

You could hear him calling to the girl as they ran about the back of the house, around the barns and back to the house.

The older Master Pereira had a blind-spot when it came to Jonathan. He wasn’t a bad man, no, not at all. He also did not pay much attention to his family, having given himself over completely to the administering of those who administered his little rice-growing kingdom. He was unusual in that he kept the doctor on call for his family and for the property, which is to say, the slave people. Most plantation owners let the Africans tend to themselves until and unless some injury or illness grew well beyond the point of mere maintenance and repair.

“My watchword,” he declared once or twice over that sherry he and the doctor occasionally drank together, “is health, the health of our rice-farming, the health of our people…”

What did he mean by “people”?
the doctor wondered the first time he heard that.

Did he mean his own family, his co-religionists—the tiniest of minorities in this countryside, though in town a fair number of his “people” congregated on the Sabbath and prayed in the beautiful if sparely decorated synagogue (he had been a guest there and observed its austere façade and interior).

The Jews, the few he knew, always impressed him with their business acumen and their concern for the quality of their wares. The master had grown up in the Caribbean, he explained to the doctor, and while his family had not owned any human goods—he called slaves that—he had observed a number of plantation owners and their operations. And here, in retrospect, as the doctor recalled this conversation in light of the worrisome—because it was worrisome, no matter how much he tried to discount it—behavior of the man’s son, things grew quite interesting.

“My people, you see,” the man said to him, “themselves lived in bondage in Babylon, and so knew the heady stuff of freedom when they achieved it. Unlike the Africans we now own, they did not have to travel far to labor for others with no recompense.”

“Egypt was not far?”

The doctor decided that he would engage the man, whom he normally spoke with only about the medical conditions of family members, and slave retinue. Why should he not? Such interesting views the man had.

“Not in terms of land and landscape. Quite similar to, say, Judea.”

“And so, Babylon the same?”

“Quite the same.”

“Whereas here, in our Carolina, the land differs greatly, yes, I see that. But your further argument?”

“These creatures are adrift,” the master said. “So far from home, they cannot, surely cannot find a moral compass or master the situations in which they find themselves.”

“And so we give them the comfort of food and the vocation of laboring and so bring them a certain order?”

“Well said,” the master said. “Have you been reading the same German authors as me? Von Herder and such?”

“No, no,” the doctor said, “I don’t read many Germans. I am just thinking about what you are thinking, and I decided that this must be your thought.”

“Yes, it is, as you heard, and heard correctly. We do bring this disorderly and dislocated group of people some order and tie them to a place.”

“Yes, sometimes literally tie them,” the doctor said with a laugh.

When at last he walked away from this conversation, which had begun as a discussion about one thing and ended about another, he felt a bit of shame about that laugh.

But then he wasn’t so much concerned about the maintenance of his own soul but focused all of his working energy, and a great deal of his thought, on the health and physical welfare of others. His flaws, and he had some, did he not? (he chided himself for an hour or so about that laugh), seemed few in comparison to all the good he did. Not that he focused much on what he did either. He simply performed his labor as he was trained to perform it, and so kept his patients as healthy as he possibly could. Some, of course, grew sick and died. It was a wise doctor who knew that he could do little to prevent the forward-teetering patient with an ailment well on its way to carrying him off. Mainly he tried to keep the majority of the people he saw—including the slaves—on the path to a balance of work and some comfort, even if, in the case of the slaves, it meant an often explosive few hours just before the Sabbath, the only time they truly had to themselves.

***

All of this—what he probably thought of as his philosophy, though he never called it such—he put into a notebook bound in cow-hide and whose pages he kept from everyone else, even his wife, which, by the time of his first encounter with the Africans on the auction block in town, meant no one. The invisible hand of an illness—the slaves called it The Visitor—swept over the county and his wife had died of it suddenly, one of those patients to whom he could only give comfort rather than aid. Since they had had no children—he was too busy, he convinced himself, delivering other people’s children to have time for another marriage of his own, let alone children—the notebook rested in a drawer in his house in town unnoticed by anyone except for himself, the writer of it.

How many such books,
he wondered aloud,
languished unknown or mostly unread in various desks and cabinets in Charleston alone?
Here might be the hidden history of this difficult time in which he found himself alive, born into a system that educated and rewarded him, and turned others into chattel. He vowed to keep on writing, though no one would read his entries. At least in this way, he decided by his action, he would record his views on the strangeness and oddity of Carolina life, where he lived a variation of the motto of the Frenchman he read who declared that man is born free and lives everywhere in chains.

Some do, in South Carolina,
he wrote,
others do not.
At least others don’t wear visible manacles. The poet William Blake calls them “mind-forg’d” manacles. But he was not writing about actual enslavement. Mental slavery made for fools and foot soldiers. Actual slavery was something else entirely. The way his own throat sometimes tightened as he approached the slave quarters where he practiced his art at the master’s behest gave him pause. He was wearing his own chains, yes, though you could not see them. Yet he had to admit, in an immediate paragraph, that he had freedoms no slave would ever know. The Africans in the early shipments, may have been born free, but all of them would die in chains. Almost entirely because of them, he, who was born into the bondage of a certain way of seeing his life and the life of those around him, might possibly become free.

About such matters he wrote and he wrote and he wrote. Hours would go by in which he bent to his labor of recording the histories—or stories, as he thought of them—of various slaves he had encountered, including, as it turned out, the family of the very child whose welfare he worried about. And he wrote about the owners as well, the good Christian people whom he attended to in town and on their plantations, and of the Jewish master with whom he sometimes had those intense philosophical conversations that made him feel as though he were approaching the very borders of discovery, only to draw back ever so close to the edge of seeing life in new fashion. Medicine goes to the cause of maladies, he decided, when he thought of his particular cast of mind, but not all of them are things we might cure.