Song of Slaves in the Desert (24 page)

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For instance, the behavior of the master’s son. It grew more intense as the years passed, and the man took more liberties of time with the slave girl at the expense of his family. Old Dou told him that on trips to town he would search out small gifts for her, and when his wife found one of these hidden among his clothing wrapped in fine paper and packed into a box—this was a silk scarf made somewhere in the Orient, not something that any slave child, however adored, might imagine would become one of her own possessions—he became angry with her for spying on him. Word got around. Everyone in the congregation in Charleston heard about it. How this wife, his first, the dutiful docile daughter of distant Caribbean cousins, said nothing, until one day, finding herself at the edge of a fine despair, she asked the slave woman who kept their house for them to accompany her on a trip to town where, using money she had apparently been saving over the years, she purchased a place on a ship sailing for the island where she was born and departed. Once she had reached her birth home she wrote a letter to her husband in which she recorded the extreme suffering she had known because of his obsession and vowed never to return.

Jonathan seemed hardly to notice, his obsession having taken on proportions that finally made it difficult to go unremarked by his father.

“Dear boy,” the old man said, “you must not neglect our Abraham now that his mother has departed.”

But before he could raise the question of his son’s attention to the slave girl Jonathan spoke up.

“Father, please excuse me. I am going to town.”

He abruptly left the room, drove the carriage to town, and returned the next morning to announce that he and Rebecca, the daughter of family friends, were engaged and soon to be married. This was his way of declaring the matter closed, even before anyone could open it further. As he explained it to his new young wife his affection for the slaves was deep and complicated by the history of their own people who once were slaves themselves. He encouraged Rebecca in the education plans she made for the slaves even as he continued to proclaim in his actions his odd and obsessive feelings about Lyaza.

The doctor wrote about all this in his notebook, including how, on one morning, after being informed by the slave named Isaac that Old Dou lay in her cabin, dreadfully ill, he went to seek her out and found the girl weeping at the bedside of the older African woman while Jonathan hovered in a corner of the room.

“She very sick,” the girl said.

“Help her,” Jonathan said to the doctor.

“I will do all I can,” the doctor said.

“I hope so,” Jonathan said, though the look in his eye, a truly odd gleam that reminded the doctor of madmen he had treated while in his school days, seemed to say otherwise.

The girl appeared to be more immediately distraught, weeping, moaning at the bedside.

“Please take her out of here,” the doctor said to Jonathan, wanting them both to leave so that he might try to treat the old woman.

For that, he never forgave himself, although what happened next surely was inevitable, given the circumstances.

Jonathan took the wailing girl by the hand and led her out of the cabin and off into the fields.

“You sweety,” he said, “I will help you.”

The girl protested, looking at him as if she had never seen him before.

“Tweety-sweety,” he said.

“Stop!” she said to him.

He swatted her with the back of his hand, bullying her the way a man might bully his dog or his horse, and dragged her by the hand further away into the surrounding woods. When they reached a shaded glade off to one side of one of the cultivated fields and he drew her close to him she was whimpering like an injured animal.

“Sweety,” he said, “no crying now, no crying.”

She went limp in his arms, and he lowered her to the ground and without any hesitation stripped off her clothing and had his way with her.

As simply as that, all the years of his apparently confused adoration and hovering protection of the girl came down to this. When he had finished, he wiped himself with her skirt and tossed the rest of her clothing at her.

“Get dressed,” he said. “I have an appointment in town.”

He left her lying there, not looking back even once as he walked away across the fields.

For a while the girl lay there, mourning for herself. The young master had been rough with her and she was bleeding in a way that she had never bled before. This frightened her terribly, and so she pulled on her clothes and walked back toward the cabin. No sign of the man in the fields ahead of her, but she caught sight of a slave boy she knew and sat down in the field out of his sight until he passed by. When she returned to the cabin Old Dou lay where she had left her, breathing harder than ever before.

“Doctor,” she said.

The doctor looked her over, noticed bloodstains on her dress.

“What happened to you? Are you all right?”

“I all right,” the girl said. “Mama Dou?” (That was what she called the old African woman.)

Old Dou did not reply, merely lay there breathing so hard that Lyaza feared she might begin to cough or spit up flesh from within her chest. Her own pain and turmoil seemed like nothing alongside this.

“Can you sit here with her?” the doctor said. “I have made her as comfortable as I could.”

“Yes, massa,” Lyaza said.

“I will return in the morning,” the doctor said (worrying, without saying anything about it, that the old African woman might not last the night).

Lyaza sat beside Old Dou’s pallet while the woman laboriously took in air and pushed it out as noisily as an ungreased carriage wheel. The next two hours went by slowly. All her short life the girl had known this woman as her caretaker and the mother she never had. “You a new girl,” Old Dou always said to her. “New girl from the Carolina.” Dou told her the story of her birth, complete with the tale of the passage, but keeping it less awful than it actually was. “Time enough for you to know everything. Time enough.”

Was it now time?

“New girl?” The old woman breathed the words out roughly.

“Mama?”

“Your head whirling? Don’t let it be whirling.”

She urged calm for the girl, but her own voice, and breathing, suggested urgency.

“You all right?” she said.

Lyaza shook her head, but the old woman did not notice.

But she detected somehow the tears in the girl’s eyes.

“What, new girl?” she said.

Lyaza hesitated, and the woman said, “Do not be sad. We all go. Come and go. Yemaya…take us in her arms.”

The old woman slipped further away, like someone out at sea at the end of a long rope that kept growing longer.

“Yemaya,” she said, slipping, slipping.

“Ah, Yemaya,” the girl said.

“Yemaya,” the old woman said in a whisper floating atop her breath.

“Mother,” the girl said.

“New one,” the old woman said in a voice so soft that the girl had to lean her ear down to the woman’s lips. Her chest, always soft with her pillow-like breasts, seemed hard, calcified. Her breath smelled sour, like bad onion.

“Mother,” the girl said again, pressing herself closer to the woman’s face.

“New…”

The girl wept through the old woman’s last breath.

Light had faded from the cabin. She was still weeping at dawn when the doctor returned.

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said as though he were addressing a girl from town. “What have we here?”

He knelt at the side of the old woman, lifting her hand and feeling for her pulse. Gently he placed the dead woman’s hand at her side and turned to ask a question of the slave girl. His eyes narrowed as he took in her figure, the blood that had darkened on her skirt.

The living old woman’s fist had been clenched, the dead old woman’s hand lay open, a stone resting in her cooling palm.

The doctor picked it up, turned it over, and then handed it to Lyaza.

“This must be yours to keep,” he said.

Another morning came, and Isaac was waiting for me at the back door.

“It’s time, mas’,” he said, escorting me out to the barn.

“How are you this morning?” I said.

“It’s a big morning, mas’, for the rice.”

“For the rice crop, I know, yes,” I said. “But what about you, Isaac?”

“Me, massa?”

He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in a foreign language.

“You.”

Isaac shrugged.

“What’s me?” he said.

I stared at him but said nothing and we mounted up and rode a while in silence.

I did not know what to say. It was all so odd, to be in the company again of a man who was not, according to the law, if not the law of nature, truly a man, with all the attendant rights and freedom. Might this have been what it was like to be in the company of an ancient Hebrew, a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt? This man seemed so placid, as if his people had not been brought here in chains, like animals, like imported goods, where mine had left behind lands where they had less than the rights they deserved and so arrived in America to find their full share of freedom.

I tried to keep all this in mind as I spoke to him, though I could not keep out of my mind the image of Liza gliding up to his cabin door in the dark and him coming out to greet her. I was not someone who could guard his feelings from obtruding, such as my father could, or my cousin Jonathan, so I am sure he must have heard some of my rough emotion in my voice.

“Isaac, will you tell me, how old you are?”

He shook his head.

“Let me ask you a question, massa.”

“What is your question?”

“Would you talk to this horse?” he said.

“Talk to the horse? I suppose I might talk at it, to keep it going or to make it feel as though I was its friend, that I wasn’t going to beat it.”

“Then you can’t talk at me.”

“I would like to talk with you, Isaac.”

“Why? What’s the use of it?” He gave a shake of his head and turned his gaze to his horse. “Come on, boy,” he said.

“You talk to
your
horse.”

“Animal to animal,” he said. “This horse and me, we speak the same language.”

“Damnation!” I said.

“Is that a question, massa?”

“An expression,” I said. “You are not fooling me, Isaac. You are obviously an intelligent fellow, or you could not be overseeing the rice planting as you do.”

“Oh, massa from the North, I can oversee the rice because I am close to the rice. And close to the horse. I can tell you what the wind says, what the water says, and then I tell the rice what to do.”

“You did tell me that the rice crop depends on the knowledge that you all brought over from Africa. You are a sly fellow, Isaac,” I said. “But do not be sly with me. I have come here to learn, and slyness does not help.”

“Den I’se not be sly, massa,” he said.

“Is that your slave voice, Isaac?”

“Das right, mas’. It’s de voice I can’t leave behin’.”

“But my cousin’s wife, your master’s daughter-in-law, has plans for that, as you know.”

“She got plans, sho.’”

“Speak plain English, please, sir.”

Isaac slowed his horse to a stop. And I tried to halt mine, though it walked a few paces further along so that I had to look back at him over my shoulder.

“Don’t call me that, massa,” Isaac said.

“Call you what?”

“You called me ‘sir.’ Don’t fool with me, Mr. Yankee Master.”

“I am not fooling with you, Isaac. I can tell that you have a good mind. I can see that Rebecca’s teaching is working quite well.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” Isaac said. “Quite well, yes.”

“She is preparing you for freedom,” I said.

“Is that what she is preparing us for? And what if she is just preparing us for being a better kind of slave?”

“She has good intentions, as far as I can tell,” I said.

“And does her husband, your cousin Jonathan, my master Jonathan, have good intentions?”

“I cannot speak for him,” I said.

“You don’t want to speak for him,” Isaac said. “Because he is a liar and a hypocritic.”

“Isaac!”

“Oh, yes, sorry, mas’. I’se know de slave can’t talk ’bout de mas’ dissa way. It be a bad way, and I’se sorry, I’se truly is.”

“She’s taught you well, hasn’t she?”

“Who?”

“Miss Rebecca.”

“She’s taught me almost nothing,” Isaac said, “except to put a fine point on all the things I’ve known since I was a child.”

“She wants to help.”

“She helps to make my condition more painful. I learned how to read, but not from her. When she wanted to teach me I had to pretend I knew nothing, and after a while she had me read certain things that prove to me that I am all the more hopeless and damned.”

“How did you learn to read?”

“You got to know everything about my life? Do I know everything about your life? How did you learn to read?”

“I had a teacher, a man in New York.”

“Well, massa, the doctor here in the county taught me.”

“But about Rebecca…she is a good woman,” I said. “She had a vision—”

“While her husband lurks around the shacks at night?”

I lost all control then.

“You do not have to lurk around, do you? You live in the cabins.”

I pulled up my horse and he turned and reined in his animal.

“What are you talking about, massa?”

“No more ‘massa’,” I said.

He reached over and held the reins of my horse.

“What are you talking about, me not having to lurk around?”

“Liza,” I said, nearly choking on her name.

“You want to talk about Liza? She is like my sister. Or like a cousin. Yes, like a cousin.”

He dropped the reins and pushed at my horse, his own mount stepping away a foot or so between us.

“I see,” I said, but I did not see. And he knew that.

“Do you?” he said. “Do you see? Massa? What do you see? Hard to see nigger slaves in the dark. Except when they got a light tone on their skin. Easier to see the high yellow, ain’t it? Easier to aim for. ’Cept some masters go for the real dark. They like to sink into the black of dark, they like to just disappear and get swallowed up in the black of the black, don’t they?”

“I would not know,” I said.

My horse gave its head a shake, anxious to move again.

“You wouldn’t, eh? Well, you got some cousins who know, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

His horse gave a whinny and now both horses danced a little in place.

“We got to move,” Isaac said. “You said what you wanted to say.”

“I want to tell you one more thing, though,” I said.

“What’s that? I mean, what’s that, massa?”

“Stop that, please.”

“What is it?” Isaac’s voice turned hard again.

“I am not that kind of man.”

“What kind of man is that?”

“First of all, not the kind of man who would make another man his slave. And second, not the kind of man who would make a woman his slave.”

“’Sat right, massa? Well, I’m glad you came down here from up North to learn some things. Because you got a lot to learn.”

“I want to learn,” I said.

“You will,” he said. “You will.”