Song of Slaves in the Desert (31 page)

When the first light comes up she is lying there asleep, her skin turned off-gold in the early news of dawn, her breasts like dark puddings, her nipples like raisins. Her braids undone, her hair become a tangle of clots and burrs, her eyes moving beneath her eyelids, as if she might be watching a music show in the privacy of her dreams. And her chest moves up and down with her breath, though she breathes so silently I can’t hear even a whisper of the stuff that gives her life.

She seems so close and yet so distant from me, she in her slumbering state, me in my wakefulness.

Or is it me who is dreaming and she who, in another plane, is awake and wondering about me as I wonder about her?

Our God is a dour God, somber and distant in these latter days. Nonetheless I pray to him, of whom I have never asked much before, that He might make this moment last, make it so. This brown-skinned girl with gold-flecked eyes and hair like vines and limbs like those of a goddess carved of sandstone—here is Eden, here is Paradise—and all the rest an afterthought, the moody preoccupations of men too stony to unbend to the call of the moment.

I now shocked myself, because for the first time in months I thought of Halevi, who before this journey had been my constant companion, at least in thought. If he were here, I decided, we might argue this.

But my company now is not a philosopher, but a slave who has shown me something I hadn’t known before about freedom.

I was still pondering all this when she slowly opened her eyes.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” I said.

“It is light, I am late.”

“It is early. No one is stirring, not even the birds.”

She sat up and shook her head from side to side as if to shake sleep from her mind.

“I have to go, I have my duties.”

“What duty could be greater than this? To stay here with me.”

“Yes, massa,” she said. “But I got other chores. Sunday, it’s a big breakfast Precious Sally is making and she’ll be needing my help to serve.”

“So we’re back to that? To ‘massa’?”

“We never went away.”

“Liza, you and I have traveled some distance from there.”

She reached up and touched a playful finger to my chest.

“You rode me.”

“We rode together.”

“But we went far.”

“We went deep,” I said.

“Horses don’t go deep.”

“Some do. Ours did. We did.”

She shook her head, as if amazed at a thought.

“All the horses around here, and, you know, I never been on one.”

“Oh, yes, you have—”

“No, no, Nate, I’m saying, I have never ridden a horse. Isaac, he always promised me, but he never did do it.”

“I am no great horseman, but sometime I will take you for a ride. On my Promise.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

“That thrills me.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, for a slave girl, to have a master make a promise to her, you don’t know how good that feels. Will you promise, though, to let me ride my own horse?”

I lay down beside her and whispered in her ear.

“I promise.”

Her ear—like a beautiful shell you might find washed up on the beach after a storm.

“I must go now,” she said.

“Stay a little while longer.”

“Precious Sally will be looking around for me. You would not want for her to find me here.”

“She never comes up to the second story.”

“She could be waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.”

“Does she know about…?”

“About this?”

“About us.”

“Mr. Yankee, sir, you have a lot to learn. There is nothing that goes on in a plantation like this that the folks don’t know about.”

“My folks? My family?”

“The slave-folks, that’s who I am talking about.”

“I suppose that is because I in my fit of love madness told Isaac?”

She nodded, her face a picture of smugness that I tried to kiss away to no avail.

“You are a fortunate man,” she said.

“I know that.”

“Not because of anything except that Isaac must like you. Otherwise he might have killed you.”

“And then what?”

“And then, he would have run off.”

“And lived as a fugitive?”

“He would have run far enough so that he would have found his freedom.”

“That’s quite a price to pay for freedom,” I said. “To kill someone, and then run.”

“It looks like a steep price to you,” Liza said, “because you won’t ever have to pay it. To a slave, it’s something, but not that much.”

I surveyed her, this woman who had stolen
my
own freedom, and then I said, “Would you would kill someone to be free?”

“If I had to. If I was running, and he stood in my way.”

“But you are not running,” I said. “So that will not be a price you have to pay.”

She gave me a sly smile, and showed me all the light in her eyes that I longed to see, even while seeing it. I caught her in my arms once again, and though she protested, it was a feeble attempt. It made me think that she might never want to be free of me!

She took a deep breath and said, “I’m not running—yet.”

Another week went by. In the fields the kernels of rice were plumping in the sun, and the water that nourished them grew warmer and warmer each day, more like a tepid bath than a cooling wash. Over in the brickyard the sun beat down so hot that it made the entire clearing feel as though it were on fire, and the mud blocks appeared to turn to bricks with the speed of bread dough in a fiercely heated oven. Few songs from the slaves now. They worked in nothing but their tattered trousers, their dark sweat-soaked bodies gleaming in the sun, rank kerchiefs tied around their heads to keep the sweat from pouring into their eyes and blinding them. I quickly removed my coat and now and then exercised my privileges of stepping into the shade and taking a rest against a tree or going to the horse and drinking from the animal-skin water bag that I had tied on to the saddle when I left the house in the morning. The water tasted rank, absent the coolness that had made it so appealing when one of the house slaves had drawn it for me from the well just after breakfast.

The slaves had their own way of cooling off, with a break in their labors coming every hour or so when they would wade out into the creek up to their shoulders, or some even ducking their heads under while others joked about alligators catching them for supper if they didn’t catch them first. Once at midday they had time to rest, on some pallets that were put there for just this purpose, pallets soaked with sweat and worn thin by the daily grind of bodies splayed out upon them. (There were not enough to go around, and most of the slaves sprawled during this respite on the ground, under the shade of the trees at the edge of the glade, which in this season was no shade at all.)

After a day such as this I found myself waiting for the right moment at dinner to ask for an interview.

“You wish to speak to me?” my uncle said. “We are speaking now.”

I tried not to look around at the other faces at the table, my aunt’s, Jonathan’s, Rebecca’s, and I avoided any recognition of white-haired, ramrod straight Black Jack who stood at his ready just behind my aunt’s place, or Precious Sally, at her customary stand near the rear door.

“Might we speak in private?”

Cousin Jonathan raised his lip and glared at me.

“Something about the rice, no doubt,” he said.

My uncle turned on him, in as sudden a way as a heavy man like himself could turn.

“Have some respect for your cousin.”

“Might we speak now, sir?”

“Let me eat my dessert and we’ll retire then to the veranda.”

I watched him devour two slices of Precious Sally’s best peach pie and swallow his coffee in one gulp, which gave me little time to rehearse the speech I planned to make to him.

“It is so hot this evening, is it not it?” my aunt said.

“It is,” Rebecca said.

Jonathan continued to glare at me, ignoring his dessert.

“Come on, mass’ Jonathan,” Precious Sally said from the doorway where she kept her watch. “Ain’t you going to eat my pie? It’s delicious.”

“What about him?” Jonathan said.

In the place before me my own dessert lay untouched.

“I made it for you, mass’.”

I couldn’t help but be distracted as Jonathan, looking dutifully scolded, reached grudgingly for his fork and attacked the pie.

“Well, now,” said my uncle, his own plate now cleared. He got up and lumbered to the veranda, with me a few paces behind.

Outside, in the swell of the early evening heat, my fear cooled me. I watched carefully as he lowered himself into his large wicker chair that creaked as he sat like an old bridge with heavy wagons crossing it.

“Shall we have a little brandy then?” he said when he had settled.

“Thank you, sir, but not for me.”

“Don’t suppose it will do me any good, but then it can’t hurt either, can it?”

He called for Jack, who almost instantly appeared, and told him to bring us some brandy.

The light had faded, but the noise of the day still pushed against that border of sound that came with the night. I listened, waiting for Jack to return and depart again.

“Now then,” my uncle said, raising his glass.

“Uncle,” I said, raising my own glass and quickly swallowing, “I will not dance around the subject.” I cleared my throat and spoke again, as forthrightly as I could muster. “I wish to buy Liza.”

He paused a moment, silent except for his breathing that was so intense I could hear it despite the rising sounds of night, and looked at me as though I had caught him in the eye with a bright lantern light.

“Well, then, so you shall agree to my proposal? Have you written to your father? I don’t pretend that I kept track of everything that happens on this plantation, but I would know if you had sent out a letter.”

“I have not yet written to him, Uncle,” I said.

He wagged his head from side to side.

“But it is good news that you have made up your mind. And as far as owning anyone, you will own all of that girl’s fifty or so uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters, and so forth. Though it is difficult, if you ever were so inclined as to figure just who is related to whom. I know there are Gentiles who keep good records about these matters, and I know that we Israelites are famous for keeping our genealogies, but that has never been of much concern to me.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief with which he dabbed at his forehead, giving the impression that he was an overweight dandy rather than a businessman.

He was putting me off, playing with me, but I would no longer be toyed with in this manner.

“Uncle,” I said as forthrightly as I could, “I don’t want them all. I just want her.”

Now he appeared puzzled, using his great bulk to somehow sink down inside himself and keep from the question I had proposed.

“Well, hum, there are so many difficulties…” He suffered a jagged cough, and appeared almost bewildered by that occurrence, and stuffed his cloth into his pocket and quickly poured himself another brandy.

“Difficulties…?”

“None that…I don’t wish…Nephew?” He raised his beefy arm and drank.

“Yes, Uncle?”

“We will own all of these slaves in common, you see? But I cannot sell you that girl. In fact, if you had decided to recommend to my brother that you believe this enterprise of ours to be a bad proposition, your aunt and I would sell all the slaves, except for a few, like Liza and Precious Sally and Black Jack. They would come to town with us and work for us in whatever house we might acquire there.”

“So, Uncle, you are saying no to my proposal?”

“Is it a proposal? Either it is or it isn’t.” His hands were trembling, which gave me the impression that he felt nearly overwhelmed by this difficulty. “Do you wish to become partners with me and your cousin in the plantation?”

“That question I am still pondering, Uncle.”

His eyes wandered off to the front lawn, where fireflies played across the hedges.

“That is, as I say, a simple question. But you have complicated it enormously by your query about Liza.”

“You are fond of her, Uncle?”

“As I say, were we to sell all else and move to town, she would be one of the few we would keep.”

Isaac came to mind, the picture of him soaked with sweat, bending above the rice stalks.

“You would sell Isaac?”

“Isaac? Oh, no, no, no, he had slipped from my mind.” An agitated look spread across his face. “No, we would keep him also.”

I shook my head in dismay.

“But you would not sell Liza?”

Now his voice tightened, his drawl nearly disappearing from his speech, like the old cultivation water from the rice fields upon the opening of the drain ditches.

“Nephew, how do I say this? She is like family to us.”

“I am part of the family. So she would not be leaving the family if I bought her.”

He took several deep breaths, and I watched him, and waited, listening to the now overbearing sounds of night.

“Dear nephew,” he said, “Because you are so insistent I will consult with your cousin about this question. Though I doubt he will hold a view different from my own. He…is quite attached to that girl.”

“Is that so?”

My uncle ignored my impudence and focused again on the matter that mattered most to him.

“Allow me to say this again. If you persuade your father, my brother, to invest in the plantation, you will in effect become the girl’s owner.”

He cleared his throat.

“I wish to resolve our business. Young man, the future of our family depends on this, and I trust you will make the right decision. And when I say family, I hope you understand that it includes all of the slaves who work on this plantation.”

“Uncle, I am still pondering all this. I hope that by the time of the rice harvest, everything will be clear to me.”

“Which will be soon. We have had good hot days, and Isaac tells me the kernels are plumping up beautifully.”

“Yes,” I said, “it will be soon.”

“Meanwhile, I will speak to my son about your proposal. Who knows that he may be more forgiving than I suspect.”

He looked down into his glass, and after this gesture of refusal to meet my eye I looked out into the night.