Song of Slaves in the Desert (36 page)

We are coming so close, she is coming so close!

He was a creature of habit, and had to be, but was any single morning typical of the way his days moved along? The doctor didn’t think so. You would notice if you were observing him that he rose before dawn and in nightshirt and slippers, with a cup of tea at his desk side, spent an hour or so reading and making entries in his notebooks by lamplight before the early sun made it just as easy to read and write in natural light, though by then his hour was usually up. He had done this before he had married, all the while during his marriage, and continued it after his beloved wife had gone to her rest. Even that one hour out of twenty-four of peaceful contemplation of the words of philosophers and historians and some poets made even the worst day that followed something he could endure.

Homer’s Achilles fought bravely for all time against the Trojans. The doctor was reading his story as he did each year since college, touching his wedding ring and with some difficulty, because his digits appeared to have swollen a bit, turning it slowly around and around on his finger. His heart raced as he closed his eyes and imagined the battlefield, the plain of Troy, and eventually his heart slowed a bit and he reached for his notebook and made an entry, and then set that book down.

Homer, this season, he thought to himself. And next would come Shakespeare again. Oh, he had plans, he had plans. Thinking ahead he pictured
Hamlet
, filled with ghosts and wisps and woes and worries, and swords. And then, a comedy. He would read
Midsummer Night’s,
or
All’s Well.
But all was not well, he knew that, and he only hoped that he might read at least one more play before going to that undiscovered country so well put forward in the other play.

Oh, that this too solid flesh…

To be or not…

Once more into the breach…

As it turned out, that year he finished all he had planned to read and still remained alive on this earth, and so he took up the late plays, first
A Winter’s Tale
and then
Pericles
, marveling at the sweetness and fluency of the older Shakespeare.

And still he remained!

And so he went back to
The Tempest
, of his early education.

And then, as the seasons turned, Homer’s time came around again.

That was the volume on his lap on one of those early mornings, birdsong in the air even before the light made its way up out of the sea and across the fields and ponds to his house on the outskirts of the city as he was making an entry in his notebook—“…in the course of human freedom…” the fragment read—and his pen must have fallen from his fingers as caught in the ripple of pain in his chest he grasped himself to himself, and all the possibility of morning light fell away.

A knock at the door returned him to this world.

He mustered all his strength and called for the visitor to enter.

“What a surprise! Come sit…”

The doctor patted the place on the sofa next to where he sat, and Liza, after hesitating a moment, placed herself next to him. She felt awkward, no doubt, in her plain dress, dust on her bare legs, the faintest whiff of horse still clinging to her because of the ride on the bench of the carriage.

“How have you been, my dear?” He cleared his throat, and found his normal voice.

“Been fine,” Liza said.

“No trouble out there…” He dipped his head vaguely in the direction of the plantation. But here, in his house, he might easily have been gesturing toward the river to the north, or to the sand dune islands that bordered on the ocean. This close to the water the breeze sometimes blew in off the water, sometimes it blew out from the farmland west of the city. The doctor had begun to savor these small incidents of life, the daily round of street noises and gulls calling, those visiting breezes, and surprise visitors such as this.

“I am sorry I have not visited…”

“Pay no mind, sir,” Liza said.

“I miss making my rounds…”

“Yes, sir…”

“So many years on my feet, bending toward my patients, trying to comfort them through all the worst…these past few months I have missed it terribly…”

“We have missed you, sir,” Liza said.

“And all’s well? I know I am repeating myself.”

Liza did not hesitate.

“Yes, sir, all is well.”

“You have no problems?”

“No, sir.”

What could she say that he did not know? What good would it have done to have said anything at all? This peaceful room, the breezes blowing through it, the serenity of the moment.

“Would you like some tea?”

“I will make it, sir,” Liza said.

“Would you? It is some ordeal now for me to get up. I have a woman who cooks for me and such. She is out at the market at this moment.”

“I will be happy to, sir,” Liza said.

While she prepared the tea, he talked much more openly than he had ever done before about his life, about the countryside he loved, about the city he enjoyed, walking along the Battery in the early morning and again at the end of the day, the whisper of the wavelets against the embankment, the sounds of the rivers converging in the ocean harbor, gulls overhead, always gulls, music and light from the nearby houses, and he had done some things, good things, he hoped, and made life a little better for those for whom it might have been otherwise.

Why some men turn their lives into the duty of making kindnesses for others and why some turn toward making other people squirm and even suffer there is no answer, is there? Who could say? Who knew, who knew?

He asked her about her reading. He gave her some new books.

Just before she left for her ride back to the plantation, he took her hands in his—it was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her—force she knew, anger she knew, worry she knew, pain she knew, but never this before, never this—and stared deeply into her eyes.

Just before she went out the door, he said, “I wish you a good future, Liza.”

The air in the kitchen that morning roiled thick with the odor of frying meat and baking breads while Precious Sally prepared my breakfast in silence. I ate in silence. Until the hour when Jonathan and I made our departure from The Oaks in the carriage, rolling along the leafy trail that led to the main road, I did not speak a word aloud.

Finally, I could not help myself.

“Explain to me again, Cousin, just what are we going to hear?” My mind was filled almost entirely with thoughts of Liza. Politics was not something to which I wanted to give any thought.

“Here is the essence,” Jonathan had said to me as we rode to town. “You’ll recall my brother-in-law, Joseph Salvador, who sits in the legislature?”

“Yes, I remember him. Tall, red-haired? With a nose that looks as though it’s been flattened by a spoon?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way. But yes. He has invited us to this gathering, to which he has gained entry by virtue of his service in the legislature.”

“And they are discussing what?”

“The perils of nullification, the possibilities of secession.”

“Nullification?”

“The state of South Carolina rejected some years ago the principle that the federal government might set tariffs for all the states. It was hurting our merchants and farmers.”

“And secession?”

“A more drastic proposal. If Henry Clay had not persuaded Congress to pass a bill keeping tariffs low, it might have found more backing.”

“I am thinking,” I said, “that if New York City seceded from the Union, we might form our own sovereign island. And make our own navy of the river barges that go back and forth to Albany, capital of another country.”

“It is amusing to think of these matters, yes, Cousin, if you are not from South Carolina. Here it is deadly serious.”

“Money is always a serious matter,” I said.

“Oh, yes, and add to that a matter even more serious, and you have a palimpsest of trouble.”

“A palimpsest?”

“One matter laid upon another.”

The day was hot, dust rose in columns toward the branches of the leafy oaks, and we stopped speaking for a while.

After a time my cousin inclined his head toward me and said, “You are very quiet, Cousin Nate. Are you feeling poorly?”

“Just fine, Cuz,” I said, taking a deep breath, so that I did not allow myself to spew out everything that I wanted to say.

“Quite hot today,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “Makes you almost wish you were a nigger, does it not? You’d be used to this heat, having lived your life in Africa. Or having a father who lived there.”

“Your slaves,” I said, “most of them I think were born here, of parents who were born here.”

“Yes, but back of every one of them, you find an African.”

I paused to ponder that, musing about all of the mysterious Africans standing in long rows behind my Liza. I knew where I came from, and I wondered, wondered about her. All my wondering rose up with the billowing towers of dust.

In town the streets as usual bustled with commerce and society. We quickly made for the garden of a house on Water Street where we settled in to listen to a number of men in black coats and stiff white shirts giving reasons of a very serious sort as to why South Carolina should not only ignore the tariffs imposed on it by the federal government—“even at these lower rates, thanks to the Clay bill?”—“Yes, because we are fighting for a principle here.”—but should seriously consider a proposal for secession.

My cousin’s brother-in-law, Joseph Salvador, the red-haired Jew from Charleston, stood in the thick of it.

“If we are to live as real men,” he said, “then we can only be governed by a union of free men.” He pointed to a man across the veranda from him. “I am a real man. And you are a real man.”

“Indeed,” the man said, touching a finger to his collar. “But what do you mean by ‘real’?”

“Free,” said Joseph Salvador. “A real man is a free man.”

Another man spoke up. “But are we now free?”

“Not until we govern ourselves,” said Joseph Salvador. “To give power to a federal government that is made up of no one makes no sense to me. Real men are states’ men. And a government with no state is not a real government.”

“Especially a government that may one day tell us we cannot hold slaves,” the same man Joseph Salvador had addressed now spoke up.

“A government whose very fortress sits at the entrance to our harbor,” said another man.

My cousin leaned toward me and said in a whisper, “He is the head of our bank.”

Tariffs, money, slaves, the conversation continued for a while, leaving my head both swirling with matter-of-fact thoughts and oddly disposed to dreaming. Liza, yes, she was on my mind. A slave. And might she one day be freed by federal fiat? Become a real person? Her eyes, her mouth, her hair. None of these men would wish it so. Was she real, or only a dream person? The way she touched me. Her fingers on me. Her beating heart. The perfume of her steaming breasts and loins. The flavor of her color, the vinegary smoothness of her flesh to my tongue. The anti-federals wanted to keep her a slave, the federals wanted to free her. And so where did I stand?

The meeting—and my daydreaming—went on for hours. After it adjourned Joseph Salvador joined us in the yeasty warm half-light at a local tavern.

“And what did you think, Mr. New York?” he said to me while we tore apart two roast birds and drank tankards of vinegary ale.

“Of the meeting?”

“Of course, of course, the meeting.”

I chewed, swallowed, washed the food down with ale, dabbed at my lips with my coat sleeve.

“It put forward an interesting perspective.”

“Merely interesting? It shines a light on a path, I believe. And if we follow it, both terrible and wonderful things may occur.”

“Secession, you mean?”

“That, yes.”

“We are all—” and I had never thought about this before but the thought came naturally—“one family, all of us in the various states, and so secession seems wrong to me. Rather like a son declaring he is no longer part of a family.”

Now my cousin spoke up.

“Your example is flawed, Nathaniel,” he said. “The states are not children. If it is a family, it is a family made up all of fathers.”

“Brothers, perhaps?”

“If you will.”

“If half of the brothers withdraw to make their own family, what happens to the others?”

Joseph Salvador made an answer, but I was withdrawing at that moment back into those thoughts of Liza, enhanced, no doubt, by my draughts of ale. Her eyes, one the color of dawn, the other the color of trees.

“The truth!” my cousin said, jarring me from my reverie by pounding his fist onto the table.

“Don’t push the man,” Joseph Salvador said. “He is new to our ways.”

“No, I want him to tell us the truth,” my cousin said.

“The truth?” I looked up from my ale, wondering about the nature of the question.

“If you could live here like us,” Joseph Salvador said, “you would, would you not? Away from your cold climate, at ease on a plantation, or, urban fellow that you are, enjoying yourself in this city.”

“And,” my cousin put in, “You would find yourself a pleasant wife, perhaps Anna, or another of Rebecca’s many appealing relatives and friends. And you would open a branch of your father’s, my uncle’s, import business. You would raise a family. And you would have the power and the choice to keep your private life interesting, if you understand what I mean.”

“Do I know?” I said.

“Perhaps you do.”

Jonathan laughed a laugh so hard he spit bubbles of ale across the table.

“Pardon, pardon,” he said, “I am not usually this less-than-fastidious.”

“I ask you, Cousin, what do you have in mind?”

“In mind? In mind? The long history of our people, darkened by slavery in Egypt, long in bondage there until our savior Moses led us out of the land of captivity.”

“A long procession through the ages,” Joseph Salvador added, “up to where we sit now, with Jews like myself in the state legislature.”

“That is not what my cousin was saying.”

Jonathan feigned innocence.

“And what might I have been saying except what I said?”

“You were speaking about our freedom, and thinking about certain aspects of your own private life here.”

“Or perhaps I was thinking about
your
private life here? Might there be a certain dark woman who figures in that?”

“What, dear Cousin, might you know about that?”

“Know? So there is something to know?”

“It is time to go,” I said, pushing back from the table so brusquely that I nearly overturned it.

“Oh, yes, Cuz, because we have one more meeting.”

“Another?” Now I was not merely angry with my cousin but mystified. I would have been even more mystified, not less, if I had been aware that I was approaching a cross-roads in my life, knowing only that I had a deep sensation that great change was in the works.

Jonathan gave Joseph Salvador a conspiratorial glance.

“Jonathan,” I said in protest, “has your wife tried to put me in that company of her cousin Anna again?”

“Anna?” Salvador shook his head. “No, no, don’t fear the fires of social obligation. This is something quite outside the bounds of etiquette.”

“What then?” I said.

The pair of them ignored my question.

Our meeting had gone from morning, through mid-afternoon, and now the sun, as we stepped out onto the brick walk before the house, was swinging westward toward the end of the day.

“Will there be some food and drink at this mystery rendezvous?” I inquired.

“Plenty for the belly and the spirit,” my cousin said.

Salvador gave a shake of this thick red mane and bid me climb aboard the carriage.

***

The ride to the fine house at the edge of the Battery took no time at all. Liveried servants ushered us inside. My cousin and his brother-in-law made conversation about this and that with a slave woman as dark as night and shoulders as broad as a man’s. She served us tea in the parlor. Yours truly still fumed, but not so much that he could not admire the fine portraits on the wall and the deep, cushiony carpets, some with abstract weaves, others depicting certain scenes from our history, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the burning of Washington.

Music from a spinet drifted down from the floor above.

“And where are the other conspirators?” I asked of my cousin.

“They will be here momentarily,” he said.

Sure enough, within moments we heard voices in the hall, and a quintet of beautifully dressed slave girls walked lightly into the room.

“Is this the meeting?” I said, standing up.

My cousin shook his head at what he took to be my impossible attitude. I certainly did feel impossible and stupidly surprised.

“Can you ever rest your busy mind, Cousin?”

“Sorry,” I said with a shake of my head, “this is not what I had in my mind at all. I am not passing any judgments on you, Cousin. This is just not…” I stood up. “If you will excuse me, I am going to take a stroll.”

His manner quite cold my cousin said, “Meet us here in two hours, or walk back to The Oaks.”

“Very well,” I said and left the room.

A servant let me out of the house just as a trio of stringed instruments sounded in the hall. I walked down the steps and fairly well loped across the park to the ocean-side.

What a marvelous way to clear my head! The sea was calm, or seemed so at least in the fading light. Out beyond the squat shape of Fort Sumter on the horizon the sky appeared to be striped with multi-layered clouds, some pink, some peach, some darker, like fog. But even as I watched the cloud-shapes shifted and the colors turned to lavender and then to red, the darker turning light, the lighter turning dark as Nature made her paintings on the sky. If I could have stood here forever, fixing my attention on the works made in air, I would have chosen to do that, fixed in time, certainly, but in the knowledge that however difficult might be the choice I had to make I would not now or ever have to make it.