Song of Slaves in the Desert (37 page)

An hour later I stood once again in front of that house on the edge of the Battery. Within moments of my arrival, both my cousin and Joseph Salvador emerged from the front door and even before I could speak the clatter of horse and carriage sounded behind me.

Joseph Salvador, avoiding my eyes, waved a farewell to my cousin, who joined me at the carriage. We rode back to The Oaks, which took not an inconsiderable amount of time, in darkness and silence. Only as we neared the end of our journey did he say anything at all, and this began as small talk about tariffs and nullification and secession.

“Father will be interested to know what transpired,” he said.

“Shall we tell him everything?” I said.

“Don’t be such a moralistic oaf,” my cousin said. “Do you believe that he is a paragon of virtue himself? Good God, Nathaniel, when you finally see the truth of things I expect it will come as such a blast of light that you might nearly go blind.”

“And will I ever see the truth?”

“Cousin, I really do not know.”

“I know enough about you, sir, that I find it, I must say, truly uncomfortable to ride with you like this.”

“Is that so?” Jonathan turned to me and over the sound of the moving carriage and lay a hand on my arm. “Just how much do you know? Enough to worry about any partnerships we might make? Or enough to challenge me to a duel?”

I clenched my fists, having never been spoken to like this before in my life by one of my own kin. But I forbore, saying nothing. We rode in silence under the great starry vault of the sky. It was a moonless night, and though the stars glittered everywhere above us, in some places seeming to be as thick as dust, the moisture in the air kept us from a perfect sight of the heavens. Things blurred, things faded. But that was the way we saw such matter in this world. And I thought to myself, what if there were a way for us, me and Liza, to grow wings and fly up into that space, and hurry away to some star where we might be alone and together and happier and easier than we are? And then I said to myself, I will book us passage on that ship to New York, the two of us, and we will sail away, if not fly.

At last, the great dark tunnel of trees lay just ahead. We rode along, beneath the shadowy wood, darkened by the darkness.

Then we saw at a great distance at the end of the low road the house all aglow, candles in every window.

“What is it?” I asked my cousin. “Another meeting? It looks as though they might even be having a party!”

When we made our way inside the house, we found the front parlor filled with weeping slaves and wailing Jews. Rebecca sat in a chair near the door, moving her head from side to side, crying out, “He’s gone! He’s gone!” while my aunt lay unmoving on the couch, Precious Sally was kneeling next to her, dabbing at her face with wet cloths.

“Oh, my aunt,” I said, rushing to her side.

She coughed, let out a whimper, cleared her throat.

“It happened so suddenly. He went up to take a nap, and awoke a short while later with a small fever. He said he was tired, and went back to sleep. I looked in on him while he was sleeping, and he was soaking such a sweat I didn’t know what to do. After a while I asked Sally to make a poultice.”

Tears flowed from her eyes and it took her a few moments to regain her composure.

“She went out back and did not return for a long time. When she did, she wore a terribly long face. ‘There’s another man, Jason, sick out back in the cabins,’ she said. ‘The Master is sick upstairs,’ I told her. ‘You must pay attention to him.’ ‘The man in the cabins, he seen the Visitor,’ she said. ‘Please, Sally,’ I told her, ‘don’t you start a panic. Please go up to lay the poultice on the master.’

“She went up, and after a while she came part way down the stairs, the saddest look on her face. ‘You better come up, missus,’ she said to me. I could not move. I asked Rebecca to go in my stead.”

Rebecca spoke up from her chair.

“I went back upstairs and found him lying there, a feeble smile on his face. His head appeared huge to me, his skin pale and taut across the bone beneath.

“‘Has the rice come in?’ he said.

“‘Yes, my beloved uncle,’ I said, ‘the rice has come in.’

“‘I am glad,’ he said, closing his eyes. Next he whispered something so quietly I could not hear. I leaned my ear close to his lips.

“‘Free them,’ he said. His last words before he lay still, so quiet and peaceful. I tried to wake him.”

Her voice rose into the higher registers. “I could not! I tried, but I could not!”

From outside the house the voices of field hands drifted up—

Working all day

And part of the night,

And up before the morning light,

When will Jehovah hear my cry

And set a poor soul free?

They stood huddled in a corner of the veranda, shaking their heads, singing under their breath, and Isaac stood with them, singing, talking. I look around for Liza, but did not see her. My heart beat back and forth from calm to hectic, calm to hectic. All the while the slaves kept singing.

When will Jehovah hear my cry

And set a poor soul free?

Jonathan had gone up the stairs, and now he came down.

“Well, now, folks,” he announced, and he appeared to be looking directly at me, “I have seen my father, and he has passed away.” More weeping and wailing from all gathered here. Jonathan waited until the noise subsided somewhat and then said, “I suppose this means that The Oaks is now mine.”

I felt as though I had taken a blow to the face.

“I must see him,” I said and turning from my cousin—his hard jaw gleaming red in the light of the fire, I mounted the stairs, footsteps following after me. I turned with a start to see young Abraham at my heels.

“Abe,” I said, “you must not go in now. The sick room is not a good place for you to visit.”

He shook his head, and tears rolling down his cheeks he clambered past me up the stairs.

“Do not touch the…do not touch him,” I called after him as with fallen shoulders he stepped into the room where his grandfather lay.

Leaving them both to the dark, I wandered along the hall and entered my own room. It was dark inside, and a few traces of Liza’s perfumes and odors lingered in the air. I closed that door and drifted back down the hall. From the sick room came the sound of a young boy sobbing hoarsely, as for the first time in his life. From the parlor the sounds of mourning grew louder and louder.

“Cousin,” Jonathan called up the stairwell. “Come down, it is time, and I have some things to say.” It was odd how strong his voice sounded, given the loss he had just suffered. “Come down!”

The candles fluttered as a breeze stirred in the otherwise quiet hall. At the bottom of the stairs moved the shapes and shadows of the mourners and the slaves. I shook my head, my limbs, though, froze me in place, and my heart settled almost to a stand-still, either in calm or in fear.

A floorboard creaked behind me.

“Abe?” I turned around, staring into the dark.

A hand came up and touched me at the small of my back, and I turned yet again, my blood chilled with fright.

“Nate,” Liza said, “it is time. Come with me!”

Liza clearly knew her way down the damp dark narrow back staircase, leading me by the hand as we descended into the room behind the kitchen and stepped to the rear door of the house.

Promise stood there quietly waiting along with my cousin’s usual mount.

“How—?”

Isaac stepped out of the shadows and offered me the reins.

“Up you go, massa,” he said, giving me a hand up and then hoisting Liza onto the back of Jonathan’s horse.

Now the animals jittered about in the dark.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Running,” Liza said. She sounded a bit out of breath as she spoke, but it could have been the snorting and clattering of the horse.

I felt as though struck by a bolt of lightning.

She led, I followed, as we took the dark trail behind the barns and on into the woods. In a moment the house, for all of its lights, was swallowed up in the gloom of the trees.

“We must turn back,” I said, feeling as though I had just come out of a dream. “I cannot leave them in the midst of their mourning just for…” I stopped speaking, unsure of what I could say.

“I can’t leave them neither,” she said. “‘In the midst of their mourning.’ But it is my mourning, too.”

“You liked the old master, did you not?”

“Yes,” she said, “I did. I liked him.”

“No matter that he owned you?”

“He did own me, and then again he did not.”

We talked, but we did not stop. Perhaps it was an illusion created by the dark but it seemed like no time had passed before we came to the fork in the road and ducked under the trees to take the trail to the brickyard.

“Wait here,” Liza said as we arrived at the clearing. She dismounted and I watched her shadowy figure enter the small brickmaking shed.

Promise moved about in a small circle, sniffing and snorting, swatting his tail. I knew the creek was nearby. I could hear creatures splashing about in the water.

“Liza?” I called out, just as she reappeared in the clearing, a sack over her shoulder and a shadowy companion at her shadowy side.

“You know this boy, I think,” she said.

I peered down at the young fellow, who was, because of his skin color, almost invisible in the dark.

“You!” I said.

It was the slave boy from Perth Amboy, who traveled with the mean-spirited man, and ran away.

“Have you been hiding all this while in the brickyard?”

The boy touched his hand to his forehead in a sort of salute and moved with Liza to the horse. In a moment she had remounted, and he swung up onto the animal behind her.

“Are you ready?” Liza said.

“Am I ready? We have to go back to the house. I must go back. And you, too. All will be forgiven. If you go back now there will be nothing
to
forgive.”

“Perhaps in another life.”

I still did not understand, or did not want to.

“Liza, my uncle—”

“He’s dead,” she said, “and there will be nothing but trouble.”

“No, no,” I said. “Jonathan is the heir. I will buy you from him. I will take you north.”

“If he sells me,” she said. “it won’t be to you. He will sell me at the auction block in the town.”

“I can bid for you there.”

Such a sound of disgust mingled with horror burst from her throat that even in the dark I could measure the intensity of her response.

“I will not allow you ever to
bid
on me!”

“I will do whatever I must do.”

“You will not have the opportunity, I tell you now. He will sell me down river or kill me first.”

The horses pawed at the ground, snuffled and snorted, anxious to move somewhere, anywhere.

“Why?” I said, “Why?” and I despised myself for the horse-like whine I could hear in my speech.

In a voice I had never heard her use before, it was so drained of spirit, so ghostly, she said, “He will see the will and he will sell me.”

“The will? My uncle’s will? How do you know this? How do you know about my uncle’s will?”

“He left it in his desk. One day I found it there. I read it. Thus the dangers of teaching your inquisitive slaves to read.”

Again, the horses asked us,
Can we please move now? Now?

“There was a surprise,” she said. “The way we live here, there is nothing anymore to surprise us and then along comes a surprise.”

“And what was that?”

“He had another child,” Liza said.

“By some other wife? Did he keep a family down in the Islands?”

“No, no,” she said.

“Oh, no, not him!” I could not hide my pain and dismay at learning this. “He, my dear uncle, also went down to the cabins?”

“He did, indeed,” Liza said.

“I do not know the laws of the state in this matter,” I said. “Could it be possible for him to leave property to a child born of a slave?”

“I don’t know the law,” she said. “But in the will he recognized the child as his own.”

“And who is this child?”

Please,
said my horse.
Now, I truly need to move now.

“Easy, Promise,” I said. “Easy.”

“The child did not know. He is a man now and suffers to know. None of
us
knew, not until I read the pages. When your cousin hears the news he will be very very angry. He will sell the man down river, or somehow arrange for the patrollers to take him into their custody.”

“Who is this man? Do I know him?”

“You know him.” Liza sighed, and bent to pat her own insistent horse while the Amboy slave slipped his arms around her waist and held to her.

“Who?”

I thought of all the Africans I had met here, I thought of the African men, toiling their lives away in the heat and dust and flowing and ebbing waters.

And then it occurred to me.

“Oh, Liza! It is Isaac! My uncle is his father! He is a cousin to me and half-brother to Jonathan!”

“Whatever Jonathan is to any of us. Now we must start moving. He will have probably already discovered we are gone, and it will be all Isaac can do to distract him from our trail.”

“Our trail? And just where are we going?”

“With this boy in tow? Where do you think? We are going away. Or I am. You, of course, are
free
to stay.”

Liza gave her horse a kick, and he set to moving, and so Promise moved, and all of us moved into the dark.

We began our journey by heading back toward the main road. It was a risk, but the choice lay between abandoning the horses and making off through the woods on foot, or taking our chances on meeting trouble on the road and keeping our superior means of travel.

“They may be waiting for us at the house!” I called to Liza over the noise of our animals.

“If Jonathan has gone after us, he is already on his way to town,” Liza called back to me.

“How do you know?”

“Isaac will have told him we have gone that way, and he will be leading him there. Jonathan will remember that you went to town to visit the shipping office.”

“Should not Isaac be running as we are?”

“He will not run,” Liza said. “He is too proud.”

Oh,
I said to myself,
and I have no pride, and so I am running.
But another voice came to me and said,
Yes, you are running, running with this woman to love and freedom!

Suddenly we broke into the clearing and looked back and saw the house still all ablaze with lights. I pictured my aunt and Rebecca gathered about my uncle’s body in the upper room, or huddled together for succor in the parlor, their ears inclined toward the sound of our passage.

Oh, Uncle,
I called out to him in my mind,
I am stealing what was not yours to keep! And what is not mine to take!

Perhaps my uncle replied to me from the world of the dead, but our horses made too much noise for me to hear anything but the beating of their hooves against the hard dirt of the road.

Pounding away they were as we raced down the tunnel of trees to the main road—and headed northwest instead of southeast.

“Do you have a plan?” I called to Liza as we hurried along. She didn’t turn to look at me, but the slave boy did, his young face showing no emotion as we moved under the dark trees on a part of the road I had never traveled.

“Lord,” I said to all and no one, “I wish I had my pistol!”

She did not reply, but the boy turned his head and gave me a knowing nod.

What did he know? Who was he, he still almost a child, who had boarded that ship in New Jersey and traveled with the wickedest man I had ever met, and then escaped, hiding at the brickyard at The Oaks all these weeks, harbored, of course, by the other slaves?

If he had truly escaped.

Long minutes passed. Liza noticed the animals were beginning to tire, and so we slowed down a bit, but still moving forward along the dark road. It was late for country life, and no one was on the road, and if there were other people living out in the fields along the road they were sleeping or sitting up awake in the dark.

“Liza?”

“Hush, Nathaniel,” she called back to me. “We’ll have time later to talk.”

“I should have—”

“Hush!”

I had spoken too soon, because I saw, as she did, a light flickering up the road far ahead, a light that danced and waxed and waned I hoped against hope it was a phantom lamp, one of those will-o’-the-wisp tricks of the darkish air, product perhaps of swamp gases and the dampness of the hour. But as we approached the light became still, and hovered at just the height it would if it were a torch or lamp held by a man on horseback.

It was in fact two lights, each held by a man on horseback.

“Whoa!” called out one of them as we slowed down on our approach, as if he were talking to his own horse.

“Liza—”

“Hush!” she cautioned me.

“Well, well, well, good evening, Mister Yankeeman,” said the patroller Langerhans, holding up one of the torches. “Out kind of late, ain’t you?” He turned to smile to his two assistants, who nodded back at him, smiling.

“As are you,” I said.

“I’m on patrol,” said the slave-catcher. “And you?”

“Me?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, slurring his
esses
.

“I’m going about my uncle’s business,” I said.

“In the middle of the night? With a slave girl riding along? And what? Who is that darky sitting up behind her? Wouldn’t be the young nigger we come out to look around for not long ago, could it?”

“He is nobody to you,” Liza said.

“Liza, I’ll take care of this.”

Langerhans made a clucking noise in his mouth.

“Will you?”

“Stand aside,” I said.

Langerhans shook his head, which gave his already rather monstrous aspect in the wavering light of the torch an even more grotesque appearance.

“I can’t do that. I get paid to keep niggers from running off and if I don’t my children aren’t going to eat.”

“She has a pass,” I said.

“Really? And does that boy have a pass, too? Where’re y’all riding in the middle of the night?”

“She is going to visit family,” I said. “North of here.”

“That’s funny. All the family I ever hear about is living north, when all the family I ever know about has gone south.”

“I’ll show you the passes,” I said, reaching into the inside of my coat.

“Slow,” Langerhans said. “Show me slow.”

“Of course,” I said, preparing to pat my pocket as though I had lost the paper, a ghastly empty place swelling in my heart because of the absence of my pistol.

“Slow!” he said again.

In the wavering light of the torch I saw a movement at Liza’s side.

Langerhans saw it too, and made a joke.

“Oh, my,” he said to his men, “do you see what I see? This nigger girl’s holding a pistol just big enough to take off a toe or the tip of a nose.”

The men laughed as Langerhans turned in his saddle.

“But she don’t even have it cocked. Might be loaded, though I doubt that, but it ain’t cocked. If you’re lucky enough to know it’s even loaded, how you going to fire a weapon it ain’t cocked, I ask you that?”

“Liza,” I said, meaning for her to lower the weapon.

Instead she moved her free hand across it and we all heard the sound.

“Lordy,” Langerhans said again, as though he were announcing a show, “looked what she done! She done cocked that weapon! Oh, oh, oh, ain’t she smart? I mean, smart for a nigger bitch!”

“Liza,” I said again, speaking but feeling unable to breathe.

“Liza,” Langerhans said, mocking my voice. “He wants you to put that gun down now. Even if it ain’t loaded.”

Liza in silence kept that weapon level and pointed directly at Langerhans.

“Liza, you hear him?”

Langerhans sounded a bit impatient now.

“Liza,” he said again.

“Liza,” I said.

“Come on, you bitch—” Langerhans reached toward her.

Came a loud blast and flash of light, a man screamed, the horses jumped about, I grabbed Promise’s reins. At that moment my heart felt as though it might break through my rib-cage and fly away like a terrified bird.

“Ride!” Liza called to me.

And we rode.

A second loud bang, and a flash spurred our horses even faster.

I heard a voice, a moan. It was mine, but it also echoed along behind us in the dark.

***

After about half an hour we slowed, then stopped, looked down the road and saw nothing, no light, nothing—and when the horses settled a bit, stopped their nickering and whinnying, we breathed in the dark, wondering, hoping, worrying, wondering.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“No,” she said. “But I’m not bleeding.”

The slave boy spoke up from behind me on the horse.

“I ain’t breathing.”

“You are if you’re speaking.”

“Then I’m breathing,” he said.

“Hurry now,” Liza said, giving her horse a start.

I rode up next to her, making up the way through the woods.

“How long have you been keeping my pistol?” I asked her.

“Long enough,” Liza said.

And we started off again, two runaway slaves and a Yankee, each of us now a murderer. I carried heavy regrets, oh, yes, I carried regrets, and a mixed burden of hope and despair. Liza and I were running, and I would not see the harvest.