Song of Slaves in the Desert (40 page)

Jonathan had known something had gone wrong that night almost immediately after he saw his son Abraham come trundling down the stairs.

“Papa, they are running,” the boy said. “I saw them.”

The boy’s words startled him.

“They are upstairs,” he said.

“I saw them go down the back stairs, sir,” the boy said, a wide smile on his face, this lad who sought approbation from his otherwise-distant father.

“They are in distress,” Jonathan said. “We are all in distress. Come, Abe, let us visit your grandfather together and make our farewells.” At which he led the boy back up to the second floor and the room of his recently deceased father.

Which, except for the corpse, they found empty.

“I told you,” Abe said, “They are running.”

“So be it,” Jonathan said. “The patrollers are riding tonight, as always. They will not get very far.” He kneeled a while at his father’s bedside, and his son followed his lead, dropping to his knees and folding his hands, but, like his father, at a discreet distance from the body and the sheets.

One can only make a wild surmise about what went through the boy’s mind. His childhood lessons from the Bible taught to him by his grandfather spoke of freedom and yet he was surrounded all his young life by slaves. He read little, played games with stones and small knives, loved his horses, and in town he spent time with distant cousins who disdained the slave-holding of his family even as they invited them here and there, dinner to tea to musical nights at the synagogue. Abe—he knew nothing, he was a noisome child and a little citizen to be admired. Given the chance he would have ridden with the patrollers, enjoying the glamor of it all, chasing, catching slaves.

Jonathan had quite a lot on his own mind, almost all of it pertaining to the inheritance. The land, now his, the house, now his, the income, now his, all the slaves now his, and all the slaves that would be born in his lifetime, all all his. And the debt was now his. He had never considered himself a greedy man, and he had worked hard for this plantation and the inheritance of it, keeping watch over the overseers, keeping watch over the expenses of the business. He and his family, as he saw it, never pushed any of it toward the line where necessity passed over into excess. They had the slaves build furniture and the necessary appurtenances of persons and household, they bought what farm equipment they could not make themselves, and the food for all and the food for the slaves, and the doctor’s attendance upon them, and whatever small things they required that they could not manufacture themselves. Sorry as he was to see his father go, he worried no worry out of the ordinary, at least for the few hours left in the night that passed when he had not yet read the will. That was how sure of himself and his inheritance he was. And that was how free he was of greed, that he would not feel compelled to make certain that these lands and this house all had with his father’s passing come to him. The only compulsion he felt was to keep after me and press me to draw my father into the business of the plantation.

At dawn he sent Isaac with word of his father’s demise to the congregants in town. He then retired to his bed, besotted, immediately drowsy with the understanding of what had happened. Birds, awake since before the first light, sang outside the window, keeping him awake for a while longer, during which moments he made a fantasy of what he would say to Liza on her return, and what he would say to me—she, the ungrateful daughter, and me, the cousin and betrayer, traitor to the family and our race. But of course he would then soften a bit toward me, needing me as he did to help shore up the accounts. Toward Liza he would be unrelenting, though he wondered what he might do if I pleaded her case. Eventually all this meandering of mind was too much for him and he sank beneath the waves of sleep.

But did he dream? Revealing certain fine aspects of his sensibility I had never known before, he explained that he had some fluttering visions in that early morning doze, and he claims he heard songs in a musical scale that he did not recognize, and he felt a certain presence, like that he had known only once before, as a boy in the Dutch Antilles when he was nearly drowned in the surf. The presence felt feminine, he said, and it came as a kind of pushing with physical muscle, a kind of urging, without a voice or even a gesture to move him along. Coming out of the dream he saw himself as the descendant of Moses, the Liberator of his People, and if he understood such a contradiction between himself and the figure out of the Old Testament, who led the Jews out of bondage and thus into a world of freedom unlimited and the beauty of living without masters, he gave no sign. The irony of better seeing himself as a Jewish Pharaoh never came to mind.

Immediately upon awakening he called for Isaac, now back from town, whom he told to notify all the slaves that the master had gone. (How little he knew of his own small dominion that he did not surmise that almost from the exhalation of his father’s last breath every last slave on the plantation learned of his going.)

Stepping into the morning sun, followed by his faithful Isaac, he looked up at the cottony brilliant sky and announced “I am now the Master,” and then gazed off into the trees near the border where the distant creek took in the tidal flow.

“Yessir,” Isaac said, without any untoward glance or questionable fluctuation of his voice except that which normally occurred in moments such as this.

“Fetch the horses,” Jonathan said.

“Yes, sir,” said Isaac.

Jonathan watched as the slave turned and ran toward the barn. Just then a shiver passed through Jonathan’s body, a cold so fierce and of the instant that he looked over to the trees with the thought that some minor whirlwind might have crossed the borders of the plantation as if, or so he wondered in that instant, it had come to carry away the soul of his immediately deceased father. Was it the Visitor clasping an arm around his shoulders in a confederacy of chills and illness? He brushed that worry aside, certain in his own well-being and assurance, though another thought came to him, which Isaac’s presence in his sight may have engendered. He was not quite sure.

He had felt at such loose ends before, in his rage and rapist rampage in the pantry, he had felt his blood turn so hot it nearly boiled his brain. But never ever had he heard a voice in his mind say to him such as, Go back to the house and read the Will.

As if led by an invisible hand he turned and walked back in the door and went through the kitchen and up the stairs to his father’s study where there he searched—it took only a minute or two—for the Will, which rested in the same place on the desk where Liza had first seen it. (He could not have known, of course, that Liza had been here before him. But almost as if he could read thoughts on the ether something caused him to go to the window, papers in hand, and look out toward the barns where Isaac was preparing the horses.) “Hurry, you nigger,” he said out loud, as if his voice could carry through the wall.

Glancing down at the papers, he read along, making quiet noises in his throat, noises of assent, until his eye stopped on a name.

“You, nigger!”

He dropped the Will on the desk and without looking back retraced his route down and through the house, out the back way and walking steadily toward the barn.

He saw Isaac leading the horses to him and barked out a command.

“Fetch my gun!”

“Yes, sir,” Isaac said, tying the horses to the back rail of the porch and going into the house.

In a moment he returned with Jonathan’s long gun.

“Going to catch us a runaway nigger,” Jonathan said as he took the weapon from Isaac. With a bit of clumsiness he held the weapon in one hand and used the other to mount the horse.

“Liza?” Isaac said.

“That is the nigger,” Jonathan said. “That is the one.”

They rode at a fast pace to the edge of the swamp and then slowed down. He knew full well that Liza had at least a half-day’s start on him. When in the distance he saw the young Jersey boy leading a horse upon whose back I lay draped, his heart sank. He wanted no impediment to his quest.

“Take him back to The Oaks,” he told the boy when they stopped and met on the faint trail into the swamp.

“Yessir,” said the boy.

“Now tell me which way she went,” Jonathan said.

Unprompted by the barely conscious passenger on the horse—the fever-crazed creature that I had become—the boy jagged a finger to the north.

“Up there,” he said.

“North?” Through his nose Jonathan made a snorting noise like a horse. And then almost with a kind of familial pride, he said, “I never took her for being that stupid. She is an educated girl. She knows her geography. The damned doctor taught her that.” And then, almost as an afterthought prompted by paternal pride, he added, “She has read many more books than most white folks.” He looked over at the boy and without a word flicked out his hand and slapped him across the mouth.

“Do not lie to me, boy,” Jonathan said.

“Yessir,” the boy said. Scarcely visible against the darkness of his skin, a thin line of dark red blood ran from his nose to his upper lip.

“Take my cousin back to The Oaks. Don’t you be running or I’ll set the patrollers on you quick as anything. Don’t know why they did not catch you all in the first place, running the way you were, noisy as hell, I would guess.” He said no more to the boy.

Without looking back, he goaded his mount and followed by Isaac continued along the road into the watery turf where muscly-vined trees raised their bushy heads to blot out the direct light of morning. They had not ridden more than another half mile when they saw a cluster of birds, turkey vultures jigging around and upon the bodies on the road.

“Isaac!” Jonathan shouted. “What is that?”

The slave—Jonathan’s half-brother, let us say it!—rode forward and stepped just short of the bodies. The birds cocked their heads at him and returned to their work—it was steady and vigorous work—on the bodies.

“Massa Jonathan?” Isaac called out.

“Yes?”

“Shoot the gun!”

“What do you say?”

“Shoot the gun in the air!”

Jonathan obliged, bringing off a loud report and watching, along with Isaac, as the carrion birds scattered into the air with a sound like wet canvas flapping in the wind.

Isaac then dismounted and kneeled beside the bodies.

“Langerhans!” he called out to Jonathan. “It is Langerhans!”

“And the other two?”

“Patrollers, like him. I don’t know their names…”

Jonathan watched him as he leaned closer, pulling apart the trio of tangled bodies. After a moment or two he stood up, holding one of the patrollers’ pistols in his hand.

Jonathan urged his horse a step or two closer.

“What happened here?” he said.

Isaac shook his head.

“I don’t know how she do it! Killed one or two, the other killed the other. Guess it happened in the dark, only this lamp here—” he kicked at the lamp lying nearby—“to see by.”

“How do you know Liza shot them?”

“Massa Nate, he wouldn’t shoot.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s a good man.”

“He would not do it to help Liza run?”

Isaac stared up at him, noticing that Jonathan had raised his gun.

“Naw, I don’t think so. Look, Massa Jonathan, he came back. Liza, she kept on going. Maybe she even kept her gun on him to keep him with her.”

Isaac was staring at the gun.

“You think she did that?”

“Could be. I dunno.”

The large birds flapped their wings, making a sound unlike anything Jonathan had ever heard before, a cross between a beating heart and wet laundry set out to dry in a strong wind.

Isaac saw that he was staring at them.

“Don’t be worried about those birds,” he said. “They won’t come down when we’re standing here.”

“Good, good,” Jonathan said.

“Now this little thing,” Isaac said, holding up the patrollers’ pistol, “it couldn’t keep—”

Jonathan aimed his weapon at Isaac and pulled the trigger. His horse gave a little dance as the blast knocked Isaac off his feet. The vultures started into the air and then settled back in the tree.

“You killed those patrollers,” Jonathan said, leaning over his horse. “Not Liza. She’s just a runaway.”

Isaac, lying on his back on top of the body of Langerhans, blinked and blinked, making small noises all the while blood bubbled up from his chest.

“Did you know that you are my brother?”

Isaac said something, but Jonathan could not make it out.

Jonathan shot him again.

In that instant his soul surged with rage upon his already murderous rage as out of the corner of his eye he saw the young black boy from New Jersey, apparently having tied me to the horse and slapped the animal into making his lazy way back to The Oaks on his own, tearing out across the fields in the direction of the swamp.

Jonathan’s return to The Oaks was not a happy one, he explained to me. A number of slaves had seen him ride out with Isaac, but saw no Isaac with him on his return.

He has stayed behind with the bodies, he rehearsed to himself. But he did not have to explain. There was no one to explain anything to but himself.

Or perhaps to yours truly.

Which is what he began to do when he came through the door, the smoking remains of his father’s will in his hand, and the currents of smoke floating up the stairs behind him.

When he had finished he said, “Now I must go, and I suggest you do the same.”

I coughed on the wafting of the rising smoke and stood up tall again, still feeling rather faint.

“Goodbye, Cousin,” Jonathan said. “I am going to put this place in order and expect that I will write to you for your reply.”

“Y-yes,” I said, “yes,” trying to understand him correctly and make a plan even as I stumbled weakly to the door.

My last glimpse of cousin Jonathan came as I reached the ground floor and saw him through the rear windows running, weapon in hand, toward the burning barn.

Precious Sally came up behind me and touched my arm.

“A horse out front for you, Massa Nate,” she said.

I thanked her and went to the door.

A great commotion came from the burning barn and from the cabins beyond. Someone fired shots. Someone beat on a deep-throated drum (and where had that instrument come from, I wondered in my still-lingering delirium).

She raised a hand. “Better go now, Massa Nate.”

I slipped out the door, where a young slave child, apparently under Precious Sally’s orders, had brought me my old Promise and stood there holding the reins, as still as a statue amidst the rising commotion of sound from the barns. Quickly, I mounted the beast and the boy released the reins. He gave the horse a slap on the rump and I—the least experienced of horsemen—kicked my mount to turn him toward the drive that led to the road to town just as from around the corner of the big house charged a cadre of slave men waving pitchforks and scaling knives. As more slaves came running from the barns, some of these men carrying torches that burned deceptively diminished in the bright light of the morning sun, my horse, apparently frightened and distracted, broke into a gallop, carrying me directly toward the burning barns. Only a flaming length of lumber that just then peeled away from the arch above the door and fell in our path turned the animal away from its apparent goal of taking refuge in the burning building itself. It danced to the left, and then arched a step to the right. I felt the beast nearly trip and falter, as it stumbled over a sack at the side of the barn—which turned out to be the body of my cousin, blood running from slashes along his neck and face.

“Jonathan!” I called down to him.

My cousin, wretch that he was, lay there as silent and still as a stone, a blood-drenched life-sized sack of flesh.

Shots rang out behind me and I turned to see the small boy who had held my horse now standing on the back veranda, a gun—I was too far away to recognize it as Jonathan’s—in hand. He fired again, into the air just as from the upper floors of the house above him a great volt of flame leaped out through the windows of what had served as my room.

Promise came suddenly to life and surged around the flaming building, carrying me into the woods, in the opposite direction from what I took to be a route for my escape.

“Halt!” I cried out. “Whoa!”

He kept on galloping, and I nearly fell as we entered the first curtain of trees sheltering the land along the creek.

More gunshots echoed behind me, and the smell of smoke lay thick about the branches past which we rushed. But when we entered the clearing at the brick house landing all seemed calm and quiet. Men worked at the ropes that kept the brick barge in place at the water’s edge. One of them turned and saw me, and then another and another.

Promise came to a halt and I slid off his back, hitting the ground hard and lying there, almost as still as my late cousin back near the barn. My eyes remained open, and I watched the men, in their tatters and long hair, gathering around me, murmuring to each other. I was fully expecting to join my cousin in the darkness to which he had just repaired.

One of the men kneeled down and held me by the ankles. Another took me by the arms. Together they lifted me up and carried me slowly to the water. Unaccountably, they were in low voices singing a song I had only recently heard.

Massa sleeps in de feather,

Nigger sleeps on de floor…

“Please,” I said in a whisper, having no quarrel with pleading for my life.

When we’uns gits to Heaven,

Dey’ll be no slaves no mo’…

“No more,” I said. “No more, no more, no more, no more…”

They raised my feverish raving corpus higher, almost to the level of their heaving chests, and just as I thought they were about to hurl me into the creek and leave me to drown they lowered me over the rail of the boat and carried me onto the deck, setting me down gently among the sacks of rice from the recent harvest.

A breeze came up, and the boat carried me to town where some of the kindlier Jews, those with professions, not human property, cared for me until I felt strong enough to depart for New York. This took about a week, and by then Rebecca, I heard, had already put away her mourning clothes and faded into the bosom of her family, preparing to give birth soon to her child. I heard this from her cousin Anna, who knew I was in town.

One morning, just before I set sail for home, she appeared on the veranda of the town house where I was staying, raven-haired, pale-cheeked, her long neck bared to the sun.

“Is there any chance you might stay longer in town?” she inquired over the tea my hostess had immediately set before us.

“I cannot,” I said. “I must return to my father and make a report to him.”

“Will you ever return to Charleston?”

Anna fluttered her long dark eyelashes and tilted her head toward me in an interrogatory fashion.

Slaves—men and women—had died, died every day, barns and houses went up in flames, and even as we were speaking fugitives hurried through the wilderness, hoping to find freedom on the other side of dark forests, tall mountains, flooding rivers. And attractive young girls hoped to make their dreams of romance and family come true, despite all of everything else. I had one waiting for me in New York. This much I had learned about life.