Song of Slaves in the Desert (5 page)

In the first light of the new morning at sea I awoke, sat up, and said my prayers, feeling the very change in the weather, as though a line had been drawn in the water which we had crossed sometime in the night. From where we had sailed, New York, Perth Amboy, the Virginia coast, it had been winter, and now we moved through spring and the air itself sang a different tune in the spreading sails overhead.

“…yawlfancyforatoinpashatteras…”

A voice from above—God? No, a sailor climbing the highest point of the deck.

“What, sir?” I called up to him.

“…past Hatteras,” he said, pointing to the coast line, a burnished high yellow green in the first light of morning.

“The Cape Hatteras?”

“Yes, sir,” he called down to me. “Turning past it just now…”

I went to the rail and took a deep, deep breath, feeling the salt air rise in my lungs as if I were inhaling the chemic broth of the South. I felt like the boy in the Hawthorne story, a kinship not merely formed by the likeness of the author’s name and mine, but because of the sense of having put one world behind me as I faced the new one just coming over the horizon. The paternal old God of my father and his father before him had drawn a line in my life, and I had crossed it already, on my way to the new parts.

Sails and hulls littered the green waters near shore the closer we got to our destination. Past Cape Lookout—another sailor kindly informed me of our location—by lunch (which, not caring much to speak again with the other passengers, I took in my cabin), and after dinner, as the last of the sun quickened toward the western horizon, we sailed past Cape Fear. The winds changed yet again, becoming less intermittent and undependable, as if the gods whose breath they were—I’m joking, of course, in a metaphorical way here, as only old tutor Halevi has taught me to do—were working more in tandem with our fates. Dolphins swooped up out of the depths and skimmed the waves and dove again. Their beautiful swimming gave me such a sign of hope as I can hardly describe!

One more night at sea. Though the ocean was calm my heart and mind were not, no matter how intensely I tried to concentrate on my reading by lamplight. Alas, I felt so suddenly sorry for myself, sailing south as I was instead of across the heaving Atlantic on my way to England and my tour. In disgust at myself and the world, I turned down the lamp. As I lay in the rolling dark, I was not only traveling south over the water in this ship but traveling in my mind back north into the past, to the morning in Perth Amboy when I awoke to my dear mother’s last outcries, the morning I watched her slip away into another country. Oh, sleep, I cried out on the stage in my imagination where all this played out. Sleep, come soon and blot all this into blackness!

***

A bell clanged me awake. Shouts and cries, the shrill pitch of seabird calls, the roar of barrels rolling and sails flapping, announcing Charleston in the morning. If in New York the air was thin and drenched with sun, here it was thick, syrupy and wet with light that seemed to rise up from within the shallow turbulent waters rather than settle upon us from the sun above. And that thick air carried a different sort of sound, not so much music as the essence of birdsong—calls from the seabirds skimming above us, calls from birds ashore—and that thick air bore a certain perfume, the scent you imagined emanating from the gardens of Paradise, a whiff of fruit and tart flower, and sweet fire and the flow of melted sugar and chocolate and coffee and tea. And if in New York there had been a black face or two in the larger crowd, here it was all reversed, with the majority of faces black—from the longshoremen who caught the ropes cast to them from the bow by the
Godbolt
’s crew to the men who lounged in place behind large carts and wheelbarrows heaped high with packets and bales to the children who skidded about underfoot almost as if in a dare to the larger human creatures to step on them if they could—all were black.

The color of things, not just the faces of the slaves (and I was assuming that here, unlike New York, all black people were slaves) but the air and the noise and the light, made me feel as though I had arrived in another country, a place that I might have imagined if I had read about it in one of the history books that Halevi and I had studied together, somewhere that I could not have constructed in my mind without great prompting. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the sight of the harbor, the ships, the piers, the warehouses, and the city beyond. It was just that I never would have imagined it in this way, perhaps never would have, never could have, imagined it at all.

Was it the kind of mind I had? Or was I just too young and—peace be unto you, Halevi—too unschooled to appreciate or understand these matters? Who knows what I might have decided then and there if I wasn’t rudely jarred from my musings by the silver-haired man in black cape and suit brushing past me, followed by his young black servant with the baggage.

As he briskly descended the gangplank he turned and hurled these words up at me:

“Pereira, we’ll meet again, I’m sure!”

And then he cut a brusque passage through the crowd, followed by the boy with the bags.

I would have kept my eye on him, except I was immediately distracted by a young woman, sweet of face, who waved a handkerchief at me. Yes, I was sure she was waving to me.

A sailor came up alongside me and picked up my bag. But I took it from him and made my way down the gangplank, pleased that I needed neither slave nor free man to help me carry my baggage. A smile spread across my face—I could feel it stretching the skin of my cheeks—and I advanced toward the waving woman.

“Cousin Nathaniel?”

Her voice, a cooling slow-turned series of noises, wrapped around my name in the oddest way I’d ever heard. She had dark blue eyes and wore her brown hair parted in the middle with curls dangling at either side of her face like twirling vines.

“Sir!”

A man alongside her, a paunchy fellow, much older than me, with a flat nose and a fierce green-eyed gaze, thrust out his hand.

“Hello,” I said.

“I am your cousin Jonathan,” he said, “and this is my wife Rebecca.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” I said, and turning to Rebecca said, “And touched that you waved so heartily at a complete stranger like me.”

Rebecca laughed, and pressed herself against my cousin’s arm.

“He is just like you,” she said to Jonathan. “Why, it runs in the family, doesn’t it?”

“What does, darling?” Jonathan said. He spoke to her using sweet words but his tone seemed born of distraction and perhaps more paternal than avuncular.

I could not help but stare at this man, whether because of my own curiosity at meeting someone with my own family blood or because I had been sent to investigate the means of his livelihood or even for some even deeper reason I could not say. Certainly I saw a passionate intensity in his eyes, though mixed with some other extremes that I could not find the words to describe. He certainly looked back to me with great fervor. And he spoke with deep feeling.

“Welcome to Charleston, Nathaniel, we are hoping you are going to stay with us a while.”

“Why, yes,” I began, “since our fathers—”

At which point I felt a tug at my hand and a slender hard-jawed dark man a year or two younger than myself tugged at my bag.

My first response was to keep holding on to it.

“Allow Isaac to help you,” my cousin said, noticing, almost before I did, that I was not about to hand over my possessions.

“Of course,” I said, nodding to the young man, who meandered away with the bag toward the edge of the crowd.

We followed slowly along, with my cousin pointing this way and that at various buildings and alleys and streets, saying names I did not catch. I was feeling a bit disoriented, walking on land after my days on the ocean, and the sun lay like a thick cap upon my head and like a heavy cape upon my shoulders. I blinked against its brightness, and felt suddenly rather sleepy and struggled to catch my breath.

“This weather…” I said.

My cousin laughed, and Rebecca reached for my arm.

“You will become accustomed to our weather,” she said. “After a few years…”

“I am not—” I said. And then laughed at her joke, enjoying the sweet and appealing way that she laughed in response.

“Are you hungry, sir?” my cousin said. “Because if you are we can take food here or begin our drive to the plantation.”

“My head says drive, my stomach says stay here a while.”

“Good man,” my cousin said, clapping a heavy arm tightly around me. “Rebecca, let us treat him to our best.”

Rebecca shook her curls and took me by the other arm.

“I am so happy you are here!”

We ate beneath the shade of a large umbrella at an open-air market near the docks, served by African waiters who carried plates of fried fish and vegetables galore to our long table. After my days and nights on the water I found that I had developed a huge appetite and concentrated on meeting it when I became distracted by shouts and cries from the market building nearby, as though some athletic competition were transpiring. It wasn’t until I remarked on it that my cousin mentioned the auction.

“Auction? What kind of auction?” I said.

“Come, I will show you,” my cousin said, a thin smile curling at his lip.

Rebecca shook her curly head.

“I was afraid of this. Please, no.”

“He should see it, Rebecca, don’t you think? He will sooner or later, so why not sooner? It is one of the major attractions of our fair city.”

The noises grew louder, and I set down my utensils, my appetite piqued for another variety of hunger.

“No, please, sir,” I said. “We are here now. I want to see it, whatever it is you speak of.”

“I will not,” Rebecca said, with a shake of her curls. “These poor Africans…take him without me.”

“Africans?” I said.

“Today there are no Africans,” my cousin said. “The federal government allows us no more Africans at our ports, you know.”

“You know what I meant,” Rebecca said. “You will go alone. Show your cousin, if you dare. Show him what life is really like down here.” She gave a toss of her head and turned from him. “I will wait for you at the carriage.”

My cousin pretended that his wife had not shown any scorn toward him in public.

“If you will excuse us, my darling,” he said. And motioned for me to rise and follow him.

“Women are the frailer kind, are they not?” he said to me.

And so it was only an hour or so after my arrival here on a delightful morning, in bright sunlight, in lovely warm air, with the perfume of flowers on the breeze mingling with the fresh odors of sea salt, that I, a descendent of slaves from Egypt and Babylon, witnessed my first trading in human flesh.

Life and freedom, inextricably bound, can we ever know which came first? I have read the Bible, I have read the Qur’an, I have read Darwin, I have read the commentators, and what do I know for all of that? That I don’t know, no, I don’t, not unless I say I don’t know and I’ll let some bearded who-dah in a collar or skull-cap or turban tell me that he has the word of God and will now tell me what I am supposed to know.

But I hold certain ideas over others. Sometimes I walk along the cliffs and stare out at the rushing ocean, the power there nearly convincing me that we began as ocean soup and divided, cell from cell, until we grew more complicated and complex than the early cells could ever imagine—because isn’t that like our growing up ourselves, the way we know nothing and then learn as much as we can before the wind snuffs us out like a candle? One cell from another cell, and both are equal, no man cell first and, after you, my dear, then the woman cell.

When the tide recedes and I climb down to walk among the sea-wrack and detritus, the delicious stink of life freshly delivered up by the waves, salt and sun and ammoniac air all mixed together, oh, I know I know, at least I think I know, that the miracle of God making man from clay and then woman from man’s clay might be a wonderful metaphor for our creation from the slightly moist and highly compacted earth and sand left behind when the tide went out for a million years. And the spark of lightning, like some old mining prospector’s last match, or first, breaks into fire, and heats up life’s dinner, first and foremost, once and for all.

Some say the world began in fire, some say in water. Why such opposites? Unless we need to embrace both and all the elements when we think of the extraordinary event that is life?

The bits and parts of living things came together in the oceans to make the fish.

One fish crawled on its stubby legs up onto the beach, and returned again and again. And then another and another.

Did the fish become clay?

The gods molded out of wet clay a man, and then a woman. Or a woman, and then a man. And breathed breath into them.

A complicated story made simple or a simple story made complicated? All these variations, leading back to mystery.

Out of water, out of clay our mother was born.

These meanderings I offer as I try to tell the story.

Fear, hope, love, hate, illusion, dismay boiled up in the Charleston market, known as the center for slave auctions in the region. Buyers and sellers came from far and wide to attend. And sell and buy. A large crowd wrestled about in the interior of one of the low brick market buildings, and my cousin feigned surprise. There were no longer any fresh shipments of Africans, as he explained, so this was only local chattel, slaves from farms in this county, neighboring counties, and other southern states, some of them—he tried to make a joke—from almost as far away as Africa itself.

“I myself,” he said, “have not come here for a rather long while, since we have most of our needs taken care of by our own slave families. That is, breeding and such for new hands. The boy, Isaac, who carries your bag, he was bred on our property. But now and then we do need to come here, and the prices, I have to say, have risen quite sharply since the African trade ended.” He paused and stood in quiet thought amidst the din. “Now, do not worry if you feel struck almost by a physical blow as you watch. I recall the first time I came here, Father had me accompany him when I was a boy, and it struck me that way.” He then fixed me with a stare, as though he were a scientific investigator of some sort, straining to detect my response.

I did respond. I felt myself becoming overtaken by the noise, by the sight of the bare-backed blacks, men and women, standing in chains, some of them muttering to themselves, a few of them praying aloud, one or two of them even singing, as if no one else could hear. It reeked in here something together like a sick room and a back street after a hot rain in summer. Given the sweat pouring out of me, I had to imagine the other men milling about here were effusing doubt and worry as much as the slaves were sweating in fear. I had a mad impulse to rush up to the manager and grab the keys that dangled from the belt at his waist, and unlock each and every lock on every chain and set these people free. Especially the women. It seemed so cruel to keep these females in chains, as if unchained they might do someone harm. And it was quite astonishing to me that most of the slave men and women remained so calm, and that the free people in the room were acting in such a frenzy.

The white men, some of them of a company arranging the sales, shouted the blacks down, while other whites milling about, studying the wares, or poking and pinching Africans here or there so that black flesh suddenly turned white before the mark faded, kept their silence.

I looked over at my cousin, the sweat running down my forehead into my eyes and stinging, stinging.

“Is it always so hot in here?” I asked.

“The heat aside,” my cousin said, “what do you think of this?”

I shook my head, my entire body feeling inflamed by all that went on around us, blacks led around in their chains, white men shouting.

“I can see,” he said, “that you have not prepared yourself for this. Here.” My cousin reached into his coat pocket and came up with a silver flask, proffering it to me.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Have a sip, sir, a sip only, and that will restore you.”

“Very well,” I said, and took a sip from the flask, feeling even greater heat and the heady moment afforded by the fine brandy contained therein.

I handed the flask back to my cousin, and he took a long swallow from the container, and, just before returning it to his coat, another.

“Tell me,” I said, over the din, “How much does it cost to buy a slave?” From another pocket he took out a piece of coarse paper on which some printing had been made and handed it to me.

OFFER OF SALE

Offered by Charles Tristman the following six slaves:

Maree, black girl 16 years old at $1250.00

Maryan, black girl 16 years old at $1250.00

Lucy, grif girl 14 years old at $1150.00

Bette, grif girl 14 years old at $1150.00

Jane, black girl 12 years old at $1000.00

James, black boy 14 years old at $1200.00

All of said slaves are warrant sound and healthy in body and in mind and slaves for life…

“What is a ‘grif girl’?” I asked.

“A slave of mixed blood,” my cousin said. “That is, white and African. A mixture that always improves the stock.”

My stomach turned at his words. While my cousin talked to me of high prices, of dollars, and the cost of a hardy male and the cost of a breeding female, I felt my temperature rise. After a few moments I thought I might, like some fragile female, fall to the ground in a faint.

“I am afraid I am feeling somewhat ill.”

“You are here to learn about our business,” he said, “and this is the first part of the first lesson.” Once more he offered me a drink from the flask. I hesitated, and he thrust the container at me, refusing to bend until I took another sip.

“Now,” he said, after taking another drink for himself and giving me a bullying stare, “New Yorkers are famous for being bold, are they not? Stand tall, Cousin. Look and listen.”

Thus, despite my fear that I might succumb to my growing misery, we stayed. With my mind abuzz from the powerful brandy I watched and groaned as the noise grew louder and the bosses urged first one and then another and another black in chains up onto the platform in the center of the building, shouting out names and prices and qualities. Vile sweat and fearful breath drenched the air and as bodies glistened in the heat men moved forward to press and study the flesh and bones of the darker people—some with mouths open in silent prayer, others muttering curses, most of them silent, mouths clenched.

One man bid a slave to raise his arms, one at a time, over his head. Another asked a woman to turn and turn as he gazed at her breasts (and I gazed at him gazing and then gazed back at her, feeling myself become aroused, and scolding myself for that). And there in the middle of it I saw an unwanted if familiar figure, the man from New Jersey, still cloaked all in black, moving in a studious manner from slave to slave, the young black boy tagging along behind him. As if he felt my eyes on him he turned and stared directly at me.

“Young New Yorker!” he called out. “We have some things to discuss!”

“Do you know that man?” my cousin said.

“From the voyage here,” I said.

“I have seen him before,” my cousin said.

The din grew louder as my cousin appeared to study the man for a few moments, and then turned to me. I felt even more unsteady on my feet and motioned to my cousin, himself with eyes downturned, that I did truly wish to retreat.

“Perhaps it was a mistake to come here first,” he said when at last we left the market for the sweeter, fresher air of the pier-side. “But do not judge what we do by what you just witnessed. If you went into a hospital surgery and saw the surgeons sawing off limbs you might be disturbed but you would not think all surgeons did such things to all people they knew.”

“I am not here to judge anyone,” I said, remembering the business of my purpose. “I am here to learn about the workings of the plantation.”

“Of course,” said my cousin, leading me, flask in hand, from the place of misery.

“Was it awful?” Rebecca said as we approached.

I nodded.

“It makes me want to run away from here,” she said. “Nathaniel, they do not do things like this up north, do they?”

“No, no, they don’t,” I said. “Up north everyone’s free.”

“Jews are free, I know.”

“Of course,” I said. “Everyone is free. Or most everyone.”

“Then I cannot wait to visit the North.”

“Yes,” I said, “you two must come and visit us in New York.”

Lapsing into polite chatter, punctuated by further sips from my cousin’s flask, I bathed copiously in my own sweat, and soon we made our way to the carriage. I confess that the memory of the auction crowd, bathed in brandy, quickly faded from my mind.