Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [101]
“Go on,” Rebecca said.
The slave lifted his copy of the Bible and began to read in a clear steady voice with scarcely an error in his pronunciation. My eyes remained on Liza, her near-pale skin and her own blue-green eyes, and my mind began to drift. This was more attention to the Bible than I had given it since I was a boy and tutored by my Halevi. After Isaac finished his passage, Rebecca asked several of the field hands to try, and these were much less agile at their reading.
I was beginning to get bored, when Rebecca interrupted one of the young men, a heavy boy, his skin dark as swamp water in the shade, as he was stumbling about with the page.
“Jacob, do you understand what you’re reading?”
“Yes, missus,” he said.
“Can you explain it to the rest of us?”
“No, missus,” he said.
“Then you don’t truly understand it, do you?”
“It’s a lot of story ’bout freedom,” he said. “But I don’t know no none of it.”
“One day you will.”
“That’s what the Jesus folks say,” one of the other hands spoke up.
“What do they say?” Rebecca asked him.
“They say, we die, and then we free.” He made a loud noise with his lips and everyone smiled in his direction.
“And what do we say?” Rebecca nodded for him to keep speaking.
“Jews say, we free until we die.”
“Life is everything, yes,” Rebecca said.
“And one day…”
The boy spoke up in a manner that I had never heard a slave employ.
“And one day?” Rebecca urged him on.
Now he appeared to be slightly embarrassed by all the attention we were giving him. But he spoke anyway.
“And one day we’ll be free in this life, in this world.”
“And the key to this door?”
The boy smiled, showing a mouth empty except for three or four wooden teeth.
“The Book,” he said.
“The Book, yes,” Rebecca said. “This Book, and all books. Reading will make you free.”
At which point she passed her copy of the book to Liza, who picked up where the darker boy had left off.
“Exodus, thirteen, verses fourteen through sixteen,” Liza announced. “‘And when, in the future,’” she began, “‘your child asks you and says, “What is this happening here?” you shall say to your child [she looked up, and she stared directly at me but neither smiled nor acknowledged me in any other way], “With a strong hand God brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage. When Pharaoh’s [she said “ph-haro” and Rebecca corrected her] heart was hardened against letting us leave, God killed every first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of human to the first-born of beast. Therefore I now sacrifice to God every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first-born among my sons.” And so it shall be for a sign upon your hand and for frontlets between your eyes that with a strong hand God brought us out from Egypt…’”
I watched her all the while she read, noticing the way her lips scarcely moved, and the grace with which she held the Book. It was a remarkable event that I was witness to, the readings by these slaves on the subject of recovering the freedom of a people who had been in chains in Egypt. That it was my own people who had won their freedom charged the reading with seriousness, and that it was part of my family that owned these slaves who were reading about freedom made the event even more remarkable to me. And that I spent most of this hour studying the face and neck and collarbone and slender chest and arms of Liza made it a most memorable event as well.
As the hour ended I said to her as quietly as I could, “My cousin Rebecca has taught you well.”
She gave me a quick smile and said, “I have another teacher, also, a doctor.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to do or say, wondering, wondering, if Liza were my slave, would I set her free?
Chapter Forty-one
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Half-light, Half-dark
The child Lyaza grew, and the doctor, who had been a fairly young man when she was born, found himself noticing certain signs in his own life that demonstrated to him that he, too, was growing older. As the child turned handsprings in front of Old Dou’s cabin,