Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [102]
This girl gave off light, life, stars in her eyes!
The doctor, who was married but without issue, felt her as a mild magnetic force. He watched her play, and when he stopped in at Old Dou’s cabin once or twice a month to see how the child was faring, he sometimes watched her with her eyes closed in sleep, dreaming of who knows what kind of freedoms that might set her apart from the daily round of the plantation. At times like this he recalled what when he first saw it he recognized as aberrant behavior, the young master’s baby-babbling over the infant girl. This little thing, wraith-like and so charming, also wandered through his thoughts in idle hours. So innocent she was of her condition, it gave him pause to consider how even a slave might seem to herself somehow free if she was not aware of her own perpetually indentured state. Perhaps all of us live this way, he considered, wrapped in chains and yet thinking ourselves free. And was that a kind of freedom after all, or just an illusion of living without chains?
Free men are often the worst, he decided, noticing with his clinical eye over the course of several months of visits to The Oaks that the plantation owner’s son appeared to have kept his attachment to the slave girl, which by this time the doctor found to be quite bizarre, prowling about the house, trying to look innocent even as he tracked little Lyaza, who often played alongside Dou while the woman worked. Over the course of several years his great interest, in the doctor’s eyes, clearly took an aberrant turn. It seemed to come out of nowhere, though the doctor knew that whatever physical abnormality he might discover in a patient, there was usually a cause buried somewhere deep in the man’s history. Although sometimes, as it might possibly could be with Jonathan Pereira, the illness remained inexplicable. Illness! Thus the doctor named it, based on his observations, but an illness that revealed itself as more spiritual or mental than physical. Here was a man so caught up in the movements and sounds of this child that he seemed no more free than metal splinters in the field of a magnet. Whenever the doctor saw them together Jonathan fluttered about the child in such an embarrassing thrall of attraction that the doctor could only look away, if not leave the room, whenever he saw him at his game.
Just as he had in that moment of her birth, when Jonathan babbled over the girl’s head, “Weety-sweety, sweety-weety…”
Was it that he had happened by accident to have been present at her birth and somehow felt a special link to her?
The doctor considered that as a possibility. But without speaking to Jonathan, always too busy anyway either with work or with his silly prattling over the slave child, he could not say for sure. Who knew what he wanted? That was the doctor’s sense of things at first. Did the young man himself know what he wanted? The odd light in his eye, the slight quavering of his tongue when he opened his mouth to breathe, the hitch in his motion before he approached the girl as if with some purpose before suddenly halting just short of her and turning away to stare at some distant point on the ceiling or through the window—these hints at his state gave the doctor pause. He feared that he knew more about what the man wanted than the man did himself.
And so, against his better judgment as a physician who believed his profession meant observing and deducing, not introducing himself into the situation at hand, whenever he was present he tried to intervene,