Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [103]
“Perhaps Lyaza would like to show me her doll collection,” he would say, allowing the slave child to lead him to where her makeshift play-toys lay in rows behind the pallet where she slept.
There they would sit and she would babble on about which doll had what name and what her duty was around the plantation.
The owner’s son stood over them, as if on guard.
“Oh, little weety-sweety, sweety-weety, show the doctor your dolls…”
It was embarrassing to hear a grown man behave this way.
“Sweety-weety, little weety-sweety…”
The man, behaving in such foolish fashion, sounded more like someone caught in some net of his own unknown devising—the doctor really had no name he could put on it—than a grown man tending to one of his own properties.
But then who am I to judge? the doctor said to himself. There appeared to be little harm in all this, just the embarrassing foolishness of it all. Also, he could not stay here and focus on it. Always it came time for the doctor to leave: he had to make his rounds and then return to town for his regular practice. Now and then he would allow himself to consider what Jonathan might be doing in his absence. The child herself, to look at her, enjoyed his attention. The doctor could only hope that all was innocent. And after Jonathan’s wife had a boy child, the doctor decided that that was that was that. The man now had offspring of his own and would tend in the natural direction of raising the boy.
This, however, did not happen, at least not in any way that the doctor could observe. As the girl’s body changed over time and she lurched into adolescence with the beginnings of breasts and jutting hips, she drew all of Jonathan’s visible attention even as his young son cleaved to his mother, estranged, because of his father’s behavior, from the paternal realm. The girl played on, oblivious to the nature of Jonathan’s interest, merely enjoying all the attention he gave her.
Old Dou, who had much earlier recognized his behavior as obsession, tried to stand between them.
This she could do while the girl remained a child. As she grew older, Lyaza found that she had the freedom to run about the grounds and play by herself in various nooks and crannies of the big house and the nearby outbuildings. Old Dou could not keep up with her.
Not so the plantation owner’s son. He ran with the girl, and ran some more, even after his own family duties became, with the birth of his own son, pressing, and even after, when his wife left him and returned home.
“Oh, sweety! Sweety-weety! Wait for me!”
You could hear him calling to the girl as they ran about the back of the house, around the barns and back to the house.
The older Master Pereira had a blind-spot when it came to Jonathan. He wasn’t a bad man, no, not at all. He also did not pay much attention to his family, having given himself over completely to the administering of those who administered his little rice-growing kingdom. He was unusual in that he kept the doctor on call for his family and for the property, which is to say, the slave people. Most plantation owners let the Africans tend to themselves until and unless some injury or illness grew well beyond the point of mere maintenance and repair.
“My watchword,” he declared once or twice over that sherry he and the doctor occasionally drank together, “is health, the health of our rice-farming, the health of our people…”
What did he mean by “people”? the doctor wondered the first time he heard that.
Did he mean his own family, his co-religionists—the tiniest of minorities in this countryside, though in town a fair number of his “people” congregated on the Sabbath and prayed in the beautiful if sparely decorated synagogue (he had been a guest there and observed its austere façade and interior).
The Jews, the few he knew, always impressed him with their business acumen and their concern for the quality of their wares. The master had grown up in the Caribbean, he explained to the doctor, and while his family