Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [104]
“My people, you see,” the man said to him, “themselves lived in bondage in Babylon, and so knew the heady stuff of freedom when they achieved it. Unlike the Africans we now own, they did not have to travel far to labor for others with no recompense.”
“Egypt was not far?”
The doctor decided that he would engage the man, whom he normally spoke with only about the medical conditions of family members, and slave retinue. Why should he not? Such interesting views the man had.
“Not in terms of land and landscape. Quite similar to, say, Judea.”
“And so, Babylon the same?”
“Quite the same.”
“Whereas here, in our Carolina, the land differs greatly, yes, I see that. But your further argument?”
“These creatures are adrift,” the master said. “So far from home, they cannot, surely cannot find a moral compass or master the situations in which they find themselves.”
“And so we give them the comfort of food and the vocation of laboring and so bring them a certain order?”
“Well said,” the master said. “Have you been reading the same German authors as me? Von Herder and such?”
“No, no,” the doctor said, “I don’t read many Germans. I am just thinking about what you are thinking, and I decided that this must be your thought.”
“Yes, it is, as you heard, and heard correctly. We do bring this disorderly and dislocated group of people some order and tie them to a place.”
“Yes, sometimes literally tie them,” the doctor said with a laugh.
When at last he walked away from this conversation, which had begun as a discussion about one thing and ended about another, he felt a bit of shame about that laugh.
But then he wasn’t so much concerned about the maintenance of his own soul but focused all of his working energy, and a great deal of his thought, on the health and physical welfare of others. His flaws, and he had some, did he not? (he chided himself for an hour or so about that laugh), seemed few in comparison to all the good he did. Not that he focused much on what he did either. He simply performed his labor as he was trained to perform it, and so kept his patients as healthy as he possibly could. Some, of course, grew sick and died. It was a wise doctor who knew that he could do little to prevent the forward-teetering patient with an ailment well on its way to carrying him off. Mainly he tried to keep the majority of the people he saw—including the slaves—on the path to a balance of work and some comfort, even if, in the case of the slaves, it meant an often explosive few hours just before the Sabbath, the only time they truly had to themselves.
***
All of this—what he probably thought of as his philosophy, though he never called it such—he put into a notebook bound in cow-hide and whose pages he kept from everyone else, even his wife, which, by the time of his first encounter with the Africans on the auction block in town, meant no one. The invisible hand of an illness—the slaves called it The Visitor—swept over the county and his wife had died of it suddenly, one of those patients to whom he could only give comfort rather than aid. Since they had had no children—he was too busy, he convinced himself, delivering other people’s children to have time for another marriage of his own, let alone children—the notebook rested in a drawer in his house in town unnoticed by anyone except for himself, the writer of it.
How many such books, he wondered aloud, languished unknown or mostly unread in various desks and cabinets in Charleston alone? Here might be the hidden history of this difficult time in which he found himself alive, born into a system that educated and rewarded him, and turned others into chattel. He vowed to keep on writing, though no one would read his entries. At least in this way, he decided