Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [105]
Some do, in South Carolina, he wrote, others do not. At least others don’t wear visible manacles. The poet William Blake calls them “mind-forg’d” manacles. But he was not writing about actual enslavement. Mental slavery made for fools and foot soldiers. Actual slavery was something else entirely. The way his own throat sometimes tightened as he approached the slave quarters where he practiced his art at the master’s behest gave him pause. He was wearing his own chains, yes, though you could not see them. Yet he had to admit, in an immediate paragraph, that he had freedoms no slave would ever know. The Africans in the early shipments, may have been born free, but all of them would die in chains. Almost entirely because of them, he, who was born into the bondage of a certain way of seeing his life and the life of those around him, might possibly become free.
About such matters he wrote and he wrote and he wrote. Hours would go by in which he bent to his labor of recording the histories—or stories, as he thought of them—of various slaves he had encountered, including, as it turned out, the family of the very child whose welfare he worried about. And he wrote about the owners as well, the good Christian people whom he attended to in town and on their plantations, and of the Jewish master with whom he sometimes had those intense philosophical conversations that made him feel as though he were approaching the very borders of discovery, only to draw back ever so close to the edge of seeing life in new fashion. Medicine goes to the cause of maladies, he decided, when he thought of his particular cast of mind, but not all of them are things we might cure.
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For instance, the behavior of the master’s son. It grew more intense as the years passed, and the man took more liberties of time with the slave girl at the expense of his family. Old Dou told him that on trips to town he would search out small gifts for her, and when his wife found one of these hidden among his clothing wrapped in fine paper and packed into a box—this was a silk scarf made somewhere in the Orient, not something that any slave child, however adored, might imagine would become one of her own possessions—he became angry with her for spying on him. Word got around. Everyone in the congregation in Charleston heard about it. How this wife, his first, the dutiful docile daughter of distant Caribbean cousins, said nothing, until one day, finding herself at the edge of a fine despair, she asked the slave woman who kept their house for them to accompany her on a trip to town where, using money she had apparently been saving over the years, she purchased a place on a ship sailing for the island where she was born and departed. Once she had reached her birth home she wrote a letter to her husband in which she recorded the extreme suffering she had known because of his obsession and vowed never to return.
Jonathan seemed hardly to notice, his obsession having taken on proportions that finally made it difficult to go unremarked by his father.
“Dear boy,” the old man said, “you must not neglect our Abraham now that his mother has departed.”
But before he could raise the question of his son’s attention to the slave girl Jonathan spoke up.
“Father, please excuse me. I am going to town.”
He abruptly left the room, drove the carriage to town, and returned the next morning to announce that he and Rebecca, the daughter of family friends, were engaged and soon to be married. This was his way of declaring the matter closed, even before anyone could open it further. As he explained it to his new young wife his affection for the slaves was deep and complicated by the history of their own people who once were slaves themselves. He encouraged Rebecca in the education plans she made for the slaves even as he continued to proclaim in his actions his odd and obsessive