Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [106]
The doctor wrote about all this in his notebook, including how, on one morning, after being informed by the slave named Isaac that Old Dou lay in her cabin, dreadfully ill, he went to seek her out and found the girl weeping at the bedside of the older African woman while Jonathan hovered in a corner of the room.
“She very sick,” the girl said.
“Help her,” Jonathan said to the doctor.
“I will do all I can,” the doctor said.
“I hope so,” Jonathan said, though the look in his eye, a truly odd gleam that reminded the doctor of madmen he had treated while in his school days, seemed to say otherwise.
The girl appeared to be more immediately distraught, weeping, moaning at the bedside.
“Please take her out of here,” the doctor said to Jonathan, wanting them both to leave so that he might try to treat the old woman.
For that, he never forgave himself, although what happened next surely was inevitable, given the circumstances.
Jonathan took the wailing girl by the hand and led her out of the cabin and off into the fields.
“You sweety,” he said, “I will help you.”
The girl protested, looking at him as if she had never seen him before.
“Tweety-sweety,” he said.
“Stop!” she said to him.
He swatted her with the back of his hand, bullying her the way a man might bully his dog or his horse, and dragged her by the hand further away into the surrounding woods. When they reached a shaded glade off to one side of one of the cultivated fields and he drew her close to him she was whimpering like an injured animal.
“Sweety,” he said, “no crying now, no crying.”
She went limp in his arms, and he lowered her to the ground and without any hesitation stripped off her clothing and had his way with her.
As simply as that, all the years of his apparently confused adoration and hovering protection of the girl came down to this. When he had finished, he wiped himself with her skirt and tossed the rest of her clothing at her.
“Get dressed,” he said. “I have an appointment in town.”
He left her lying there, not looking back even once as he walked away across the fields.
For a while the girl lay there, mourning for herself. The young master had been rough with her and she was bleeding in a way that she had never bled before. This frightened her terribly, and so she pulled on her clothes and walked back toward the cabin. No sign of the man in the fields ahead of her, but she caught sight of a slave boy she knew and sat down in the field out of his sight until he passed by. When she returned to the cabin Old Dou lay where she had left her, breathing harder than ever before.
“Doctor,” she said.
The doctor looked her over, noticed bloodstains on her dress.
“What happened to you? Are you all right?”
“I all right,” the girl said. “Mama Dou?” (That was what she called the old African woman.)
Old Dou did not reply, merely lay there breathing so hard that Lyaza feared she might begin to cough or spit up flesh from within her chest. Her own pain and turmoil seemed like nothing alongside this.
“Can you sit here with her?” the doctor said. “I have made her as comfortable as I could.”
“Yes, massa,” Lyaza said.
“I will return in the morning,” the doctor said (worrying, without saying anything about it, that the old African woman might not last the night).
Lyaza sat beside Old Dou’s pallet while the woman laboriously took in air and pushed it out as noisily as an ungreased carriage wheel. The next two hours went by slowly. All her short life the girl had known this woman as her caretaker and the mother she never had. “You a new girl,” Old Dou always said to her. “New girl from the Carolina.” Dou told her the story of her birth, complete with the tale of the passage, but keeping it less awful than it actually was. “Time enough for you to know everything. Time enough.”
Was it now time?
“New girl?” The old woman breathed the words out roughly.
“Mama?”
“Your head whirling? Don’t let it be whirling.”
She urged calm for the girl, but her own voice, and breathing, suggested urgency.
“You all right?” she said.
Lyaza shook