Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [108]
“Den I’se not be sly, massa,” he said.
“Is that your slave voice, Isaac?”
“Das right, mas’. It’s de voice I can’t leave behin’.”
“But my cousin’s wife, your master’s daughter-in-law, has plans for that, as you know.”
“She got plans, sho.’”
“Speak plain English, please, sir.”
Isaac slowed his horse to a stop. And I tried to halt mine, though it walked a few paces further along so that I had to look back at him over my shoulder.
“Don’t call me that, massa,” Isaac said.
“Call you what?”
“You called me ‘sir.’ Don’t fool with me, Mr. Yankee Master.”
“I am not fooling with you, Isaac. I can tell that you have a good mind. I can see that Rebecca’s teaching is working quite well.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” Isaac said. “Quite well, yes.”
“She is preparing you for freedom,” I said.
“Is that what she is preparing us for? And what if she is just preparing us for being a better kind of slave?”
“She has good intentions, as far as I can tell,” I said.
“And does her husband, your cousin Jonathan, my master Jonathan, have good intentions?”
“I cannot speak for him,” I said.
“You don’t want to speak for him,” Isaac said. “Because he is a liar and a hypocritic.”
“Isaac!”
“Oh, yes, sorry, mas’. I’se know de slave can’t talk ’bout de mas’ dissa way. It be a bad way, and I’se sorry, I’se truly is.”
“She’s taught you well, hasn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Miss Rebecca.”
“She’s taught me almost nothing,” Isaac said, “except to put a fine point on all the things I’ve known since I was a child.”
“She wants to help.”
“She helps to make my condition more painful. I learned how to read, but not from her. When she wanted to teach me I had to pretend I knew nothing, and after a while she had me read certain things that prove to me that I am all the more hopeless and damned.”
“How did you learn to read?”
“You got to know everything about my life? Do I know everything about your life? How did you learn to read?”
“I had a teacher, a man in New York.”
“Well, massa, the doctor here in the county taught me.”
“But about Rebecca…she is a good woman,” I said. “She had a vision—”
“While her husband lurks around the shacks at night?”
I lost all control then.
“You do not have to lurk around, do you? You live in the cabins.”
I pulled up my horse and he turned and reined in his animal.
“What are you talking about, massa?”
“No more ‘massa’,” I said.
He reached over and held the reins of my horse.
“What are you talking about, me not having to lurk around?”
“Liza,” I said, nearly choking on her name.
“You want to talk about Liza? She is like my sister. Or like a cousin. Yes, like a cousin.”
He dropped the reins and pushed at my horse, his own mount stepping away a foot or so between us.
“I see,” I said, but I did not see. And he knew that.
“Do you?” he said. “Do you see? Massa? What do you see? Hard to see nigger slaves in the dark. Except when they got a light tone on their skin. Easier to see the high yellow, ain’t it? Easier to aim for. ’Cept some masters go for the real dark. They like to sink into the black of dark, they like to just disappear and get swallowed up in the black of the black, don’t they?”
“I would not know,” I said.
My horse gave its head a shake, anxious to move again.
“You wouldn’t, eh? Well, you got some cousins who know, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”
His horse gave a whinny and now both horses danced a little in place.
“We got to move,” Isaac said. “You said what you wanted to say.”
“I want to tell you one more thing, though,” I said.
“What’s that? I mean, what’s that, massa?”
“Stop that, please.”
“What is it?” Isaac’s voice turned hard again.
“I am not that kind of man.”
“What kind of man is that?”
“First of all, not the kind of man who would make another man his slave. And second, not the kind of man who would make a woman his slave.”
“’Sat right, massa? Well, I’m glad you came down here from