Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [109]
“I want to learn,” I said.
“You will,” he said. “You will.”
Chapter Forty-three
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In My Margins
New Science
This new science, anthropology, wedded to an old study, history, and theology. These studies, my studies, knotted to family and forebears, the road down which we came…and sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, having just dreamed of that erupting volcano, the first family, my family, fleeing from it as fast as they can walk, over the cooling lava plain…
Chapter Forty-four
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Another Letter, Unsent
The Oaks
Goosecreek
South Carolina
Dear Miriam:
I am still not much the letter writer, although I have recently composed a note to my father about some of the business matters that brought me here to this plantation, with acres and acres of woods and rice fields and barns and a pretty white house at the center of things where my uncle and aunt serve as the head of the family. But I have been wanting to write to you about this family, since it is so different from our small New York groups of blood relatives. Nights on this plantation give me plenty of time for reading and writing and reflection. I wanted to use the light of the lamp on the desk at which I sit to illuminate for you what yours truly has seen and learned. It is not exactly what I had in mind when I set out on my journey here, but it has taught me certain lessons about the world and myself. I don’t know that if I had stayed in New York that I would not have learned these same lessons, but it might have taken a while longer for it to happen.
There is a grace and languidness people effuse here…
There is a city here nearby…Though some decades ago it served as the destination for numerous slave ships from Africa, with the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Charleston’s busyness subsided somewhat. From what I have observed in these days, despite active foot traffic, and the usual horses and carriages, the city takes up no more area than one of our many neighborhoods. Yet I do admit it has its beautiful places, such as the charming tree-covered park just at the southeastern point of the city, called the Battery, where the richest and the most high-born families live, where we witnessed that horrendous moment of the horse-whipping.
Such a strange proximity of beauty and barbarism!
As for my family, it is situated some miles from town, on a number of heavily treed acres, with, as I have already written, the rice fields and barns and such, and the deep creek that runs on the northern border of the property that carries boats from town to the small pier at the family brickyard…
I have mentioned some of the slaves in my earlier letter to you. South Carolina, I am told, is more of an admixture than most of the rest of the South, except perhaps for New Orleans, this probably in part because of its access to the sea and the constant traffic of ships and sailors from all parts of the nation and the globe. Importing of African slaves made the city thrive, and now the sale—oh, yes, my dear, the very exchange of human beings for money!—of slaves from all about the South continues to bolster the local commerce…
Liza appeared with the coffee pot, and for an instant no greater than the breadth of a moth’s eye, she glanced at me[—tiny jagged shock like lightning in a dark stormy early summer night sky, a thought I am not including in this letter—]and then she poured the liquid into my cup.
Liza, every bit a dutiful house servant, moved once again to my side. [And that was perhaps the first time she came close enough so that I inhaled, along with the rich cacao flavor of the coffee blend, the perfume she scattered as she raised her arm to pour, another thought I will not include in this letter.]
I cannot write this, I cannot tell her how I feel, I cannot dare to tell myself…
Chapter Forty-five
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Night-blooming Flower
With Old Dou gone, nothing stood in Jonathan’s way. A new girl,