Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [117]
“Yes, massa, I won’t.”
With mock-ferocity I loomed above her, pinning her arms to the bed.
“You will not.”
“No, I won’t, not anymore.”
“Isaac?” I said. “Is it Isaac?”
At the thought seeing the two of them meet at his cabin door I scarcely could control my anger.
“Why, if he—”
“Not Isaac, never Isaac,” she said. “He is my brother. He—”
I stopped her, because the thought came to me with a mental jolt.
“Jonathan? Cousin Jonathan?”
She sat up at once and all warmth left her voice. If it was possible to see this cacao-colored woman turned pale, I saw it then.
Silently, Liza took to her feet and picked up her clothes. In the night I had seen only a burst of flesh here, a breast, a thigh, her neck elongated in the passion of our coming together. Now in the early dawn she stood luxuriously naked in the instant before she covered herself cloth by cloth. I had never seen a woman fully unclad, and so I gathered it all in—breasts, thighs, pelvis, where her flesh curved as though it were carved from brown stone or light mahogany—while she covered what I saw almost as soon as I saw it.
“I trust it was not Jonathan. He is married,” I said in my own naïve way. “And he may be my cousin but he is old enough to be your father.”
She said nothing except, “Can you help me?”
“Help you to escape him?”
Almost fully dressed now, she turned to me as she worked her buttons closed and nodded.
“Yes.”
“I am planning to leave for home almost at once,” I said. “I can’t…I have to return to New York.”
“You got to stay a little longer.”
“I have made up my mind.”
“Just a little longer?”
I shook my head, more in confusion than anything else.
“I had planned to go to town and check the sailing schedule for boats to New York.”
“Take me with you.”
“What? I cannot—”
“Take me to town,” she said. “Take me with you to town.”
I sighed deeply, feeling myself still sinking into that same abyss I’d first fallen into before the rising of dawn.
“Can we do that?”
“I can arrange it,” she said. “I got some…some…powers here in the house.”
“They treat you well,” I said, “or so I thought until you told me about Jonathan. Liza, has he ever…?”
Now it was her turn to sigh, a strange thing to do given all the circumstances, scarcely any of which I knew at that moment.
So that when she stole out of my room just as the first rays of the sun caught the tops of the trees beyond the barns I lay back on my bed, puzzled, satisfied, shaken—bewitched, and boiling about in my own woes and desires, more certain and yet more confused than ever. Did I yet know who I was? Did I know why I had traveled here? I believed I now had the answers in my heart. But these did not match the answers in my mind.
Chapter Forty-nine
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In My Margins
What Is a Jew?
What do they believe? They wandered the desert, hoping for water. They followed a pillar of fire. They pray to one god. No afterlife? This makes them different from Christians. They see a deed as valuable in itself, and not a stepping stone toward eternity. Do they treat others as they would be treated themselves?
Chapter Fifty
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A Child Is Born, a Mother Departs
Middle of the night. All around the cabin dark kept a hold and lay a weight on the other cabins, on the big house itself not far away under the watery slim moonlight cast down by the quarter orb. Her cry went up in the darkness, and everyone heard, everyone knew. How could they not, the plantation slaves living so close together in the quiet pasture behind the rice barns. At first she lay there in the cabin, twisting and bending with the waves of labor, all alone, calling out to Old Dou and Yemaya, wondering if Wata, her mother’s mother, of whom she had heard a great deal, might be floating somewhere above the cabin, and then she heard rumbling above the roof and harsh rain fell for a short time, and then quiet, and then two voices arguing, Yemaya and Yemaya’s brother Oganyu, the baby is mine, one called to the other, and the other called back, no, no, no, the baby is mine!
The rain