Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [127]
“Are you threatening us, sir?”
“I am merely stating a fact. If you see my nigger, I expect you will hold on to him for me.”
“I doubt if he has run this way,” Jonathan said.
“It is your reputation, sir,” the man said, brushing a hand along his thick white hair. “There are only a certain number of places where he can run.”
“If I were your slave,” I spoke up, “I would run anywhere I could.”
The man turned to me, his eyes glowing near-yellow in his head.
“I thought you were a more judicious fellow. If I did not know you were from New York, I’d think you wanted to challenge me to a duel.”
He then bowed slightly toward me, and twirled around on his heel, his cape following, and departed from the veranda. Within moments he remounted his horse and without another word the man and his crew, with one last glance back at us from Langerhans, went galloping away up the road.
“Wherever he has departed to, the young slave is fortunate,” my uncle said, “to be free of that creature’s clutches.” He turned to me and asked how I had come to know the man and I explained how I had encountered him, though I omitted most of the stranger elements that had passed between us.
“Travel sometimes makes for curious companions,” he said.
As if to put a concluding point on this entire incident, around the corner of the house Isaac came riding, leading my old Promise behind him, his presence reminding me that for many long minutes while we talked with the white-haired man the slaves seemed to have faded away.
“You coming to the fields, massa?” he called out to me. And so then making a bow of my own I left the veranda and mounted my horse. I had only just begun to ride, when I heard a voice from the veranda and looked back to see Liza standing there in her apron.
My heart leaped, more animal than our steeds.
Chapter Fifty-three
________________________
Introductory Lesson
They named her Liza, a version of her mother’s and grandmother’s names, and this girl, a pale creature compared to most of the other slaves—you’d say she was the color of almonds—stood out from everyone else even as she tried to stand close. Her great-grandmother had disappeared somewhere near an African river, her grandmother went mad but still gave birth before she died, and her mother succumbed in the birth throes, victim to what felt like a curse upon all the women.
Liza hoped to escape that curse.
Her father—everyone except his father seemed to know about her paternity, from the house slaves to all who lived in the back cabins and worked in the rice fields—put her to work in the main house when she was still a child, and there Liza flourished, learned under the tutelage of a black stump of a woman named Precious Sally, to help in the kitchen and to cook simple meals, if not at first for the aging master and his family, at least for the other house slaves. The doctor checked on her every time he visited the plantation, extremely worried that her father—he took him to be that dangerously mad—might at some point try to take her up the way he had her mother. He talked to the slave child, asked her certain questions that might have led her to reveal certain matters if in fact they had occurred.
But nothing.
This gave the doctor pause, and he was, at least momentarily, pleased that no harm had come to this girl.
Yet.
Because, he surmised, her father suffered from a terrible mental difficulty, and, the doctor believed, it was only a matter of time before the man would turn his attention in the worst way to his beautiful almond-colored daughter. For a while though, the man seemed to ignore her.
Meanwhile, the girl was growing, and much to the dismay of some of the field slaves who saw it, she now and then turned cart-wheels on the lawn of the main house on her way to work in the kitchen. Cooking. Baking. Cleaning. Gathering the spices.
At this point the doctor intervened and gave her periodic instruction in how to read. At least twice a week, and sometimes more, the physician would appear at the kitchen door, as though he himself were one of the slaves, forbidden