Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [130]
“Tell them I commanded you to stay with me.”
“They would assume that,” she said. “It is another matter.”
“Tell me.”
Dimly in the dark I could see her move her head from side to side.
“Not to be told.”
“Another secret? Another truth I thought to be true turns out to be something else than it seems?”
“Many things are not what they seem. ‘I am black but O my soul is white!’”
“What is that you say?”
“A poet, William Blake said that. The doctor read that poem to us. And we read it ourselves. I can recite it to you.”
“You can?”
“Don’t you think I have a memory?”
“Of course, of course, I do. Please do say it.”
She said the poem, and I lay back on the pillow, astonished.
“Striking, quite striking,” I said. “My own education has been deficient, because I do not know it.”
She touched my arm.
“I can recite other poems to you,” she said.
“That makes me happy,” I said.
“I may be a slave,” she said, “but when I read a poem I am free.”
“One day you will be free. You all will be free.”
“I have read this in a book the doctor gave me,” she said. “How all men are born slaves. Of one sort or another. Even the freest man must break loose of his father and mother, and his family’s laws and rules, and his country’s. Weren’t all the English just as much slaves as we who came from Africa? And didn’t they come here to free themselves?”
“What else did you read in this book?”
“The English stopped the ocean slave trade. And one day the Carolinians will choose to free us.”
“And they will choose to lose their plantations? It would have to happen at gunpoint. As some of the legislators here have been arguing.”
“The plantations are poorly run,” Liza said, naked, and speaking as if in debate in the legislature. “If it weren’t for slaves, they would fall apart. Look here at The Oaks, how your uncle must plead with your father to help him with money.”
“And so he is a kind of slave, too, a slave to money.”
“But he chooses this. A free man may choose to give over his will. But when he chooses to win it back he has the power.”
“But for now, he is failing.”
“That is what I see at the dinner table. That is what I hear from others of us who listen well.”
“Which is a good thing,” I said. “Because otherwise I would not have come here. And we would not have—”
She leaned forward in the dark and kissed me firmly but languidly on the mouth, and we sank down together into the dunes of pillows and the ripples of sheets. Yes, all our troubles, all our obstacles, from her being born into slavery to my errand to Charleston, all conspired so that we might come together in this moment that, with blessed hindsight, I see as the high point of all our enchanted moments together. Our loving, our talk, our thoughts mingling… This daughter of the tribe of Ham, and this son of the tribe of Abraham, bound together, these distant cousins! Cousins, after all!
Chapter Fifty-five
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In My Margins
What is a Journey?
I began in Africa, on the slopes of a young volcano—before this I have no recollection—a creature moving slowly but surely on my own two feet, herding my child before me as overhead the ash began to rain down on us, and we kept moving, yes, moving across the swampy plain. We cried out to our gods, and our gods called out to us. One was fire, the other thunder. Some of us stopped on the plain where the ash stopped and some of us kept going, stopping only when we reached the forest and we lived in the desert for a long time and they lived there a long time in the forest, until hateful men who worshiped other gods came and swept us up in their nets and tied us with their ropes—oh, ropes made from plants we ourselves had grown!—and dragged us south and then north, then west, where we and our children built a city. The city baked in the heat, and one day we sailed down river to escape it, finding ourselves in the great forest, and stolen from there next we stood at ocean-side, our bodies chained to each other. How we survived that passage over water I do not