Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [133]
I reached for her hand, but she pulled back.
“Please,” I said, “don’t turn me into a beggar.” I patted the bed alongside me. “Come sit, please.”
“Oh, massa,” she said. “De massa call.”
“Stop it.”
She burned a look at me that gave me more pain than her fist that crushed my nose.
“What massa want?”
“Stop it, please.”
“No,” she said, her voice returning to normal. “Tell me what you want?”
“I want you,” I said. “I want you to sit here beside me.”
“You want me?” She burned me again with that gaze. “You want me?” She shook herself as though a cold wind had just passed over her body. “You can have me. Oh, yes, you got me. Massa, anything you want.”
And with an angry jerking motion, she tore at her frock, ripping buttons as she pulled.
Now she stood before me, naked to the waist, her chest heaving.
“Here,” she said, bowing toward me, then descending to her knees and pulling at my boots. “Now.” Off she pulled a boot, throwing it against the wall, then another.
“Stop it,” I said, pushing at her as next she tried to interfere with my buttons.
“Massa want me to stop?”
“Yes, stop.”
She ceased her frenzied tearing and fell back onto the floor, hugging her knees to her chest.
“Yes, massa,” she said, and began to sob most terribly.
“Liza,” I said, not knowing what to say beyond her name. I eased myself down onto the floor beside her and took her in my arms.
“You say you love me,” she said. “Don’t you know that is the cruelest most awful thing to tell a woman like me?”
“But I do love you.”
She ignored what I said.
“And do you know why it is so cruel?”
“No,” I said in a whisper near her ear. “Tell me.”
“Because I am not free to refuse you. And I am not free to accept you, either. I am just a lonely piece of chattel, do you understand? A Jew-slave, as they call us in town. I am like Promise, the horse you ride here. A Jew-horse he is, too.”
Turning in my arms, she breathed close to my face. The pain of my bleeding nose was nothing compared to the ache I felt in my chest.
“Perhaps it is time to go,” I said, pushing myself against the bed and standing up.
“So it’s a lie?”
“What is?”
“You say you love me, and you’ll send me away?”
“It is too painful,” I said.
“Yes, isn’t it? Oh, I hate her, that bitch-cousin of yours! I hate her profoundly!”
As hot as it was in the room, Liza then gave a shiver and crossed her arms across her breasts.
“You hate Rebecca? Why?” I said. “She has been so good to all of you.”
“That is the reason I hate her! And I hate the doctor, too!”
I had to shake my head.
“You hate these good people? Why?”
“It was terrible of them to be good to us. Before I learned to read, before I read all these things I read, I didn’t know how much I was hurting.”
“Liza,” I said, and once again took her in my arms.
“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t be good to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll hate you, too!”
She pressed herself against me, trembling wildly. In an instant we threw ourselves on the bed, God’s Jew-slaves, both of us, doing the bidding of our bodies that He had created out of dust and clay.
Chapter Fifty-eight
________________________
Beyond Words
The first time it happened just after she had been reading and talking about what she had read with the doctor—a novel about, of all things, the South Pacific, about sailors stranded on an island with natives who reminded her of some of the African stories she had heard in the cabins. He had made his rounds, and then left for town. She returned to the kitchen to prepare for Precious Sally’s evening meal, her mind filled with that South Sea story, and with another part of her mind marveling at how reading could carry you away out of your present life, out of slavery, even, at least while you were reading the story.
A knock on the wall, and Isaac came into the room.
“How are you today, Liza?”
“Fine,” she said. “We just been reading together.”
“What you reading?”
And she told him, and he agreed that it sounded like a fine story, something he might like, and though he was a little behind her in his ability to read he said he would try