Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [135]
I was still pondering all this when she slowly opened her eyes.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” I said.
“It is light, I am late.”
“It is early. No one is stirring, not even the birds.”
She sat up and shook her head from side to side as if to shake sleep from her mind.
“I have to go, I have my duties.”
“What duty could be greater than this? To stay here with me.”
“Yes, massa,” she said. “But I got other chores. Sunday, it’s a big breakfast Precious Sally is making and she’ll be needing my help to serve.”
“So we’re back to that? To ‘massa’?”
“We never went away.”
“Liza, you and I have traveled some distance from there.”
She reached up and touched a playful finger to my chest.
“You rode me.”
“We rode together.”
“But we went far.”
“We went deep,” I said.
“Horses don’t go deep.”
“Some do. Ours did. We did.”
She shook her head, as if amazed at a thought.
“All the horses around here, and, you know, I never been on one.”
“Oh, yes, you have—”
“No, no, Nate, I’m saying, I have never ridden a horse. Isaac, he always promised me, but he never did do it.”
“I am no great horseman, but sometime I will take you for a ride. On my Promise.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“That thrills me.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, for a slave girl, to have a master make a promise to her, you don’t know how good that feels. Will you promise, though, to let me ride my own horse?”
I lay down beside her and whispered in her ear.
“I promise.”
Her ear—like a beautiful shell you might find washed up on the beach after a storm.
“I must go now,” she said.
“Stay a little while longer.”
“Precious Sally will be looking around for me. You would not want for her to find me here.”
“She never comes up to the second story.”
“She could be waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Does she know about…?”
“About this?”
“About us.”
“Mr. Yankee, sir, you have a lot to learn. There is nothing that goes on in a plantation like this that the folks don’t know about.”
“My folks? My family?”
“The slave-folks, that’s who I am talking about.”
“I suppose that is because I in my fit of love madness told Isaac?”
She nodded, her face a picture of smugness that I tried to kiss away to no avail.
“You are a fortunate man,” she said.
“I know that.”
“Not because of anything except that Isaac must like you. Otherwise he might have killed you.”
“And then what?”
“And then, he would have run off.”
“And lived as a fugitive?”
“He would have run far enough so that he would have found his freedom.”
“That’s quite a price to pay for freedom,” I said. “To kill someone, and then run.”
“It looks like a steep price to you,” Liza said, “because you won’t ever have to pay it. To a slave, it’s something, but not that much.”
I surveyed her, this woman who had stolen my own freedom, and then I said, “Would you would kill someone to be free?”
“If I had to. If I was running, and he stood in my way.”
“But you are not running,” I said. “So that will not be a price you have to pay.”
She gave me a sly smile, and showed me all the light in her eyes that I longed to see, even while seeing it. I caught her in my arms once again, and though she protested, it was a feeble attempt. It made me think that she might never want to be free of me!
She took a deep breath and said, “I’m not running—yet.”
Chapter Sixty
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A Proposal
Another week went by. In the fields the kernels of rice were plumping in the sun, and the water that nourished them grew warmer and warmer each day, more like a tepid bath than a cooling wash. Over in the brickyard the sun beat down so hot that it made the entire clearing feel as though it were on fire, and the mud blocks appeared to turn to bricks with the speed of bread dough in a fiercely heated oven. Few songs from the slaves now. They worked in nothing but their tattered trousers, their dark sweat-soaked bodies gleaming in the sun, rank kerchiefs tied around their heads to keep the sweat from pouring into their eyes and blinding them. I quickly removed my coat and