Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [138]
He looked down into his glass, and after this gesture of refusal to meet my eye I looked out into the night.
Chapter Sixty-one
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The Stranger
She had first heard of this matter when attending to a dinner in the big house some months before his arrival.
“I have written to him,” the master had said.
“Good, then,” said the missus.
“And he has written back.”
“You did not tell me.”
“I am telling you now,” the master said.
“And what did he say?” put in Jonathan, leaning across the table with great seeming intensity in his father’s direction.
“Ah, you have an interest in your New York uncle, whom you have never shown an interest in before?”
“Father, we have never needed to before.”
“We did not need to,” the missus said.
“And now we do,” the master said.
“Indeed we do,” said Jonathan.
“A strange uncharitable family we are,” the master said.
“Without survival,” Jonathan said, “there can be no base for charity.”
In the kitchen Precious Sally explained to her that this was the New York part of the family that had not stayed south when first they came up from the islands.
“They brothers,” she said. “But only half. Different mothers.”
“Just like us,” Liza said.
“All people alike,” Precious Sally said. “They just got different ways of living.”
“Aside from the truth,” said Liza, speaking in the voice she had acquired after years and years of reading, a voice she rarely ever used except when she felt safe, and with only the few people she trusted, “that some are slaves and some are free, I would agree with you.”
But on that morning some months later when Isaac told her that the New York cousin was coming into the port at Charleston, she discovered that all were not the same. This one, Nathaniel Pereira, tall, and without much of a smile, gave her an odd feeling in her belly, and she wondered why. A pale-skinned man with that dark hair, he was not at all handsome to her, and he walked so stiffly she wondered if he might just break apart. In one of the melodramatic novels she had taken to reading of late the heroine might have felt some fateful tie to the man such as he was. She coldly noticed his lack of gravity—it was more that he lacked a certain amount of weightiness—even when she compared him to Jonathan whom she detested and despised.
Her father! A sneaking monster, a horror of a man! A snake, a devil in disguise!
And now here comes this New Yorker—who, unbeknownst to him, was her cousin, of sorts! He seemed to have chosen to use his freedom at the service of remaining detached from the life around him. It was almost as if he were a white ghost, passing through the world but never becoming part of it. Liza knew with all her heart that if she were free she could never live this way.
“Here, listen now, here is my plan,” her father said, talking, talking, while she lay there, burning, her heart no longer holding enough tears enough to weep.
And when she had heard it, she said, “I will not.”
And he said, “Yes, you will. I am your father and you will do as I say.”
“I will not,” she said again, even more resolute than before.
“Filthy whore, bitch, scum of a slave, you will do what I say or you will be hammered up on boards next to the barn!”
***
Several nights after her first encounter with the New Yorker she returned to her cabin and found her father waiting for her with a fiendish grin on his face.
“Go away,” she said.
He reached up to pull her down and she danced out of his reach.
“Come here,” he said. The stink of his whiskey breath offended her sorely, even where she stood from him at a distance.
“I won’t,” she said.
“I am ordering you to come here. Do you want a beating?”
“You cannot have me,” she said.
“You bitch, I own you!”
“But since I carried out your wishes with your cousin, I am spoiled goods. Even more than spoiled, since you first spoiled me.”
“I will show what is spoiled and what is not. Come here, or I will tie you up and take you and leave you in the barn with the other animals.”
She took a tentative step toward