Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [140]
“Please,” my uncle said.
“Please what? Please who?”
My uncle raised a hand in the air. My aunt subsided back into her chair.
Rebecca then tried to ease the situation.
“Nathaniel, do you recall my cousin Anna?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, happy to change the music at the table, though given my present cast of mind I had only the faintest recollection of a girl in Charleston.
“Talking of witches, perhaps she may put a spell on you.”
“This is quite enough now,” my aunt said.
Rebecca shook her head, smiled, and said no more.
***
Dear Father [I wrote later that evening before bed], Soon the rice crop will be ready to be harvested, an event that I am using as the marker for my own decision about what we ought to do about the prospect of investing in The Oaks. Though I have not come to a formal conclusion I can assure you that my belief is firm—we should not tie ourselves to any enterprise that depends on the enslavement of other Human Beings…
I wrote further, offering observations about the family and the weather and what little I had heard about political events in the state.
And I tore it up.
I picked up my pen and stared at it, then set it down, and got up and went to the window, the only place down here I truly called my own, where night thoughts beckoned and I could wonder in freedom about all the entanglements in which I was caught—my father, my family, my New York, and here in South Carolina, my Liza.
I felt like a fly in a web, wriggling and wriggling until I made myself all the more entangled.
A breeze stirred, an unusual occurrence, and then I heard the sound of a horse, and a shout. What was I to make of this? Was it a slave trying an escape? Was it one of the patrollers come to rouse us to some duty in which we did not believe?
A few moments later and I heard footsteps in the hall, and my uncle’s and Jonathan’s voices raised in discussion. A few moments later came a knock at my door.
“Cousin?” Jonathan said.
“Yes?” I spoke.
“I hope I haven’t awakened you,” Jonathan said. “We have just heard of a meeting in town we must attend. Be ready to ride in with us early tomorrow morning.”
“Of course,” I said, “but what sort of meeting?”
“One that should be both inspiring and maddening. I can’t say more.”
“I will be ready,” I said.
***
At moon-rise, another knock, one I had been counting on.
“Quickly,” I said.
“You seem distressed,” Liza said.
“Jonathan was here only a short while ago.”
“Don’t worry, he didn’t see me.”
“Can you be sure?”
“I am sure,” she said. “Sometime he has to attend to his wife.” Liza undressed and climbed into the bed with me with a nonchalance suggesting that she had been my wife for a thousand years or more.
I took a few breaths, calming myself.
“What did he say to you?” she asked.
“My cousin has invited me to a meeting in town.”
“What sort of meeting?”
“The same question I asked,” I said. “He would not say.”
“I will leave early,” she said.
“You always do,” I said.
“We don’t want to be caught,” she said.
“But I am your massa.”
“Yes, you are.”
“And so it should not matter, should it?”
“But it does, Nate,” she said, giving me all of her mouth.
Moon, and moon, and more moon, and we settled back, and the faintest fingers of a breeze brushed our bodies, and then evaporated.
Moon-set. A wave of sadness overwhelmed me at the sight of this sandy-skinned beauty lying beside me, and then she opened her eyes—so dim it was in the room, on the verge of dawn but not yet dawn—and looked at me as though assessing what it might mean if she were not here and what it meant that she was.
“It worries me,” she said. “We cannot do this again—”
“What, my love?” I cut her off.
“We must be more cautious,” she said.
“I do not care anymore about being safe,” I said, “and neither should you.”
“Oh, Nate, Nate, when you are a slave there is nothing else to be afraid of. But when, as you are, you are free, there is a great deal to fear. I fear for you.”
Philosophy—and sympathy!—from an African! From a slave-girl!
She got up to dress, and I tossed about in my