Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [144]
And in the last dark of the night he would venture out into yard and call out that it was time, and they would all, every single man, woman, and child on the plantation, steal away into the woods, and head for the Big Swamp. He could see it now, a town growing under their hands, and fields of vegetables and fruit, not an easy life, making their own cloth and clothes, raising their own bulls and cows and horses. But it would be their life, their own life, and it would be precious, because it was first watered with blood.
Oh, Isaac, poor Isaac!
“Boy!”
Old Walla-Walla, in those days, before Isaac took over, still a fixture in the stable, came up behind him slapped his fist at the bridle and nearly knocked him down, so unbalanced he was in his vision of revenge, murder, and blood.
“You think the horses going to feed themselves? Back to work, boy, back to work.”
He shook off the mayhem in his mind and went back to work. He worked, he mucked. Time enough went by so that Liza seemed to have forgotten much of her pain and turmoil surrounding the young master’s brutality. She rose each morning and went to work in the house, looking like her pretty young self, which was what she was, and crossing paths now and then with the man, but more often again than not with his wife. No looks passed between them let alone words.
In the odorous stables, in his mind, young Isaac could not stop the boiling in his mind.
When old Walla-Walla told him one morning to hitch up the carriage and drive the young master to town he devised yet another plan. It was so firm in his mind that after he had finished getting the carriage ready he went back among the cabins to where his old father lay, drunk already since dawn.
“What are you doing?” his father said with a moan and a groan.
“I’m going to town,” he told the older man, to look at him, a broader-faced and slightly darker version of himself.
“Why you tell me, son? Something special? You go to town always, but you never come all the way here from the barns to tell me.”
It was true, Isaac scarcely ever visited his father. He did not like to see a man crushed by life, a man always drunk on some kind of home brew or other, from waking up to going to sleep. He had not worked ever since Isaac could remember. And yet the master never bothered him. This gave Isaac too much to think about, so he did not think much about it at all.
“What is in your mind?” The old man looked up at him from a pallet low on the cabin floor.
Young Isaac took a deep breath. And then spoke.
“Mama. How I miss her. And this girl, Liza, how I like her. And these white people and Hebrews, I hate them. The Christians, too. I hate them. You have lived your whole life already, father, but I am only half—”
“Less than that, I hope,” his father broke in to say.
“—if you say so, but I do not want to live it—”
“Like me?”
Isaac turned away, unable to look his father in the eye.
“Yes.”
“You want to live like this? Good, tell yourself that. Because you ain’t got no choice, anyway.”
“I do,” his son broke in.
“What’s your choice?” his father said. “Going to sleep just after sundown or going to sleep before the moon goes down?”
“Daddy, what are you talking about?”
His father rolled over on his side and talked to the wall.
“You got a choice, wall? Lean one way on a Sunday, lean another way on a Monday?”
As if the fantasy he had created for himself of slaughtering the entire family had never entered his mind, Isaac said, as slaves often did, “It ain’t so bad here, Daddy. It ain’t so bad. I hear of whippings other place, and a lot worse.”
“Boy,” his father said, “worse has been here. You just sort of missed it by a little.”
“What are you talking about?”
The older man reached for a cup of his liquor and took a swallow.
“I loved your