Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [147]
“I thought this was about love, but this about the slaves,” Isaac said.
“I suppose so,” Liza said. “Or perhaps not.”
“The big folks know you take these from the house?”
Isaac tried to show his concern by touching her on the arm, but she pushed his hand away.
“The doctor gives me books,” she said. “I told you that.”
“Doctor, he ain’t been around,” Isaac said. “Some folks say he sick.”
Now Liza looked interested.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Nowhere in particular,” Isaac said. “I just heard it.”
“What kind of sick?”
Liza set the book down, spine up—Frankenstein was the name on it—and reached over for Isaac.
“Heart trouble, what I heard,” Isaac said.
“Cousin,” she said, “when—?”
“What you call me?”
“Cousin. Like in the book, Isaac. It is a close name, something of affection.”
“Affection? Hungh!” He snorted like a horse. “This reading playing some tricks on you, Liza. Times, I do not know what you are talking about.”
Liza tried to ignore his discomfort.
“Tell me about the doctor, what else you heard?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I will ask folk but for now I hear only nothing more.”
He settled in next to her on the pallet, boyish, despite his bulk.
“Read to me?”
“All right.”
She picked up the book and tried her way through another chapter, while Isaac, though tired from the day’s labors, remained awake and alert.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips…
She explained this to him as she read, and he gave it his best attention.
“Aiiee, this monster got yellow skin and black lips. I do not want to meet him in the woods in the dark.”
“Do not walk there and you will not meet him.”
“How come no one ever told me about him before this?”
“It is a secret.”
“Our doctor make him?’
“No, Doctor Frankenstein made him.”
“He live in Charleston?”
“He lives in this story.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What I just said.”
She gave him a playful shove, which turned out to be harder than she had intended, and he went rolling over onto the dirt floor.
“Were you listening?”
“I was listening.”
He brushed himself off and crawled back onto the pallet.
“Keep on reading.” He snorted again like a horse. “Monsters! I ain’t afraid! Here they got black skin and yellow lips…So what’s afraid of that?”
Chapter Sixty-seven
________________________
In My Margins
Isaac
Hurry! Run! Hide!
Chapter Sixty-eight
________________________
Isaac’s New Plan
Isaac meandered.
First he went to the barn and checked on the horses, and then he took a stroll out under the trees, gazing up into a sky as clear of clouds and so beautifully ultramarine that it might have been an ocean itself.
Ocean, ocean—could he have deep water on his mind?
Half the day passed before he returned to his father’s cabin, which shows that a man enslaved can sometimes find ways to waste time if he has been enslaved long enough. The woods, the creek, the fields, the creek again. Beside the waters he sat down and rested his back against a tree, listening