Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [149]
“She not me,” said his father. “I’m gone. She here. I’m gone with your mama.”
In spite of himself, Isaac shoved the woman and sent her flying back against the far wall and ran out of the cabin.
A week went by before they found his father’s body in the creek, partly eaten by swamp animals, right there near the tree under which he had dozed and dreamed.
Isaac started walking in a circle, then running, running, running around.
Chapter Sixty-nine
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Permission
Who brought the news? The news just traveled, person to person to person, in this instance from the lips of someone from a neighboring plantation who met someone from the cabins out there in the fields, who told Precious Sally, who told Liza—that the doctor lay quite ill in his house in Charleston, and she, who had felt the suffered clasp of slavery every day in her young life now felt it in the most subtle ways, because she wanted nothing more than to go to town and visit her mentor except that there was no way for her to do this.
Except there was one way.
And did she know she could go through with it? The fact that she thought of it and kept it in mind and almost immediately put her plan into action suggests that she knew what she had to do, she knew what would probably occur, and she had prepared herself for that.
Did this mean that she had become a new woman or that everything in the past that had pushed her to this point was now about to begin blossoming? When it happened she had little idea, if any, of how much would transpire in the aftermath. In all of our lives we live in unknowing fashion, acting without thinking about consequences, until one day we stop to consider the consequences before we act, and it seems as though our life has become so strange it might be someone else’s life.
This slave child, daughter of slaves who were children of slaves who in their turn had been slaves, never to see the light or even contemplate the possibility of seeing the world by that longed-for illumination of freedom, how much did she know beyond the immediate plan of action? How much did she fret about what that plan might bring about? What do we know? Do I know, do you? Some doctors and geniuses think they can predict human behavior. I think at best, if we are lucky, that we might with great struggle possibly with some accuracy describe it.
Though sometimes even the actors cannot recall what took place in elaborate and significant detail.
This way, that way. It seems that everyone had a plan in those days. For example, Liza recalled putting her plan into motion by waiting in the big house at the end of her day, waiting for her father to arrive.
He might have been traveling, she didn’t know, and perhaps his return to the plantation took place some days after she first considered what she might do in order to get to town to visit the doctor. In memory hours, days such as this melt together.
Came the hour when he did arrive at the house, whether from the rice ponds or from some journey of further reach we do not know, and she was waiting for him.
Though she did try not to show this, her anticipation and her hope, her worry, and her desire. What good might that have done? She waited for him with a calmness she had never noticed before in herself, as calm as waters some days before a winter storm, as calm as sky before the end of daylight. Such were the ways she tried to describe her state of mind to herself as she waited for this man who had ruined her and yet had kept her alive. The harm he had done her she could not calculate, but aware of his power she understood just how much she had to placate him. As simple and at the same time as complex had been her ties to the gods—the ties she sometimes felt resonating in her limbs and chest and belly—her links to this man seemed both tame and wild.
She despised him, she had to admit to herself, and yet when she heard his footsteps on the front steps and then the sound of the front