Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [160]
“How—?”
Isaac stepped out of the shadows and offered me the reins.
“Up you go, massa,” he said, giving me a hand up and then hoisting Liza onto the back of Jonathan’s horse.
Now the animals jittered about in the dark.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Running,” Liza said. She sounded a bit out of breath as she spoke, but it could have been the snorting and clattering of the horse.
I felt as though struck by a bolt of lightning.
She led, I followed, as we took the dark trail behind the barns and on into the woods. In a moment the house, for all of its lights, was swallowed up in the gloom of the trees.
“We must turn back,” I said, feeling as though I had just come out of a dream. “I cannot leave them in the midst of their mourning just for…” I stopped speaking, unsure of what I could say.
“I can’t leave them neither,” she said. “‘In the midst of their mourning.’ But it is my mourning, too.”
“You liked the old master, did you not?”
“Yes,” she said, “I did. I liked him.”
“No matter that he owned you?”
“He did own me, and then again he did not.”
We talked, but we did not stop. Perhaps it was an illusion created by the dark but it seemed like no time had passed before we came to the fork in the road and ducked under the trees to take the trail to the brickyard.
“Wait here,” Liza said as we arrived at the clearing. She dismounted and I watched her shadowy figure enter the small brickmaking shed.
Promise moved about in a small circle, sniffing and snorting, swatting his tail. I knew the creek was nearby. I could hear creatures splashing about in the water.
“Liza?” I called out, just as she reappeared in the clearing, a sack over her shoulder and a shadowy companion at her shadowy side.
“You know this boy, I think,” she said.
I peered down at the young fellow, who was, because of his skin color, almost invisible in the dark.
“You!” I said.
It was the slave boy from Perth Amboy, who traveled with the mean-spirited man, and ran away.
“Have you been hiding all this while in the brickyard?”
The boy touched his hand to his forehead in a sort of salute and moved with Liza to the horse. In a moment she had remounted, and he swung up onto the animal behind her.
“Are you ready?” Liza said.
“Am I ready? We have to go back to the house. I must go back. And you, too. All will be forgiven. If you go back now there will be nothing to forgive.”
“Perhaps in another life.”
I still did not understand, or did not want to.
“Liza, my uncle—”
“He’s dead,” she said, “and there will be nothing but trouble.”
“No, no,” I said. “Jonathan is the heir. I will buy you from him. I will take you north.”
“If he sells me,” she said. “it won’t be to you. He will sell me at the auction block in the town.”
“I can bid for you there.”
Such a sound of disgust mingled with horror burst from her throat that even in the dark I could measure the intensity of her response.
“I will not allow you ever to bid on me!”
“I will do whatever I must do.”
“You will not have the opportunity, I tell you now. He will sell me down river or kill me first.”
The horses pawed at the ground, snuffled and snorted, anxious to move somewhere, anywhere.
“Why?” I said, “Why?” and I despised myself for the horse-like whine I could hear in my speech.
In a voice I had never heard her use before, it was so drained of spirit, so ghostly, she said, “He will see the will and he will sell me.”
“The will? My uncle’s will? How do you know this? How do you know about my uncle’s will?”
“He left it in his desk. One day I found it there. I read it. Thus the dangers of teaching your inquisitive slaves to read.”
Again, the horses asked us, Can we please move now? Now?
“There was a surprise,” she said. “The way we live here, there is nothing anymore to surprise us and then along comes a surprise.”
“And what was that?”
“He had another child,” Liza said.
“By some other wife? Did he keep a family down in the Islands?”
“No, no,” she said.
“Oh, no, not him!” I could not hide my pain and dismay at learning this. “He,