Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [161]
“He did, indeed,” Liza said.
“I do not know the laws of the state in this matter,” I said. “Could it be possible for him to leave property to a child born of a slave?”
“I don’t know the law,” she said. “But in the will he recognized the child as his own.”
“And who is this child?”
Please, said my horse. Now, I truly need to move now.
“Easy, Promise,” I said. “Easy.”
“The child did not know. He is a man now and suffers to know. None of us knew, not until I read the pages. When your cousin hears the news he will be very very angry. He will sell the man down river, or somehow arrange for the patrollers to take him into their custody.”
“Who is this man? Do I know him?”
“You know him.” Liza sighed, and bent to pat her own insistent horse while the Amboy slave slipped his arms around her waist and held to her.
“Who?”
I thought of all the Africans I had met here, I thought of the African men, toiling their lives away in the heat and dust and flowing and ebbing waters.
And then it occurred to me.
“Oh, Liza! It is Isaac! My uncle is his father! He is a cousin to me and half-brother to Jonathan!”
“Whatever Jonathan is to any of us. Now we must start moving. He will have probably already discovered we are gone, and it will be all Isaac can do to distract him from our trail.”
“Our trail? And just where are we going?”
“With this boy in tow? Where do you think? We are going away. Or I am. You, of course, are free to stay.”
Liza gave her horse a kick, and he set to moving, and so Promise moved, and all of us moved into the dark.
Chapter Seventy-six
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Moving into the Dark
We began our journey by heading back toward the main road. It was a risk, but the choice lay between abandoning the horses and making off through the woods on foot, or taking our chances on meeting trouble on the road and keeping our superior means of travel.
“They may be waiting for us at the house!” I called to Liza over the noise of our animals.
“If Jonathan has gone after us, he is already on his way to town,” Liza called back to me.
“How do you know?”
“Isaac will have told him we have gone that way, and he will be leading him there. Jonathan will remember that you went to town to visit the shipping office.”
“Should not Isaac be running as we are?”
“He will not run,” Liza said. “He is too proud.”
Oh, I said to myself, and I have no pride, and so I am running. But another voice came to me and said, Yes, you are running, running with this woman to love and freedom!
Suddenly we broke into the clearing and looked back and saw the house still all ablaze with lights. I pictured my aunt and Rebecca gathered about my uncle’s body in the upper room, or huddled together for succor in the parlor, their ears inclined toward the sound of our passage.
Oh, Uncle, I called out to him in my mind, I am stealing what was not yours to keep! And what is not mine to take!
Perhaps my uncle replied to me from the world of the dead, but our horses made too much noise for me to hear anything but the beating of their hooves against the hard dirt of the road.
Pounding away they were as we raced down the tunnel of trees to the main road—and headed northwest instead of southeast.
“Do you have a plan?” I called to Liza as we hurried along. She didn’t turn to look at me, but the slave boy did, his young face showing no emotion as we moved under the dark trees on a part of the road I had never traveled.
“Lord,” I said to all and no one, “I wish I had my pistol!”
She did not reply, but the boy turned his head and gave me a knowing nod.
What did he know? Who was he, he still almost a child, who had boarded that ship in New Jersey and traveled with the wickedest man I had ever met, and then escaped, hiding at the brickyard at The Oaks all these weeks, harbored, of course, by the other slaves?
If he had truly escaped.
Long minutes passed. Liza noticed the animals were beginning to tire, and so we slowed down a bit, but still moving forward along the dark road. It was late for country life, and