Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [165]
“You might have,” Liza said. “It did not seem absolutely certain to me that you would have. You almost surely would not have run with me if it had not happened. I knew that if the patrollers had met me and I was alone on the road I never would have gotten past them.”
“Liza,” I said, “ I offered to buy you. Is that not that proof of how I felt?”
“Yes, but you forgot you were never going to own me. Jonathan would not allow his father to sell me to you. The older his father became, the more power the son took on. I was his daughter. He would have killed me, I have told you, before he ever let me go.”
The woods nearby, the swamp, had come alive with the sunrise, with sounds and calls alerting us to the nature of the world. Everything was bird and animal and insect, tree and water, rushing and stagnant, this was the place we lived in, and made our ways as best we could.
“My cousin is a vile, disgusting, deceitful and dishonorable man,” I said. “He deserves to be horse-whipped, or worse.”
“And yet he is my father,” Liza said.
“And my relative, yes. A man who only days ago made clear his desire to become my business partner in a family enterprise.”
Now Liza inched further away from me, but kept her lips closed as the boy from Jersey awoke and looked around.
“Is there anything more?” I said.
“Even more,” she said.
“What might that possibly be?”
The sun had risen to a true extent, and I imagined beneath it the rolling ocean that had carried ship after ship from African shores to our own, here near Charleston, and to other southern ports where this national horror and the deep bloodstain upon our nation first began. It was clear to me now in a way that no legislative debates or newspaper reports or even, as perhaps would happen, the narratives of future historians might tell of it, that how it bent bodies to the pleasure and finances of the owners was nothing, nothing, compared to the way it bent souls.
“Yes. When I came back that second night—”
“At his orders.”
“No. I acted out of my own free will.”
“And are you acting now?”
“As in a play? I have heard of plays, Nathaniel, but I have never seen one.”
“You should see one,” I said. “They are good stories, performed upon a stage for all the audience to see. Consider my story. Stealing away my cousin who literally, in a most unromantic fashion, belongs to another man, this slave, also my cousin, with whom I have committed incest—oh, it would make a good play, I think.”
Quick as some lithe snake that snaps around and takes its poor unthinking prey, without a second’s delay, Liza slapped me in the face.
“It was my only chance,” she said while I held a hand to my stinging cheek.
“And am I nothing but a stepping-stone to you,” I said.
“At first, yes,” she said, touching a hand to my cheek.
I drew back, disturbed, yes, even disgusted.
“You are nothing but a temptress,” I said. “Eve, tempting me to crime.”
“You enjoyed the temptation.”
“Yes, worse yet, I enjoyed the crime.”
“Will you still help me now?”
“I don’t know that I have a choice.”
“You can leave us here and return to The Oaks.”
“If I knew the way.”
“I can point you in the right direction.”
“Yes, as you pointed me toward my crime. With your directions, I would probably lose myself fairly quickly in these bogs and be eaten by alligators.”
“You are sweet enough meat for them,” Liza said.
“Don’t be so scandalous as to joke about all this. We are in terrible danger.”
“I am, the boy is, not you.”
“I am aiding and abetting.”
“Your cousin will not take such offense if you return now. Say that I kidnapped you at gunpoint.”
“With my own pistol that you stole from me?”
“It is a good story. It might make a good play.”
I ignored her attempt at humor.
“He will see through it,” I said. “He sent you to me. He knows what must have happened. And so he will know that you turned me against him and the rest of the family.”
“A family of slaveholders,” Liza said.
“If they are to be condemned, then the entire South is to be condemned.”
“And should it not be?”
“The wives? The children?”
“Wives hold slaves