Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [166]
“What of the children?”
“Innocent, until they reach their majority.”
“Liza…” I sighed.
“Yes, Nate?”
She had inched so close to me by then her warm acid night-breath bathed my face in the foul truth of its scent, a perfect match for the foul taste in my own mouth. Though I had questions for her, her proximity made it impossible for me to ask. I encircled her in my arms and held her close. She trembled, as tough as she seemed.
One kiss—our awful breaths combining—and then another. And then we fell back, exhausted, like two halves of some broken animal, against the tree.
“Our last gasp,” I said, “our pathetic last gasp of freedom. They will be sending dogs after us. And there is a lot of the South that lies between us and the North. Liza, I am afraid that I know the city, not the woods. I will not be much help to you in this from now on.”
“Nate,” she said after a while, “I have a plan.”
She began to speak. Towards the end of her describing it to me my eyes wandered over to the edge of a stand of ferny trees to see the slave boy hunkered down there, as they say in these parts, awake and alert. I wondered how long he had been watching.
“Jersey Boy,” I called over to him.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“When Liza has finished explaining her plan to me, will you tell us your own story? We have a long day today and tomorrow and tomorrow. I hope you will tell us.”
Chapter Seventy-nine
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The Jersey Boy’s Tale
I was born free,” the boy said, while the light of the morning sun drifted down through the pines. “Up there in Perth Amboy. In a little shack behind a big house on Water Street. Early as I can remember in my life, I used to lie there listening to the waves slapping against the rocks below, and I would dream of ships and the flow of water. From the top turret of the big house, where I climbed some time after I grew a little you could see over Staten Island right out past the bay into the ocean, the great ocean where ships from all parts of the world came sailing.
“My Ma, free-born herself, she worked in the kitchen of the big house. Most days and nights I’d sit in a corner of the kitchen, enjoying the smells of the food, and Ma or the wash girl who did the dishes, offering me a morsel now and then. Fish. Meat. Carrots. Corn. All the fresh flavors, and sometimes dessert, cake with rum. I’d be sitting in my corner while Ma was rushing about serving the folks in the dining room and I could hear the noisy music of their talking and smell the rosy stink of the cigars the men were lighting up and puffing on. That rum would take my thoughts and melt them down and I’d flow away, dreaming of my Pa and sailing ships and the way the gulls swooped across the beach and dove toward the rocks to crack open oyster shells they’d picked off the beach.
“I liked it there on the sand and sneaked down as often as I could to run along the water line and pick up shells and stones.
“‘One, two, lucky stone!’
“I’d throw one hard out over the water, sometimes getting it to skip real good.
“‘One, two, lucky stone!’
“Once I thought, hey, what if I could ride a stone out over the water, and just keep skipping till I got someplace else?
“‘One, two, lucky stone!’
“There was some other boys, free boys like me, but born to slave mothers who got bought or somehow otherwise came up from the South to New Jersey. We ran together on the sand, ran like these horses we rode away on, dashed up to the waves and back again, and I can still taste that salt in my mouth, deep salty, not like this stinging taste of the water in this swamp.
“Sometimes we built castles in the sand. Once we made a jail and put the little sand crabs inside, saying these are the prisoners. Another boy said the crabs was our slaves. Why, we could keep them, but we couldn’t make them do nothing. They wouldn’t build nothing. They just tried to dig their way out of the jail. Not good slaves.
“I was thinking, give them a chance, give the slaves a chance. I was thinking, slaves got a Ma, slaves feel hurt, slaves want to be free, look