Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [167]
“But because that was all they did, one of the boys says, ‘Let’s drown ’em,’ and he took water in his hands and poured it over the crabs. But they liked it, they swam around, and all of them was digging in the wet sand, disappearing into it.
“‘Slaves, they get away,’ the boy is shouting. And the others are calling out, ‘Yay, catch them slaves!’ ‘Catch them!’
“I went to make to catch them, but used my hand to smash open the wall of the jail.
“And they got away! They got away!
“I would walk back up the hill feeling happy for the crabs! They got away!
“All the time we played there on that beach, it was a wonderment, that’s how my Ma called it, when I told her what we did.
“I wish I could have told my Pa. But I never did know him. Ma told me every now and then he was a tall handsome man from Spain who worked on the repair of ship’s sails right down near the ferry slip. I remember seeing him once only, late at night, when I was a little boy, when he came to the shack smelling of tar and whiskey and cigar smoke, and Ma went out with him and I began to cry.
“‘Hush now,’ she said, poking her face back into my part of the shack. ‘Hush, you hear. That’s your father, and you don’t want to make him unhappy.’
“No, I didn’t want to do that. Never.
“So when the lady of the house, Mrs. Christian, came out to the kitchen one day and took me up and into her room, saying, ‘Charles (that’s my name), do you know how to read?’ I said ‘No, ma’am.’
“I wasn’t much for that, because something told it was a lot of work. But she said if I learned it would make my Ma and Pa happy so I said I would try.
“She learned me my letters, and how to read on the Bible. ‘And Moses went and spake these words unto all Israel…’ See, I remember what I read. ‘And he said unto them, I am an hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go out and come in; also the Lord hath said unto me, Thou shalt not go over this Jordan…’ And if you think that is all I know, what about, ‘Amaziah was twenty-and-five years told when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-and-nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Jehoaddan of Jerusalem…’ or ‘And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled, and his sleep brake from him…’
“You heard enough? What about, ‘The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars…’
“If I knew what the ‘horns of the altars’ was…
“Yay, so I could read, and sometimes now at her parties Mrs. Christian asked me to come out and read to the guests.
“And that is how I know who among her guests was mean and who was friendly, the tugging at my ears, the pinching.
“A lot of time went past. I know it, because when I started thinking about who I was and where I was I only came up to a low ink mark on the back of the kitchen door and when this bad thing happened to me I was a number of marks taller. And that took time.
“The bad thing?
“It was the man with the loud voice and the white hair and the wild eyes, dressed like a rich man, though he had a smell about him, something like the beach where the fish stank but worse. I don’t know anybody else smelled it, except me. Now he came to the Christian house, traveling, he was, in from some place such as a city in the north or a city just to the west, wherever he was from, I don’t know, I never heard him say a word about where he come from, his city, his Ma and Pa, almost as if he came from nowhere, and that was where he was going, except he made a stop along the way to the house.
“I suppose he had been there before, because he knew my name, and he knew the Christians. It happened I was in the kitchen, helping my Ma carry out a tray, when he saw me, and next thing I know he was pinching my cheek and saying how much I looked like a little nephew of his.
“‘He is dark like you, perhaps not as dark, but dark enough. And his eyes are aslant like yours, rather like a Musulman’s.’
“I didn’t know what to say,