Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [168]
“‘Have you ever seen a Musulman?’ he asked me.
“I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“‘You are a smarty boy. I heard you read.’”
“‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
“‘You are a gift to the world.’
“Yes, sir.”
“‘And a great boon to the household here. Do you have a mother?’
“‘She works in the kitchen, sir.’
“‘Big black woman?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘You both are a boon to the Christians.’ His eyes narrowed and he took a big breath, breathing that smell on me when he breathed out. ‘I have a packet for the Christians,’ he said, ‘out in my carriage. Can you come help me lift it, boy?’
“‘Yes, sir,’ I said, because what did I know?
“I told Ma and she didn’t pay attention because she was working with the meal so hard, and I followed the man down the steps out front and down to the street and he told me we had to go in his carriage to the pier where the packet was on a boat.
“Some of my friends were walking up from the beach, white boys, born free as free, lucky ones.
“‘Hey, Charles!’ ‘Charles, what you doing?’ They called out to me.
“‘Tell them you are helping me,’ the man said.
I was a good lad.
“‘I’m doing some help!’ I called back to my friends.
“‘Git a penny for it!’ one of them shouted as the man pushed me up onto the carriage seat.
“I loved riding high up above the street, and loved watching the houses pass by, and seeing the ships come up over the top of the hill and then we rode down to the water and we climbed down.
“‘Do you like ships?’ the man said to me.
“‘Oh, I do,’ I said.
“‘We’ll fetch that packet now,’ he said.
“I went along, riding with him up to the piers, and next thing that happens is we are climbing aboard the ship where we met you, sir, and going down into his cabin, where he tells me to wait.
“I didn’t know what to do except do what he asked. I was no slave, but I was a polite boy, because Ma raised me that way.
“So I waited, leaning against a wall of the cabin, sitting on the bed, standing up, looking out the porthole, seeing the bay. The boat was rolling from side to side, and I wondered why, some waves come in from the far part of the bay, I figured, because I had seen the bay in storms a lot since I first remembered running on the beach. When the land started moving, I shook my head, couldn’t figure it.
“We cleared the tip of Staten Island before I understood what was happening, and by then it was too late, there was nothing I could do.”
(At this point in the boy’s story I shivered with a round of chills, recalling, as the sun moved around the sky, how tired I was and physically drawn by the events of the night before.)
“I was sitting on the bunk with my head in my hands crying when the man came back to the cabin. He carried a sack with tack and fruit and sat down next to me and handed me the sack.
“‘Where the bee sups,’ he said.
“‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, taking a piece of tack from the sack and chewing on it.
“After a few minutes, the man jumps up and says, ‘Come to me, you little black gumbo,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you comfort.’
“I went on crying.
“‘Yes, yes, weep your tears,’ he said, ‘weep your little nigger tears, crocodile tears, jungle tears, and I will feed you candy.’
“I didn’t know what he was talking about, maybe he didn’t know either. But he came over and sat next to me and put his arms around me—and threw me on my back on the bed.
“I gave him a fight, same way I’d give a fight to some big boy in town who jumped on me from behind, trying to hurt me. But this was something I never knew, what he did, pulling my trousers down and stripping off my underclothes, throwing me on my back again when I tried to push up, push away.
“‘Gumbo, Sambo,’ he said, whistling, gurgling through his teeth like some kind of animal in the woods.
“He kept pushing against me just when he leaned over and snuck his head down there, and he tried to eat me up, and his biting hurt and I screamed, and he pushed his hand over my mouth and kept on eating, except he didn’t chew me and swallow me, he just chewed, and he didn’t stop until I was choking, and coughed up nasty yellow slug in