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By Root 1206 0

and all the slaves that would be born in his lifetime, all all his. And the debt was now his. He had never considered himself a greedy man, and he had worked hard for this plantation and the inheritance of it, keeping watch over the overseers, keeping watch over the expenses of the business. He and his family, as he saw it, never pushed any of it toward the line where necessity passed over into excess. They had the slaves build furniture and the necessary appurtenances of persons and household, they bought what farm equipment they could not make themselves, and the food for all and the food for the slaves, and the doctor’s attendance upon them, and whatever small things they required that they could not manufacture themselves. Sorry as he was to see his father go, he worried no worry out of the ordinary, at least for the few hours left in the night that passed when he had not yet read the will. That was how sure of himself and his inheritance he was. And that was how free he was of greed, that he would not feel compelled to make certain that these lands and this house all had with his father’s passing come to him. The only compulsion he felt was to keep after me and press me to draw my father into the business of the plantation.

At dawn he sent Isaac with word of his father’s demise to the congregants in town. He then retired to his bed, besotted, immediately drowsy with the understanding of what had happened. Birds, awake since before the first light, sang outside the window, keeping him awake for a while longer, during which moments he made a fantasy of what he would say to Liza on her return, and what he would say to me—she, the ungrateful daughter, and me, the cousin and betrayer, traitor to the family and our race. But of course he would then soften a bit toward me, needing me as he did to help shore up the accounts. Toward Liza he would be unrelenting, though he wondered what he might do if I pleaded her case. Eventually all this meandering of mind was too much for him and he sank beneath the waves of sleep.

But did he dream? Revealing certain fine aspects of his sensibility I had never known before, he explained that he had some fluttering visions in that early morning doze, and he claims he heard songs in a musical scale that he did not recognize, and he felt a certain presence, like that he had known only once before, as a boy in the Dutch Antilles when he was nearly drowned in the surf. The presence felt feminine, he said, and it came as a kind of pushing with physical muscle, a kind of urging, without a voice or even a gesture to move him along. Coming out of the dream he saw himself as the descendant of Moses, the Liberator of his People, and if he understood such a contradiction between himself and the figure out of the Old Testament, who led the Jews out of bondage and thus into a world of freedom unlimited and the beauty of living without masters, he gave no sign. The irony of better seeing himself as a Jewish Pharaoh never came to mind.

Immediately upon awakening he called for Isaac, now back from town, whom he told to notify all the slaves that the master had gone. (How little he knew of his own small dominion that he did not surmise that almost from the exhalation of his father’s last breath every last slave on the plantation learned of his going.)

Stepping into the morning sun, followed by his faithful Isaac, he looked up at the cottony brilliant sky and announced “I am now the Master,” and then gazed off into the trees near the border where the distant creek took in the tidal flow.

“Yessir,” Isaac said, without any untoward glance or questionable fluctuation of his voice except that which normally occurred in moments such as this.

“Fetch the horses,” Jonathan said.

“Yes, sir,” said Isaac.

Jonathan watched as the slave turned and ran toward the barn. Just then a shiver passed through Jonathan’s body, a cold so fierce and of the instant that he looked over to the trees with the thought that some minor whirlwind might have crossed the borders of the plantation as if, or so he wondered in that instant,