Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [177]
A great commotion came from the burning barn and from the cabins beyond. Someone fired shots. Someone beat on a deep-throated drum (and where had that instrument come from, I wondered in my still-lingering delirium).
She raised a hand. “Better go now, Massa Nate.”
I slipped out the door, where a young slave child, apparently under Precious Sally’s orders, had brought me my old Promise and stood there holding the reins, as still as a statue amidst the rising commotion of sound from the barns. Quickly, I mounted the beast and the boy released the reins. He gave the horse a slap on the rump and I—the least experienced of horsemen—kicked my mount to turn him toward the drive that led to the road to town just as from around the corner of the big house charged a cadre of slave men waving pitchforks and scaling knives. As more slaves came running from the barns, some of these men carrying torches that burned deceptively diminished in the bright light of the morning sun, my horse, apparently frightened and distracted, broke into a gallop, carrying me directly toward the burning barns. Only a flaming length of lumber that just then peeled away from the arch above the door and fell in our path turned the animal away from its apparent goal of taking refuge in the burning building itself. It danced to the left, and then arched a step to the right. I felt the beast nearly trip and falter, as it stumbled over a sack at the side of the barn—which turned out to be the body of my cousin, blood running from slashes along his neck and face.
“Jonathan!” I called down to him.
My cousin, wretch that he was, lay there as silent and still as a stone, a blood-drenched life-sized sack of flesh.
Shots rang out behind me and I turned to see the small boy who had held my horse now standing on the back veranda, a gun—I was too far away to recognize it as Jonathan’s—in hand. He fired again, into the air just as from the upper floors of the house above him a great volt of flame leaped out through the windows of what had served as my room.
Promise came suddenly to life and surged around the flaming building, carrying me into the woods, in the opposite direction from what I took to be a route for my escape.
“Halt!” I cried out. “Whoa!”
He kept on galloping, and I nearly fell as we entered the first curtain of trees sheltering the land along the creek.
More gunshots echoed behind me, and the smell of smoke lay thick about the branches past which we rushed. But when we entered the clearing at the brick house landing all seemed calm and quiet. Men worked at the ropes that kept the brick barge in place at the water’s edge. One of them turned and saw me, and then another and another.
Promise came to a halt and I slid off his back, hitting the ground hard and lying there, almost as still as my late cousin back near the barn. My eyes remained open, and I watched the men, in their tatters and long hair, gathering around me, murmuring to each other. I was fully expecting to join my cousin in the darkness to which he had just repaired.
One of the men kneeled down and held me by the ankles. Another took me by the arms. Together they lifted me up and carried me slowly to the water. Unaccountably, they were in low voices singing a song I had only recently heard.
Massa sleeps in de feather,
Nigger sleeps on de floor…
“Please,” I said in a whisper, having no quarrel with pleading for my life.
When we’uns gits to Heaven,
Dey’ll be no slaves no mo’…
“No more,” I said. “No more, no more, no more, no more…”
They raised my feverish raving corpus higher, almost to the level of their heaving chests, and just as I thought they were about to hurl me into the creek and leave me to drown they lowered me over the rail of the boat and carried me onto the deck, setting me down gently among the sacks of rice from the recent harvest.
A breeze came up, and the boat carried me to town where some of the kindlier Jews, those with professions, not human property, cared for me until I felt strong enough to depart for New York. This