Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [178]
One morning, just before I set sail for home, she appeared on the veranda of the town house where I was staying, raven-haired, pale-cheeked, her long neck bared to the sun.
“Is there any chance you might stay longer in town?” she inquired over the tea my hostess had immediately set before us.
“I cannot,” I said. “I must return to my father and make a report to him.”
“Will you ever return to Charleston?”
Anna fluttered her long dark eyelashes and tilted her head toward me in an interrogatory fashion.
Slaves—men and women—had died, died every day, barns and houses went up in flames, and even as we were speaking fugitives hurried through the wilderness, hoping to find freedom on the other side of dark forests, tall mountains, flooding rivers. And attractive young girls hoped to make their dreams of romance and family come true, despite all of everything else. I had one waiting for me in New York. This much I had learned about life.
Chapter Eighty-four
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The Last Rising Sun
A dreary Manhattan morning, the harbor filled with noise and rain. At the house Jacobus greeted me with a shaking of feathers, a phrase, and a squawk. My reunion with my father was not as pleasant. He wondered at my depleted physical state, at which time I unleashed on him all of my fury at the misery and murder the Southern branch of our family had brought into the world. He listened all too calmly—a trait, in the midst of my surprising (to me) rage, he pointed out was quite useful in business—and then explained that he had little idea that his brother and nephew oversaw such suffering.
“Little idea? Father, sir, they were keeping slaves. Did you expect the slaves to be cheerful about their servitude?”
“Nathaniel,” he said, looking me in the eye, “I had no idea—”
“Or little?” I broke in.
“Or little,” he said, “that the conditions would be such as you witnessed. I had to have you confirm this for me.”
“And so I have confirmed it?” I said.
“Yes, you have,” he said.
“Father, you sent me down there knowing what it was I would find?”
“I was not fully certain.”
“But in the main you were.”
“I was.”
“Sir,” I said, “do you know what you have done to my life?”
It was all I could do not to assault him, so angry I was at his apparent naïveté—and my own. It was all I could do not to burst out with the name of the woman who had changed my life. But to speak about Liza would have been to have demeaned her. I kept her private to my thoughts, even as my Father took some care to ensure my full recovery, ordering Marzy to be attentive to all of my needs, which of course our dear old retainer did always without needing any orders. She fed me well, she kept the rooms clean, with as much fine sunlight pouring in as the weather would allow, and because in an odd way it appeared as though she understood the nature of my continual sorrowful demeanor she kept a polite distance all the time she worked around me, which seemed to me to be some kind of tacit recognition that I was no longer the child she had helped to raise but instead the man I was supposed to have become.
I could not keep my concentration on any prose I might try, the picture of Liza coming between me and anything I attempted to give myself over to—Liza, Liza, Liza—during the day, and at night I raved about her to myself before I fell asleep, and for weeks after my return to the city I dreamed of her as well.
Yet I could not speak of her with anyone.
When my old teacher Halevi happened to pay me a visit—urged on, I am quite sure, by my father, to make some assessment of my mental state—I did raise the questions that had haunted me ever since my southern journey, the matter of human bondage and the practice of it by my own family. He wanted only to speak in abstractions, bringing up the question of Evil as if my cousin Jonathan found himself