Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [180]
“Your duty is to—”
“I cannot,” I said.
Now her speech gained in volume and intensity all at once.
“This is because your uncle and cousin behaved so horribly over a decade ago? This makes no sense to me. I know that slavery is wrong, Nathaniel, but your duty is to me and your children and the family business.”
I sat there, stone-like, because I had to and because I could. I spoke of duty, but without revealing the torments of loving and losing Liza I could not make my complete case for going to war. Hundreds of men my age in New York and New England were volunteering, I was sure, for the fight against the Confederacy, men with deep philosophical and religious persuasions. How many of them had known Lizas? Few of them, I was sure. And if they did, they would volunteer all the more, twice, or five times, or fifty times, more, until they had given everything for the sake of a slave they had loved—still loved!—in this horrendous struggle between bondage and freedom.
I sat very still while Miriam unleashed a tirade against me, and I sat very still long after she had left the room.
***
And so I went off to war, carrying with me this manuscript, mostly complete, which I have worked to finish while on training maneuvers on the Mall at the capitol. And now, in Virginia, on this frankly terrifying evening before our first battle I have kept on with it as a means for trying to hold myself steady. Tonight I have added to and subtracted from here and there, hoping against hope that I have given the best account I could make of our life in all its flaws and pleasures. How fitting it seems to me that I should have recalled the final scene of chaos and turmoil and death at The Oaks against the dark backdrop of this encampment, with men singing quietly as once those plantation slaves had done, singing until when in the middle of the night many of us, my own tent-mates included, figured that we had better try for sleep rather than dare to meet the dawn without it.
That dawn, I feared, would be for some of us the last rising sun we would see. But no sleep came to me, and I lay as if already dead, until I picked up this pen one last time for the evening—or near morning as it is now—and as it happened to me so often over the many long years now gone since I last saw Liza I pictured her face, her eyes, her lips, tried to recall the press of her body against mine, and wondered wondered wondered where she might be if she were alive at all—but always hoping, as I hoped now that this battle morning had nearly dawned upon us, that she lived free.
And then, in the deep darkness of the night past midnight, a sign!
As I was standing outside my tent, thinking what I hoped were not last thoughts about family, about all of you my beloveds who may be reading this, someone called out to me.
“Mister Nathaniel!”
I turned to see a lanky young black man in plain blue shirt and trousers, holding up a large water bucket in his hand.
“What is this?” I said.
“I know you don’t recognize me,” he said.
I studied his black face, somewhat indistinct in the darkness, and even as I felt the press of the coming battle I took another moment, and that helped.
Yes!
“You!” I said. (I could not at that moment recall his name.)
“Yes, sir,” he said, smiling in the lightening dark, his bucket at his side.
“You escaped,” I said.
“I got away,” he said.
I shook my head and took a breath.
“You saved my life,” I told him.
“You helped me save mine,” he said. “But other folks died that day, that’s sure,” he said, confirming for me what took place between Jonathan and Isaac.
“It was tragic,” I said.
“Was Biblical, almost, my mother said when I got home to tell her,” he said.
“Do you still live in New Jersey?”
“Well, I did, until I came down here. I’ve got a job up there, nothing much except it brings in food for my wife and little boy, and helps me help my mother who is still living there too. But with this war, I’ve been trying to enlist. They just keep handing me things like this water bucket and tell me the