Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [188]
Chapter Eighty-seven
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Eliza Stone (& Son)
Less than a week after arriving in the city, finding a place to stay—a loft over a barn behind a large stone house on Washington Street—finding work (menial labor, to start, sweeping up in a bakery at the foot of the long hill she lived on), she went into labor. She took up the work again soon after I was born, while I slept in an ancient cradle given to her by the baker, a cradle she placed next to the ovens, and so made me a warm cache in the cool foggy San Francisco mornings in which my life began. The baker, who had come by ship all the way from New York City to pan for gold in the Sierras and found enough of the elusive metal to buy himself an oven and a storefront, fell in love with her the first time she entered the store to buy a breakfast bun for herself and me. He spoke to her—his way of making affectionate praise—of the dark (meaning African) origins of half the Italians on the lower part of the boot of his country, he recited to her parts of the Aeneid, a poem he had nearly memorized on his voyage from Naples to New York, and then refreshed his memory of on his voyage from New York around the Horn to San Francisco.
When he told her how worried he was about her, a mother trying to raise a newborn on her own in a city as cool and windy as San Francisco, she, while sweeping, sweeping, and washing the baking pans and helping him knead and roll the dough, told him her story in bits and pieces, saying at one point, “I was born a slave. Do you know what that means? Every day I wake up and breathe air as a free woman it remains a triumph for me!”
“It’s a triumph? Where you learn to talk that way?”
Liza laughed at him.
“Because I was born a slave does that make me forever chained and ignorant?”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I like you story. You come all the way here, you mother from Africa, you come from all the way across America, a big journey, it’s like the Aeneas himself make. It’s a epic, á la America!”
At the end of the work day, he took to walking her up the hill toward home, carrying me, still a rather small bundle, in his arms. People on the street often stared. At that time, with so few Africans living in the city, she was an oddity, a mahogany face among the many white folk and Chinese. She felt alone, until I arrived, but she had felt alone before. Even the worst of the things she had to do, the worst of the men she had met in her life, they were nothing compared to the great forces of mother nature, her mountains and rivers and deserts! And yet—and yet, she had to say, without these men her life would have been less than something. Our beloved ancestors, even her despicable father, the when all is said and done rather naïve but decent Nate, my father, the men she met along the way, why, all of them became stepping stones on her journey here. Even the half-Cherokee woman, of whom she thought wistfully now and then, she, too, served as yet another stepping stone. As far as what she had to do in order to reach this place, what’s some degradation and humiliation compared to long years of being enslaved?
***
As it happened, a few months after I was born, Eliza Stone—which was the name she took when she first arrived in the city—found that at last she had put the worst behind her. Time speeded up, unusual when you have an infant to raise, but nonetheless that was what happened. The baker bought her books, he bought her newspapers, he bought me toys carved from dark wood. Eliza could tell what was coming. And on a foggy morning in winter, while the oven warmed the inside of the shop, her worst fears came true.
“Eliza,” the baker said, “put down your broom.”
Gently, he took the broom from her and set it upright against the counter.
“We have known each other only a short while,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, gazing out at the fog rolling past