Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [189]
“Yet I feel I know you.”
“You have been generous to me. And I am grateful to you,” Eliza said. She removed her apron and laid it on the counter.
“What are you doing?” the baker said.
“I am going,” Eliza said.
“Where are you going?”
Eliza felt as though she had been sleep-walking—this was one of a thousand topics she had read about in recent months—and suddenly had awakened.
“To take my son for a walk.”
“Please, please, he is sleeping in the back. We must talk, you and I, please.”
She ignored him and stepped into the back room where I lay drowsing on a pallet.
“Come along,” she said, and swept me into her arms and carried me up the hill into the fast-moving wall of fog. The baker followed us half-way up the hill, and then, apparently, his heart could not take it, and he slowed down, and she soon left him behind.
Marriage? No, no, no, she wanted none of that, seeing it as just another form of imprisonment. Still, she looked at me and saw traces of my father’s face, and thought to herself that someday, perhaps when I had grown a lot more, we might make a trip East and look up the man who had helped her win her freedom. (In the time they had spent together she thought only of keeping her plan together, feigning whatever emotions she needed to create in order to make that plan work. Poor Nate, she had fooled him, although there had been moments, especially after she had discovered that she was carrying me, that she had come close to believing in her feigned feelings as true.)
***
Time blew on, like that fog. My mother sold the silver candlesticks. Just before the money from that transaction was about to run out she found a job cleaning house for a tall, pleasant woman who thought of her as a self-educated free soul from somewhere in the East with whom she often discussed, over tea, the questions of the day such as, for example, women’s suffrage. Her employer believed that if it came to war between the North and the South, one of the results of a Northern victory would be universal emancipation and the delivery of the right to vote for all former slaves. Liza agreed, adding that perhaps the North might punish the South by taking the vote away from all slaveholders.
“Interesting,” the other woman said. “Interesting.”
They continued that discussion for quite a while, taking time off to discuss the relation of darker-skinned people to whites—an oddity, as I may have mentioned, in San Francisco, but not in the South and the Northeast—and of Europeans to Africans (about which my mother had read).
They talked about politics, yes, and literature—her employer was reading David Copperfield at one point, and Liza was reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. It was interesting, especially when they were discussing literature, that her employer stared at Liza in an odd but familiar way, as if she remained in constant astonishment that a black women could recite poetry.
Especially the poetry of William Blake, of whom she had not heard until she heard Liza recite.
“‘My mother bore in the southern wild, / And I am black, but oh my soul is white!’”
Liza’s employer asked her about the south and Liza told her some stories out of her life and the lives of her ancestors, as much as she could remember of what she had heard, which turned out to be quite a lot.
One morning, some months into my second year (while I lay in the care of a neighbor’s daughter), the woman informed my mother that a new private school near her home on the upslope of California Street was hiring teachers.
“You would make a good teacher,” the woman said.
“Do you truly think so?” Eliza felt tears pull up in her eyes. “I am not at all trained. Though I had a good teacher when I was younger, a doctor, Harvard-educated.”
“Here in California we are a bit freer than in the East,” the woman said. “I see how you raise your son, I have enjoyed our discussions. I think you will make a fine teacher of the young.”
“If you think so, thank you,” Liza said. “But what shall I wear? I know I