Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [19]
The color of things, not just the faces of the slaves (and I was assuming that here, unlike New York, all black people were slaves) but the air and the noise and the light, made me feel as though I had arrived in another country, a place that I might have imagined if I had read about it in one of the history books that Halevi and I had studied together, somewhere that I could not have constructed in my mind without great prompting. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the sight of the harbor, the ships, the piers, the warehouses, and the city beyond. It was just that I never would have imagined it in this way, perhaps never would have, never could have, imagined it at all.
Was it the kind of mind I had? Or was I just too young and—peace be unto you, Halevi—too unschooled to appreciate or understand these matters? Who knows what I might have decided then and there if I wasn’t rudely jarred from my musings by the silver-haired man in black cape and suit brushing past me, followed by his young black servant with the baggage.
As he briskly descended the gangplank he turned and hurled these words up at me:
“Pereira, we’ll meet again, I’m sure!”
And then he cut a brusque passage through the crowd, followed by the boy with the bags.
I would have kept my eye on him, except I was immediately distracted by a young woman, sweet of face, who waved a handkerchief at me. Yes, I was sure she was waving to me.
A sailor came up alongside me and picked up my bag. But I took it from him and made my way down the gangplank, pleased that I needed neither slave nor free man to help me carry my baggage. A smile spread across my face—I could feel it stretching the skin of my cheeks—and I advanced toward the waving woman.
“Cousin Nathaniel?”
Her voice, a cooling slow-turned series of noises, wrapped around my name in the oddest way I’d ever heard. She had dark blue eyes and wore her brown hair parted in the middle with curls dangling at either side of her face like twirling vines.
“Sir!”
A man alongside her, a paunchy fellow, much older than me, with a flat nose and a fierce green-eyed gaze, thrust out his hand.
“Hello,” I said.
“I am your cousin Jonathan,” he said, “and this is my wife Rebecca.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” I said, and turning to Rebecca said, “And touched that you waved so heartily at a complete stranger like me.”
Rebecca laughed, and pressed herself against my cousin’s arm.
“He is just like you,” she said to Jonathan. “Why, it runs in the family, doesn’t it?”
“What does, darling?” Jonathan said. He spoke to her using sweet words but his tone seemed born of distraction and perhaps more paternal than avuncular.
I could not help but stare at this man, whether because of my own curiosity at meeting someone with my own family blood or because I had been sent to investigate the means of his livelihood or even for some even deeper reason I could not say. Certainly I saw a passionate intensity in his eyes, though mixed with some other extremes that I could not find the words to describe. He certainly looked back to me with great fervor. And he spoke with deep feeling.
“Welcome to Charleston, Nathaniel, we are hoping you are going to stay with us a while.”
“Why, yes,” I began, “since our fathers—”
At which point I felt a tug at my hand and a slender hard-jawed dark man a year or two younger than myself tugged at my bag.
My first response was to keep holding on to it.
“Allow