Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [190]
“I have things I can let you wear,” the woman said. Later from her closet, she pulled some blouses and skirts, and a jacket for two for a horsewoman to wear while riding in the park.
Dressed in this fashion, Eliza went for her interview. Her fusion of intelligence, determination, and poise won her a post there. Her classrooms were lively, and because of her wit and passion on the subject of geography and literature and history her students adored her. Her industry and accomplishments in the classroom won her an award.
Picture her on that evening.
Eliza Stone—this mahogany-skinned angel who appeared ever younger than when she had first escaped the plantation and struggled to make her way westward. And even more beautiful. Those of us born free can never know it, how finding your freedom can light a lamp in your soul and allow it to illuminate your life! At the very least this made for her stunning physical presence. In the audience that night was one of the patrons of the school, an older gentleman who had survived the last Fremont expedition and made his fortune in construction around the Bay. His young wife had died in childbirth, as had the infant, and ever since he had dedicated himself to helping students around the Bay. The light he spied in Eliza nearly blinded his soul.
This led to one of my earliest memories, which consists of blue sky, warm surf breaking across the sand at Ocean Beach, and women in bright cloth skirts swaying with hands held aloft and guitars and (what I later learned were) ukuleles accompanying the movements of their loosely jointed hips—my mother’s ocean-side wedding to this tall man with streaming gray hair—much older than Eliza, he seemed already to be worn by sun and battered by wind—who paid for my schooling right up until the time I graduated from Cal.
While a preacher intoned words into the offshore winds I crawled on the sand amidst the brown legs of the swaying dancers, searching for shells and star-fish, my future as far away from me and yet as inevitable as one of the distant waves at the horizon.
To Eliza the beach meant something more than a place to play or marry and celebrate. That broad reach of sand called her back to her own mother’s stories about the shores of home, the last glimpse she had of it before descending into the bowels of the slave ship—a few palms, birds skirring across the pearl-white sky, the long stretch of sand. Even in the midst of great celebration she picked at the mental scars of the awful passage over water, the loss of all things that had once belonged to her heart and soul. She could not let these memories go.
***
Not only did Eliza win awards and the love of her first husband. She accrued other honors and won other hearts. For a number of years she spoke regularly to the parents of her students, and then to groups of parents whose children she did not teach but who attended her school. Her reputation as a speaker spread through the educated class of the city, and this led to an invitation to speak at an impromptu evening that some recent immigrant from the East had put together in the hope of initiating the San Francisco equivalent of his beloved Chautauqua. Many people had recommended Eliza to him, and when she stood up before the assembly of some hundred interested folks, men and women, he understood why.
Her subject was freedom and love, things that many people, caught up as they might be in family strife and work life and the getting and spending that the poet speaks of, lost sight of and failed to grasp what these things meant in their lives, if they ever pictured them at all at the start.
“I was born a slave—” that was her usual way of beginning her talks, which, after this initial event, proliferated around the Bay for many a year—“someone owned me. How many of you were born free? How many of you claim never to have had masters?”
She had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she had read Emerson, she had read Homer and the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, and the Qur’an, and of our native writers