Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [193]
Some parents lose interest when their children grow older, others become more and more attentive to them and seek their company. My mother was the latter sort of mother. The older I got, the more she talked to me of her life, and what she found within it.
“Some nights when I can’t sleep,” she told me, “I sit here, watching the lights of ships in the bay, thinking back to the passage of my people from Africa to South Carolina, that awful journey, and nothing it seems can take me off that mark, that black place in memory. Then, as some kind of miracle, Ish, I recall Nate’s face, and how in his eyes I saw the possibility of freedom. That is the gift he gave me, that young man from New York City. I wish only that I had not had to leave him behind…” (Ay, the further in time she left him behind, the more affection she believed she felt for him!) Here, she made a huge sigh, and in that expiration of breath and sound only much later could I fill in the details of desperation and love and aspiration and fear, among other emotions, that had driven her to this point in her life, where she could sit and ponder the past which had nearly destroyed her. I did not know my father, and in a visceral way, never would, so I could only listen and wonder as she continued to speak.
“I have done many things in my life that a reasonable feeling person might easily regret. Whatever I did, I did to make my freedom. I know it must seem that I have had to be a terribly hard person in order to survive. And that is true, for the most part. From anything that seemed as though it might deter me from my plan I kept my distance. But I am not so hard that now and then, as in this moment, or I wouldn’t be speaking of it, that I don’t think of Nate. Poor man. Rich man but poor. He was in love with me. I used him, I admit that freely. I’m sure he went on to make a good life for himself. He had all the advantages…though I do wonder precisely what he made of himself once he returned to his native New York.…”
She began to cry, and I sat there, feeling chained to my chair, when after a while she wiped at her tears and gazed out at the water.
“I am sorry, Ish. Do you think I am a bad woman for keeping you from your father?” she said. “Do you think I am evil? Let me tell you, I hope that you never, well, you could never find yourself as I did, born into slavery, and so you will never ever understand, and blessedly so, that you would do anything—anything—to become free.”
Her tears ran freely again, and it took her a while to calm herself.
She said, “I never think about my father, that hateful disgusting man, except that I wanted to tell you about him. I do think of Isaac, poor Isaac. Where is he now? Where is he?” Light and cloud passed across the waters of the Bay. She gazed out at this everyday wonder, dreaming with eyes open about who knew what. Then she said:
“Of course I think sometimes about what would have happened if I hadn’t left Nate behind. As sick as he was, the dogs would have caught up with us. How the patrollers would have torn me away from him and returned me to the Pereiras. How my father would have…oh! And what Nate might have done! Oh! Yemaya, I know I did the right thing!”
She kept her eyes on the water, as if dreaming while awake. Yemaya! It had been some time since she had uttered the name of the goddess who had given her such good protection in life. Yemaya, she vowed, I am sorry, I will not forget you!
So I think it was then, when I was at a relatively late age, that the idea of finding my father, the man of whom she spoke with such affection, became something of an obsession for me.
***
I did not pay much attention when yet another man came into her life, this fellow a successful portrait artist originally from Holland named Jan Argus, who met her at a dinner one night and volunteered to paint her. They became quite close, though they never married, and the first portrait Jan made of her still hangs on the wall of my Manhattan apartment. (But I don’t mean to get ahead of myself in recounting this story.) Jan and I became friends