Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [194]
“Do your studies in the work of Darwin show you how to make sense of our story?”
“Our story?”
“The story of the world.”
“We are only just beginning to talk about it,” I said. “The clergymen are not happy about it.”
“No, no,” said Argus, “they would not be, would they? But if their god cannot withstand the discovery of some millions of years of life, why, then what kind of a god is it anyway in whom they believe? I ask you.”
“And I tell you, not a very powerful god at all.”
Such were the conversations one could have back then, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of where we are now, when I was first trying to make sense of what he called “our story.” Argus and I would walk and talk, and now and then he would invite me to his studio in a former barn that he rented for scarcely anything from one of his wealthy Nob Hill patrons. There I met on several occasions an astonishingly beautiful Island girl who was posing for him with or without various Hawaiian garments, a girl whom I first knew as “Holly,” before we married and she introduced me to the proper pronunciation of island things.
Yes, that is how much time went by. I evolved from infant to baby to boy to young man before that morning when Eliza awoke late and as she was moving from the bed to the bath happened to step past a mirror in the master bedroom of our house and then stepped back. Something in her image caught her eye. Her rich brown face that Jan Argus had captured so beautifully in his portrait had turned suddenly ashy and she appeared to herself as a different woman.
Quickly she removed her clothes and noticed that the ashy patina covered her breasts and belly, too, as well as the tops of her thighs. She turned to see her back over her shoulder but the light would not allow her to see herself clearly from behind. She kept this view to herself and never mentioned it to Jan.
More time passed, months, years, and in bits and pieces and sometimes in longer stories she told me over many cups of tea on many afternoons, Eliza delivered to me the history of her family, and her own life, such as it had been before arriving in the Promised Land of California. I think she missed her students, and I also believe, though she never would admit to it, she missed the audiences which had once filled every seat in large theaters who had come to hear her talk.
***
Was this a dream or was it real? That was how Eliza put this next story into a frame.
Of a Sunday morning in August, she and Argus had been out walking on the far western edge of the city, where the cliffs overlooked the churning ocean, the beautiful, hypnotic, but deadly ocean, and he had stopped to relieve himself along the trail. She kept on walking, focusing on the large veil of fog that cloaked the sky in the direction of the Farallons. It served her as a kind of wall on which she began to project the stereopticon-like images out of her mind where thought met memory, in other words, those things never far from her everyday thoughts. That ocean—it gave her a sound show while she pictured again the ship that carried her grandmother to Carolina. Soon she imagined she heard shouts and the crack of whips and the groans and songs of all the African people, her cousins and kin, who arrived in chains and lived in chains. She heard laughter, of goddesses and gods and human beings, the crunch of thunder, the rush of water flooding the fields, the grunts and snores of men she had known, the touch of the doctor’s hand, curative, the grasp of her father’s brutal fingers, maniacal, spitting and caressing, kissing, fending off but not too well the inevitable thrusts of his monstrous desires, his falling away of gasp and grunt, striated breathing while she lay scarcely alive, breath turned to noxious gas, body turned to water, heart beating but not caring.
What was freedom if these visions came with it?
A