Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [198]
“I never thought I would reach this moment. At last, at last, at last…I…am…a free woman.”
Chapter Ninety
________________________
A Son Appears
But I was not yet a free man, and had only a few inklings of what I might become when I saw the sign for the first time. There it was, set into the brick façade of a building on a little lane just off Wall Street, the sign I had been looking for.
PEREIRA AND SONS, IMPORT-EXPORT
I had pictured this sign in my mind ever since I boarded the train in San Francisco and headed east, the sign bearing the name that I had thought about on and off for a number of years.
How many times had I rehearsed my entrance! Touching a hand to my head and a finger to my tie, adjusting my vest, pulling my coat just so (with my other hand in my pocket feeling the smoothness and the striations of that relic of a stone, by all rational standards a legacy seemingly impossible to have been transmitted down along all these centuries, yet here it was, cool and smooth to my touch), I stepped into the office, where I would say to a welcoming receptionist that I had come to see Mr. Nathaniel Pereira.
There was no one to greet me. The large room smelled of tobacco smoke and eastern spices and the chill remnant of a morning in March and the faintest touch of tar. On the walls hung photographs of sailing ships in various harbors, one of which I recognized as our own, another which I believed was Honolulu, and others I could not recognize except for the exotic composition of the smaller boats—junks, canoes, mainly—that surrounded the larger vessels.
My eye came to rest on the photographic portrait just at the end of the row of pictures of ships.
The uniformed man, in middle-age, of medium height, posed, unsmiling, in front of a row of tents which stretched to the horizon.
My chest tightened.
“May I help you?”
The voice struck me also in a physical way, and I turned to the man, a fellow the same height and same face as the officer in the photograph, without the cast of age. But when I tried to speak I merely let out a cough.
“Sir?” the man said. “I am Emmanuel Pereira, may I be of some assistance?”
I took a step toward him, then stopped, trying to catch my breath. I had rehearsed this part also.
“Y-yes,” I said, “I am happy to meet you.” I paused and took another breath. And another. “I am your brother.”
Emmanuel took a moment, inclining his head a tad toward me, taking in my color and my clothes, my long straight hair, the blue-green of my eyes.
“Well, well,” he said at last. “I…Father had always hoped…”
“He told you about me?”
“He wrote a recollection of his life. He wrote about…your mother…”
“You use the past tense, sir. That means that he is deceased?”
Emmanuel nodded, slowly, sadly, tilting his body a little to the right.
“Yes, I am afraid that is so. A long while ago. He volunteered at the start of the war, and he died in his very first battle.” A flicker of emotion passed across his face. “Our mother is likewise deceased. After a long illness.”
Something weighty, like a ship’s anchor, seemed to fall within me the entire length of my body.
“And mine as well.” I extended him a hand. “And so, my condolences to us all…”
Emmanuel took my hand. “But, well, my…brother!”
“Ishmael,” I said, taking his hand. “Ishmael Stone.”
We embraced firmly, in manly fashion. My brother smelled of the salt air of the harbor and tar from the planks—clearly he was an import-export sort of fellow, and if he looked nothing like me at first, well, then, I figured, it had to be because I just had not looked long and hard enough at him. (Who knew, what after my transcontinental train trip, what I smelled like!)
“Ishmael,” he said when in the next few moments we stood back from each other. “The name is Biblical.”
“Yes,” I said, the rest of the words tumbling from my lips, “but not what you think. My mother may have been born a slave, but she was from childhood a voracious reader, taught by a caring doctor who attended to the slaves on the plantation where