Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [199]
“A novel about whaling?”
“Yes, and the narrator, because there is a narrator, one of the sailors on this ship that goes on a truly dangerous voyage, is named Ishmael. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is how the book opens. I’ve long since read it myself, of course.”
“So, Ishmael,” my brother said, “well, I must read that book too.”
“It is a fine book,” I said. “And a truly momentous American story.”
“Reading is not my first interest,” my brother said. “Business and family always stand in the way. But I always have hopes for the time for it.”
“Good,” I said “Good, good.”
We began to talk, and he took me home with him that evening and I met the rest of the family, wife, children, step-mother. I could scarcely breathe for the sentiment I felt on meeting them and getting to know them. Whereas growing up in San Francisco where not many with my shade of skin walked the streets and so I felt constantly goggled at and pointed to, here in New York where many descendants of slaves and freemen both resided, I could only draw attention to myself by shouting in the street—which I did not do, of course—or by walking into a family gathering for the first time where someone announced that I was a long-lost brother-in-law or brother or uncle or all of these. They lavished much initial affection on me, and I tried to reciprocate as best I could, only child that I was.
Emmanuel raised a glass to me at dinner that first night.
“To my long-lost half-brother,” he said. And then he stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “No, no, no, to my long-lost, and now found, brother!”
With tears in my eyes I reciprocated. And then added:
“To our father.”
“To father—grandfather—all…” Family voices in celebration rang through the air.
“And to my mother,” I said. “Whom I only wish you might have known.”
“To your mother!” Again the voices in tribute rang through the air.
I had lived alone since my mother’s death, and traveled alone, but now my singular state was fast disappearing. The next day I met two more long-lost brothers of mine, one of them a physician and the other also a partner in the family business.
They took me in, fed me, clasped my hands, kissed me on the cheeks, gave me a bed. After all of my mother’s stories about life on the plantation I felt now that the Pereiras had somehow saved me from regarding family life as a pit of desolation and woe and enslavement and murder. I was, though, only beginning to learn about this side of where I came from, beginning with the end.
On a long walk along the wharves in the deep salt steep of a Sunday afternoon my brother Emmanuel described to me our father’s demise.
“In the first wave of battle, apparently, at Bull Run.”
I sighed, breathed in, breathed out.
“I am very sorry that I will not be able to meet him.”
“I am, too,” my brother said.
“The funeral must have been difficult for all,” I said.
“Yes, yes.”
He described to me the woe spread all around, and the weeping and wailing. And the wake that followed.
“It is, I believe,” Emmanuel said, “so much worse for us Jews than for the Gentiles. They believe in an afterlife, whereas we do not.” He sighed deeply and touched a hand to my shoulder. “Were you raised as a Jew or a Gentile?”
“Such as I was raised,” I said, “I would have to call myself an enlightened pagan, if I am at all enlightened.”
“Our father was not all that much for his religion.”
“Jews believe in doing good deeds, do they not?”
“They do,” my brother said.
“Our father did a great deed indeed,” I said, with a wink, “in helping my mother to become free.”
“Yes, yes, we have read of it.”
“Have you? How?”
He then told me about our father’s memoir, a copy of which he handed to me immediately upon our return to the house.
“You are named after a character in a