Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [44]
“He’ll be showing you around the plantation and explaining matters to you.”
“Good,” I said. “As soon as I have my breakfast I’ll be ready for my tour.”
Isaac looked at my uncle, who shook his head.
“With the Sabbath coming up you should move along.”
“Very well then, Uncle. We will go.”
“That’s the spirit, boy,” my uncle said. “Isaac, he is all yours.”
What a strange world, I thought, to say such a thing when Isaac belonged to him.
Though he did not show it. In fact, one of the first things he explained to me as we went out the rear door of the main house was that the way my uncle ran things on this plantation was out of the ordinary.
“You’ll rarely, sir, see your African man working as overseer. Usually the job is reserved for a white man, someone tough as nails.”
“But you are an African man—”
“And tough as nails.”
It was his joke, but though I laughed, he did not.
The joke came at my expense as he led me behind the house to the stables.
“Is this barn the first stop on the tour?” I said.
Isaac squinted at me in the early morning mist.
“We mount up here,” he said.
“I do not ride,” I said. “City boy, and all of that, you know?”
“Master Jonathan has taken the carriage to town,” Isaac said.
I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll try.”
Something flickered in the corner of my eye. Distracted, I turned and caught a glimpse of the slave girl hurrying from the house to one of the out-buildings.
“Keep your mind on the horse,” Isaac said. I was afraid he would laugh, but he remained solemn in his demeanor.
After several tries, I mounted up and we went on our way, into a morning filled with busyness and news.
Chapter Nineteen
________________________
First Lesson
The big horse was called Promise and Isaac sat alongside me on a large black stallion whose name he did not say. He urged our mounts into motion and we went riding slowly away from the house. Promise, as big as he was, seemed a gentle beast, though I remained a bit wary of him.
Yet I was warier still of my mission to this place.
“May I ask you some questions?”
Isaac seemed to nod his head ever so slightly as we rode along. This I took to be positive.
“Is my uncle good to you?” I said.
“Not a question, sir. He is very good.”
Recalling the auction block, I said, “I cannot imagine he would ever sell you away.”
“No, sir. But sometimes that happens.”
“I cannot imagine it.”
“Things is different down here, sir,” he said, and stared over the head of his horse at the trail ahead.
What kind of a life did this man have, I wondered as we rode along, in which someone might sell him in an auction? Was he born here in Carolina or had he been born elsewhere? From the way he walked and gestured, I assumed he was a native of Carolina soil, especially because his face showed such features as might have been the result of having had an Indian mother or father, a long straight nose and high cheekbones, and deep-set gray eyes. Most un-African, I thought to myself, because it seemed almost as though he were a handsome white man whose skin had darkened somehow in the night. Also most un-African about him was the way he stared me hard in the eye, almost as though he knew something about me, something he did not admire.
“Isaac?” I called to him. “Do you have any Indian blood in you?”
That manner of his—he turned, and turned away, pretending that he hadn’t heard me. Meanwhile we kept up our pace along the trail, and I kept on wondering. His mother? Perhaps some Indian whom my uncle had bought as a slave and introduced to one of the African men in the barracks, a woman whose family had lived in the woods and swamps long before we Europeans arrived, and traveling up and along the coast, enjoying a carefree (if sometimes difficult) life of fishing and hunting to keep themselves fed. For how long had they and their ancestors done this? Yes, I kept on wondering about this. Far, far back in time, back at least to the time when my own ancestors were