Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [45]
And their god or gods? Who were they? Where were they? I pictured them as idols or invisible amid the storm clouds that passed over our heads on hot days in spring and summer seasons. I asked him a question about religion. And he was quick to reply.
“Miss Rebecca,” he said, “she’s teaching us about religion.”
“And do you find it interesting?”
“I do, massa, I do.”
“In Africa, your people had a certain type of religion. I studied something of it with my tutor when I was a boy. Animism, he called it. The worship of spirits living in trees and rivers and such.”
“I don’t know, massa, I never learned that. Just the Hebrew.”
“Can you read Hebrew?”
“I can recognize a few words, massa,” he said. “Aleph,” he said. “Bet…”
“That’s more than I can read of it,” I said.
I let our conversation fall away, dwelling in my amazement that this fellow, a little darker than me, but with more Hebrew, might be put up for public sale. With this in mind, it seemed appropriate that the mist still hovered over the rice fields as we made our way toward them. Though I had traveled a similar route the day before on the carriage, sitting high up here on my horse with nothing above but the sky gave me a different sense of the land and its extension. The animal’s rolling gait, the screen of fog, with new sun touching on high clouds above us, all of it conspired to make a picture for me of beauty, strangeness, and possibility. Why the latter, I could not have said just then, but it was a feeling that stole over me, a feeling of hope in the face of duty.
The scene we encountered gave my fantasy more fuel.
In the mist a dozen or so dark men and women (though some of these were children, male and female, whose smaller stature led me to conclude they were all women) worked in the rows of the rice fields, stooping to their particular tasks of planting the individual stalks each in a small bed of mud. Aside from the clomp and click of our horses’ hooves, the sounds here came from birds fluttering overhead and calling to one another—and an audible chant from the workers in the rows of rice plants.
Rize is…nize…
Nize is…rize…
…the men’s voices low and rumbling, like thunder in advance of lightning, the women’s voices sparkling, high, like the twitter of the birds, and the children added to the twitter of the upper registers of sound.
Nize is…
Rize is…
“Nice music,” I said.
“Oh, yes, nice music, massa, ain’t it?” Isaac said.
“I’d think it would give them some incentive to keep working, to keep moving. The rhythm of it would push them along.”
“Yes, massa,” Isaac said. “It pushes, yes. And I push them.”
“Isaac, please, I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘massa.’ I find it rather odd.”
“But that is who you are, sir. The massa.”
“I am only my uncle’s nephew.”
“But soon to be a massa.”
“How do you know that? What do you know?”
Perhaps he would have answered me, perhaps not. But at that moment a cry broke past the boundary of sound and the slaves began shouting and throwing up their hands, pointing.
“Excuse me, sir,” Isaac said, and dismounted and waded out into the water where he took charge of the noisy gang that had formed in one corner of the field. A few moments later he returned, followed by an agitated group of men and women holding up a young girl in their arms.
“What is it?” I said. “Is she hurt?”
He took a blanket from the back of saddle and placed it on the ground. The slaves lowered the young woman onto the blanket and gathered around her while she began to writhe and moan.
“Is there something I can do?”
Isaac looked up at me.
“Are you a doctor, young master?”
I shook my head.
“Shouldn’t we take her to the house?”
“The midwife right here. Planting rice alongside her. Keeping watch.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Yes, yes, so you just sit there on that horse. Unless you care to ride back to the house by yourself.”
“I will wait,” I said, and leaned forward in the saddle and watched. From my perch I had in fact a better