Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [51]
“I am hungry,” young Abraham complained.
“Yes, yes,” said my uncle, “let us begin.” He muttered a prayer under his breath while Jonathan raised a glass of wine and all followed his example. Black Jack leaned close to the table and served while Precious Sally the cook watched with approval from the doorway.
The evening meal consisted of roasted hens and stewed tomatoes, platters full of rice mixed with herbs and piquant spices and plentiful amounts of red wine. I couldn’t help but notice when I looked up from a knife-stick of food, how the cook watched us quite carefully, interested obviously in how much—or how little—we were enjoying her meal—a little Hebrew Carolina feast fixed by this big woman born in Africa many decades ago.
There was no small enjoyment to it. The fowl, the rice, and the wine we drank in copious amounts to wash it down—it made me perspire to eat this much this vigorously, but the flavors, every tip to the tongue and buttery savor, were delicious. After the food had disappeared the wine kept flowing.
“Is this evening much the same as your own Sabbath celebrations at home in New York?” my uncle asked me, his glass raised high in his huge hand.
I shook my head.
“We live in a quiet house,” I said. “Only the three of us. And I can’t say that we pay much attention to the Sabbath other than that we attend to our prayers on Saturday morning.”
“Your aunt has not taken over the woman’s responsibilities since your mother’s death?”
The light outside had faded and the flickering candlelight at the table must have made the instant flush of blood to my face not as noticeable as I feared it might be.
“No, sir,” I said.
“She will,” said cousin Jonathan. “It is the custom.”
“Perhaps,” said my aunt, “the Sabbath in the city is more difficult to practice. Out here in our country we make it something quite special.”
“We’ve had the rabbi come out from town to speak with us all,” Rebecca said.
“And she means all,” Jonathan said, “Jews and pagans.”
“Yes,” my uncle added, “though I was severely disappointed in his approach to such matters.”
“In what matters exactly, uncle?” I said.
Abraham sat up straight in his chair.
“Turning the niggers into Jews,” he said.
My uncle slapped his hand on the table.
“Where do you hear such talk? Certainly not at my table.”
“He takes this from your tone,” his daughter-in-law said.
My uncle ignored her, ordering the boy from the room.
The boy sat there, head slightly bowed.
“Go,” Jonathan spoke up.
The boy made to moan and left the table.
As he did so I caught sight of Black Jack, peering at us from the doorway, a near-smile on his face, as Precious Sally stood behind him, shaking her head, as if all of us were the age of young Abraham and entirely out of order.
“I apologize, Father.”
My uncle nodded curtly.
“And I apologize, Nathaniel,” Uncle said to me, his face as red as the coat of an old British soldier.
“Sir, nothing to apologize for. I am not so far away in age from Abraham and I recall it as a time when in confusion about whether I was still a boy or becoming a man I often felt such contradictory furies in me that I would say, or I should say, could say, just about anything.”
“But you probably didn’t,” my uncle said.
“No, though I wish I had. I was a good lad, my father always said.”
My aunt, who had been silent throughout this outburst, or, rather, in the end, silently weeping, now spoke up.
“I don’t want to think of my grandson as a cruel boy. But he spoke so cruelly…”
“Mother,” cousin Jonathan said, “he spoke out of ignorance.”
“He hears the word about in the town,” Rebecca said. “Perhaps the best thing is to keep him out of the town.”
My uncle sighed a loud sigh, hissing through his large teeth like some kind of specimen from the woods.
“We have fallen down in our teaching of the boy,” he said. “We must make all the more of an effort.” He looked over at Black Jack (Sally had disappeared back into the kitchen). “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, sir,” Black Jack said.
Uncle paused,