Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [53]
Chapter Twenty-three
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More to Learn (2)
Jonathan’s declaration, seeming half in jest and, to my ear, half in earnest, set the other family members to explaining themselves.
“I know that it must seem quite a fearful situation,” my uncle said, “because we are a people who lived all too long in bondage ourselves. And yet we own these people, you are going to say, yes, I know. Unfortunately right now we cannot run the plantation without their labor. But when the time comes we will effect their emancipation.”
“When the time comes, yes,” my aunt said quietly, and I could not tell by her voice whether she was ratifying what Uncle said or disputing it.
“You cannot,” my cousin said quickly, “set a slave free and expect he will know how to take care of himself. There have been experiments I have read about where birds of prey, wounded in one way or another, have been taken in by people of sympathy, and nurtured until their injuries, broken wings or legs, whatever they might have been, have been repaired, and then were set free into the wild again, only to perish, because they had forgotten their instincts for survival.”
“And so you keep them here until you have trained them.”
“We have only just begun our training, isn’t that true, Rebecca?”
His wife nodded in agreement, keeping her eyes on me as if in search for some acquiescence.
Turning to me, Jonathan added, “Over the years we have had both good luck and bad with the sort of Africans we have kept here, and it has only been lately that we put our minds to the question of why this has been so. It has been Rebecca, my wife, who has been instrumental in this.” He took another drink of wine and looked over at his wife.
Rebecca at last spoke up.
“Your uncle and my Jonathan did all the preparation,” she said. “With the help also of a physician friend of ours. Perhaps at some point you will meet him. He visits now and then and tends to the health of our people.”
“Or perhaps not,” my cousin said. “He has been ailing himself and lately does not visit that often.”
“In any case, dear Nathaniel, my little idea was like a small spark to their kindling.”
“It was your idea?” I said, feeling a small spark of interest myself.
“I had a vision,” Rebecca said.
“Really? I’ve never met one of us that had a vision.”
“But, dear cousin, I did. I…I had not yet been able to conceive a child, but I had found ways to help small children. It was honey-making season, just a few years ago, when this idea came to me. I was spending an afternoon to myself while waiting for my beloved—” and here she cast a sweet eye at my cousin—“who was working with the slaves at the brickyard, strolling in the fields at the edge of the house. And I saw a bee, and took it upon me to follow it.”
“Bees?” I said. “But what on earth can this have to do with slaves?”
“Explain to him,” Jonathan said.
“I will,” Rebecca said. “I followed the bee, keeping it in my sight as it made a rather dizzy pattern in the air just above and beyond my head, lighting from tree to vine to tree, until I thought I had lost sight of it and stopped to catch my breath. And the busy little insect buzzed just past my head, as if to invite to follow it further.”
“Busy and buzzing,” said my cousin, the wine having loosened his tongue a bit.
Rebecca took a breath and continued.
“And so I wandered through the woods, and I don’t know how long I took, until I saw the sun slanting down behind the trees and knew it was time to start back to the house because my dear Jonathan would be returning from the rice fields soon—in fact, I could hear the dark people singing, their voices carrying like the noise of the bees and birds above the trees and then—”
“The dark people?”
“The slaves,” Jonathan said.
“The darkies,” Abraham said from the doorway and just then the heretofore absent Liza came up behind him and gave him a rude side-wise shove,