Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [54]
Rebecca made a point of ignoring this distraction. I wished I might have ignored it, such a sudden spear of fire in my heart the sight of the slave girl produced in me.
Meanwhile, my cousin’s wife went on, “They were singing, and here she took a deep breath and I watched her chest heave up and down as she sang the words in a voice deeper than her own. ‘Don’t mind working from sun to sun, If’n you give my dinner when the dinner time comes…’”
Now I took a swallow of wine, and Jonathan took another.
The doorway was now empty, Liza gone.
“It was beautiful music,” Rebecca went on, “as beautiful in its own way as anything I hear in the synagogue—”
“Well, I certainly am not sure about that,” said my uncle, her father-in-law.
“Hush,” said my aunt.
“I am not trying to be disrespectful—”
“Please, my dear, continue,” said Jonathan. “Father?”
My uncle shook his head, a signal for her to go on with her story.
As she spoke, I pictured not her but Liza gliding through the woods on the trail of the bee, her piercing green gaze and skin the color of walnut stippled by sunlight as she roamed from glade to glade.
Rebecca recounted her discovery, which, as I recollect it, had something to do with a Biblical vision of bees making honey in the corpse of a dead lion. I was not sure what she meant by this but would have politely kept on listening, except that I could not keep Liza out of my thoughts. I put her on the auction block in my mind and turned her this way and that, so I could observe her build and her strengths and whatever weaknesses—there were none—she might show forth.
A thousand, I bid. And then bid against myself. Two thousand! Three!
I turned her again and again, and bid her stare down at me from the block, before turning a haughty pose and looking away.
Four thousand!
“However,” my uncle was saying when I prompted myself to pay attention to the conversation at the table, “I believe that while they may be children they can learn and become educated over time. In fact, I believe that all of the problems we have with our slave population comes from the fact that most owners ignore their capabilities rather than encourage them. For if he were treated as a perennial child, what man would not want to break his bonds and find his own freedom. Though, of course, that would be always disastrous for these people. Without an education, they could, in freedom, only fall back into the same mental bonds that held them back in the first place.”
My leg had begun to ache from sitting so long, and I gave it a little shake, drumming my fingers on the tablecloth, and letting my eyes wander as again my mind did, lighting first on Precious Sally, who stood upright in the corner of the dining room, unmoving except for her huge chest working up and down, up and down, as she breathed, and then to Black Jack, who himself stood perfectly still in the doorway.
“And so we cultivate them,” my uncle went on, “teaching them how to read, thanks to dear Rebecca here—” Rebecca made a gentle noise with her mouth and bowed her head toward Uncle—“and our physician friend from town, and teaching them such tricks of the artisan as making bricks.”
His eyes rested on me, and so I sat up and showed my interest in these matters.
“How long have you been doing this, dear Uncle?” I inquired.
“For some time now,” he said.
“And have you made many slaves ready to be freed?”
My cousin broke in.
“None, dear Nathaniel. We could not farm without them. But in a cultivated state they will, we believe, become much more cheerful in their present state and find some freedom in what they may read and discourse about.”
My aunt spoke up again.
“It is the Sabbath and I don’t want to hear any more talk about work and business, do you hear?”
“Yes, my dear,” said my uncle. He motioned to Rebecca, who broke out into a song about the Sabbath bride, and we all joined in, not that I knew the song, but I moved my lips and mumbled the words along with the rest of the devout and dutiful family.
“And tomorrow being the Sabbath all