Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [71]
Now it was Anna’s turn to blush as Rebecca introduced me and we shook hands and exchanged polite confidences, such as the fact that I had come from New York and that she was the oldest of four children, living on Society Street with her father who was a merchant.
“And how long will you be staying in Charleston?” Anna asked me.
“However long it takes me to conclude my business,” I said. “And so, my answer is, I do not yet know.” The room had grown hot with the presence of so many of us, but the sharp tropic tang of this girl’s perfume cut through the thickness of the must.
“If you come back into town I hope we will have the chance to see you.”
Oh, my blush ran hottest yet!
“That would be lovely,” I said.
“Our cousin can arrange it,” Anna said.
“Of course,” I said, turning to Rebecca.
“Tra-la, for now,” she said. “I see my in-laws are beckoning to me. We’ll all meet again before the great bye-and-bye in the sky. Anna, we will come visit you.”
“I would enjoy that, Becky,” Anna said.
“But now we must return to the country.”
It was a long ride home, it was a short ride, I can’t recall which, my mind was so stuffed full of a number of things—and the warm air on my face, and the noise of the horse and carriage, and the sky so blue above, and my new family in the carriage along with me.
Could I consider living here?
Of course, I said to myself, and imagined meeting pretty dark-eyed Anna at dinner and paying court to her and taking long walks with her along the Battery, where arm and arm we would gaze out upon the water.
We are probably very distant cousins, Anna, I imagined myself saying.
And how would she respond?
Nathaniel Pereira, I heard her say, what of Miriam? What of her? Are you so fickle that you find yourself daydreaming of me when that sweet girl back in Manhattan is pining away for you?
Yes, yes, I suppose I am, I said, daydreaming, while the carriage bounced along, bringing me closer and closer to The Oaks, my temporary home on earth, I am that fickle, because I am young and youth is fickle and youth daydreams and flits from flower to flower like the happiest bee in summer.
A flower, a face, drifted into my thoughts.
Liza.
Chapter Twenty-nine
________________________
In My Margins
A Hard Bargain
How could it not have happened the first time he went to an auction? He was of the right age, and in the right frame of mind, that is to say, isolated, lonely, longing, and in a constant torment of desire. This state arrived even before dreams, and sometimes he could not dream without having first purged himself of the cool and nagging fluids over which he had little control in the making of.
In the same ten years that coincided with his torturous and agonized adolescence, when his father built the plantation from scratch, Charleston saw a blossoming of the slave trade as few other American ports came to know, so for this boy, fresh from his coming of age ceremony, accompanying his father to an auction at the docks, the time was ripe for all that languished negatively in his soul to come forward into the light.
For this he was reborn.
Perhaps his father saw a certain anticipatory look in his eye, or perhaps he felt it incumbent upon him to make a brief speech to his son and had decided long in advance that he would do this. You can be the judge. Here is what he said, as the carriage rolled through the streets of Charleston (he might have said something just after they left the plantation, or somewhere along the dusty road into town, but he waited until what seemed to be almost the last minute. Why? Fear? Worry? Guilt? Who knew? But perhaps we might figure that out from what he said).
“Son, I want to warn you that some things you witness this morning may shock you and repel you. There is no more raw a situation than the one you are about to see. (The older man spoke with a slight accent, a mixture of his forebears’ Dutch and his island English, of the second-generation variety.) Our business is rice, no more, no less. But on occasions such as this we have to