Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [8]
A louder noise up above, and I understood by the sound on the steps that it was my father coming down to meet me.
“Good morning, sir,” I said.
“Good morning to you, Nathaniel.”
He was a trim, bent-shouldered man, about an inch shorter than my own height of six feet, with shaggy gray hair and eyes just then still red with sleep that made me wonder if some brass band in his dreams might have serenaded him as he mused about sending me off to do his business in the world, which I was about to do on this out-of-the-ordinary day.
“Quite a morning,” he said as if reading my thoughts, while Marzy set his coffee on the table.
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir, yes sir!”
He blinked into the light streaming in from the east side of our back kitchen.
“Hush, Jacobus.” And then to me: “A good day to travel, it appears.”
I nodded, and tried to put aside my anger. The week before, the two of us had sat in his study and quarreled, and this morning I was still bitter, for after having concluded my tutorials a month ago I was ready to set out on my grand tour before settling in as a junior partner in the family business of import-export. Instead my father informed me that first I must undertake a voyage to Charleston to make some inquiries into the affairs of his half-brother, who owned a plantation there.
“A good fellow he is,” my father had said, his accent, the product of his childhood in the Caribbean (and the faintest hint of his father’s Dutch) set ever so slightly at an angle to our New York speech. “Though I have not seen him these many decades since we were boys together in Antigua. He writes to tell me that aside from now weighing as much as two Hebrew men of normal size he is in good health. And awaiting your arrival.”
“Awaiting my arrival, father?” I had said.
“Yes, he is.”
“And so you have been corresponding with him about this for some weeks now?”
“This happens to be so.”
I shook my head. “I wish I had known, Father. I am terribly disappointed. What matter could be so important that I have to travel down to Charleston instead of sailing off on my tour?”
“Your tour, Nathaniel, will come. But family comes first, however distant they may have been in earlier relations. My brother needs some looking to. I do not mean to set your mind against him but he fears that his only son may not be entirely capable of taking over the plantation. There is some question of the boy’s—now man’s—temperament. I had hopes that I might resolve this matter by letter and so have not spoken about it with you until now. Alas, my dear boy, things have not resolved. My brother has appealed to my familial responsibility. Which is why you must make the voyage to Charleston before the voyage to Europe. I need some advice about this matter. Should we or should we not invest in his enterprise so that we might offer both support and direction? That is the question.”
“Are we going to become tobacco merchants, or sell whatever it is he grows down there?”
“No, Nathaniel, not tobacco. Rice. Southern rice to feed the belly of the northern nation. A thousand acres of fields and rice-growing ponds.” He paused and blinked into the sunlight as though he had only just discovered it had dawned. “And a hundred slaves.”
“Slaves? Father, I know nothing about rice. And less about slaves.” At this moment I cleared my throat and tried to assume a vocal posture of certainty. “I certainly do not want to learn about either.”
“You will learn. You are old enough now to learn some things about business.”
“And young enough to know nothing, Father,” I said.
“I like humility in a man,” Father said. He smiled, which produced in me a feeling of warm good will. “You will know what to tell me soon enough about whether or not we should invest in my half-brother’s enterprise. He is a large man in many ways, this fellow of our blood. I do not know him