Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [83]
But as happens sometimes with our desperate fantasies I was immediately distracted from it as we approached the clearing at the creek-side where the brickyard stood, and the same crew of men I had seen on my first tour of the spot were all in place, already set to their labors.
“Mornin’, massa,” a few of them said, raising their heads from their business.
We dismounted and tied up our horses and stepped closer to the men to watch as they worked, some of them at a large pool of water and mud where they mixed in straw from a large pile nearby, and others next to them, cutting and shaping the wet loose-formed bricks they extracted from the pool.
“They work here by themselves,” I said. “What is to stop them from bolting into the woods?”
“Is that why you wanted to come here first, massa? To see if any of them looked like he wanted to run away?”
“Not at all,” I said, embarrassed to myself at my secret motive for choosing the brickyard over the rice fields. “I’m merely curious. This is unusual, is it not it? Men, not free, working by themselves out here on the edge of the plantation, making straw into bricks. According to the Bible, that is what my own people did when they were slaves.”
“That is in the Bible?”
“The Jews were slaves once, yes.”
“I remember the missus teach us that,” Isaac said.
“Very good,” I said. “First labor in bondage. Then freedom.”
“Yes, and so it is our turn now, massa? Here you are, come down to figure things for your father, so that you all might buy a plantation of your own and work the slaves. I don’t hear how that means setting us all free.”
“You know a lot about my business here, it seems.”
“This a small place, a plantation, smaller than a small town.”
“It is small. But pretty.”
“Pretty hard,” he said, gesturing toward one of the men who was going back and forth to the creek and hauling water back for the brick pit, and two others digging up mud and two others hauling armfuls of hay from the back of an old wagon (without horse to haul it) and mixing it with the mud, so that when it had enough substance they cut brick-shapes from it and set these on the pallet in the sun.
Over and over.
A few bricks each few minutes.
Stand there long enough and you could see the entire life of the lowly brick from mud hole to baked entity lined up alongside the shed-house, where the finished bricks, lifted from the pallet, lay piled beneath the make-shift roof. In a thousand years, enough bricks for a holy tomb!
“You see how it’s done?” Isaac asked me. “Straw and mud into bricks. A simple thing. Like most things in life. One plain thing mixed with another makes something different yet the same. The way they do this, it hasn’t changed much since the first days we read of them in Exodus. Your ancestors, my brothers here, they work the same way as in Egypt, breathe the same way, eat the same way, make all of the same ablutions, and hold all of the same desires.”
“You are quite eloquent, Isaac, a fine example of just what my uncle’s plan for educating your people can accomplish.”
Isaac snorted through his nose the way my horse might, if stung by an insect or slapped by a tree branch.
“Uncle massa has a plan? Well, the doctor helps us,” he said. “He comes now and then from town.”
“I have heard of him but I have not yet met him.”
“Don’t know that you will, massa,” he said.
The look in his eye, I could not explain it, if asked, and I was not asking myself about it. I retreated over to where old Promise was tethered and I extracted a jar of spring water from the saddlebag and took a long drink.
“Massa, can I ask you a question?” Isaac said.
“Of course. What is it, Isaac?”
“Do you have an idea of why you are standing here?”
“Here, at this brickyard?”
“Here, in Carolina, on this earth.”
I looked around, seeing this place at the water, the drying bricks, the shed, and I was about to make an answer to Isaac, when I was jolted back into the workaday realm by a shout from one of the brick-makers.
“Boat coming up!”
“Hey, da boat!