Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [91]
His stay in New England had informed him a great deal on these questions. Here in Carolina, where his own forebears went back enough generations to put them at least a hundred years before the war for independence, there was never any question that it was commerce above and beneath all else, on which the well-being and satisfaction of society was built. All of his people had owned large plantations or ships or warehouses for storing what came in on the ships, and as a family over the generations they had amassed a fine legacy of land and houses and animals and human property.
He was one of the few male members of his family who had decided that such commerce was not his fate (while the women, whose destiny was to enjoy the fruits of all the great commerce by practicing the arts of music or drawing or sewing or even poetry, never questioned it). His father expressed his disappointment upon hearing that one of his sons, the one, in fact, in whom he saw the greatest potential for working in the world of commerce, would choose to take up the art of medicine, but since it was, unlike the music or drawing and the other things the women practiced, an important art he acquiesced in his son’s choice of a future. But the man did understand why his son might choose to take another path in life. The buying and selling of the numerous bodies of Africans, for example, one of the aspects of his business, had over the years driven him deeper and deeper into an understanding of the human soul that caused him to question his own life and the life of his business. He had read on the question of human nature as presented by various philosophers—he was not at all an uneducated man and had, in fact, attended the same New England school where his wayward son, as he liked to think of the physician, had gone to medical college—and he had read and studied in the area of theology, which was one of the reasons he found church on Sunday so boring, always comparing the priests to those deep and profound thinkers on the subjects to whose level they hardly ever seemed capable of reaching themselves. The paradox of freedom remained the question at the heart of the matter. He accepted God and his laws, and yet he never could get over the problem that allowed for a man to make his own way in the world and still accept that he remained a creature whose every step was preordained by his Lord.
Praise God! Praise the Lord! That was a mouthful, but necessary to set down on paper.
And furthermore: most of his family was too obtuse to appreciate the fineness of such a problem, but his physician son was one with whom he could speak, and speak freely, especially after the doctor had finished his schooling. There had been a slave revolt in a small plantation to the south of Charleston, an incident in which the slaves had turned on the master and his family, killed them, and burned the house and all the barns and killed the animals before fleeing into the woods where, eventually, starving and afraid, they had been found by a large cohort of militia and unofficial outliers who brought them back to the home county seat where they were quickly tried and every one of them, mostly men, but also a few women, hanged.
An isolated incident, but nonetheless the old patriarch talked about it with his physician son, asking him aloud what he had been asking