Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [92]
“After all the years of reading and studying I have done on the question,” the father said to the doctor, “I can only conclude that men may be born free but that these Africans are not true men. Science has shown us, how they not only live closer to the animal but their brains are not at as high a stage as our own. You, son, have looked at human brains and at animal brains over the course of your schooling. Surely you have seen the difference?”
“And what if, father,” the doctor said in what was one of their final discussions on the subject, before some agent in his father’s blood turned sour and weakened the nature of his body’s life-giving fluid, “I can tell you that I have never discerned a single important difference between the Caucasian brain and the African brain? What if I told you that?”
The doctor’s father smiled—he had the most charming smile, as his wife, the doctor’s mother, and several other women over his lifetime, would attest—and his son knew that their discussion was about to end. The man’s smile always announced his decision to conclude whatever matter was at hand.
“Based on all that I know,” he said, “that is, adding my experience on to what I have read in philosophy, I can only say that you have not looked hard enough, son. As to the act of observation itself it may be that just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder so does the possibility of freedom.”
“Father, are you saying these people were born to become slaves rather than free men?”
But his father had already turned away.
All of this came to mind for the doctor, though his father was long dead and his brothers had taken over the family business, and he himself having drifted into the orbit of these Hebrews, whom he had befriended after they had called him one desperate night to attend, if he could, what turned out to be the last hours of the matriarch of the Pereira family. More death! This time it had been the withered Jewish crone who had been an infant in Holland and after her family’s passage to the Antilles had grown to womanhood in the islands. Oh, time! Oh, time! A few decades after the American Revolution, one of her sons had packed them all up and moved them to Charleston when it became clear that there might be greater fortunes to be made in South Carolina than on their small Carib isle. Another son went to New York. Pondering all this change and transformation made the doctor both lament to himself and celebrate the perseverance of this tribe. Yet he understood the decision of someone who wanted to set a course for a more prosperous shore. At her vigil, hopeless, of course, but one in which he tried all that he knew about medicine that might change the course of the old Hebrew woman’s decline, he encountered unfamiliar complexity in the person of Old Dou, the crone of darker hue who as an infant had arrived on a slave ship before anyone else in the household. (In the middle of a storm at sea she had slipped out from between her mother’s legs, and after her mother had died of dysentery some weeks later spent the rest of the voyage being passed along among the strongest of the remaining women, and some of the men.)
So here she was, the African woman, the first time the doctor had spied her, hovering over her old mistress’s body, drawing her hands along the lines of her arteries and veins. When the doctor, about to apply leeches, asked what she was doing, she explained that she was using the power in her hands to smooth out the flow of the old woman’s blood.
“Up north, not so many years ago,” the doctor said, drawing on some lore he had acquired during his medical training in Massachusetts, “someone might call what you are doing witchcraft.