Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [98]
“Can you find your way back, Cousin?” she said, rather playfully.
“I believe I can,” I said.
She then left me to close the door to the little room. After making my toilet I wandered on my return to the front of the house, passing a small sitting room from which I heard voices.
“You are not feeling well?” A woman spoke, whose voice I did not immediately recognize.
“I cannot go on,” I heard a woman say. This was my cousin Rebecca, speaking in a voice so tormented that I nearly did not recognize it. Whatever playfulness she might have feigned while speaking to me had disappeared.
“What choice do you have?” This, I now understood, was her cousin Anna.
“None,” Rebecca said.
“That is right,” Anna said.
“I…I spoke to Mother.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said, this is our lot. And I should not complain anymore, it would not be good for my child.”
“The father of whom…”
“Yes?”
“…is the father of whom?”
“You make a joke, Anna, and I wish that I could laugh.”
“I am sorry, Cousin. I do not care to make you feel any worse than you already do. It would not be good for your child.”
“My child…” Rebecca’s voice dropped away, almost to the inaudible. I leaned closer and listened hard.
“I wish that I had no child coming.”
“Rebecca!”
“I do sometimes wish that.”
“Please, please,” her cousin said. “Let us speak of other things.”
Rebecca seemed to recover herself almost at once.
“Do you mean…?”
“Yes, I do.”
“He seems like a gentleman.”
“I do like the way he carries himself.”
“And you would like for him to carry you away to New York?”
Even as I felt myself begin to blush I heard the rustling of skirts and hurried away from the door, thinking back to her walk through the dark on the way to the cabins while continuing on to the front of the house where the rest of the party waited for me. Rebecca and Anna soon returned as well and we made our farewells.
And now I must tell you of the second incident, something that you will find awful and revolting, and so I suggest that you set this letter down and put it aside if you fear being horrified and affronted. I apologize in advance for the awful picture it gives, something that soundly jarred the stillness I mentioned when I first began this missive.
As we were driving along the Battery (for who cannot resist a last turn along this wonderful avenue, with the park of trees on one side and the ocean on the other side of the sea wall), we saw a commotion up ahead. A carriage had just run off the road, apparently because of some fault and distraction of the horse, and sat up on the grass, with the animal, a huge chestnut gelding, now docile in front of it, head bent, nibbling at the local flowers. Just as we approached, the driver, a man dressed all in black with top hat and silvery-white hair down to his shoulders (I instantly recognized him as a man who had boarded our ship in Perth Amboy on our way south) leaped down from his seat, raised his arm high and beat at the horse with his whip.
The animal lifted its head and whinnied in pain.
Whup! Again, the man slashed at the beast across the eyes.
“Dumb!” he cried out. “You, dumb!”
Again he slashed, and the horse whined, and tried to pull away, carriage and all, but the man had grabbed at its traces with his free hand and kept slashing with the other.
From the stoop of a house across the park, where he had been sweeping the pavement, a slave came running, waving his broom and shouting.
“Stop!” Jonathan called out.
At first I thought he meant to shout this to the man beating the horse, but when he called out again I understood that he meant for the slave to halt.
But the black man kept on running, and without a pause, reached the man and horse, and pulled