Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “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 very well, though am sure he would help me if I needed help. He has asked us for assistance that we cannot give without some investigation. It is my impression that we are his last resort. And you, young man, are mine. Will you help me?”

  “Of course, Father,” I said. “But after this, Europe?” I said. “My tour?”

  “Son, I promise you, assist us first in this matter and I will send you immediately thereafter. Remember, your mother was always a kind person. For her, family came first…”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “There is one more thing.”

  “Yes, Father?”

  He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, took out a small pistol, and offered it to me.

  “Father?”

  “Remember, the world is not always kind. A man needs protection while traveling,” he said. “The weapon is at the moment unloaded. Tomorrow I will buy you bullets. You are a man now, going about your father’s business. Carry this weapon always on your person. You may see some things down there in the South…well, never mind.” For a moment I stared at it and then took it from him.

  He next reached into his pocket and took out his gold timepiece, as if to establish that it was time for one thing and now it was time for another.

  “Your grandfather’s watch,” he said. “Which he consulted often while sitting in his office and looking out at the Carib palms. And which was next mine, and now yours. It is your watch, son, and from now on you will have to wind it.”

  Chapter Three

  ________________________

  In My Margins

  What Are the Origins of Man?

  Where had they come from? Out of the earth? Fire? Water? Water!

  When the mountains sprung up out of the sea, and the cleft of water sprung into the light—

  Because it does come first—

  Yes, tell me the first part, first—

  The mountains arose, and the water poured down their slopes back into the cleft left behind by the rising land, and fire seized the surface of the sea, and the rains came and the fire turned to smoke and the smoke rose to cover the face of the sun. Where once large animals wandered the land when it was hilly and covered with trees, and cleaved to another great mass of land that no one had a name for because no one had yet been born to give things names—

  And after another great rain the sea remained burning, the smoke and steam rising higher and higher, and all the animals and trees went up in flame.

  Pillars of fire and burning bush…?

  Mountains melting and ice arising…and the seas in tumult…?

  Do we know, do we know when and where it all began except to say that the oldest rocks came out of Africa and somewhere on those shores some fishy creature probably pushed its snout for the first time up from the sea into the air? This in a long life of reading and speculation is what we have come to believe. But the preachers say otherwise. What do the imams and the rabbis say?

  Chapter Four

  ________________________

  Boarding the Godbolt

  On this important morning, the first day of a new turn in my life that would change forever the direction I would take, I could feel the weight of that timepiece, wound and working, in my pocket—and the pistol—as I took a moment now to study my father’s face, and tried to imagine someone who looked nearly alike but weighed twice as much as he. I had some questions. But I gave up the thoughts as my Aunt Isabelle, looking, because swaddled in bed-clothes, twice her own normal size, came tottering down the steps from her room.

  “Dear boy,” she said, “dear, dear boy…”

  Her eyes were still dull from sleep, but nothing diminished the effervescent nature of her soul.

  “I shall miss you!”

  She glided up to me and touched a long extended finger to my collarbone.

  “Oh, how I shall miss you!”

  “He’s not going that far away,” my father said. “Imagine if he were going off on his tour how long he’d be gone.”

  “I wish I were,” I said.

  “Don’t be ungrateful,” Father said. “You accomplish this mission, and I’ll send you on your travels for two years rather than one.”

  “Truly, Father? Thank you, sir, thank you.”

  “That would make me sadder still,” said my Aunt Isabelle, turning away as if to mourn in solitude and reaching out a hand so that Marzy might offer her a cup of steaming coffee.

  “And make me happier,” I said, but immediately, upon seeing the hurt I made in her—she glanced at me over her shoulder and rolled her eyes—tried to jolly my remark away as a joke and a laugh. “Yes, sir,” I said to the parrot.

  “Yes, sir,” Jacobus said to me.

  Marzy, weeping quietly, signaled to us that our cab was waiting.

  And so Father and I went into the streets of early morning to the clatter of horses’ hooves and the cries of vendors and the shouts cast from one building to another as we crossed our narrow island on the way to the river.

  I still had many questions for him about the business I was taking up, and about the specific nature of my journey. But he sat back against the seat, his eyes closed in thought, or as I saw him sometimes in synagogue, deep in prayer, and so I did not feel as though I might interrupt him just then. For, truth to say, I felt a confusion of things. I was a bit afraid and also quite honored and somewhat annoyed and a trifle curious as to what would happen on this journey. In all my twenty-some years I was a perfect Manhattan lad and had never wandered further from this rocky island than to the Bronx farm to the north and the Jersey cliffs to the west, and to that Perth Amboy harbor to the southwest, where my mother and I had disembarked when I was a boy of seven to quarantine ourselves against the illness that had swept across the lower part of our borough—to no avail, since she sickened and died soon after our arrival.

  Oh, family! Oh, dear mother! As sweet as she was, that old Aunt Isabelle of mine, my late mother’s sister, could not take her place.

  But hark! Music in the distance, to distract us from our thoughts of woe!

  Yankee Doodle went to town

  Riding on a pony

  Here was a brass band greeting us as our carriage drew up to the pier, with flag-wavers standing behind them, and such bright music pouring out of h
orns and pipes that the musicians might have been performing at an election rally instead of a harbor farewell for the passengers, soon to include me, of this large yawl bobbing serenely in the rising river tide at pier-side. “It’s all a merriment, is it not, son?” My father peered out from his side of the cab.

  “I’m feeling rather that way, Father,” I said. “I believe I heard them play before when they were in favor of the mayor. Now they are just Yankee Doodles doodling our farewell.”

  “The music changes with the mood of things,” he said. “Has not Halevi taught you your Plato?” He called to the driver and within moments we were standing at the pier-side with my few bags at my feet. Not more than a moment or two went by before a crewman snatched up my luggage and went scurrying up the gangplank to the ship itself.

  “‘The Godbolt,’” I read from the bow.

  “A good name, do not you think?” My father raised his eyes to the strong early morning sun while the band played on.

  “Any name will do,” I said. “It’s the journey that matters.”

  “Well-said, sir!” He clapped me on the back. “When I hear you speak like that, it gives me heart. The money I paid for your education was well-spent. I know that you will stand well for our enterprise. The family is depending on you.”

  “I am going to try, Father,” I said, though in my heart I could not have said that I was sure I would succeed.

  “You will keep your eye on the star that guides us,” he said.

  “I will, sir.”

  My father then, in an act most uncharacteristic of a man who usually kept his distance, took me by the hand and pulled me so close to him that were he not usually so gentle I could almost imagine he might do me harm.

  “I know this will not be easy for you,” he said.

  “I will do my best, Father.”

  “The weather will be warm. You will appreciate that.”

  “I will,” I said.

  He cleared his throat, a noise he often emitted, though not at such immediate proximity that it sounded in my ear like an animal’s roar.

  “You will do this for the family,” he then said.

  “Yes, sir,” I responded.

  “You will do the family honor in what may be a difficult situation. To invest or not invest? That is the question. Young Hamlet Pereira, do you understand? Down there in that Carolina plantation you will be my eyes.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, smiling at his jest.

  “As far as the matter of the slaves,” he said…

  “Yes?”

  “We do not own such property, but your uncle and older cousin do. You must respect their views on such matters. The question has to do with finance. Do we invest or not? Put your mind to work on this question, not your heart.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, without much thought to it.

  I wanted to say something more, but the ship’s bell clanged, and sailors whistled to sailors, and so Father gave me a little push and started me toward the gangplank.

  “Father,” I said, “is there anything I—?”

  “Your uncle will explain,” he said, “as he did to me in his letter.”

  I did not know what to say or what to ask. I felt suddenly orphaned and uneasy, with the pier beneath my feet giving me the impression I was already subject to the cycles of the tides.

  “I will write to you, sir!” I spoke up in a burst of emotion.

  “As you like.” Father gave me one last blink of assent. “Bon voyage,” he said as I turned to climb the gangway.

  “Thank you,” I said over my shoulder, feeling the presence of the watch in one pocket and that of the pistol in another.

  As the band played on I mounted higher and higher, and despite my ignorance and my uncertainty, felt in my soul as I gained the deck as though I were growing taller and taller.

  “Welcome aboard, sir,” said an officer, in smart blue uniform and braids and gold stars, as he snapped me a salute.

  Immediately I went to the rail and looked down, seeing my father appearing considerably smaller now that I towered above him on the deck, and I waved, and passed along the salute from the sailor. A carriage raced up to the dock and a small, dark, curly-haired figure emerged from the cab, my childhood sweetheart, Miriam (I should have mentioned her earlier, but truly in the emotional departure from New York I had forgotten her), she whom I walked home with from synagogue on holidays and sat with cheerfully in the parlor of her father’s house, nearly tripping as she ran, with her eyes fixed up here where we stood on the deck. True to what I took at that time to be the nature of woman, she appeared always to be late to appointments.

  “Hello!” I called to her, feeling my heart sink at the sight of her.

  “Nathaniel, Nathaniel, bon voyage! I’ll wait for you!”

  “I’ll return soon!” I called, caught up in the romance of the moment, stirring as it was, with the cries of seabirds and the noise of the crowd and the music of the band. Though my father’s plan, of which I was the instrument, called for a stay on the plantation of only a month or so, I suffered suddenly the premonition that I would never see her again—shipwreck or drowning or murder would come between us, I feared, rather foolishly I have to say.

  Although for an instant it seemed as though the pier began to move, it was us, our ship, which shifted away from the land. Even while I was suffering my outrageous fear of loss, we had loosed ourselves from the mooring, and that sensation of floating free of land stayed with me from then on. One moment land-bound, another and the pier and my father and Miriam and my past life receded swiftly into the distance. Being no sailor I cannot explain what the crew did as they worked the sails, though their shouts sounded smartly from the hold and we moved smoothly down river and then headed east into the Kill van Kull—the purser came alongside me and explained our route—to put old Manhattan behind us. With the New Jersey shore to starboard we sailed down the Kill toward Perth Amboy—this same trip I had made so long ago with my dear mother—where we were to pick up more passengers and some mail. The water was calm, the sun warm, the few other people on deck, older than I was (which meant less hair and more belly) speaking quietly of their various business ventures. The hiss of our prow cutting the water and the low singing of the wind in the sails gave me a false sense of what the rest of our voyage would be like.

  ***

  But first, Perth Amboy—the original capital of our emerging union of states—a green curtain beyond the waterside as we first caught sight of it. Egrets flew up at our approach and gulls soared and squawked, laughed and squealed, as if to mock my recollections of traveling here when my mother and Marzy and I sought to escape the plague—yes, some escape, when, as I have previously disclosed, Mother had already been infected.

  Small boats carrying fishermen drifted in the outgoing tide from the Kill and the late afternoon sun lay limp on the southern horizon, a green line above the line of green water of the river that flowed into this bay from the west. I buried my sorrowful memories in thoughts of the national past. We New York school boys who had studied our history and news of the current day knew that Ben Franklin’s son, William, when he was governor here, had built himself a large brick edifice on a hill not far from the waterside. But the trees grew so thickly together that I could not see beyond them, and just when I was thinking that we might have an hour or two to explore this seemingly virgin place we threw down our anchor a quarter mile short of the lone pier jutting out into the water, where the only person in sight was a brown-skinned fellow, an Indian or a servant, who sat with his legs dangling over the edge, sending up large swirls of smoke from a long pipe. Whatever mail or people we might be taking on would be rowed out to us rather than have us come in to shore.

  Just as well, I said to myself, so that I would never have to step foot again on that soil where my mother had perished.

  I had no sooner turned my head away to look again at the sandy beach across the Kill where the borough of Richmond pointed toward the bay, when a packet boat
came rushing toward us. The sailors made to hold her close and a tall man with long, flowing, silver hair, in a dark cloak and tall hat, also black, stepped from the boat onto the rope ladder dangling from our starboard bow and deftly climbed aboard, followed by a young tarry-skinned boy who dangled two bags in one hand while he followed the man up the rope ladder.

  A few minutes later a second boat—bearing the mail, apparently—came alongside us, and soon after that the captain shouted his orders and we were underway once more, leaving green Amboy behind.

  Medium swells met us at the confluence of river, bay, and ocean, making us mount and fall, mount and fall, like some giant horse running over a series of hurdles. With each heave my stomach climbed into my throat and then receded, climbed up and then receded.

  “All the way from the Azorias,” said a voice behind me. I turned to see the tall man in the black cloak and hat, though now he held the hat in his hand because of the strong breeze blowing off the ocean that would have easily swept it into the waves. Up close his shoulder-length hair seemed so white it matched the spume of the wave-tops.

  “What, sir?” I said.

  “The swells,” he said. “They begin to roll nearly at the Gates of Hercules and gather strength as they move westward across the ocean. Hard to believe they do not tear apart a state such as New Jersey, but by the time they strike the beach they lose their will.”

  His breath smelled foul.

  “I have never been out on the ocean before,” I said, stepping back from him. “It is…a stronger sensation than I imagined.”

  “But how ever did you get here,” the man said, his voice deepening, “if not over the ocean?”

  I shook my head, confused slightly, at his question.

  “I sailed from New York, sir,” I said.

  “Not my question,” the man said. “Not how did you get to Perth Amboy, but how did you come to these shores first of all if not by ship?”