Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “A hundred Africans to work in the rice fields,” I said, recalling to myself my reason for being here. “That is a large number of people to order about and care for.”

  “Our father, your uncle,” Jonathan said, “is a bit of genius when it comes to that.”

  And as if he were the director of some opera house back home he flicked the whip at the horse, we emerged from out of the canopy of trees, and came upon a line of black men in rough tattered clothes walking toward us, their voices raised in song.

  Don’t mind working from sun to sun,

  [they sang]

  If’n you give me dinner—

  When the dinner time comes!

  He slowed the carriage almost to a halt and nodded as the men stepped to the side of the road to let us pass, doffing their caps in the old English peasant way. I could not help but smile at the simple music of their melodious outcry.

  Don’t mind working from sun to sun,

  [they sang again, voices languid in the heat]

  If’n you give me dinner—

  When the dinner time comes!

  “Evening,” my cousin said to the crowd.

  “Evening,” came the response from the men.

  “Even.”

  “Eben.”

  “Ben.”

  Don’t mind working from sun to sun,

  If’n you give me dinner—

  Their low voices faded away into the mix of sunlight and shade. In their wake rose up a wave of body stink from hard day’s work, and creek mud (though I hadn’t yet seen the creek), mixing with the general putrefaction of things in nature, riled up by men tramping through it and across.

  “A bit less rhythm and they could sound like us singing at synagogue,” I said.

  “You think you’re making a joke,” Rebecca said.

  “What is she saying?” I asked of my cousin.

  Jonathan allowed the reins to go slack and the horse slowed and thus the carriage, and we emerged out of the trees at the small wooden bridge over what he told me was Goose Creek, a broad and swiftly flowing stream of water that seemed as much like a small river to me as it did a creek.

  “Here I used to come all the time when I was boy, to sit by the creek-side and drop in my line. Do you have places from your boyhood that you recall?”

  “Of course,” I said, and was about to begin describing a boyhood place, when he tied the reins, jumped down from the seat, fetched a water bag from the rear of the carriage and filled it at the creek-side.

  Rebecca and I sat quietly together while he watered the horse. Every now and then she would glance down at her full belly, as if to convince herself it was still there.

  A few birds called from the woods behind us. The light was slipping away and now and then a fish splashed in the broad creek. In the distance the slaves kept up their chants, a sound wavering on the darkening air.

  “It must be…” Rebecca spoke almost in a whisper.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “It must be…different from here up north in New York.”

  “Quite different,” I said.

  “Are the Jews different?”

  “You see me,” I said. “Do I seem different?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Most Jews I know are like me. Except that most of them are more diligent in the practice of our religion.”

  “You are not a diligent Jew?”

  “No, diligence it seems is not my way.”

  “We are Reformers, ourselves,” she said. “We ride on the Sabbath and the High Holy Days, for how else would we reach the synagogue? It is much too far to town to walk, as you must have noticed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Perhaps Jews are better in the city then. For we can walk to the synagogue because it is only a short distance.”

  “We try our best,” Rebecca said. “And God must know that. Because He knows everything. Our congregation is in turmoil. We are hoping that God will help us settle a number of our disputes.”

  “Amen,” said my cousin as he climbed back up onto the bench. “Are you having a fine old theological discussion?”

  “In part, yes,” I said, allowing myself a smile.

  “Father’s always good for that around the dinner table,” he said. “A place I expect where you hope soon to sit.”

  And with that he gave the whip a twist and we began moving again, taking the narrow road along the river for a short while and turning onto a path that took us back into the trees.

  It was dark when we reached the house, though because of the wonderful array of lamps that illuminated it from within it seemed like something out of a dream, a construction of slender pillars and balconies with a wide porch running around like a girdle, the entire structure raised up on wide brick posts and a set of broad stairs leading up to the main floor—the entire building at first glimpse seemed almost like a confection for a party table. Jonathan handed over the carriage to the same tan-complected young man who had driven us back from town while Rebecca and I climbed the steps to the entrance. The same slave girl met us at the door, and it gave me a tiny jolt, as if lightning had struck my chest, to see her again, especially when for an instant she fixed her eyes, a pale green shade, firmly on me—the stranger—and then looked past me at Rebecca.

  “Missy,” she said.

  Jonathan came bounding up the steps, ignoring the girl.

  “Come in, come along,” he said, “the parents are waiting.”

  “Hello! Shalom!” came a hearty shout from the dining room and we walked in to find my uncle and aunt sitting already at the table.

  “Where have you been?” said my uncle, whom I knew immediately by the set of his eyes and jaw, though his resemblance to my father ended there because of the rolls of fat in which these familiar features were embedded. “We thought the patrollers had gotten you.”

  “Please, dear, don’t you joke about such things,” said the gray-haired woman—my aunt, I had already decided—whose size, or lack of it, was all the more noticeable because of my uncle’s girth.

  “We gave our honored cousin a tour,” Jonathan said. “Through the woods to the brickyard and the creek.”

  “It is a goodly property,” my uncle said. He patted his belly. “Like me, I’d say.”

  The others laughed, and I gave up a smile. My father, a rather goodly shaped man himself, had warned me about his brother’s weight. But still when my uncle stood to introduce me all around I found that I could not keep my eyes off the globe of his belly.

  “Goodly, sir,” I said. “I especially enjoyed the woods and the creek-side.”

  “I told him how I used to fish there as a boy,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes, you grew up in Paradise, did you not?” his father said. “But now.” He touched a hand to the shoulder of the gray-haired woman. “Your Aunt Florence.”

  I bowed toward her and she bestowed a toothy smile upon me.

  We took our places around the table.

  At this point a tall young boy trundled into the room, looking partly like a youthful Jonathan and partly not.

  “My son, your second cousin Abraham,” Jonathan said.

  I nodded to the fidgety boy, who was as it turned out the only child of a first marriage made by my cousin Jonathan to a Jewish woman who had returned to the Antilles years ago. The boy’s eyes darted left to right, right to left, as though he expected at any moment to be overtaken by some adversary.

  “You’re a Yankee,” he said.

  “A Yankee Doodle Dandy,” I said.

  “You don’t look different from the rest of us.”

  “Did you expect me to have horns?”

  “Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns,” the boy said.

  “You have seen it?”

  “I have seen drawings only. Papa says though he will send me to Europe for my tour when I’m older and I will see the original.”

  “My father is sending me also,” I said. “Perhaps we could travel together.”

  �
�You are too old,” the boy said.

  “Abraham,” his stepmother said, “mind your manners. Please excuse him, Nathaniel. He may think you are old but he is still a child.”

  “Damned if I am,” Abraham said.

  “Abe!” My cousin rolled around in his chair. “Leave the room!”

  My youngest cousin, who one day, I imagined, would become heir to the plantation in the long scheme of things after his father, having taken over after my uncle’s demise, loosed his reins, scowled in my direction and obeyed.

  My uncle now raised himself out of his chair, a rather monumental action that combined a great intake of breath and a steely pressing of hands on table arms and the uplifting of his massive chest and belly. The odd thing, I noticed, was how delicately he performed this, almost like a performer on a stage. No grunts, no moans, no complaints—only that inward sigh and he was on his feet.

  “I will see to the boy,” he said to my aunt, and then begging my pardon he moved slowly from the room leaving the rest of us to talk quietly in his wake.

  “Such a young ruffian,” said Jonathan, pouring himself wine from a beautifully carved glass decanter.

  “Jonathan,” said my aunt, “please wait for the blessing.”

  “I bless this wine,” Jonathan said and took another sip.

  “Jonathan,” his wife said, “please.”

  “Am I a worse and more rebellious boy than my own son?”

  He winked at me, and took another sip of wine.

  “Abe is just a child,” my aunt said. “We must forgive him.”

  “If I used language such as that at table I’d take myself into the hallway and give myself quite a talking-to.”

  “But you do not,” Rebecca said.

  “Because I will not,” Jonathan said. “Not because I do not have it in me.”

  He drank again, and then reached for the decanter to refill his glass.

  “Oh, Jonathan,” said his mother, my aunt, “I wish you would tutor that boy a little more vigorously.”

  Jonathan merely took another sip of wine, and out of the desire to seem a good guest and accommodating member of the family I also took a drink. The blend of rich dry grape and the brandy I had drunk earlier stayed on my tongue a while. So this is how my Carolina cousins live, I sighed to myself, with this leisurely pace of taking food and drink—or in Jonathan’s case in the reverse order—while attended by numerous bonded servants.

  A trio of them made their way in and out of the room in an intricate choreography, carrying steaming platters of beef and fish and corn and tomatoes and carrots and baskets of bread, and aligning the silver and wine bottles, silently, as if almost we were not present, or at least just mere statuary rather than living creatures and us, or at least the rest of the family, ignoring them, as though they were invisible.

  But in fact they were quite darkly visible, and the more dark they were the more present, beginning with the cook, Precious Sally, as I soon learned she was called, who stood in the doorway, showing almost as much bulk and flesh as my uncle as she directed the other servants in their dance of food and service. Two women and one man, the women dressed in white aprons, like Sally’s, whose apron was as large almost as a tablecloth in order to cover her huge amount of flesh, which made their darkness all the more stark. The man, a tall old fellow, with a forehead like a bulldog’s and skin as dark as a night without a moon, wore a blue serving coat and britches, and bowed as each dish reached the table, ostensibly overseeing the service, but always with his ear cocked toward Sally, clearly the director of this entertainment.

  I waited patiently—I was not just then sure why—for the advent of the lighter-skinned Liza, who had met us at the door. But she never appeared, since, as I quickly surmised, this was not in her line of duty.

  My uncle lumbered back into the room, followed by his repentant grandchild Abraham. We waited and watched silently until they took their places at the table again.

  “And now,” my uncle said, with an audible wheeze, “to begin. Abe, will you say the blessing?”

  My younger cousin looked down at his plate and folded his hands in front of him.

  “God of our Fathers, God of Abraham—that’s me—”

  “Abe!” His father spoke up.

  “—and Isaac, (we own him)…”

  “Abe!” his mother cried out.

  “…we thank you for the fruit of thy fields.”

  “‘For our daily bread,’” Jonathan encouraged him.

  “And for the bread of our table.”

  “No Hebrew?” I said, turning to Rebecca.

  “We are Reformed here,” she said. “Which means we have reformed our prayers.”

  “We sound like Gentiles,” I said.

  “At home do you speak Hebrew?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “But I always imagine all other Jews as more religious than me.”

  Abraham squinted at me across the table, wondering what it was I could be talking about and if it made any sense for him to listen well.

  Through all this banter we ate and drank, and I watched the servants move to and fro through the room. I thought at one point that I might have caught a glimpse of the slender slave girl on the other side of the doorway, but when I looked again she was gone, if she had been there at all.

  After supper we men retired to the porch—what they called here a “veranda”—and my uncle offered port and cigars to me and Jonathan. The smoke kept the insects at bay and we talked a while about matters broad and consequential and narrow and of no matter while imbibing the rich imported liquor.

  “The Indians first smoked these,” my uncle said, “as I understand it, as a form of prayer. They puffed on these and it made a rope of smoke that rose from their lips to the nostrils of their gods.”

  “Smoke instead of prayers?” I said.

  “Smart boy,” my uncle said. “Yes, you might put it that way.”

  A faint recollection, wispier than smoke, drifted into my memory.

  “My dear mother, may she rest in peace,” I said, “lighted candles every Sabbath. I still remember that.”

  “Same principle,” my uncle said. “She was a lovely woman. I met her only once, when I traveled up to New York on business and stayed with you.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said.

  “You were the smallest of children then.”

  “But I would have remembered.”

  My uncle laughed and his bulky belly and arms and neck shook with his laughter.

  “Because of my girth, no doubt, you think. But I was a lesser man back then. No bulkier than slender Jonathan here.”

  “And so I have something to aspire to then, father?” my cousin said, sipping from his cup.

  “You do, indeed, sir,” my uncle said.

  We puffed out our smoke for a while longer, while the butler appeared with a bottle of port.

  “Black Jack,” my uncle said, “this is my nephew, here from New York to learn the ways of running a plantation.”

  I made to shake hands with the man but he backed a step away.

  Alone then, we sipped the wine and talked.

  “I’d like to hear all the news about my brother,” my uncle said.

  I made a summary for him of all, or most, that had happened in the past year—telling mostly the story of our business.

  “And so he is well?”

  “He is, sir.”

  “And your late mother’s sister? How is she faring?”

  He paused in thought, while I idly studied the shadow of the candle flickering across his broad face. In and out of the light his face shifted, looking first younger, than old, younger, old.

  “She is well, sir,” I replied, unhappy at the thought of Aunt Isabelle, whose person had not entered my conscious thoughts for a good long while.

  “You say your father has not remarried.”

  I shook my head.

  “And he has no thought about marrying Isabelle? Isn’t that her name?”

&
nbsp; “Yes, sir,” I said.

  My uncle tilted his large head to one side, then the other.

  “It is an ancient custom of our people, you may recall, when a man becomes a widower to marry the sister of his late wife.”

  The thought gave me the fearful chills.

  “He has not said a word to me about it.”

  “You would be the last to hear, I think,” my uncle said. “But I know men and I know my brother. Your visit here has much to do with business, but it does also give your father some time alone with Isabelle.”

  It occurred to me with a shudder in my blood that all of this, my mission, my journey, might all have been a ruse constructed by my father, and then I brushed the thought aside and washed down some of my worry with more port. Where was the slave girl? Where was she?

  “But it is business that brings me here,” I said, daring myself to squarely light on the matter at hand.

  “Business, business, yes,” my uncle said, “the busyness of our lives. Your father seems quite determined to educate you in these matters.”

  My attentive cousin poured me another glass of the wine, and then poured another for himself.

  “These matters,” I said.

  “My business is failing,” my uncle said.

  I sat up, alert to the news.

  “He never told me this. He told me only to study your enterprise.”

  My overstuffed uncle leaned forward with a smile on his moon of a face, his large head floating in front of his body in the candlelight.

  “Do you know the difference between us and the Gentiles?”

  “They worship Christ,” I said. “We merely produced him.”

  “Very good,” my uncle said, with a laugh. “Very good. But there is something more, something in the character of the Gentile to which I’m referring.”

  “They are less devout?”

  “Sometimes they are more devout, much more.”

  “Then we are less?”

  “People say we Reformed are less than whole Jews. But we are inspired to act as we do by an inner power.”