by Alan Cheuse
“I cannot go into it, it is too distressing,” she said.
“But you must tell me,” I said. “Obviously you came here to ask for help and I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth of the situation.”
“It is too awful to tell,” she said, making liquid sounds with her lips, as she if were still drinking from the cup.
“Take a moment,” I said. “Compose yourself.”
I took a moment myself, also, getting up from the bed and going to the window, and once again staring, staring, as I had been doing on so many nights since my arrival, into the native country dark. It was late, and so few fireflies flared up their winking lights around the field, but in the dark, as if over water, the distant sounds of the animals from the barns and from the woods beyond them, flared up, and subsided, flared up, and subsided.
“Now, Liza,” I said, turning back to her, “please tell me your story.”
“Later, Nate,” she said in a whisper, finally taking hold of my name.
“Later?” I said. “Speak up, I can hardly hear you.”
“Later,” she said.
“Later than what?” I said, venturing near the bed and leaning close so that I could make out whatever it was she was going to say.
She reached for my hand and pulled me down close to her, so that I collapsed of my own weight onto the space she made next to her by rolling to her side.
“Liza, I—”
Yes, I tried to speak, but she was upon me, tugging me close, and pushing her soft lips upon mine, so that I opened my own to hers.
Cinnamon and bonfire, a bouquet of blood and wine, and the sour-sweet taste of desire long fermenting in the throat, and deeper—all this I tasted, as we pressed against each other, as though each wished to press hard enough to pass through the body of the other.
“Liza,” I said, halting our long kiss just for the sake of saying her name.
“Nate, Nate, Nate,” she said, the words falling on my head like petals from a night-blooming tree. “Do you wish to know me?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do. Do you wish to know me, with your own free will?”
“What is that?” she said, in a voice quite perplexed.
“You choose this, not as a slave but as a free woman?”
“But I am not free.”
“I do not own you, Liza. Do you choose this?”
“But I am the master’s property.”
“No one ordered you here, did he?”
Her slight hesitation to answer my question gave me pause.
“Did Uncle tell you to come here?”
“No!” she said in an outraged whisper. “He would have me whipped if he knew.”
“Whipped? He has people whipped?”
“It has happened, yes.”
“Who would dare to order such a thing? Who would dare to carry it out?”
Liza remained silent.
“They have never whipped you, have they?”
“No, no, no, not me. Oh, you would know it if you saw.”
“Jews employing the lash used on them by the Egyptians! I hope I never live to see such a thing.”
“If you stay here long enough, you will.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Liza, that I suggested my uncle sent you here to coerce me, to tempt me to stay.”
I kissed her again, tasting the bouquet of her lips, with the added tincture of desire now flavoring the spittle that we mingled in our mouths.
As when an apple, still tethered to a branch by the slimmest clasp, begins to shake in the first brisk autumn wind and its stem incurs a fatal tear, I found myself, pressed against her, on the verge of falling.
She made a mewing sound beneath me, and in the dark I wondered if woman had turned into cat.
This was all so new to me that all I knew was that I should behave, the way a man did, as though it were not new to me.
“Massa,” she said.
“Please,” I said.
“Nate. Nate.”
“Yes, Liza?”
“Before this happened, you were a free man.”
“Yes?”
“And you are still free?”
“I am.”
“Though now you own a slave.”
“What do you say?”
“I am yours, Nate.”
Time went by, cocks crowed in the yard also, and the faintest scrim of a false dawn showed over the tops of the trees beyond the barns. When it became light enough to see Liza’s skin next to mine it was time to figure our way out of this dilemma. Instead, we lingered, luxurious in the aftermath of our mated desires.
“Now tell me the truth,” I said, “why is it you came to me in the night? Who was pursuing you?”
Liza laughed, and touched a finger to her full lips, which stood out in a sort of inverted rendering of dark against light as the light filled in the hollows of her face made by night.
“I was pursuing myself,” she said. “I was pursuing you.”
“So it was not my old uncle?”
She laughed again, this time slightly hysterical.
“I didn’t say, massa, it was anybody.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Yes, massa, I won’t.”
With mock-ferocity I loomed above her, pinning her arms to the bed.
“You will not.”
“No, I won’t, not anymore.”
“Isaac?” I said. “Is it Isaac?”
At the thought seeing the two of them meet at his cabin door I scarcely could control my anger.
“Why, if he—”
“Not Isaac, never Isaac,” she said. “He is my brother. He—”
I stopped her, because the thought came to me with a mental jolt.
“Jonathan? Cousin Jonathan?”
She sat up at once and all warmth left her voice. If it was possible to see this cacao-colored woman turned pale, I saw it then.
Silently, Liza took to her feet and picked up her clothes. In the night I had seen only a burst of flesh here, a breast, a thigh, her neck elongated in the passion of our coming together. Now in the early dawn she stood luxuriously naked in the instant before she covered herself cloth by cloth. I had never seen a woman fully unclad, and so I gathered it all in—breasts, thighs, pelvis, where her flesh curved as though it were carved from brown stone or light mahogany—while she covered what I saw almost as soon as I saw it.
“I trust it was not Jonathan. He is married,” I said in my own naïve way. “And he may be my cousin but he is old enough to be your father.”
She said nothing except, “Can you help me?”
“Help you to escape him?”
Almost fully dressed now, she turned to me as she worked her buttons closed and nodded.
“Yes.”
“I am planning to leave for home almost at once,” I said. “I can’t…I have to return to New York.”
“You got to stay a little longer.”
“I have made up my mind.”
“Just a little longer?”
I shook my head, more in confusion than anything else.
“I had planned to go to town and check the sailing schedule for boats to New York.”
“Take me with you.”
“What? I cannot—”
“Take me to town,” she said. “Take me with you to town.”
I sighed deeply, feeling myself still sinking into that same abyss I’d first fallen into before the rising of dawn.
“Can we do that?”
“I can arrange it,” she said. “I got some…some…powers here in the house.”
“They treat you well,” I said, “or so I thought until you told me about Jonathan. Liza, has he ever…?”
Now it was her turn to sigh, a strange thing to do given all the circumstances, scarcely any of which I knew at that moment.
So that when she stole out of my room just as the first rays of the sun caught the tops of the trees beyond the barns I lay back on my bed, puzzled, satisfied, shaken—bewitched, and boiling
about in my own woes and desires, more certain and yet more confused than ever. Did I yet know who I was? Did I know why I had traveled here? I believed I now had the answers in my heart. But these did not match the answers in my mind.
Chapter Forty-nine
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In My Margins
What Is a Jew?
What do they believe? They wandered the desert, hoping for water. They followed a pillar of fire. They pray to one god. No afterlife? This makes them different from Christians. They see a deed as valuable in itself, and not a stepping stone toward eternity. Do they treat others as they would be treated themselves?
Chapter Fifty
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A Child Is Born, a Mother Departs
Middle of the night. All around the cabin dark kept a hold and lay a weight on the other cabins, on the big house itself not far away under the watery slim moonlight cast down by the quarter orb. Her cry went up in the darkness, and everyone heard, everyone knew. How could they not, the plantation slaves living so close together in the quiet pasture behind the rice barns. At first she lay there in the cabin, twisting and bending with the waves of labor, all alone, calling out to Old Dou and Yemaya, wondering if Wata, her mother’s mother, of whom she had heard a great deal, might be floating somewhere above the cabin, and then she heard rumbling above the roof and harsh rain fell for a short time, and then quiet, and then two voices arguing, Yemaya and Yemaya’s brother Oganyu, the baby is mine, one called to the other, and the other called back, no, no, no, the baby is mine!
The rain fell again, and now she heard Old Dou soothing the arguing children of the god. The rank odor of decaying fish drifted through the cabin. Lyaza felt her water break and then gush across the pallet.
A dog barked.
She felt her head floating free while the bottom half of her leaked like a broken crock.
Up on the roof Yemaya and Oganyu wrestled accompanied by great yells and thumping for the soul of the unborn child. She looked up through the wood and saw Old Dou dancing around the squabbling siblings. She cheered on one, and then the other, and then the first. Lyaza took up the cheers, wriggling out of her aching, writhing body and sailing up onto the top of the cabin, naked, trembling, feverish, excited, desperate, lonely, sad, despondent, hungry, happy to see Old Dou, so recently departed, even under such awful circumstances, sad that in a short while she would bring forth the spawn of the awful slave-keeper.
“Monster,” Old Dou called him, reading her mind.
“I kill him,” Lyaza shouted back.
“But the baby,” Old Dou said, folding her arms across her chest as the god-sister and god-brother flew off into the black sky, going where neither woman could say. Up to the moon? Up to heaven beyond? Back to the home country? Up and up and up, and then diving back down beneath the sea? Yes, perhaps there, where Yemaya kept her home and where Obatala had raised her and her brother, among the flow of great undersea currents, among the fishes, cousins to whales, lovers of dolphins.
In that water Lyaza saw the outline of a plan. As if in a dream she leaped from the roof and landed some yards away from the cabin and leaking water and fluids made her way across the fields to the rice paddies where the water surged into the holding ponds at high tide and the salt leached out, making a mist that stung the nose. By the edge of the lapping pond she lay down and eased her legs apart so that the child slid freely from her body. Taking up the light burden she held the ropy tie in her teeth and cut the placenta from the living child. Her mouth tasted of salt and blood, as if she licked herself down below where the child had emerged.
Drums in the distance, either just on the other side of the rice ponds, or at some distance in the world of her head, that close, that far the sound.
Yemaya spoke to her from the pond.
“Take your child up and raise her.”
Lyaza stood up and held her child above the water.
“Raise her,” the goddess said.
“Take her,” Lyaza said.
“No no no no no no no no no no,” the goddess said.
Lyaza screamed at Yemaya.
“Take her away!”
“No!”
“This child filthy spawn of filthy master wretch!”
She took a deep breath and hurled the infant into the air, as though she were pushing against someone in a dance. It disappeared into the mist and she waited to hear the splash, but none came. She stumbled on leaden legs through deserted fields back to the cabin where she lay back down on the bloody pallet. Closing her eyes, she saw behind the lids the stout figure of Old Dou, and a shadowy woman standing behind her, either the ghost of the mother she never knew or Yemaya, just which she could not say. With a loud sigh she settled down into the filth of her life and the wretched sleep of the hopeless, awaking at the first light of dawn, a soft light that stole in like an ocean dew, settling over the doorway and then the floor and finally touching her where she lay in her misery, an empty hulk of a girl ready for nothing but death.
Soon after the light arrived a boy named Isaac showed up with the infant in his arms. The boy grew taller and taller, and his face turned into that of Jonathan, the master’s old son who stood there, nodding his head, the infant now in his possession.
“Devil!” she screamed at him.
Oh, Yemaya! These women reached the heights of childbirth, and then they plummeted into darkness. Lyaza stood up, reached for her child, and fell dead on the cabin floor.
Chapter Fifty-one
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Love in Town
That morning I slept late, one of the indulgences of plantation life. Liza, I presumed, must have immediately begun her work for the day. I imagined her hurrying down to the kitchen where she assisted Precious Sally, the woman who had the largest hand in raising her, touching milk and water, eggs and flour—her magical presence turning these elements into nourishment for all of us.
I could picture Precious Sally opening her eyes in the dark, saying her prayers to the gods, whichever she might believe in—and raising her large body out of her bed of ticking and straw, pulling on her apron and making ready to proceed to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, where she found Liza already baking the daily bread.
Isaac, perhaps having slept in his clothes, slowly raised his head off the straw pillow and looked around at the sound of the crowing birds, knowing he must wake his crews and get them moving into the fields as the sun was rising. And in the other cabins, dozens upon dozens of other slaves beginning their long morning, awaking out of the freedom of sleep into another day of captivity, some with words of love, some with curses on their lips, stumbling out into the woods and performing their ablutions, and then eating a corn cake and taking a sip of water and hasting to the fields.
Some of them were singing, a little love tune—
I love my darlin’, dat I do,
Don’t you love Miss Susy, too?
Some sang parts of a work song—that same
My old missus promise me
Shoo a la a day,
When she die she set me free
Shoo a la a day…
I could hear the music, though most were moving in silence, dragging their feet, heads lowered, eyes still fixed on whatever dreams they might have lived in their sleep.
To belong to another person! To be owned by someone the way people owned shoes or carriages or tables and chairs and horses and tools! It never occurred to me to consider such matters even after my days living at The Oaks, at least not until after that night with Liza. Lying there in my bed, the odors of our coupling still rising like ancient perfume from the pillows and sheets, I was reluctant to give up the memories of the night before even as I knew I had to arise and dress and descend the stairs to the breakfast table into the world of strife and suspicion.
Liza was nowhere to be seen. Here I met my uncle. Even as he skewered a small breakfast bird on his fork he appeared to be watching me carefully as I entered the room
.
“Well, lad,” he said, “and how are you this morning? Slept rather late, did you? And I thought you were early to bed.”
“I read a while, Uncle.”
“Ah, the reading. Always something I plan to do but never get to it.” He sighed, and chewed on the small bird.
From another doorway Jonathan entered the room, like a leading actor suddenly making his entrance on stage.
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
“Good morning, son. And did you have a good rest?”
“After great exercise, great rest,” he said.
“Oh, were you out wandering in the night?” I tried to stare my cousin down, but he met me glinty glare for glinty glare.
“Jonathan is always up early,” my uncle said, “always on the watch for odd stoppages and difficulties.”
“And for the good events, too,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” my uncle said. “Certainly for the good as well.”
“What good, Cuz,” I said to Jonathan, “do you find in your wanderings at night?”
“Oh, a quiet night, Cuz, with nothing stirring except a slight breeze, and a few peaceful songs on the air from the cabins.”
“You do help to keep the peace there, do you not?”
My cousin stepped toward me and leaned his face close to mine. I could smell traces of foul whiskey on his breath, the residue, no doubt, of a night in the cabins.
“You yourself seem quite well rested,” he said. “Tell me, dear Cousin, do you take this kind of leisure in New York? I will wager a week’s worth of labor that you do not.”
“No,” I said, “I am usually up quite early, as I’ve been doing since I arrived. Except for last night.”
“Always a good idea to make an exception some time,” my uncle said. “Sally? Was there liquor in the pie last night? Our young nephew appears to have been drugged.”