by Alan Cheuse
I watched as Liza made her way to the big house, picturing her shifting hips beneath the bright clothes she wore.
“I am going to stay a while,” I said. “At least through the rice harvest,” surprising myself again with my certainty. I watched my cousin’s eyes following her.
“You have given this some serious thought, and it makes me happy,” he said. But the look on his face did not affect happiness, not at all.
All this I attributed to his drinking.
My uncle, however, behaved rather jovially at the lunch table and I did not believe it had anything to do with drink. That so many things were about to erupt I had no inkling.
“I’m pleased to hear that you will be staying on a while longer, nephew,” he said.
“It pleases me, too, Nathaniel,” my aunt said.
Rebecca echoed her sentiment.
“I hope this means you will help me with our teaching.”
“Certainly,” I said. “I believe that is important.”
“Important for…” Jonathan stopped, glanced around the room. Precious Sally, standing at her usual post in the doorway, made a sound in her throat, but said nothing, of course.
“Important for the slaves,” I said. “To be free and illiterate, that is not true freedom.”
“Yes, yes,” my cousin said. “To be free like me, able to read, that is true freedom.”
“It is, Jonathan,” Rebecca said.
“Yes, I am glad to be free to read this,” he said, pulling a letter from his coat pocket and holding it up to the light.
“Do not—” my uncle said.
“I want him to hear it,” Jonathan cut him off. “He is part of the family…our wonderfully large family…”
“Very well then,” my uncle said, and slumped back in his chair.
“This note arrived early this morning.”
“Yes,” I said, ignoring what I took to be his prescience about my purposes there. And Liza’s. Did he suspect us? Of course, he suspected us. Or perhaps he had even ordered her to…? Fortunately for my mental state at the moment, he cut off my thoughts as he waved the letter in front of us.
And then began to read.
“‘Christians of Charleston! Awake! While you have been sleeping certain Forces have gathered in the countryside, teaching slaves to study murder. A certain Jew has been showing them a Plan! Under the oaks a travesty is brewing! Tend to your possessions, tend to your Souls! The True Way is to follow Jesus! Step off the Path and you are Lost! Watch for my next Bulletin!’ Signed ‘Your Brother in Christ.’”
Rebecca burst into tears.
“They want to scare me. This is not fair. I discovered years ago that our good doctor friend from time to time has also been teaching Africans to read. Then why should I stop? I will not stop. I will go on with my instruction.”
“Of course, you will,” Jonathan said. “But we do have to be aware there are certain parties opposed to it.”
“It is none of their business,” Rebecca said.
“They are making it their business,” Jonathan said.
“I will not stop. That is the end of it.”
“Yet it might be the end of us,” my cousin said.
“Nonsense,” I said, thinking back to the inquisitive shipping clerk. “This is the doing of some befuddled individual and surely not the majority view in the city.”
“I believe that is so,” my uncle said. “They are good to us here.”
“They are not good. They are merely tolerant,” my aunt said. “I was afraid this might happen.”
“It is nothing of the kind,” my uncle said.
Rebecca wept again.
“You never liked me,” she said to my aunt.
“This is not true,” my uncle said. “She does like you. She loves you, child.”
“When you go, she will be mean to me,” Rebecca said.
My aunt stood up and went to the doorway.
“When he goes, I am moving to town.”
“And how will you live, Mother?” Jonathan said.
“I will establish myself as a sole trader. I will open a business.”
“What business?” my uncle said. “What business do you know?”
“I will sell lace, perhaps. I will sell dresses.”
“What do you know about dresses?”
“What do you know about rice farming? Everything you have here comes from the Africans.”
“Then perhaps I shall depart this world at an early date,” my uncle said, “and give you the opportunity to work sooner as a sole trader.”
“Is that what you wish?” my aunt said.
“No, no, no, no. I do not wish that. But if I did leave early, you can sell The Oaks, and sell the slaves and have enough money to move to town and establish yourself in business.”
“And me? Where would that leave me?”
My cousin’s voice turned almost to a childish whine.
“Working with your mother,” my uncle said.
“This is the only work I know,” my cousin said. “Here, at The Oaks.” He paused, as if contemplating some important fact. “But if we had to sell all this, I suppose…”
Rebecca began crying all the louder.
“Rebecca, please,” Jonathan said.
Rebecca stood up and pointed her finger at Jonathan.
“I am a lady in distress. To think you’d sell all these people!”
“You are not a lady,” my aunt said, “none of us is a lady. In fact, you’re much more like a child, with your childish notions of teaching these slaves to read.”
“Be quiet, Mother, please,” Jonathan said. “Rebecca is doing a fine thing.”
“I am pleased you say so,” Rebecca said. “Of late I haven’t been sure what you thought of my work.”
My aunt, her mother-in-law, ignored her remark.
She said directly to Jonathan: “And are you doing a fine thing too? Cavorting with the—”
“That will be enough,” my uncle said, making it seem as though speaking were as much a chore as lifting. “All this talk about my departure is quite premature and it is putting a terrible strain on my old corpus and I want to end it right now. Do you hear me, Jonathan?”
“Yes, sir,” my cousin said.
“Mother?”
Silence for a moment. Then she made a reluctant, “Yes.”
“Daughter?”
“I will be silent,” Rebecca said.
“Thank you,” my uncle said. And then he turned to me.
“Nephew?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He has nothing to do with this,” Rebecca said.
“Is he teaching them, too?” My aunt turned to me and made a smile close to a leer—it was sickening to see this woman do such a thing with her mouth.
“Are you?”
I did not know what to say.
“Mother, please,” my uncle said.
“You sound like him,” my aunt said, pointing to Jonathan.
“I am his son,” Jonathan said.
“And whose sons are yours?” my aunt said to him. “Or daughters!”
At which point Rebecca made a wailing noise, like something you feared as a child you might hear at night in the dark.
Bam!
My uncle slammed the heel of his hand on the table, rattling dishes.
“I will not have this kind of talk at my table,” he said. “I will not!”
All of her offensiveness disappearing in an instant, my aunt now began to cry.
“Mother,” Jonathan said, “if you are going to become a sole trader you must not give in to tears.”
My uncle turned to him with a fury I had not seen before.
“Your mother will not speak to you anymore about these matters and you—you will not speak to your mother in this fashion.”
“Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” my cousin said, suddenly remorseful.
Rebecca went on crying even as my aunt’s weeping subsided.
I noticed just then that the slav
es had left the room.
How I wish I had followed them, to the barns or the fields, wherever they had fled, because the next minute brought the sound of men and horses outside the house and then someone striding up the front steps of the veranda and knocking loudly at the door.
“Nevermore!” I said.
“What is that?” my cousin asked.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Ask Black Jack,” my uncle said.
I paid him no mind and left the room and went to the front door.
Which I opened and felt the shock of seeing once again the silver-haired man in the top-hat who had boarded the boat in Perth Amboy and beat the horse and slave in town. Behind him just beyond the house waited men on horseback, Langerhans and his crew, and one or two others whom I did not recognize.
“You again?” he said. “These then are your people?”
“May I ask you what your business is, sir?”
“That is precisely the question I have come to ask here, and as it turns out I have come to ask it of you.”
Behind me I heard my uncle stirring.
“Who is it, Nate?”
“A man from New Jersey,” I said.
“New Jersey?”
My uncle came lumbering up to the door.
“Not truly from New Jersey,” the man said. “That is where this fellow and I met, but I have been associated with other states and other places.”
“This fellow is my nephew,” my uncle said. “Now what is your business here?”
The man looked past me at my suddenly alert and agitated uncle.
“May I come in?”
“I will come out,” my uncle said, and gave me a little shove to move me out onto the veranda so that he might follow.
The man stepped aside, looked back at his companions, and signaled them with his hand to remain where they were.
“And now, sir?” my uncle directed the man to the table and chairs to the left of the door. “Will you sit?”
“Thank you,” the man said. “But we are in a hurry. Unless perhaps you can answer our question.”
“And that would be, sir?”
My uncle looked at me, as if I understood what he was thinking.
“My slave has run off,” the man from Jersey said. “Have you seen a little nigger about twelve, dark as night, wearing red trousers? This fellow here, your…?”
“My nephew?”
“Ah, hah! Yes, your nephew. He has seen him.”
“Have you?” my uncle turned to me.
“Not recently,” I said. “I first saw him on the ship. We were passengers on the same ship.”
My uncle cleared his throat and inclined toward the man.
“Why did you come here to inquire? Was he seen heading in this direction?”
“A good question, a very good question,” the man said. “I was directed by these colleagues of mine…” He gestured toward Langerhans and the patrollers. “The good folks in Charleston said you all might know something about runaways.”
“Did they?” My uncle pushed his belly forward and stepped closer. “What else might they have said?”
“I’ve never been a man to waltz around the truth, have I?” He looked directly at me. “Have I, son?”
“I would not know,” I said.
“You know something of me. You may know enough to know that I will tell you now what I learned in town. I’ll tell you that I learned in town that here on this plantation some odd things have occurred. That you brothers of the Jewish creed, in collusion with a certain medical man, have been teaching slaves how to read and write. And—”
“First,” my uncle broke in, “that is not any of your interest. And second—”
“First,” the man said, “it goes against the nature of things that the Africans should try to acquire the skills of a higher breed. And second—”
“First,” my uncle said, “there is no evidence that Africans are what you infer is a ‘lower breed’ than white men. And second—”
“First, there is evidence that those of the tribe of Israel are a breed apart,” the man said, his finger poking the air, and his eyes all-ablaze, “and second—”
Now I was growing angry.
“Second what?”
“Second, it is clear I am gaining no traction talking to you here. Now you will excuse me, because I have to go and catch my little nigger.”
At this point Jonathan, who had been listening in the doorway, stepped out onto the porch holding the offensive missive in his hand.
“Did you write this letter?”
“Sir,” the man said, “I don’t know what letter you’re referring to.”
“This letter,” Jonathan said, and began to read from it again.
“Stop!” My uncle waved his hand. “I will not allow these things to be spoken in my house.”
“I respect that, sir,” said the white-haired man.
“You are a strange man,” Jonathan said, crumbling the letter in his fist. “A strange man from—” He turned to me. “From where?”
“New Jersey, I believe,” I said.
“Wherever you are from, it is now time for you to leave the house, please, sir,” Jonathan said.
“I will be going,” said the man, “and though I’m in a hurry I at least expected that I might have been invited in so that I could at least decline the invitation. But that would have been a Christian thing to do, to offer such an invitation, and you—”
“We are not Christian, no,” Jonathan said. “Now please leave, sir.”
“I will leave, and frankly I hope never to return. Because if I do it will be most unfortunate.”
“Are you threatening us, sir?”
“I am merely stating a fact. If you see my nigger, I expect you will hold on to him for me.”
“I doubt if he has run this way,” Jonathan said.
“It is your reputation, sir,” the man said, brushing a hand along his thick white hair. “There are only a certain number of places where he can run.”
“If I were your slave,” I spoke up, “I would run anywhere I could.”
The man turned to me, his eyes glowing near-yellow in his head.
“I thought you were a more judicious fellow. If I did not know you were from New York, I’d think you wanted to challenge me to a duel.”
He then bowed slightly toward me, and twirled around on his heel, his cape following, and departed from the veranda. Within moments he remounted his horse and without another word the man and his crew, with one last glance back at us from Langerhans, went galloping away up the road.
“Wherever he has departed to, the young slave is fortunate,” my uncle said, “to be free of that creature’s clutches.” He turned to me and asked how I had come to know the man and I explained how I had encountered him, though I omitted most of the stranger elements that had passed between us.
“Travel sometimes makes for curious companions,” he said.
As if to put a concluding point on this entire incident, around the corner of the house Isaac came riding, leading my old Promise behind him, his presence reminding me that for many long minutes while we talked with the white-haired man the slaves seemed to have faded away.
“You coming to the fields, massa?” he called out to me. And so then making a bow of my own I left the veranda and mounted my horse. I had only just begun to ride, when I heard a voice from the veranda and looked back to see Liza standing there in her apron.
My heart leaped, more animal than our steeds.
Chapter Fifty-three
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Introductory Lesson
They named her Liza, a version of her mother’s and grandmother’s names, and this girl, a pale creature compared to most of the other slaves—you’d say she was the color of almonds—stood out from everyone else even as she tried to stand close. Her great-grandmother had disappeared somewhere near an African river, her grandmother went mad but still gave birth before she died, and her mother s
uccumbed in the birth throes, victim to what felt like a curse upon all the women.
Liza hoped to escape that curse.
Her father—everyone except his father seemed to know about her paternity, from the house slaves to all who lived in the back cabins and worked in the rice fields—put her to work in the main house when she was still a child, and there Liza flourished, learned under the tutelage of a black stump of a woman named Precious Sally, to help in the kitchen and to cook simple meals, if not at first for the aging master and his family, at least for the other house slaves. The doctor checked on her every time he visited the plantation, extremely worried that her father—he took him to be that dangerously mad—might at some point try to take her up the way he had her mother. He talked to the slave child, asked her certain questions that might have led her to reveal certain matters if in fact they had occurred.
But nothing.
This gave the doctor pause, and he was, at least momentarily, pleased that no harm had come to this girl.
Yet.
Because, he surmised, her father suffered from a terrible mental difficulty, and, the doctor believed, it was only a matter of time before the man would turn his attention in the worst way to his beautiful almond-colored daughter. For a while though, the man seemed to ignore her.
Meanwhile, the girl was growing, and much to the dismay of some of the field slaves who saw it, she now and then turned cart-wheels on the lawn of the main house on her way to work in the kitchen. Cooking. Baking. Cleaning. Gathering the spices.
At this point the doctor intervened and gave her periodic instruction in how to read. At least twice a week, and sometimes more, the physician would appear at the kitchen door, as though he himself were one of the slaves, forbidden to enter through the front door, with books in his arms. He taught her the alphabet from an early age. The way she sounded each letter seemed to him a small miracle, and she mastered this quickly. Oh, and doesn’t this make all the difference! He sighed to himself. Give the young bird a little shove from the nest and it instinctively spreads its wings and however clumsily flies to safety. And the human child? She sounds her letters, and soon will be able to fly on her own, yes. Scientific-minded fellow that he was, the doctor encouraged her to read to him from geography books first, such as some that he bought in town.
INTRODUCTORY LESSON