Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  “Isaac,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, “I…I am in love with her.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  ________________________

  …And Nights

  The night of that same day Liza burst into my bedroom.

  “How dare you!” she said, throwing her fists at me as I stood up to meet her.

  I caught her by the wrists and we spun around, almost as if in a kind of dance.

  “How dare I? I did not know a slave could say such things!”

  “You didn’t? You didn’t? Well, despite my life of slavery I am free—I am free to hate you!”

  She tore one of her hands free and banged me in the nose. The pain pulled me back and I clasped both hands to my face.

  “Nate, Nate,” she said in a sudden worried cry, “Are you all right? Are you?”

  Hands still covering my aching face, I stumbled back against the bedroom wall.

  “No,” I said, “no, I’m not.”

  My voice sounded thick. Glancing down behind my hands I could see the blood dripping onto my shoes.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Liza said, and guided me in her arms to the bed.

  “I…I’ll fetch some water. Wait!”

  “Wait? Wait? My blood cannot wait.”

  “Here,” she said, and snatched a pillow from the bed and shoved it at me. I caught it in one hand and pressed the billowy thing to my face. She left the room while I sat on the edge of the bed, breathing hoarsely but steadily, feeling the blood run out of my battered nose and down my shirt front.

  In a moment she was back. Her eyes were wild, her duster spattered with my blood.

  Clutching the cloths she had just fetched and dipping them into the water from my drinking jug she dabbed at my nose, and then bid me press the wet cloths against it.

  “Lie back,” she said.

  I obeyed, but gagged on the blood that ran down the back of my throat.

  I sat up again.

  “Back,” she said.

  “Are you the massa?” I said. “It is choking me.”

  She approached me again, dabbed, pressed. After awhile, in which we both remained silent except for our breathing, the blood stopped flowing.

  “Why did you say that?” Liza asked.

  I pulled the cloths away from my face.

  “What did I say?”

  “You know what you said.”

  I shook my head, this motion somehow stirring up the pain, if not the blood, almost in an instant.

  “You told Isaac you loved me.”

  I sighed, and swallowed, and tasted the bitter iron of my own blood.

  “I said that, yes.”

  “So stupid.”

  “Me? Stupid?”

  She shook her head, frightened all of a sudden by her own aggressiveness toward me.

  “I said it,” I said, “because it is true.”

  “It is not.” Her voice was hoarse and raspy.

  “Oh, but it is, sad to say. And wonderful, too.”

  I tossed the bloody cloths onto the bed and reached for her hand.

  She pulled it away.

  I reached again.

  “You’re still bleeding,” she said. I felt the hot stinging in my nostrils, still wet with the flow.

  She picked up the cloths, refolded them so that the clean side showed, and pressed that against my face, at the same time pushing me back so that my head lay against the bloody discarded pillow.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  “You don’t,” I said.

  “I do, I do. You have ruined everything.”

  “And how have I done that? What did you have before…?” I stopped myself, amazed at the stupidity and cruelty of such a remark.

  “Yes, you’re right, massa. Dis nigger woman, what she have befo’ de man from New Yawk, he come along?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling my shame as more intense pain in the center of my face.

  “What did I have? Oh, what did I have?”

  It was her turn to hold her face and moan.

  “Liza,” I said, “I did not mean to—”

  “Leave me be!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, you’re sorry. You’re sorry.”

  With a huge sigh, she heaved herself to her feet and stood unsteadily before me.

  “I can’t come here anymore. I have been wanting to tell you this, and now I must tell you this.”

  “Is it so awful for you? I hadn’t understood that it was, Liza. I thought…I thought that you felt something the same as I did.”

  I reached for her hand, but she pulled back.

  “Please,” I said, “don’t turn me into a beggar.” I patted the bed alongside me. “Come sit, please.”

  “Oh, massa,” she said. “De massa call.”

  “Stop it.”

  She burned a look at me that gave me more pain than her fist that crushed my nose.

  “What massa want?”

  “Stop it, please.”

  “No,” she said, her voice returning to normal. “Tell me what you want?”

  “I want you,” I said. “I want you to sit here beside me.”

  “You want me?” She burned me again with that gaze. “You want me?” She shook herself as though a cold wind had just passed over her body. “You can have me. Oh, yes, you got me. Massa, anything you want.”

  And with an angry jerking motion, she tore at her frock, ripping buttons as she pulled.

  Now she stood before me, naked to the waist, her chest heaving.

  “Here,” she said, bowing toward me, then descending to her knees and pulling at my boots. “Now.” Off she pulled a boot, throwing it against the wall, then another.

  “Stop it,” I said, pushing at her as next she tried to interfere with my buttons.

  “Massa want me to stop?”

  “Yes, stop.”

  She ceased her frenzied tearing and fell back onto the floor, hugging her knees to her chest.

  “Yes, massa,” she said, and began to sob most terribly.

  “Liza,” I said, not knowing what to say beyond her name. I eased myself down onto the floor beside her and took her in my arms.

  “You say you love me,” she said. “Don’t you know that is the cruelest most awful thing to tell a woman like me?”

  “But I do love you.”

  She ignored what I said.

  “And do you know why it is so cruel?”

  “No,” I said in a whisper near her ear. “Tell me.”

  “Because I am not free to refuse you. And I am not free to accept you, either. I am just a lonely piece of chattel, do you understand? A Jew-slave, as they call us in town. I am like Promise, the horse you ride here. A Jew-horse he is, too.”

  Turning in my arms, she breathed close to my face. The pain of my bleeding nose was nothing compared to the ache I felt in my chest.

  “Perhaps it is time to go,” I said, pushing myself against the bed and standing up.

  “So it’s a lie?”

  “What is?”

  “You say you love me, and you’ll send me away?”

  “It is too painful,” I said.

  “Yes, isn’t it? Oh, I hate her, that bitch-cousin of yours! I hate her profoundly!”

  As hot as it was in the room, Liza then gave a shiver and crossed her arms across her breasts.

  “You hate Rebecca? Why?” I said. “She has been so good to all of you.”

  “That is the reason I hate her! And I hate the doctor, too!”

  I had to shake my head.

  “You hate these good people? Why?”

  “It was terrible of them to be good to us. Before I learned to read, before I read all these things I read, I didn’t know how much I was hurting.”

  “Liza,” I said, and once again took her in my arms.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t be good to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ll hate you, too!”

 
; She pressed herself against me, trembling wildly. In an instant we threw ourselves on the bed, God’s Jew-slaves, both of us, doing the bidding of our bodies that He had created out of dust and clay.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  ________________________

  Beyond Words

  The first time it happened just after she had been reading and talking about what she had read with the doctor—a novel about, of all things, the South Pacific, about sailors stranded on an island with natives who reminded her of some of the African stories she had heard in the cabins. He had made his rounds, and then left for town. She returned to the kitchen to prepare for Precious Sally’s evening meal, her mind filled with that South Sea story, and with another part of her mind marveling at how reading could carry you away out of your present life, out of slavery, even, at least while you were reading the story.

  A knock on the wall, and Isaac came into the room.

  “How are you today, Liza?”

  “Fine,” she said. “We just been reading together.”

  “What you reading?”

  And she told him, and he agreed that it sounded like a fine story, something he might like, and though he was a little behind her in his ability to read he said he would try it.

  “It’s so funny, Isaac,” she said. “I read the words, and it gives me such a fine feeling beyond them. It is something we should do all the time.”

  “I hope to do better at my reading,” Isaac said.

  “You should,” Liza said. “I swear, it’s how we get free even if we’re still chained to this place.”

  “Yes, yes,” Isaac said. “I will try it, because I do feel chained. Even by these Hebrews I feel chained like their old ancestors, just like the Israelites in Egypt.”

  Liza stood at the cutting board, preparing vegetables for the meal.

  “You been reading, you been reading your Bible.”

  “I have,” Isaac said. “I surely have.”

  “The religion in the Bible?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s only one kind of freedom. These novels the doctor’s been giving me.”

  “The ones you talking about?”

  “And other ones,” Liza said. “Lots of others.”

  “They ain’t about religion.”

  “Some are, some aren’t. But they all make me free in my mind in so many more different kinds of ways than the Bible makes me free. Brother, I am beginning to love them more than I can say in words.”

  “That’s what you were saying.”

  Liza giggled.

  “In words, yes. Now that’s a joke!”

  That was when he came into the kitchen.

  “What are you doing here?” he said to Isaac.

  The whiskey fumes spread out on his breath like morning mist.

  “Fetching some water to Liza,” he said.

  “Get out. Fetch something else somewhere else. Get to the barns!”

  “Massa,” Isaac said, retreating out the door.

  Jonathan moved toward her and Liza retreated—unfortunately—toward the pantry.

  “You whore!” he shouted at her, shoving her through the open door. “Fornicating with that boy,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Fornicator,” he said, swatting her with the back of his hand.

  Fear roared through her blood and she tried to squeeze past him but he shoved her back inside the pantry and pulled the door closed behind him.

  “No, please,” she said, in a voice that reminded her, even as her fear rose in her blood, of how she spoke in dreams.

  He batted her with his fist and she stumbled back against the shelves. Sacks of sugar and grain slipped down around her feet. In a nightmare of motion he pulled at his trousers, pushed her down, and planted himself on top of her, hip to hip. As he began to fumble at her with his fingers, she writhed in desperation, unable to free herself from his weight. He took himself in hand in preparation for coming into her, and she slapped at his face.

  He grabbed her wrist, and they fought for a moment, her blood still racing, before she felt herself giving way beneath the heavy press of him. Her blood turned to tears, now coursing through her body like rain-water.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  ________________________

  Dawn

  When the first light comes up she is lying there asleep, her skin turned off-gold in the early news of dawn, her breasts like dark puddings, her nipples like raisins. Her braids undone, her hair become a tangle of clots and burrs, her eyes moving beneath her eyelids, as if she might be watching a music show in the privacy of her dreams. And her chest moves up and down with her breath, though she breathes so silently I can’t hear even a whisper of the stuff that gives her life.

  She seems so close and yet so distant from me, she in her slumbering state, me in my wakefulness.

  Or is it me who is dreaming and she who, in another plane, is awake and wondering about me as I wonder about her?

  Our God is a dour God, somber and distant in these latter days. Nonetheless I pray to him, of whom I have never asked much before, that He might make this moment last, make it so. This brown-skinned girl with gold-flecked eyes and hair like vines and limbs like those of a goddess carved of sandstone—here is Eden, here is Paradise—and all the rest an afterthought, the moody preoccupations of men too stony to unbend to the call of the moment.

  I now shocked myself, because for the first time in months I thought of Halevi, who before this journey had been my constant companion, at least in thought. If he were here, I decided, we might argue this.

  But my company now is not a philosopher, but a slave who has shown me something I hadn’t known before about freedom.

  I was still pondering all this when she slowly opened her eyes.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “It is light, I am late.”

  “It is early. No one is stirring, not even the birds.”

  She sat up and shook her head from side to side as if to shake sleep from her mind.

  “I have to go, I have my duties.”

  “What duty could be greater than this? To stay here with me.”

  “Yes, massa,” she said. “But I got other chores. Sunday, it’s a big breakfast Precious Sally is making and she’ll be needing my help to serve.”

  “So we’re back to that? To ‘massa’?”

  “We never went away.”

  “Liza, you and I have traveled some distance from there.”

  She reached up and touched a playful finger to my chest.

  “You rode me.”

  “We rode together.”

  “But we went far.”

  “We went deep,” I said.

  “Horses don’t go deep.”

  “Some do. Ours did. We did.”

  She shook her head, as if amazed at a thought.

  “All the horses around here, and, you know, I never been on one.”

  “Oh, yes, you have—”

  “No, no, Nate, I’m saying, I have never ridden a horse. Isaac, he always promised me, but he never did do it.”

  “I am no great horseman, but sometime I will take you for a ride. On my Promise.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “That thrills me.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, for a slave girl, to have a master make a promise to her, you don’t know how good that feels. Will you promise, though, to let me ride my own horse?”

  I lay down beside her and whispered in her ear.

  “I promise.”

  Her ear—like a beautiful shell you might find washed up on the beach after a storm.

  “I must go now,” she said.

  “Stay a little while longer.”

  “Precious Sally will be looking around for me. You would not want for her to find me here.”

  “She never comes up to the second story.”

  “She could be waiting for me at the bottom of the
stairs.”

  “Does she know about…?”

  “About this?”

  “About us.”

  “Mr. Yankee, sir, you have a lot to learn. There is nothing that goes on in a plantation like this that the folks don’t know about.”

  “My folks? My family?”

  “The slave-folks, that’s who I am talking about.”

  “I suppose that is because I in my fit of love madness told Isaac?”

  She nodded, her face a picture of smugness that I tried to kiss away to no avail.

  “You are a fortunate man,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “Not because of anything except that Isaac must like you. Otherwise he might have killed you.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then, he would have run off.”

  “And lived as a fugitive?”

  “He would have run far enough so that he would have found his freedom.”

  “That’s quite a price to pay for freedom,” I said. “To kill someone, and then run.”

  “It looks like a steep price to you,” Liza said, “because you won’t ever have to pay it. To a slave, it’s something, but not that much.”

  I surveyed her, this woman who had stolen my own freedom, and then I said, “Would you would kill someone to be free?”

  “If I had to. If I was running, and he stood in my way.”

  “But you are not running,” I said. “So that will not be a price you have to pay.”

  She gave me a sly smile, and showed me all the light in her eyes that I longed to see, even while seeing it. I caught her in my arms once again, and though she protested, it was a feeble attempt. It made me think that she might never want to be free of me!

  She took a deep breath and said, “I’m not running—yet.”

  Chapter Sixty

  ________________________

  A Proposal

  Another week went by. In the fields the kernels of rice were plumping in the sun, and the water that nourished them grew warmer and warmer each day, more like a tepid bath than a cooling wash. Over in the brickyard the sun beat down so hot that it made the entire clearing feel as though it were on fire, and the mud blocks appeared to turn to bricks with the speed of bread dough in a fiercely heated oven. Few songs from the slaves now. They worked in nothing but their tattered trousers, their dark sweat-soaked bodies gleaming in the sun, rank kerchiefs tied around their heads to keep the sweat from pouring into their eyes and blinding them. I quickly removed my coat and now and then exercised my privileges of stepping into the shade and taking a rest against a tree or going to the horse and drinking from the animal-skin water bag that I had tied on to the saddle when I left the house in the morning. The water tasted rank, absent the coolness that had made it so appealing when one of the house slaves had drawn it for me from the well just after breakfast.