Song of Slaves in the Desert

by Alan Cheuse

  The animals lowed and moaned. Time unrolled to the pace of a turning wheel. A million years ago she had started out in the dank dark swamp. Back in a time before that the river rushed beneath the flat bottom of the boat she crossed on. Before that the Christians, her old man among them, bellowed on the prairie, waking the stars with their testaments of faith. She breathed hard, and time moved forward, she breathed again and time moved back, again, and time flowed out to all the horizons and time rushed like a gusher toward those recently awakened stars. At what seemed like the highest point of the high prairie over which they plodded they came to a crest from which you could look down and see, miles below, a thin strand of river. An unfamiliar voice came into her head and told her in a plain, straightforward way, that if she jumped she would sail down to meet her mother, and mother’s mother, and all the mothers before her, and she would stay at peace and in serenity for all the time to come. Hawks swooped below her where she stood. Whose voice was that?

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  She leaned a little closer to the edge and her gaze sank down a mile to where her very own goddess Yemaya stood breast-deep in the rushing river. It shocked her to meet the goddess so far from her home grounds.

  “Shango speak to you,” Yemaya said. “Don’t listen. Everything I did, even saving the life of your monster father, I did so you can live near the other ocean. Don’t stop now! It is always better to be born, no matter how it happens, than never to come to life! And you don’t know, the child you are carrying may be the one to save everyone and everything! Back away! All of us carry such regrets, woman,” the voice—almost now completely her own—said to her, “all of us. Slave or free, none of us is truly free, not in this world. And there is no next! Run! Come! Go!”

  The goddess raised a hand as she raised her voice, and as if she were standing next to her Liza fell back, then fell to her knees and said to Yemaya and to the hawks floating below the edge of the cliff and to anyone else who might be listening, “My ancestors walked away from a volcano, they settled in a red city only to flee from beasts who wanted to sell their bodies, they traveled west on a river, and, captured again, sailed west on an ocean in, oh, how difficult a passage! I will keep going.”

  ***

  Some nights later—or was it months or was it years?—as chastely she and the old man lay together under the desert moon east of the California border, she heard him give out a loud expiration after which came silence.

  First, she had to dig a grave. And when she had done this—a shallow declivity was all she could produce even with great struggle—and said a few words (“Old man, I offer you my thanks for a place in your wagon and wish you speedy transport to your heaven!”) she still had a desert to cross, the dry land once a sea-bed, a hazy burning sun above! The wagon animals died next. She abandoned these bloated oxen, their tongues stiff in their mouths, and the wagon and most of her belongings, a monument to all she had done to travel this far. She proceeded first on foot and then—arriving in a small town on the edge of the desert and, with money she had taken from the dead old man’s pocket, buying a horse—on horseback, north and west to San Francisco, the city she had heard described all along her way as the great and beautiful metropolis on the bay.

  She sold the horse to a passing Mexican, striding up a hill, drinking in the fog. From the top of the hill—water three-quarters all around—islands—a bay—the seemingly placid ocean to the west bleeding into the low horizon. A pastel city! Half in sun, half in fast-moving fog, water and sky beyond nearly every rooftop, this dream-like metropolis caught the light and turned her around and around in joy, that she had finally reached a place where she might live as herself.

  Chapter Eighty-seven

  ________________________

  Eliza Stone (& Son)

  Less than a week after arriving in the city, finding a place to stay—a loft over a barn behind a large stone house on Washington Street—finding work (menial labor, to start, sweeping up in a bakery at the foot of the long hill she lived on), she went into labor. She took up the work again soon after I was born, while I slept in an ancient cradle given to her by the baker, a cradle she placed next to the ovens, and so made me a warm cache in the cool foggy San Francisco mornings in which my life began. The baker, who had come by ship all the way from New York City to pan for gold in the Sierras and found enough of the elusive metal to buy himself an oven and a storefront, fell in love with her the first time she entered the store to buy a breakfast bun for herself and me. He spoke to her—his way of making affectionate praise—of the dark (meaning African) origins of half the Italians on the lower part of the boot of his country, he recited to her parts of the Aeneid, a poem he had nearly memorized on his voyage from Naples to New York, and then refreshed his memory of on his voyage from New York around the Horn to San Francisco.

  When he told her how worried he was about her, a mother trying to raise a newborn on her own in a city as cool and windy as San Francisco, she, while sweeping, sweeping, and washing the baking pans and helping him knead and roll the dough, told him her story in bits and pieces, saying at one point, “I was born a slave. Do you know what that means? Every day I wake up and breathe air as a free woman it remains a triumph for me!”

  “It’s a triumph? Where you learn to talk that way?”

  Liza laughed at him.

  “Because I was born a slave does that make me forever chained and ignorant?”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “I like you story. You come all the way here, you mother from Africa, you come from all the way across America, a big journey, it’s like the Aeneas himself make. It’s a epic, á la America!”

  At the end of the work day, he took to walking her up the hill toward home, carrying me, still a rather small bundle, in his arms. People on the street often stared. At that time, with so few Africans living in the city, she was an oddity, a mahogany face among the many white folk and Chinese. She felt alone, until I arrived, but she had felt alone before. Even the worst of the things she had to do, the worst of the men she had met in her life, they were nothing compared to the great forces of mother nature, her mountains and rivers and deserts! And yet—and yet, she had to say, without these men her life would have been less than something. Our beloved ancestors, even her despicable father, the when all is said and done rather naïve but decent Nate, my father, the men she met along the way, why, all of them became stepping stones on her journey here. Even the half-Cherokee woman, of whom she thought wistfully now and then, she, too, served as yet another stepping stone. As far as what she had to do in order to reach this place, what’s some degradation and humiliation compared to long years of being enslaved?

  ***

  As it happened, a few months after I was born, Eliza Stone—which was the name she took when she first arrived in the city—found that at last she had put the worst behind her. Time speeded up, unusual when you have an infant to raise, but nonetheless that was what happened. The baker bought her books, he bought her newspapers, he bought me toys carved from dark wood. Eliza could tell what was coming. And on a foggy morning in winter, while the oven warmed the inside of the shop, her worst fears came true.

  “Eliza,” the baker said, “put down your broom.”

  Gently, he took the broom from her and set it upright against the counter.

  “We have known each other only a short while,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, gazing out at the fog rolling past the bakery window.

  “Yet I feel I know you.”

  “You have been generous to me. And I am grateful to you,” Eliza said. She removed her apron and laid it on the counter.

  “What are you doing?” the baker said.

  “I am going,” Eliza said.

  “Where are you going?”

  Eliza felt as though she had been sleep-walking—this was one of a thousand topics she had read about in recent months—and suddenly had awakened.

  “To take my son for a walk.”

  “Ple
ase, please, he is sleeping in the back. We must talk, you and I, please.”

  She ignored him and stepped into the back room where I lay drowsing on a pallet.

  “Come along,” she said, and swept me into her arms and carried me up the hill into the fast-moving wall of fog. The baker followed us half-way up the hill, and then, apparently, his heart could not take it, and he slowed down, and she soon left him behind.

  Marriage? No, no, no, she wanted none of that, seeing it as just another form of imprisonment. Still, she looked at me and saw traces of my father’s face, and thought to herself that someday, perhaps when I had grown a lot more, we might make a trip East and look up the man who had helped her win her freedom. (In the time they had spent together she thought only of keeping her plan together, feigning whatever emotions she needed to create in order to make that plan work. Poor Nate, she had fooled him, although there had been moments, especially after she had discovered that she was carrying me, that she had come close to believing in her feigned feelings as true.)

  ***

  Time blew on, like that fog. My mother sold the silver candlesticks. Just before the money from that transaction was about to run out she found a job cleaning house for a tall, pleasant woman who thought of her as a self-educated free soul from somewhere in the East with whom she often discussed, over tea, the questions of the day such as, for example, women’s suffrage. Her employer believed that if it came to war between the North and the South, one of the results of a Northern victory would be universal emancipation and the delivery of the right to vote for all former slaves. Liza agreed, adding that perhaps the North might punish the South by taking the vote away from all slaveholders.

  “Interesting,” the other woman said. “Interesting.”

  They continued that discussion for quite a while, taking time off to discuss the relation of darker-skinned people to whites—an oddity, as I may have mentioned, in San Francisco, but not in the South and the Northeast—and of Europeans to Africans (about which my mother had read).

  They talked about politics, yes, and literature—her employer was reading David Copperfield at one point, and Liza was reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. It was interesting, especially when they were discussing literature, that her employer stared at Liza in an odd but familiar way, as if she remained in constant astonishment that a black women could recite poetry.

  Especially the poetry of William Blake, of whom she had not heard until she heard Liza recite.

  “‘My mother bore in the southern wild, / And I am black, but oh my soul is white!’”

  Liza’s employer asked her about the south and Liza told her some stories out of her life and the lives of her ancestors, as much as she could remember of what she had heard, which turned out to be quite a lot.

  One morning, some months into my second year (while I lay in the care of a neighbor’s daughter), the woman informed my mother that a new private school near her home on the upslope of California Street was hiring teachers.

  “You would make a good teacher,” the woman said.

  “Do you truly think so?” Eliza felt tears pull up in her eyes. “I am not at all trained. Though I had a good teacher when I was younger, a doctor, Harvard-educated.”

  “Here in California we are a bit freer than in the East,” the woman said. “I see how you raise your son, I have enjoyed our discussions. I think you will make a fine teacher of the young.”

  “If you think so, thank you,” Liza said. “But what shall I wear? I know I dress like a…Southern gypsy. Can I go this way?”

  “I have things I can let you wear,” the woman said. Later from her closet, she pulled some blouses and skirts, and a jacket for two for a horsewoman to wear while riding in the park.

  Dressed in this fashion, Eliza went for her interview. Her fusion of intelligence, determination, and poise won her a post there. Her classrooms were lively, and because of her wit and passion on the subject of geography and literature and history her students adored her. Her industry and accomplishments in the classroom won her an award.

  Picture her on that evening.

  Eliza Stone—this mahogany-skinned angel who appeared ever younger than when she had first escaped the plantation and struggled to make her way westward. And even more beautiful. Those of us born free can never know it, how finding your freedom can light a lamp in your soul and allow it to illuminate your life! At the very least this made for her stunning physical presence. In the audience that night was one of the patrons of the school, an older gentleman who had survived the last Fremont expedition and made his fortune in construction around the Bay. His young wife had died in childbirth, as had the infant, and ever since he had dedicated himself to helping students around the Bay. The light he spied in Eliza nearly blinded his soul.

  This led to one of my earliest memories, which consists of blue sky, warm surf breaking across the sand at Ocean Beach, and women in bright cloth skirts swaying with hands held aloft and guitars and (what I later learned were) ukuleles accompanying the movements of their loosely jointed hips—my mother’s ocean-side wedding to this tall man with streaming gray hair—much older than Eliza, he seemed already to be worn by sun and battered by wind—who paid for my schooling right up until the time I graduated from Cal.

  While a preacher intoned words into the offshore winds I crawled on the sand amidst the brown legs of the swaying dancers, searching for shells and star-fish, my future as far away from me and yet as inevitable as one of the distant waves at the horizon.

  To Eliza the beach meant something more than a place to play or marry and celebrate. That broad reach of sand called her back to her own mother’s stories about the shores of home, the last glimpse she had of it before descending into the bowels of the slave ship—a few palms, birds skirring across the pearl-white sky, the long stretch of sand. Even in the midst of great celebration she picked at the mental scars of the awful passage over water, the loss of all things that had once belonged to her heart and soul. She could not let these memories go.

  ***

  Not only did Eliza win awards and the love of her first husband. She accrued other honors and won other hearts. For a number of years she spoke regularly to the parents of her students, and then to groups of parents whose children she did not teach but who attended her school. Her reputation as a speaker spread through the educated class of the city, and this led to an invitation to speak at an impromptu evening that some recent immigrant from the East had put together in the hope of initiating the San Francisco equivalent of his beloved Chautauqua. Many people had recommended Eliza to him, and when she stood up before the assembly of some hundred interested folks, men and women, he understood why.

  Her subject was freedom and love, things that many people, caught up as they might be in family strife and work life and the getting and spending that the poet speaks of, lost sight of and failed to grasp what these things meant in their lives, if they ever pictured them at all at the start.

  “I was born a slave—” that was her usual way of beginning her talks, which, after this initial event, proliferated around the Bay for many a year—“someone owned me. How many of you were born free? How many of you claim never to have had masters?”

  She had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she had read Emerson, she had read Homer and the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, and the Qur’an, and of our native writers she had read Hawthorne, Emerson, Walt Whitman, and the South Sea novels of Herman Melville, to whom I hope to refer briefly anon. From all these pages and stories and poems and ideas and images she made her own story come clear:

  “Without love you cannot be free, without freedom you cannot love.”

  Her theme echoed through the minds of many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Bay area folk who had listened.

  She linked it to a second theme, something of which she also spoke a great deal.

  “What do I believe? In gods and goddesses, in rivers that speak and
birds that tell stories? Is that all in my own mind, projected by me, a human magic lantern, onto a blank wall? Or do I believe in inventions and inventors? Do I worship the power of the human mind over all else? Or do I believe in some power beyond it that has shaped and formed us? I was raised by Africans, enslaved by Jews, hunted by Christians—I know something of the world besides what exists in books, and everything I have lived through confirms for me the truth of what the best writers write.

  “Without love you cannot be free, without freedom you cannot love…”

  People kept flocking to her talks.

  One day, after speaking to a large crowd at a theater in downtown San Francisco, a young woman came up to her just as she was leaving the stage and knelt before her.

  “What are you doing?” Eliza said.

  “Bless me,” the young woman said.

  Seeing her there on her knees before Eliza several other people from the audience came up and knelt as well.