Chapter Twelve
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A long, dusty carriage ride brought us to a location about fifteen miles outside of Charleston—and I tried my best to look forward at the road ahead rather than stare at the dusty beauty of the woman—the slave—who had joined us as we left town. A fairly good road, repaired by good hands after spring rains—thick trees covered with vines and mosses—swampy ditches stretching out at either side of the road. My own old New York countryside up near the Bronx farm or the woods atop the cliffs on the New Jersey side of the Hudson seemed barren by comparison to this lush and overgrown landscape.
A near-mile-long avenue of enormous oak trees, a tunnel of trees, led to the entrance of my uncle’s house. With the moss hanging in long beard-like wisps from the upper branches and the light as subdued as in some grotto beneath the ocean, the avenue gave the impression of leading from one world to the next, a road that might take you to the land of dreams instead of merely leading you from the main road to the mansion.
“There is certainly nothing like this up north,” I said to my cousin, even as I stared and stared at the slender shoulders of the slave girl—who sat demurely, waiting for the carriage to come to a halt. “Our winters are cold and chill, with icy winds blowing off the rivers that bound our rock island. If you can imagine it, picture winter nights, with our family huddled around a warming stove, closer to the way the Eskimaux live, or those others, Russians and such, who spend their lives either freezing in winter or boiling in summer, up near the icier oceans of the world.”
“I believe that, Nathaniel,” my cousin said. “Here in our dreamy land we live lives like no other, we know that.”
“Even we Jews partake of it,” Rebecca said. “Where else Jews can live as we do I can’t imagine. Except for the Holy Land in the Bible, where else a paradise like this? Friendly Gentiles, the laws allowing us as much freedom as anyone else. The trees, the air, the water…” She gestured as a man might to the wide creek that ran parallel with the road. “Here we might make a special place for all Jews…” At which point she reached forward and touched the shoulder of the slave girl. “And those who would be Jews.”
My cousin turned to his wife and said, “I admire your dreaming…” He turned to me and with the slightest hint of a sneer on his face—but somehow kept covert in his voice—added, “My wife is a dreamer.”
Rebecca withdrew her hand from the girl’s shoulder and sat upright on the carriage bench, making a toss of her curls.
She said, “Without dreams to compare to, how do we know when we are truly awake?”
I had no answer, as if this question could find one. I took another glance at the slave girl, hoping she might turn around.
“Rebecca has a vision,” my cousin said, his tone turned slightly acerbic, as the driver, Isaac, his name was, I recalled, pulled the carriage to a halt before a grand old white house at the end of the tunnel of trees. Someone must have given some signal that I had missed, because just as we stopped, the slave girl descended gracefully from the carriage and without a glance back at us began walking to the house.
“A vision?” I said, noticing the smoothness of her movement—almost a gliding motion, as though her feet scarcely touched the earth.
“That we and all the niggers live happily together in our new Promised Land,” my cousin said. He must have imbibed more of the brandy—did that flask have a bottom?—because his voice sounded a bit muzzy and booze driven. I marveled at this, because I had never known a Jew who drank like this, or, for a fact, owned a plantation with slaves, either.
“What kind of talk is that?” Rebecca said.
He paused and turned back to his wife. “We are quite a pair, are we not? You supply the sweetness and light, my darling girl, and I supply the shadows.”
He addressed me directly.
“She’d want the Africans to raise themselves up and live—”
“Please, no more,” Rebecca said. “We have a guest and we must give him the tour of the plantation.”
“I know we have a guest. I can see we have a guest. I am attempting to explain our way of life to him.” To me, he said, “You’ve had a long sea voyage, would you like first to rest?”
I shook my head, noticing that the girl, carrying herself as beautifully upright as any woman I had ever seen before, had turned the corner of the house and disappeared behind it. Dear God and Moses, perhaps it was the small amount of drink I myself had taken, but I wanted to follow her, anywhere!
“Very well,” my cousin said, of course unable to notice the strongly magnetic feelings in my chest and loins. He dismissed the driver and climbed up onto the bench. Flicking the reins, he called “Onward!” to the horse, taking us with a left turn into the fields.
“We have about a thousand acres,” he said as we trotted off on a raggedy dirt road, “with about two hundred and fifty of them well-fenced and well-drained and in a high state of cultivation…mainly with rice…altogether I’d say there is about a little less than half the plantation under cultivation and the other half mostly woods—yellow pine, oak, and hickory. We have a number of horses and mules and cows and oxen…and there are about a hundred Africans working here, though you will not see many of them just at this hour.” He sighed, and took a deep breath, as if to regain some strength he might have given up when he had taken his last taste of brandy. “They will have stopped work in the rice fields for the day and while there may be some crews coming back from work on the dikes at the creek, most everybody else is at home for supper by now. Oh, yes, and there is a little brickyard also, near the bridge by the creek. It is a fine location, the water supply is inexhaustible, and the water is deep enough to accommodate flatboats from town so we can ship out the bricks. Some of the slaves work there, too.”
He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. Despite the slipping by of the day the sun remained hot, and the air whirred thick with buzzing insects and above us the constant cry of birds. There were a number of questions I knew I should ask, about the means of cultivation, and how much rice was grown each year, and how it was shipped, and so forth. But the heat weighed on my brain and on my tongue. I rode silently, and my cousin did not speak, so that the only sound for a while was the light rumbling of the carriage wheels on the dusty track. It had been a long day already and it had not yet ended.