Chapter Forty

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Study

In the short time I have spent at The Oaks I have learned a number of interesting things about life here, beginning with the hierarchy of the slaves. In the house Black Jack ruled, like a ship’s captain, and Precious Sally, though she had many privileges, stood just below him in rank. Then came Liza, who served my aunt as a personal maid, and attended to such other chores in the house as Black Jack and Precious Sally called upon her to do, which apparently gave her the freedom to move about the house and grounds at all hours. Like members of the family itself, all of them were always present, passing in and out of the rooms, particularly at mealtime, but certainly visible and moving about the house most other times of day.

And it was clear, from the way they carried themselves, that they held positions of authority, even though it was just as apparent that they remained servile to the wishes of my uncle and aunt, and Jonathan and Rebecca, and even young Abraham. They hardly ever spoke, except when spoken to, and never ever raised their voices the way a normal person might, if engaged in a serious conversation with someone about a moment of apparent importance, not even when Abraham raised his.

Although sometimes they found their patience tried.

As when, say, I heard my aunt, who was speaking to Liza while unaware that I was sitting on the veranda reading just outside the door, say to her in a tone usually reserved in our New York society for coachmen speaking to their horses or parents to recalcitrant children.

“Now you know how I like to see this silver?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And do you see your reflection in the knife?”

“Not clearly, ma’am.”

“And should you see your reflection in the candlesticks just as bright as day?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then, girl, polish them again and bring it back to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Or when Abraham rudely shouted down the stairs for his boots, which were somewhere in the house after having been repaired.

“Ma?” he called out.

Black Jack went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to him, that, young massa, his mother had gone out. Abraham sent a curse down the steps suitable more for a grouchy old man than a young boy.

Black Jack demurred, and fetched his boots.

Nor did Black Jack raise his voice when my cousin Jonathan, who, by now I had come to recognize, seemed to vacillate between two temperaments when it came to slaves, burst into the house one afternoon—I was sitting on the veranda, reading reports of the last five years’ rice harvest supplied to me by my uncle—and shouted for the house man.

“You ignorant bastard, that horse has not been watered! I asked you to tell Isaac, did I not?” My cousin slammed something onto the floor—his riding whip or a hat, I couldn’t see, just heard the thwupping noise as it hit—and charged outside again.

“Damned stupid nigger,” he said, catching my eye. “How am I going to run this place one day with nothing but these damned stupid niggers…”

He stomped off toward the barns.

(All the while in this, Black Jack kept his calm. More than that, back inside the house I heard him humming to himself.)

But if the house slaves were treated with a mixture of disdain and the grudging respect born of necessity, the slaves who commanded the field niggers, as my cousin called them, held a place in trust about as high as the house slaves, while the field niggers—and there were eighty or ninety of them, by my uncle’s count—were regarded as something just above the animals.

Thus it was quite strange—though just how strange I did not know until later—when of a Saturday afternoon on the veranda Rebecca gathered her group together for Bible study. She had chosen Black Jack, Precious Sally, the girl Liza, Isaac (whom I took to be Liza’s paramour), and four or five young men who worked the fields.

Some of the house slaves possessed their own Bibles, having once belonged to Gentile families and thus instructed in the Christian way. For those who didn’t have a Bible, Rebecca had copied out the text for discussion, Exodus 3, verses one through five.

She handed these to those who needed them and then said to all of us gathered there:

“Today the subject of our discussion is the story of how the Hebrew people were rescued by God from their bondage in Egypt. Here were the Israelites having been sold into slavery, and their leader Moses is given a sign.” She turned to me and asked if I would like to read.

“Me?” I had rested my eyes on Liza’s sandy brow and so was distracted.

“You are the guest,” she said, handing me a Bible with the place marked.

“Thank you, you are being very kind, Rebecca.”

I glanced at the slaves, who were regarding us as though we were a Saturday afternoon entertainment. Holding the Book before me, I swallowed hard, cleared my throat.

“‘Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far edge of the wilderness and he came to the mountain of God, to Horeb…’”

“Where’s ’at?” one of the field slaves asked another, who shrugged and pretended he was still listening intently.

Rebecca shot him a school-teacherly-like glance, and signaled me to continue my reading.

“‘And a messenger of God appeared to him in a blazing fire from out of a bush. And he looked and behold: A bush was burning but the bush was not consumed. Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this incredible sight. Why does not the bush burn up?” And when God saw that he had turned aside to look God called to him from out of the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And he answered, “Here am I.” And He said, “Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”’”

“Thank you, Cousin,” Rebecca said, taking the Bible from my hand. “Who would like to read next?”

Isaac, his jaw tilted up in a pose of challenge, gave a nod of his dark head.

“Go on,” Rebecca said.

The slave lifted his copy of the Bible and began to read in a clear steady voice with scarcely an error in his pronunciation. My eyes remained on Liza, her near-pale skin and her own blue-green eyes, and my mind began to drift. This was more attention to the Bible than I had given it since I was a boy and tutored by my Halevi. After Isaac finished his passage, Rebecca asked several of the field hands to try, and these were much less agile at their reading.

I was beginning to get bored, when Rebecca interrupted one of the young men, a heavy boy, his skin dark as swamp water in the shade, as he was stumbling about with the page.

“Jacob, do you understand what you’re reading?”

“Yes, missus,” he said.

“Can you explain it to the rest of us?”

“No, missus,” he said.

“Then you don’t truly understand it, do you?”

“It’s a lot of story ’bout freedom,” he said. “But I don’t know no none of it.”

“One day you will.”

“That’s what the Jesus folks say,” one of the other hands spoke up.

“What do they say?” Rebecca asked him.

“They say, we die, and then we free.” He made a loud noise with his lips and everyone smiled in his direction.

“And what do we say?” Rebecca nodded for him to keep speaking.

“Jews say, we free until we die.”

“Life is everything, yes,” Rebecca said.

“And one day…”

The boy spoke up in a manner that I had never heard a slave employ.

“And one day?” Rebecca urged him on.

Now he appeared to be slightly embarrassed by all the attention we were giving him. But he spoke anyway.

“And one day we’ll be free in this life, in this world.”

“And the key to this door?”

The boy smiled, showing a mouth empty except for three or four wooden teeth.

“The Book,” he said.

“The Book, yes,” Rebecca said. “This Book, and all books. Reading will make you free.”

At which point she passed her copy of the book to Liza, who picked up where the darker boy had left off.

“Exodus, thirteen, verses fourteen through sixteen,” Liza announced. “‘And when, in the future,’” she began, “‘your child asks you and says, “What is this happening here?” you shall say to your child [she looked up, and she stared directly at me but neither smiled nor acknowledged me in any other way], “With a strong hand God brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage. When Pharaoh’s [she said “ph-haro” and Rebecca corrected her] heart was hardened against letting us leave, God killed every first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of human to the first-born of beast. Therefore I now sacrifice to God every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first-born among my sons.” And so it shall be for a sign upon your hand and for frontlets between your eyes that with a strong hand God brought us out from Egypt…’”

I watched her all the while she read, noticing the way her lips scarcely moved, and the grace with which she held the Book. It was a remarkable event that I was witness to, the readings by these slaves on the subject of recovering the freedom of a people who had been in chains in Egypt. That it was my own people who had won their freedom charged the reading with seriousness, and that it was part of my family that owned these slaves who were reading about freedom made the event even more remarkable to me. And that I spent most of this hour studying the face and neck and collarbone and slender chest and arms of Liza made it a most memorable event as well.

As the hour ended I said to her as quietly as I could, “My cousin Rebecca has taught you well.”

She gave me a quick smile and said, “I have another teacher, also, a doctor.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to do or say, wondering, wondering, if Liza were my slave, would I set her free?