Chapter Fifty-five
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What is a Journey?
I began in Africa, on the slopes of a young volcano—before this I have no recollection—a creature moving slowly but surely on my own two feet, herding my child before me as overhead the ash began to rain down on us, and we kept moving, yes, moving across the swampy plain. We cried out to our gods, and our gods called out to us. One was fire, the other thunder. Some of us stopped on the plain where the ash stopped and some of us kept going, stopping only when we reached the forest and we lived in the desert for a long time and they lived there a long time in the forest, until hateful men who worshiped other gods came and swept us up in their nets and tied us with their ropes—oh, ropes made from plants we ourselves had grown!—and dragged us south and then north, then west, where we and our children built a city. The city baked in the heat, and one day we sailed down river to escape it, finding ourselves in the great forest, and stolen from there next we stood at ocean-side, our bodies chained to each other. How we survived that passage over water I do not know. Many many perished.
And that is our history in a paragraph!
Chapter Fifty-six
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A week passed since that extraordinary night, and I went about my business of taking long days in the fields stooping with the field hands as they bent themselves over the burgeoning stalks of rice—trying to pay close attention to what Isaac, armed with a short hoe and a long knife, instructed me about, the nature of the plant, the particular features of the stalk, the buds of kernels. The rice was nearing maturity—I was beginning to acquire enough expertise to notice the plumping of the kernels and the subtle transformation of shading from pale white to light green to thickest green—but I was so hot in my coat, stripping it away, steeped in sweat like a river I might have waded in up to my chin, and my head swelled up with reckless thoughts.
“Isaac,” I said, “how can you work like this? The heat is so abominable.”
“Massa,” he said with a laugh, “I like this. It makes me think, when I close my eyes, I am home in Africa, where my fathers came from.”
“Your fathers?”
“My father’s father’s father. Otherwise, they been here a long time.”
“But you still have your protection against the heat?”
“I don’t have protection. Difference is, I know I have to work here. You go home after the rice harvest.”
“You heard that I was staying until then?”
“You hear things around the plantation,” Isaac said.
We moved along, up to our ankles in salty-tinged water, the long row of rice plants.
“What kind of things?”
“Things, massa, things.”
“You must hate me for what I do,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Hate you, massa?” Isaac gave me a quizzical look, and if I had not been disturbed about what I had just thought I had made known, it might have amused me, this slave arching an eyebrow and taking the measure of me as though we were talking together on the street in Manhattan instead of in a flooded rice field in South Carolina.
“I don’t hate you, massa,” he said.
“But you know what I am doing?” I said this: part confession, part query, a search for approval, and a small part braggadocio. I said this: because a man cannot live too long without company of a confidante, someone, a friend, against whose opinion he can test his actions. I had not understood this before I left New York and arrived in Charleston, but I certainly understood it now.
“What you doing, massa? Walking in the water with Isaac.”
“Don’t be coy, Isaac.”
“I don’t know what that is—‘coy,’ massa—so I couldn’t be it.”
“I thought you were able to read.”
“Yes, but I never read that word.”
“Let me be frank, Isaac, I have only been here a short time but I know that a pin doesn’t drop somewhere on the plantation that you people don’t hear it.”
“Us people?”
“You slaves.”
“Uh-huh, massa,” he said. “Well, I suppose that’s true.” He stopped walking, and I stopped, and he plucked a rice stalk and held it up before his nose, testing it in the light. “You talking about—?” He stopped his work and raised his little hoe as though it were a weapon.
“You know, Isaac,” I said, “it is damned difficult for me to believe that I am having this conversation.”
“With a slave?”
He shook his head.
“Well,” he said, “you got to think of slaves same way you think about any people. Some of us smart, some of us quick, some of us slow. Now that Ms. Rebecca helping us to read we can make a good conversation. You want to conversate about the Bible? I can conversate about how Moses led the Children of Israel out of the land of bondage and out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.” He cocked his head in the direction of the plantation house and said, “And how Samson brought down the temple.”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
“You are doing well to ‘conversate,’” I said.
“You doing well in the field here,” he said. “And other places.”
“You…you are not angry?”
“Angry? Why should I be angry?”
“Angry at me.”
“Angry at you, massa?”
I don’t think that any white man had ever spoken to him in this way, because he gave me a look that a man might give to a talking stone or a passing cloud that rained down coins.
And then I said the next thing, the final thing, that could only have caused him great consternation. And me, also. Because I was as much delivering the news to myself as to him.
“Isaac,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, “I…I am in love with her.”