Chapter Ninety
________________________
But I was not yet a free man, and had only a few inklings of what I might become when I saw the sign for the first time. There it was, set into the brick façade of a building on a little lane just off Wall Street, the sign I had been looking for.
PEREIRA AND SONS, IMPORT-EXPORT
I had pictured this sign in my mind ever since I boarded the train in San Francisco and headed east, the sign bearing the name that I had thought about on and off for a number of years.
How many times had I rehearsed my entrance! Touching a hand to my head and a finger to my tie, adjusting my vest, pulling my coat just so (with my other hand in my pocket feeling the smoothness and the striations of that relic of a stone, by all rational standards a legacy seemingly impossible to have been transmitted down along all these centuries, yet here it was, cool and smooth to my touch), I stepped into the office, where I would say to a welcoming receptionist that I had come to see Mr. Nathaniel Pereira.
There was no one to greet me. The large room smelled of tobacco smoke and eastern spices and the chill remnant of a morning in March and the faintest touch of tar. On the walls hung photographs of sailing ships in various harbors, one of which I recognized as our own, another which I believed was Honolulu, and others I could not recognize except for the exotic composition of the smaller boats—junks, canoes, mainly—that surrounded the larger vessels.
My eye came to rest on the photographic portrait just at the end of the row of pictures of ships.
The uniformed man, in middle-age, of medium height, posed, unsmiling, in front of a row of tents which stretched to the horizon.
My chest tightened.
“May I help you?”
The voice struck me also in a physical way, and I turned to the man, a fellow the same height and same face as the officer in the photograph, without the cast of age. But when I tried to speak I merely let out a cough.
“Sir?” the man said. “I am Emmanuel Pereira, may I be of some assistance?”
I took a step toward him, then stopped, trying to catch my breath. I had rehearsed this part also.
“Y-yes,” I said, “I am happy to meet you.” I paused and took another breath. And another. “I am your brother.”
Emmanuel took a moment, inclining his head a tad toward me, taking in my color and my clothes, my long straight hair, the blue-green of my eyes.
“Well, well,” he said at last. “I…Father had always hoped…”
“He told you about me?”
“He wrote a recollection of his life. He wrote about…your mother…”
“You use the past tense, sir. That means that he is deceased?”
Emmanuel nodded, slowly, sadly, tilting his body a little to the right.
“Yes, I am afraid that is so. A long while ago. He volunteered at the start of the war, and he died in his very first battle.” A flicker of emotion passed across his face. “Our mother is likewise deceased. After a long illness.”
Something weighty, like a ship’s anchor, seemed to fall within me the entire length of my body.
“And mine as well.” I extended him a hand. “And so, my condolences to us all…”
Emmanuel took my hand. “But, well, my…brother!”
“Ishmael,” I said, taking his hand. “Ishmael Stone.”
We embraced firmly, in manly fashion. My brother smelled of the salt air of the harbor and tar from the planks—clearly he was an import-export sort of fellow, and if he looked nothing like me at first, well, then, I figured, it had to be because I just had not looked long and hard enough at him. (Who knew, what after my transcontinental train trip, what I smelled like!)
“Ishmael,” he said when in the next few moments we stood back from each other. “The name is Biblical.”
“Yes,” I said, the rest of the words tumbling from my lips, “but not what you think. My mother may have been born a slave, but she was from childhood a voracious reader, taught by a caring doctor who attended to the slaves on the plantation where she grew up. On her way west, in the part of her trip that she made by wagon—and how that happened I can tell you one day if you are interested, I can tell you all about her journey, because so much of it was extraordinary, and dangerous, and in many ways miraculous—well, but she found a copy of a book, a novel about whaling—”
“A novel about whaling?”
“Yes, and the narrator, because there is a narrator, one of the sailors on this ship that goes on a truly dangerous voyage, is named Ishmael. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is how the book opens. I’ve long since read it myself, of course.”
“So, Ishmael,” my brother said, “well, I must read that book too.”
“It is a fine book,” I said. “And a truly momentous American story.”
“Reading is not my first interest,” my brother said. “Business and family always stand in the way. But I always have hopes for the time for it.”
“Good,” I said “Good, good.”
We began to talk, and he took me home with him that evening and I met the rest of the family, wife, children, step-mother. I could scarcely breathe for the sentiment I felt on meeting them and getting to know them. Whereas growing up in San Francisco where not many with my shade of skin walked the streets and so I felt constantly goggled at and pointed to, here in New York where many descendants of slaves and freemen both resided, I could only draw attention to myself by shouting in the street—which I did not do, of course—or by walking into a family gathering for the first time where someone announced that I was a long-lost brother-in-law or brother or uncle or all of these. They lavished much initial affection on me, and I tried to reciprocate as best I could, only child that I was.
Emmanuel raised a glass to me at dinner that first night.
“To my long-lost half-brother,” he said. And then he stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “No, no, no, to my long-lost, and now found, brother!”
With tears in my eyes I reciprocated. And then added:
“To our father.”
“To father—grandfather—all…” Family voices in celebration rang through the air.
“And to my mother,” I said. “Whom I only wish you might have known.”
“To your mother!” Again the voices in tribute rang through the air.
I had lived alone since my mother’s death, and traveled alone, but now my singular state was fast disappearing. The next day I met two more long-lost brothers of mine, one of them a physician and the other also a partner in the family business.
They took me in, fed me, clasped my hands, kissed me on the cheeks, gave me a bed. After all of my mother’s stories about life on the plantation I felt now that the Pereiras had somehow saved me from regarding family life as a pit of desolation and woe and enslavement and murder. I was, though, only beginning to learn about this side of where I came from, beginning with the end.
On a long walk along the wharves in the deep salt steep of a Sunday afternoon my brother Emmanuel described to me our father’s demise.
“In the first wave of battle, apparently, at Bull Run.”
I sighed, breathed in, breathed out.
“I am very sorry that I will not be able to meet him.”
“I am, too,” my brother said.
“The funeral must have been difficult for all,” I said.
“Yes, yes.”
He described to me the woe spread all around, and the weeping and wailing. And the wake that followed.
“It is, I believe,” Emmanuel said, “so much worse for us Jews than for the Gentiles. They believe in an afterlife, whereas we do not.” He sighed deeply and touched a hand to my shoulder. “Were you raised as a Jew or a Gentile?”
“Such as I was raised,” I said, “I would have to call myself an enlightened pagan, if I am at all enlightened.”
“Our father was not all that much for his religion.”
“Jews believe in doing good deeds, do they not?”
“They do,” my brother said.
“Our father did a great deed indeed,” I said, with a wink, “in helping my mother to become free.”
“Yes, yes, we have read of it.”
“Have you? How?”
He then told me about our father’s memoir, a copy of which he handed to me immediately upon our return to the house.
“You are named after a character in a novel,” he said. “Perhaps you can tell us if this story is worth preserving beyond the immediate family circle.”
I found myself extremely excited to hold my father’s narrative in my hands. A large dark continent—my own history—lay before me, ready for me to explore.
After some weeks of staying at Emmanuel’s I found my own apartment and went to work for the family enterprise—“as our father would have wanted it,” Emmanuel said. By that time I had read the memoir once, and had begun it again, this time adding my own chapters and interpolations based on the stories my mother had told me—half-chanting sometimes, half-singing, always intense and in her heart-deep and serious way of loving the world even in its most awful and difficult moments, moments sometimes that added together to make years, always speaking what she took to be the truth. Free and educated and standing near the beginning of a grand new American century, of course I wanted see myself as part of this family and to make my way in the world. That was when it came to me, what I must do first to find an answer that would ease my curious heart.
***
The night before I departed, my brother and I—strangers, still, but hoping to know each other in some deeper way some day—took a walk along the piers on the East River, lost in thoughts of our father, and breathing in the stink of salt-fish, and the somehow annealing odor of tar and smoke.
At one point, we stopped under a lamp and he reached into his pocket and handed me a watch.
“This was Father’s,” he said, “and our grandfather’s before that. I would like you to have it.”
Even though I resembled a grown man, I wept a small trickle of tears as I took the gift from him, accepting the generosity of his legacy, which he now made mine. And that night as I wound the timepiece I wondered at the wonder in my heart, that so many turns and twists of feet and breath, so many passages of mind and time, so much evil and so much good had to transpire, for two brothers to be standing here in such a tableau as this, with yours truly now possessing both stone and watch.
The heart, old instrument, wonders, yes, and aches, the heart yearns, mourns, cries, but above all else the heart hopes and longs to be free, even as the ground we tread on, so unsteady where I grew up, and perhaps where you live, too, trembles beneath our feet. Oddly enough, a faint tremor rattled Manhattan—oh, the earth everywhere unstable!—the morning I boarded the ship for Africa, my hand in my pocket, stone in my hand as I began my voyage eastward, hoping that I might find the last, or, with luck, perhaps some of the first pieces of the truth of Eliza’s life—truth, ah, the truth, ever-changing and yet remaining so steady, at least in the distance, that we follow it the way sailing ships follow certain stars to keep themselves on course in calm seas and stormy.