Song of Slaves in the Desert by Alan Cheuse

Author:Alan Cheuse [Cheuse, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Jews, Slavery, Fiction, Literary, Plantations, Southern States, Historical, General, History
ISBN: 9781402242991
Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc
Published: 2011-02-28T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-one

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Half-light, Half-dark

The child Lyaza grew, and the doctor, who had been a fairly young man when she was born, found himself noticing certain signs in his own life that demonstrated to him that he, too, was growing older. As the child turned handsprings in front of Old Dou’s cabin, the doctor heard the noise of his own clacking joints. The child ate the simple meals provided for her by Old Dou and the field hands as though she were more breathing air than taking in food while his own digestion fell on hard times. He lost weight, his stomach growled and sometimes howled. When the girl reached a certain age she was allowed by Old Dou to wander about the house during the day and eat the scraps from the family’s table. Sometimes a guest at that table, the doctor admired the way the girl ate anything Dou or the cook handed to her.

This girl gave off light, life, stars in her eyes!

The doctor, who was married but without issue, felt her as a mild magnetic force. He watched her play, and when he stopped in at Old Dou’s cabin once or twice a month to see how the child was faring, he sometimes watched her with her eyes closed in sleep, dreaming of who knows what kind of freedoms that might set her apart from the daily round of the plantation. At times like this he recalled what when he first saw it he recognized as aberrant behavior, the young master’s baby-babbling over the infant girl. This little thing, wraith-like and so charming, also wandered through his thoughts in idle hours. So innocent she was of her condition, it gave him pause to consider how even a slave might seem to herself somehow free if she was not aware of her own perpetually indentured state. Perhaps all of us live this way, he considered, wrapped in chains and yet thinking ourselves free. And was that a kind of freedom after all, or just an illusion of living without chains?

Free men are often the worst, he decided, noticing with his clinical eye over the course of several months of visits to The Oaks that the plantation owner’s son appeared to have kept his attachment to the slave girl, which by this time the doctor found to be quite bizarre, prowling about the house, trying to look innocent even as he tracked little Lyaza, who often played alongside Dou while the woman worked. Over the course of several years his great interest, in the doctor’s eyes, clearly took an aberrant turn. It seemed to come out of nowhere, though the doctor knew that whatever physical abnormality he might discover in a patient, there was usually a cause buried somewhere deep in the man’s history. Although sometimes, as it might possibly could be with Jonathan Pereira, the illness remained inexplicable. Illness! Thus the doctor named it, based on his observations, but an illness that revealed itself as more spiritual or mental than physical.

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