Authors: Richard Zimler
Midnight stayed by the ailing woman’s side for more than two months, from her fifth to seventh month of pregnancy, treating her with essences and teas. Though he was unable to save her, he successfully delivered the baby, a boy. For this, the chief agreed to grant him safe passage out of slave territory.
First, however, Midnight insisted on rescuing his daughter. Wearing Indian garb, he was escorted back to River Bend by a party of twelve warriors. A scout of mixed black and Creek blood, who spoke fine English, stole into the plantation one evening and asked after Morri. This was the man who had been described to her as a mulatto.
As Master Edward had intended, the scout learned that Morri had died recently of illness. Midnight himself insisted on seeing her grave. Fooled by her wooden marker into believing that she was truly dead, possibly killed by Master Edward as revenge, he had the Indians take him beyond the borders of slavery, far into the wilderness that lay west of the Arkansas Territory. He no longer wished to live in the United States.
Midnight spent the next four years following the rains and the lightning in the mountains and deserts of the American
Southwest
, living as the Bushmen had for millennia.
“I went slow,” he told us. He smiled down at his daughter and caressed her hair. “And I grieved for my Morri in silence, without speaking for many months. But I went far. Then Mantis joined me, and together we rode between the toes of Eland, and it was very, very good.”
In the spring of 1825, longing again for companionship, he made his way to a ramshackle settlement of traders, trappers, and
prospectors some forty miles west of Independence, Missouri, along the Santa Fe Trail. A Jewish hunter and fur trapper from Cincinnati named Mordecai Levi was astounded and pleased by his knowledge of Torah stories and invited him along on his excursions. Midnight had been living with Levi in a wooden cabin for four months when the old adventurer noticed a curious announcement in a copy of the
Cincinnati
Gazette
sent to him by his elder sister. He had heard the Bushman greeting many times –
We
saw
you
from
afar
and
we
are
dying
of
hunger
–
and knew immediately that an advertisement including these words could only have been intended for Midnight. He showed him the newspaper.
“You are a clever lad,” said the Bushman to me now, patting me on the knee and grinning. “I understood quickly-quickly just what you meant by the beautiful feather. I began walking that very day.”
“You walked the whole way here?” Mama asked.
“Indeed,” he said, grinning.
“It must be more than a thousand miles. In how many months?”
“Three. I walked slowly because the land is very, very
beautiful
and I knew that Morri was safe with John. As always, Mantis kept repeating to me, ‘Go slow.’” He laughed. “And I did. I wasn’t about to risk another twenty years of troubles getting here.”
*
Neither Midnight nor I could sleep that first night of reunion, so we sat together long after the others had gone to bed. When I asked him about his experiences as a slave, he considered his words for a long time.
“It’s something like a stone a day, John,” he finally said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t think I can explain all it meant to me, but for now I’ll just tell you this: The master hands you a stone every day, and you take each one from him and put it in your pocket. You do it very, very carefully, because you don’t want to make him angry.” Midnight pretended to receive a stone, then placed it
in my palm. “But, John, pretty soon you run out of pockets. And you aren’t allowed to put them down, so what do you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You start swallowing the stones. Soon your stomach gets all filled up and you start feeling sick, so you lie down.” He rubbed his belly. “Just one day of rest, you think, and everything will be better. But the master keeps on handing you stones. Because he’s got his money invested in you and he’s decided he doesn’t want to wait even one day for you to get your strength back. You say no, because you think you can. So he whips you, which makes you confused-confused, since you don’t know how to live a life where you can’t decide anything. Not even Mantis can tell you how to do that. After a few months your spirit is so heavy with stones that it can no longer even stand up. So, being kind, you lie your spirit down. And you let it be covered by the stones, till it can’t breathe or move.”
“So you’re buried alive,” I said.
“That’s right, John, but only one stone at a time.”
*
When, later that night, I told Midnight that his being betrayed by my father seemed to make him different from the other slaves and his imprisonment even more cruel, he replied, “No, John, that’s not the way it was. I was exactly the same as them. Every slave has been betrayed. By his chief in Africa, who sold him for a few yards of cloth or a musket. By the white men who shackled him and brought him across the sea in the belly of their ship. By the plantation owners who purchased him and set him to work in the fields.” He spread his hands wide, then brought them together as though to gather in the entire world. “Even by this age we are living in, which permits these things to happen.”
“Is that why you do not hate my father? Why you can forgive him?”
“In part, though
forgive
is not the right word.”
“What is, then?”
He made clicking noises in his own language, which made me frown.
“John, you’ve always wanted clear answers, and sometimes
there aren’t any.” He grinned, patting my leg. “Your father did not only betray me, but all the world – all men and women and creatures of the forest – even himself. And Mantis most of all. But it was only possible because of forces and powers that went far beyond him. It took me years to see that clearly and to see my own betrayal of him in that light as well. You wish, I think, to hear that I despised him. I shall not disappoint you – I did, and for many years. But I also remembered him fondly. That made what took place between us even harder to live with.” He drew in deeply on his pipe. “We have all paid for our errors, over many years, and now I only wish your dear father were still alive. What a good man he was and how wonderful it would be to see him!”
He left me speechless, and when he smiled at me reassuringly, I knew he was telling me that we would never need to speak of these things again. I knew I would forever owe him a great debt for that alone.
Yet his insights soon turned my thoughts to how Violeta had also been betrayed by the world. His eyes, squinting, began probing me for the cause of my sudden distance, and I told him how everything had gone wrong between us. I tried not to sound heartbroken, but he detected it plainly enough and told me a story I’d never heard before:
“Once,” he said, “there was a shepherd in the north of Portugal who took his flock to the greenest pastures he could find. At night he slept in a wee stone hut nearby. But in the morning, he discovered that one of the sheep had been shorn. He was not happy. And he was very, very bewildered. The next night, the same thing happened.”
I got off my chair then and sat on my haunches to listen more comfortably to his tale. Midnight did the same. We faced each other, only a few feet apart. I felt as though we were in his desert homeland and would never be separated again.
“The shepherd was furious. Being clever, he remained awake on the third night and watched the Women of the Sky descend from the stars along a cord they’d woven from the air. He saw them grab one of the sheep and take shears to her coat.
Whereupon
he jumped out from his hiding place and ran after them till he had caught the loveliest maiden of all. He took her as his wife.
And from that moment on, he had no more trouble from the Women of the Sky.”
“He must have had some or you wouldn’t be telling me this,” I said with a laugh.
“Thank you, John, for pointing that out,” he replied, his eyes radiating joy.
“Now, there was only one problem,” he resumed. “His wife was in possession of a beautiful woven basket, and he could see nothing of its contents because of the lid. Before she would agree to marry him, she obliged him to promise that he’d never lift the lid and peer inside – at least until she had given him permission to do so.” Midnight shook his fist at me. “She warned him that if he were to disobey her wishes, a terrible destiny might await them both. Yet as the summer passed, the need to know what was inside made him restless. One day when his wife was not at home, he – ”
“He removed the lid,” I said.
The Bushman pursed his lips comically, wrinkled his nose, and gazed around as though fearing watchful eyes. Then, after peering inside his imaginary basket, he breathed in longer than seemed possible on his pipe, as though to inhale the words of the story. Wisps of smoke curled from his nose and ears.
“When his wife returned,” Midnight said, “she knew what her husband had done. She began to cry, accusing him of having looked inside the basket.
“The shepherd said to her, ‘How silly you are to shed tears over such a trifle. There was nothing at all in the basket. It was empty as can be.’
“‘What do you mean, empty?’ his wife said.
“‘That is precisely-precisely what I mean. There was nothing there.’”
Midnight clapped his hands together, so that I jumped. “And that, John,” he said, “was the very last word the shepherd ever spoke to his wife, for she reached up into the descending sunset of red and gold, took the end of a heavenly cord, and climbed back into the sky.”
“And …?” I asked.
“And nothing.” He grinned.
“That’s it?”
“Yes, that’s the end.”
While I struggled to work out what it meant, he tapped the floor between us with his foot. “John, do you know why she went away?”
“To punish him for his curiosity?”
“No, no, no,” he scoffed, twisting his lips into a frown. “That is the Jewish story of Adam and Eve. This is a Bushman story.”
When I shook my head, he said, “Not because he had broken his promise. Nor because of his curiosity. The Woman of the Sky was aware of our nature and had expected him to look, of course. Just like the God of the Torah always expects Adam and Eve to take the apple he leaves for them. No, the Woman of the Sky turned her back on the shepherd because he had found the basket empty and laughed.”
“But it
was
empty.”
“No, in point of fact, the basket was filled with the
beautiful-beautiful
things of the sky, which she had placed there for them both. The shepherd simply did not see them.”
Midnight made a circle in the air with his hand. “John, Mantis was once lost,” he continued. “And he walked all over the African desert to try to find his home. Finally, exhausted after many years, he gave up. It was only then he recognized his tree and his leaf.”
“Midnight,” I begged, “I am out of practice, so will you please tell me what you mean or I shall scream and wake the entire household.”
He pointed two fingers at me. “The lid of the basket is your eyes. When I look inside, I see beautiful-beautiful things – all that you have put there in your life. Even the Violeta you knew as a lad is there. She is there for you whenever you want her. But the secret is, she cannot come out into this world. Her destiny is to remain only inside you. In fact, whenever you try to make her come out, she dies.”
*
The next day, I told this story to Mama. I think it put her in the mood to speak to me of Midnight for the first time. But before
that, she played the second movement of Beethoven’s “
Appassionata
Sonata” with incomparable fragility and thoughtfulness, as though she were creating a new and delicate form of life with the notes – an ethereal being made of music.
I sat down next to her to turn the pages. When she was finished, I was so overwhelmed that I told her she was a genius. She laughed. “John, you are sweet, but you have mistaken me for Mr. Beethoven.”
“No, Mama, you’re wrong. His genius has come through you to me, so there is no difference.”
Her eyes moistened and she said, “That is, without doubt, the nicest thing anyone has ever told me. You know, sometimes I think if we just listened to Mr. Beethoven and Mr. Mozart a little bit more, things would be so much better. But we don’t really hear what they want to tell us. Not really.” She brushed some hair off my brow. “I don’t think I knew what they were saying until I was your age at least.”
“And what is it they’re saying, Mama?”
“It’s a secret,” she whispered, grinning girlishly.
“I’ll not tell a soul, I promise.”
“Well, John, I’ll only tell
you,
since the others would think me mad. All the great composers are telling us with their chords and melodies – and even the silences between their notes – that life is long, but not nearly as long as we first believe. It’s going to be much harder than we ever imagined too, so we must make as much beauty as we can while we are here and help all the people we love to do the same. We must listen to one another as we would listen to their music too – that’s very, very important. And we must have the courage to fight against anything that would compromise our own beauty or in any way do it harm. All the truly great composers are preparing us for living correctly, and giving us encouragement to go on with our lives as best we can, even if we’ve made the most unforgivable errors – like me and Midnight and your father.”
I wiped away tears, explaining, “It’s just that with Midnight here … and what you just said …”
“Yes, we’ve had a hard time of it, all of us. But we’ve been very lucky too. You know, it occurs to me more and more that despite
all the death we’ve known, we’ve had a chance to meet the most wonderful people – and to be with one another, of course. And now, with Midnight back, it is as though we can finally close an old rusted door behind us and step ahead together into the future, whatever it brings us. That was your doing, John. Thank you. I’m enormously proud of what you’ve accomplished.”