Song of Slaves in the Desert Read Online Free

history. And how can you have a story without history for it to blossom in? Read Shakespeare. We have not yet spawned our own.”
    “This doesn’t sound good,” I said.
    “It is neither good nor bad,” he said. “Think of it in this manner. We Jews do not yet have our savior, but one day the savior will come.”
    Though there was one American book he put forward. Which is how eventually I came into possession of a volume that I took to like a fish to water—the autobiography of our great Benjamin Franklin. Some boys worship their fathers, some worship themselves. I gave all my admiration to young Ben and hoped to live a life like his and emulate his rise from nothing to something.
    Such thoughts inspired me that fateful early morning some time after my formal tutoring had ended, and I threw myself out of the bed, dressed, and descended, carrying my bags, to the street level kitchen as quietly as I could for fear of waking my Aunt Isabelle, my late mother’s sister, who had become as much of a mother to me as any woman not my mother could.
    Red-head Marzy, our gimpy Old New York Dutch maid from a penniless family, was, of course, already awake and greeted me in the kitchen with the porridge.
    “I hope you have a good journey, sir,” she said, her narrow eyes downcast. I thought it was perhaps because of her feeling some illness, or some guilt at having missed a chore. Lord knows how little she was paid, but I knew how much she had to do!
    “Thank you, Marzy,” I said.
    “Oh, sir!” she said, and burst into a thunderstorm of tears and nose-blowing.
    “Oh, sir! Oh, sir!”
    This screech of a voice belonged to Jacobus, whom my father had brought home to me from the Indies in the time after my mother died. (My immediate progenitor had been born there, to parents who had emigrated from Holland to make a fortune on the island of Curaçao, and when he reached his majority, after marrying my mother, another Antilles Jew, had emigrated to New York City. His half-brother, of whom much more in a moment or so, had felt a similar inclination to settle in our Promised Land but sailed up only as far north as Charleston, which was and still is, despite its wanton rebelliousness, at this writing, part of our South. How sad, and at the same time provident, that he could not make the other few days’ journey north, because where he disembarked changed everything.)
    A louder noise up above, and I understood by the sound on the steps that it was my father coming down to meet me.
    “Good morning, sir,” I said.
    “Good morning to you, Nathaniel.”
    He was a trim, bent-shouldered man, about an inch shorter than my own height of six feet, with shaggy gray hair and eyes just then still red with sleep that made me wonder if some brass band in his dreams might have serenaded him as he mused about sending me off to do his business in the world, which I was about to do on this out-of-the-ordinary day.
    “Quite a morning,” he said as if reading my thoughts, while Marzy set his coffee on the table.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Yes, sir, yes sir!”
    He blinked into the light streaming in from the east side of our back kitchen.
    “Hush, Jacobus.” And then to me: “A good day to travel, it appears.”
    I nodded, and tried to put aside my anger. The week before, the two of us had sat in his study and quarreled, and this morning I was still bitter, for after having concluded my tutorials a month ago I was ready to set out on my grand tour before settling in as a junior partner in the family business of import-export. Instead my father informed me that first I must undertake a voyage to Charleston to make some inquiries into the affairs of his half-brother, who owned a plantation there.
    “A good fellow he is,” my father had said, his accent, the product of his childhood in the Caribbean (and the faintest hint of his father’s Dutch) set ever so slightly at an angle to our New York speech. “Though I have not seen him these many decades