The Book of Lost Friends(73)

The question haunted me, dredged up a few specters of my own, realities I’d never been willing to revisit, even to share them with Christopher, who’d had such an idyllic childhood, I guess I was afraid he’d look at me differently if he knew the whole truth about mine. When it finally did come out, he felt betrayed by my lack of candor in our relationship. The truth blew us apart.

It was late at night before I gave Nathan the old leather-bound Bible, with its records of births and deaths, the purchase and sale of human souls, the babies whose paternity was not listed because such things were not to be discussed. And the grid map of the enormous graveyard that now lay hidden beneath an orchard. Resting places unmarked other than possibly by fieldstone or a bit of wood slowly eaten away by wind and water and storms and seasons.

I left him alone with the words, went to clean up the dishes and put away the leftovers. I diddled around with drying the plates and refreshing our tea glasses while he murmured, to himself or to me, that it was so strange to see it all on paper.

“It’s a horrific thing to realize that your family bought and sold people,” he said, his head resting back against the wall, his fingers spread lightly alongside the writing of his ancestors, his face sober. “I never understood why Robin wanted to come here and live. Why she felt compelled to dig into it so much.”

“It’s history,” I pointed out. “I’m trying to impress upon my students that everyone has history. Just because we’re not always happy with what’s true doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know it. It’s how we learn. It’s how we do better in the future. Hopefully, anyway.”

In my own family, there were rumors that my father’s parents had held positions of note in Mussolini’s regime, had aided in the axis of evil that supported a quest for world domination at the expense of millions of lives. After the war, his family quietly faded back into the population, but they’d managed to keep much of their ill-gotten money. I never even considered investigating whether those rumors were true. I didn’t want to know.

I confessed all that to Nathan for some reason, as I returned to the living room and sat down beside him on the sofa. “I guess that makes me a hypocrite, since I’m forcing you into your family history,” I’d admitted. “My father and I were never close.”

We talked about parental relationships then—maybe both of us needed something else to focus on for a while. Maybe fathers lost early to death or divorce seemed like a more approachable topic than trafficking in human bondage and how such a thing could be continued generation after generation.

We pondered it as we thumbed through pages of the plantation’s daily logs, a journal of sorts detailing activities of business and life—gains and losses in financial terms, but also in much more human ways.

I leaned close, struggling to decipher the elaborate script noting the loss of a seven-year-old boy, along with his four-year-old brother and eleven-month-old sister. They’d been left locked in a slave cabin by their mother, Carlessa, a field hand purchased from a slave trader. It undoubtedly wasn’t her choice to report to the harvest at four in the morning to begin a day of cutting sugar cane. Presumably, she locked the cabin to keep the children from harm, to prevent wandering. Perhaps she checked on them when the gang broke at midday. Perhaps she gave her seven-year-old strict instruction on how to look after his younger siblings. Perhaps she nursed almost one-year-old Athene before hastily settling the baby down for a nap. Perhaps she stood on the doorstep, worried, weary, afraid, agonizing as any mother would. Maybe she noticed the chill in the room, and said to her seven-year-old son, “You just get you a blanket, and you and Brother wrap up. If Athene wakes, you walk her round, play with her some. I’ll be back when dark comes.”

Perhaps the last instruction she gave him was, “Don’t you try to light that fire, now. You hear me?”

But he did.

Carlessa’s children, all three of them, were taken from her that day.

Their horrific fate is recorded in the journal. It ends with a notation, written by a master or a mistress or a hired overseer—the handwriting varies, making it evident that the responsibility for keeping records was shared.

November 7, 1858. To be remembered as a cruel day. Fire at the quarters. And these three taken from us.

Those words, a cruel day, were left to interpretation. Were they an indication of the writer’s remorse, sitting at the desk, pen in hand, the faint scents of ash and soot clinging to skin and hair and the fibers of clothing?

Or were they an abdication of responsibility for the circumstances that ended three young lives? The day was cruel, not the practice of holding human beings as prisoners, of forcing women to leave their children inadequately tended while they labored, unpaid, to fatten the coffers of wealthy men.

The children’s burials were mentioned that same week, but merely in matter-of-fact terms to document the event.

The hour grew later and later as Nathan and I read through the daily logs, sitting side by side on the sofa, our shins touching, our fingers crossing each other’s as we struggled to make out notations that time was slowly bleaching away.

I try to recall the rest, now as I wake, uncertain how I ended up across the room in the recliner asleep.

“What…what time is it?” I croak in a drowsy voice, and sit up and glance toward the window.

Nathan lifts his chin—perhaps he was dozing, too—and looks my way. His eyes are red and tired. His hair disheveled. I wonder if he has slept even a little. At some point, he did slip off his shoes at least, make himself comfortable. He’s taken the liberty of borrowing a stack of blank paper from my school supplies. Several sheets of notes lie on my coffee table.