also in his eyebrows. Our glances met for a moment, and I saw in his despair that he knew he was dying.
Rushing ahead, I found a churchyard where I could rest for a while. Sitting among those headstones, I could not understand how any of us had a right to live while abominations such as I had just witnessed were allowed to happen.
I took off Daniel’s talisman and read it aloud to myself:
Closing my eyes, I then spoke one of two protective prayers Benjamin had taught me, imagining myself reflected in the silver eyes of Moses. My old friend had told me that we were — all of us — his
Then I repeated — ten times, slowly — the other prayer that he’d given me. And I whispered a verse I’d recently read in Ezekiel:
I ended with two Hebrew words:
I could not say what the purpose of any of this was, but it was all I had to help me in these dark moments. None of what I spoke or did calmed me much or cheered me. Cold sweat was cascading down my brow, and I felt that I was being emptied of all that made me who I was.
But I did not believe that an immediate lessening of my anguish was the point. For that, once I could stand, I took my disheveled self to a tavern, where I downed several ounces of a reasonable whiskey and smoked greedily at a pipe that I pulled from its hook on the wall. After shuffling back to my hotel, I washed my face, collapsed facedown in bed, and pretended I was a boy in Porto, with Fanny by my side. Breathing together, my arm around her belly, we drifted off to sleep.
XLIII
I awoke in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, but I dared not open my window to allow the sea breeze to sweep inside lest the mosquitoes follow suit. I lay naked on my bed, imagining Midnight as he must have arrived in Alexandria and then Charleston. Manacled and beaten, he was shouting my name. He could not have been prepared for the otherness of this world, where they knew nothing of the First People nor of the hunters that rose into the sky as stars. Hyena had taken Charleston and made it his own.
Here in America, he must have clung to silence as a shipwrecked man to his island. I recalled how, in confiding his stories to me, he had prevailed upon me to keep several of them secret. This had been owing to his belief that his own health, as well as that of his people, would be put in grave peril if such tales fell into the hands of evil-minded people.
Silence must have become his only hope and power. He had made himself mute.
The next morning, I made up my mind to question every apothecary in Charleston and nearby towns in the hopes that Midnight had at some time been permitted by his master to pay one or more of them a visit. Though none of the first people I spoke to could help me, several clerks advised me to stop by at Apothecaries Hall, the most well-known dispensary in the city. I could not miss it, they said, because it had a large mortar and pestle painted on its facade.
I reached there near noon and waited for over an hour to speak to the proprietor, an elderly man with a kind face and voice named Jacob LaRosa, who questioned me at length. To my solemn disappointment, he told me that he had never met such a man. Hearing a catch in his voice that I took for a sign of mixed emotions, I begged him to be truthful with me, as this was the most important mission of my life. He assured me he had never met the Negro whose drawing I’d shown him. I did not believe him, but I could do nothing.
On my third day in the city, Mrs. Robichaux, who owned the boardinghouse where I was staying, questioned me about my Portuguese heritage over breakfast.
“Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had kin in Charleston, sir!” she exclaimed.
“Excuse me?”
“Some of the Jews of Charleston are able to speak Portuguese. I have been told that they come from that country.”
She explained that there were hundreds of Jews in Charleston and that their church, as she called it, was on Hassell Street.
I ran most of the way there and found the Beth Elohim Synagogue to be an impressive structure in the Georgian style, surrounded by a metal fence of upraised pikes with a high ironwork gate.
The gate was open when I arrived, and a wizened old man wearing a large dark hat and a prayer shawl answered the door. His name was Hartwig Rosenberg and he was the hazan, responsible for singing the liturgy. He was suspicious of my motives until I mentioned that I, too, was a Jew.
Handing me a wide-brimmed hat, he led me into the synagogue proper. The shafts of light, spangled dust, and echoing of our footsteps afforded me the first moments of peace I’d experienced since arriving in Charleston. I did not feel alone at all; there were people here who’d understand me — and sympathize with Midnight’s plight.
To my questions, Mr. Rosenberg explained that there was no one by the name of Zarco in Charleston, but there were at least two hundred Jews of Portuguese descent. When he told me what the most common names were, I learned there was even one Pereira, which had been Grandmother Rosa’s maiden name. The family here spelled it Perrera.
What wonderful luck, I thought, as though entering through a gate of fellowship long locked to me. Yet when I explained my mission to the hazan, I was disheartened to learn that there were many slaveholders among the congregation. The community’s elders — in keeping with the laws and traditions of the Christian majority — saw nothing wrong with the practice, as long as the Negroes were treated with respect. As to what might constitute respect, I asked if it might be the removal of only four toes from a
His harsh and condescending manner left me furious. “So you not only wish to betray the spirit of Exodus, sir, but also to become honorary Christians? Is that what you are telling me?”
“Very clever, Mr. Stewart, except that you do not live here and therefore do not know the pressures we are under. If you’ll permit me, you might read the Torah again. If you do, you’ll see that the survival of our people is its most important theme. While I serve our community, we shall not betray it.”
Though I would have dearly liked to continue this quarrel, I said nothing more about my feelings, since I needed his help. I could fairly hear Mama saying,
I even apologized for my rashness, though I admit I regretted doing so as soon as I had spoken.
The hazan, pacified now, promised me he would ask the congregation this Friday night if anyone had seen or heard of my friend. “Perhaps,” he said, smiling to ease the awkwardness between us, “one of them even owns him. Wouldn’t that be good fortune?”
“Aye, good fortune, indeed,” I replied, unable to disguise my disgust.
I left Beth Elohim armed with Mr. Perrera’s home address and place of daily business. He apparently owned a clothing shop on Meeting Street, not two blocks away, and lived just outside the city. He, too, was a slave- owner.
On leaving the synagogue, I knew now that Midnight would not even have been able to appeal to the Jews for help. Charleston must have seemed to him a desert of the spirit. If he was still alive, where could he have found a place in this world to be himself?
When I reached Isaac Perrera’s clothing shop, I was led to an office at the back, where an olive-
