“Emma send me over special. She be glad to get her hands on the cottonade,” says Noby to Jackson.
“The bolt finally come in,” says Jackson. “Tell me how much you want and I cut it for you.”
“Four yards plenty enough. Sorry can’t be more.”
“Don’t worry. Amy got her eye on using some for new curtains, and I be able to sell the rest to somebody else sooner or later.” Jackson measures out the cloth, snips the end to get it started, and tears the fabric in a straight line. “This the last thing before I clear out your way and close up the store,” he says. “Leave you to your lodge brothers.”
“Still don’t know why you can’t join us, Jackson. There’s a place for you with the Freemasons. Always has been.” Noby can’t understand it. Jackson hung back for years, but as soon as he buried his father five years ago, he seemed to come out beyond his own family and embrace the community, though he stops short of joining the colored Freemasons.
“Nothing wrong with the Masons. Just not my nature to throw in with another group. You free to use the commissary when you need, long as it don’t interfere with store business or the school. My days is pretty full already. Right now I’m going around to Widow Cruikshank’s, see what she got for us. She holding on to a handful of books and some old supplies and odds and ends they done with at the white school, getting ready to throw out. May be better than what we using now.”
“I’d offer company, but David’s horse come up lame, and I promised to fetch him for the meeting tonight,” Noby says. “I got to get home directly and come back.”
“Just as well. Better I go to Widow Cruikshank’s alone. She know me. Too many of us standing in her yard, she may up and change her mind about giving anything away.” Jackson folds the cottonade up for Noby into a neat square and begins to tidy the counter. “So, how you and David doing?”
“Been better,” Noby says. “The drought last year almost wipe us out, put us way back, and Big Hansom can’t wait much more for some kind of settlement.”
“This a hard time for sure, for most everybody in The Bottom. David in just last week for a new saddle, but not too many spending.”
“Well,” Noby says, at a loss to come up with anything else, “hope Widow Cruikshank come through for the school.”
“Just pull the door tight when your meeting done tonight,” says Jackson.
After the Freemason meeting, Noby Smith and his brother David leave the colored get-together of men in the commissary and ride home in the same wagon. The trip in was a disappointment. David talked nonstop about his plans for expanding the farm and the best places to find a new work pony, as if he knew a pausing breath would open the door for the discussion Noby really wanted. Each time Noby tried to bring the conversation around to their debt and their precarious position, David changed the subject. During the long meeting, Noby could barely focus on the rituals as their predicament relentlessly sifted through his mind.
He decides to start slow. “We making progress at tonight’s meeting,” Noby begins. “Eight solid, God-fearing, proper men committed so far.”
David agrees. “Our own lodge of Masons.” The night is still sticky and warm, but the slight wind created by the wagon’s bumpy movement provides a small bit of relief. “May be Jackson Tademy let us use his commissary for the meeting, but it a slap in our face he don’t join,” says David. “Not like we ask just anybody, only God-fearing family men, leaders in the community. We do like the whites, help each other. May be Jackson think he too good, making money off his neighbors. Wasn’t so long ago we help him put up that store. That the least he owe us, holding our meetings there.”
“He don’t owe us nothing of the kind for a few hours’ work,” snaps Noby. Already his brother has him riled, before he has even initiated the main topic. Noby settles himself down. “Jackson Tademy the one take the risk running the store, bring in stock don’t know when it gonna sell, and he got a right to earn a little something off it. Make everybody’s life in The Bottom easier, not having to run off to Colfax so regular. If Jackson don’t want to join up with the colored Free-masons, he decide that for himself. He be my friend regardless. And I see you happy to send your children to colored school there.”
“Still,” says David, “we the leadership. He got a responsibility.”
Noby doesn’t respond, slows the horse’s pace slightly. He doesn’t want to get back to the farm prematurely, before he has a chance to confront his brother.
“We got to talk about the land, David. How we pay Hansom Brisco back? Almost three hundred acres’ worth of debt now.”
“Wasn’t me sign no note,” says David.
“You and me in this together. We brothers.” The horse steadily clip-clops toward home, a familiar route, but Noby keeps his eyes on the road ahead, unwilling to turn and look in David’s face. “Hansom need us to repay the loan, at least part. We got to sell off some land if we can. At least half to save the farms.”
“You sell whatever you want of your part, Brother,” says David. “My part don’t got no debt on it.”
“That only on paper,” says Noby. “We both responsible for the debt, equal.”
“Not how I see it,” says David.
Noby finally pulls up the reins, stops the wagon, and stares his brother full in the face. David’s cool gray eyes reflect no emotion. “You willing to cheat your own brother? You ready to sit by and watch me sell off the old homestead where our father put his sweat, so’s you can keep all the other acres in your name?”
“Seem to me the choice of the homestead was made by your father a long time ago.” The way David lays emphasis on whose father they’re talking about is contemptuous. “Your father pick you over me every time, every year of your life, always climbing his way over me to get to you. I learn early to take care of myself, and you best learn the same. Israel Smith ain’t here to protect you now.”
“Why we talking this way? What Papa got to do with it? He was your father too.”
David fixes Noby in a steely stare, and the coolness of his eyes become a smoldering pool. “The problem you in is on you to put right, you and Hansom Brisco. I consider my part of the land free and clear.”
“My family is on our land. Our mother. Is it really in you to see your mother put out her home?”
“Lucy Smith got a place in my house. I move her myself, your land to mine. She belong in a strong man’s house can take care of her.”
David’s pale, taunting face looms large, and an old, familiar red begins to crowd out everything else for Noby. All of the boyhood scrapes and taunts and fights with David have built to this. If Noby had realized the depth of his brother’s contempt, the lingering ulceration of his resentment, he never would have extended himself so fast or thrown in his lot with David.
Noby turns toward his brother and tackles him, hitting him squarely in the chest. They both fall from the wagon seat and find each other again on the dirt road. David is bigger and, although taken by surprise, quickly comes to himself and begins to fight back as they roll on the ground in the darkness. They exchange punches, both leaning hard in to each other, and David lands a blow to Noby’s belly, knocking the wind out. David scrambles back onto the wagon seat and takes up the reins, giving the startled horse an expert flick to get him moving. Before Noby can regroup, the wagon gathers speed on the path, and Noby finds himself alone on the dirt road.
He forces himself to calm down and think. Everything he has worked for is in jeopardy, and in the eyes of the law, his brother is not responsible. What David said is true. On paper, all of the debts belong to Noby, are owed by him alone. Without David’s cooperation, he will lose his land, his home, and his livelihood.
He gets up, dusts himself off, wipes the worst of the grime from his face, and begins the walk home.
Figure 16. Noby Smith
Chapter
25
1907
Jackson’s first response to the smoky scent is drowsy curiosity, a teasing intrusio
n into his hazy world of sleep. He drifts in a pleasant dream of summer barbecues, and the scorched scent of roasting meat triggers visions of dripping juices from a spit and soft sweet potatoes pushed deep beneath the hot ashes. Inexplicably, he thinks of his father, sixteen years dead, but muffled voices push away the thoughts as his senses sharpen and he realizes the embedded threat of the distinctive smell. He is wide awake in an instant, and his first lucid sensation is relief. There is no crackle of fire or heat to indicate the flames are close. His concern races to Amy, but she is there, right beside him in the bed, snoring softly. She is a heavy sleeper. Her days start even earlier than his, before the break of daylight, and she is usually fast asleep by nine or so in the evening. Jackson pushes at her, insistently shaking her by the shoulder until she stirs, her eyes still heavy.
“Something wrong,” he says. “See to Mary. Keep her still.”
Their youngest sleeps in the room with them, a baby girl not yet two, and once Jackson is satisfied Amy is alert, he jumps from bed to check on their other children. He calculates the time as somewhere around midnight. Only a couple of hours have passed since he came in from plowing by the light of the full moon, but something is changed. Jackson passes through the empty front room quickly, past the library wall, his row of books stiff and intact on the shelf. He sniffs the air as he moves, trying to pinpoint the precise location of the smoke. It comes from outdoors, not in, becoming stronger every minute, and he hurries to the back room where his three sons sleep. They are men, really, the youngest sixteen and the oldest, Nathan-Green, twenty-four. Jackson shakes them one by one, puts his hand to their mouths to keep them quiet as they come awake. Each stares at him with initial confusion, reacting first to the acrid smoke growing unmistakably stronger, as well as Jackson’s gestures of warning, but they take their lead from him and stay put. His sons recognize the layered dangers of the situation. There are white men involved.
Jackson leaves them and treads carefully to the front window to peek outside, gauging his distance from the voices. The white men’s figures are outlined clearly in the brightness of the full moon and the added flickering of light coming from the flames racing up the walls of the smokehouse at the back side of his commissary. Jackson hides himself in the darkness of the cabin’s interior shadows. Outside are four white farmers from the hill country, dressed in creased and filthy cotton shirts, grimy pants the earthen color of the land they work, and dusty, brownish leather boots. Jackson assumes there are only four men, because of the four horses, but it is never safe to make assumptions. All have dismounted, not more than twenty feet from the house.
Two men stand idle in the front yard, holding the animals, lean work horses still carrying the sweat of the ride, and another two are directly in front of his store, throwing more kerosene on the sputtering flames. The fire blossoms in a blaze of reddish orange.
“Jackson Tademy,” a voice calls from the darkness outside. “Come out. You wanna save your store.”
For one irrational moment, Jackson is tempted to marshal his sons behind him and storm the men outside, to attack them in a frenzy of righteous indignation. For the briefest instant, it doesn’t matter that they have guns and kerosene, or that they can string him up from a branch of the nearest tree as the night’s amusement with impunity, or that the issue will never be taken to a court of law. These men—any white man, for that matter—can intrude in his world at any time and burn down what has taken him a lifetime to accumulate.
Between the moon and the gathering flames, Jackson registers details of all four of the invaders, down to the three-day stubble on the chin of the man closest to the house. He is a hill-country Hadnot, the only one Jackson immediately recognizes, but one of the others seems familiar too. The blaze gains strength as it feeds on the new dose of kerosene, creeping farther up the side of the commissary’s oak walls.
By now everyone in the household is up and alert, gathered in the front room in their nightclothes, eyes leveled on him. Amy holds the baby tight to her bosom, and the three boys stand at her side, surrounding her within a tight circle of their bodies, whether protecting her or drawing comfort from her isn’t clear.
“Jackson Tademy.” A different voice, slightly higher-pitched than the first. Jackson understands the dangerous excitement in the tone. “Think you so high and mighty? Come out and show us. Some folks got more than they supposed to. Some coloreds so uppity they need bringing down a peg.”
Jackson is caught between the taunts of the men outside and the stares of his family, especially his sons, looking to him. The only one of his children not a witness to this humiliation is Andrew, moved out already and living on his own farm with his new wife. Jackson has spent over sixteen years of backbreaking work and risk-taking to get where he is now, following the template set by his father, preaching the dignity of self-sufficiency and self-pride, building his place as a leader in the community. His livelihood is tied up in the supplies in the commissary, paid for out of his pocket but not yet sold, from harnesses to tobacco, not to mention the winter’s pork in the smokehouse. The smell of an entire year’s meat roasting and crackling in the fire is strong, much more than a waste, a travesty. To rush outside and save his store is a long shot at best, and to do so to save his pride is foolish, playing in to what those men want. How many times has he preached to his sons to curb their temper, their impulsiveness, to weigh the consequences of rash action?
“Jackson Tademy.” Jackson at last places the voice. Jebediah Buckner, a hard-drinking man who lives on the other side of Bayou Darrow, a poor farmer with eight or ten children on a plot barely producing enough to subsist. “What’s the point of a coon school, anyhow? No need trying to teach a mule arithmetic.”
Jackson should have known immediately that this visit to his farm is about the school. Establishing the colored school took more years and an indirect path Jackson never could have anticipated, delayed season after season by a host of obstacles. After his father died, Jackson put it in his mind to build a colored school in The Bottom, but bad crop years, flood, no money for supplies, and terror of the night riders caused endless delays in getting established. Colored families even thinking of sending their children to a school that didn’t yet exist were subject to random threats, and the safety of the children themselves was in question. The night riders reveled in their power. In March, over in Boyce, they ran off the teacher brought in from New Orleans, giving him one day to clear out of the parish for good, and in April they slit the throat of a Frenchman in Aloha for living openly with a colored woman and raising their children in his house. Only after Jackson’s best recruitment efforts did five brave students enroll in the colored school, held during the day between nine and one, three days a week for five months of the year at the Mount Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in The Bottom. Jackson taught the classes himself, basic lessons in reading, penmanship, and arithmetic, using the few books he managed to collect in his personal library, writing out the lessons on the scratched blackboard and stretching the few precious pieces of chalk until they were merely crumbling nubs in his hand.
Jackson feels the burn of his sons’ eyes at his back. They are taking their cues from him, and his stomach churns with a deadly mix of adrenaline and humiliation. He keeps himself still and watches the flames reach higher, sees them break through the roof of the commissary, watches as the walls collapse underneath in a burst of sputtering heat. He reminds himself he has too much to live for, too much yet to do to give his life over to the white men outside. If they come for the house, he will have to go out to them, but so far they keep their focus on the commissary.
By the firelight, Jackson sees now that the men have dragged some of the supplies in the store out to the side yard before they set the first match. They begin to load odds and ends into their saddlebags to take home. When it is clear the store is beyond saving, Jebediah Buckner stares into the darkened house one last time. Jackson doesn’t move back from the window but keeps as still as he can. The white men mount t
heir nervous horses, touchy so close to the blaze, and ride away from the house on Walden Bayou. On the ground, they leave behind only several badly cracked jars of damaged preserves and a singed half-bolt of material.
The family stays inside for ten minutes more, waiting, careful not to make noise.
“Never fight,” Jackson finally says to his sons, as if the store still smoldering is no more than an object lesson staged for their benefit. “Only a fool don’t have sense enough to stay away from a fight can’t be won.” He pulls on his boots and heads outside. “Come on. We got a fair amount of cleanup to do before the daylight,” Jackson says.
Chapter
26
1907
Jackson Tademy and his four sons work side by side for an hour to smother the last of the flames with a large piece of discarded burlap, a damped-down old quilt from the house, and the reddish farm dirt they shovel directly onto the worst of the blaze. They weave in and out like ghosts in the moonlight, in cautious silence around the footprint of what used to be their commissary. Thin wisps of smoke spiral upward from the blackened skeleton of the store, and the air is swollen with the stink of cooked meat, burnt leather, and lingering kerosene. With the exception of a couple of cast-iron pots, little from what they kept in the front of the store is salvageable; although the roof has collapsed, the fire has skipped over a few items toward the back.