“Hit a white man at the gravel pit,” says Jupiter. He throws a saddle on Jackson’s mare and cinches it tight. “Hit him twice.”
Amy shudders. “They see you help him away?”
“Only one, I think,” says Jupiter. “Wash Honeycutt turn his back so’s I could collect Noby out of there, but I don’t know how long he’ll hold. A white Mason doing a good deed for a colored Mason. Darnedest thing I ever seen.”
“Well,” says Polly, but she leaves the thought unfinished, unwilling to pass judgment too early. “We don’t got much time. Hide yourself tonight after you leave Emma’s.”
Amy, Polly, and Jupiter leave the shed together, Jupiter leading the saddled horse. Lenora stays behind. She strokes Noby’s hand, crying softly, the expert fingers of her other hand seeking out the most brutalized places on his body that need patching first. Noby winces, the pain springing back to life under her probing fingers, but at the same time he feels safe in the hands of his daughter and of friends.
Noby hears the urgent ringing of the old plantation bell on the porch and the clipping of hooves away from the shed as Jupiter rides off. Before long, Polly returns with two buckets of water, one for cleaning his wounds and one with a dipper for drinking. She rips up a bedsheet for bandages.
“Make him ready to travel,” Polly says to Lenora. “Amy’s hiding the wagon. When Jackson come, he figure out where we take your papa next.”
They talk as if Noby isn’t there, but his mind is starting to clear. He can’t escape a second time from the white men at the quarry. To have any chance, he has to leave the parish.
“Get me to Sidney,” Noby says.
Both his sons work at nearby train stations. Nineteen-year-old Sidney Smith works in Alexandria, almost thirty miles away, and twenty-one-year-old Aston works closer to home at Boyce. It is one of the best possible jobs for a colored man just starting out, cleaning the toilets and assisting the red-capped porters who have seniority.
“Sidney get you away, Papa,” Lenora says, excited. “He know a lot of people at the train.”
Noby holds to this fragile thread of hope. If they get him to Alexandria, he can hide on the train and escape not only the parish but maybe the state of Louisiana.
Lenora’s face goes stiff, and she puts her finger to her lips, warning him to quiet. She throws the nearest horse blanket over Noby, hiding him, the second time that day that he is buried within the scratchy, stinking folds of horse sweat and straw, like a shroud. Lenora tiptoes to the doorway of the shed.
“Papa Jackson, it’s you,” she whispers. Her voice is so full of relief that Noby can’t help but feel a little heartened too, as if his boyhood friend has the power to make the last hour disappear, to somehow wake him from this nightmare.
Lenora lets Jackson and Nathan-Green into the shed, and when she uncovers Noby, tugging at the blanket as if performing a magic trick, the open air feels intoxicatingly fresh.
“What happened?” Jackson asks.
“He got in a fight with white men,” Polly says.
“Then you got to run,” Jackson says to Noby. He is all business.
“Alexandria,” Noby says. “Sidney get me out.”
“How long you here?” asks Jackson.
“Less than a hour.”
“How bad?”
“I hit a Hadnot. They gonna come,” says Noby.
“No, how bad a beating?”
“I can’t walk far, but I’m breathing,” says Noby. “Keep passing out.”
“Still,” says Jackson, considering, “you never make it all the way to Alexandria without somebody seeing. Boyce half the distance, mostly woods. We get you on the train there and send you to Sidney in Alexandria.” Jackson picks up the reins and bit to hitch up the mule to his wagon. “Sooner you gone from Colfax and The Bottom, the better.” He rattles off a list of things to do, mumbling to himself. “We got to get word to Sidney, let Emma know.”
“Jupiter brung Papa,” says Lenora. “He off to tell Mama now.”
“Where’s Amy?” asks Jackson.
“Hiding Jupiter’s wagon down the bayou. May be they know Jupiter at the gravel pit too,” Polly says.
The water in the first bucket is already bloody, but Lenora manages to clean out most of the cuts and stop the worst of Noby’s bleeding. She wraps strips of the sheet around the deepest wounds, careful not to tie them too tightly. Amy comes back, assesses the scene at a glance, and takes over from Lenora.
“Aston got a train pass for Boyce,” Lenora says. “Somebody got to go tell Aston at the sawmill to prepare Sidney. They won’t think nothing of me. I’ll go.”
Noby considers this girl, his daughter, almost thirty but so shy since childhood that she barely speaks except to him and Emma, and even then spares her words, as if to say too much is to risk something precious. Lenora isn’t frail, but she is fragile, and she is offering to do something beyond her own imagining.
“They know you the daughter. I’ll go,” says Nathan-Green. No one would have expected Nathan-Green to volunteer. “My wife don’t belong in the middle of this, not with white men on the prowl.” It is out of his character to play an active part where there is both danger and choice involved. “Where the mare?”
“Jupiter took her.”
“Hansom Brisco lend you a horse, just get to his farm,” Noby says.
Nathan-Green takes off running, moving fast on foot between the rows of corn and then disappearing into the dense piney woods.
“We stay here at the house, in case anybody come looking,” says Polly. She pulls Lenora to her, steadies her. “If they show up here, they find a old helpless woman, don’t know nothing. I got a few tricks left, come to that.”
Jackson pulls the wagon close to the shed, and he and Lenora help Noby to his feet. They put him faceup against the planks in the back and cover him with hay, rigging up a hollow area around his face so he can breathe. The sun is lower in the sky, but the air still throbs with Louisiana’s wet summer heat, and Noby throws off sweat, feverish.
“We got about a hour and a half,” says Jackson. “You can make it?”
Noby grits his teeth, tries to block out the ripples of pain and the stale smell of moldy hay forcing his throat to constrict. “Just get me on the train,” he says.
Jackson gathers up a last handful of straw to sprinkle lightly over Noby’s face, hide him completely from view. “Sorry, old friend. This ain’t right,” he says. “You more a part of this town than anybody.”
“Wait,” says Noby. “Wait.”
Jackson stops and leans closer, the last of the hay stalks limp in his hand.
“The school,” Noby says. “The time come for the colored school.”
“We got to make haste,” says Jackson. “They be on your trail any minute.”
“What about the school?” Noby persists. “Jackson, please. Make our passing through this life be about something. Our grandchildren worth they own school. Promise.”
“First things first,” says Jackson. “I got to cover you now, Noby. Get you away.”
“I can’t come back,” says Noby. “Tell Emma I’ll send word.”
Jackson nods, his face unyielding, and places a thin layer of hay on top of Noby’s face. It feels to Noby as if Jackson is burying him alive, consigning him to a world without light or family or anything he has ever known.
Chapter
30
1918
Emma, is Noby here?” Sheriff Clinton asks. The sheriff’s tone is neither harsh nor dismissive. He asks the question as if he already knows the answer, as if they each have a part to play and he is bored already with his assignment. Like everything else that has thrown itself at her in the last hour, his demeanor is a surprise. Emma expected worse, has anticipated the ransacking of her house and the calling out of herself and the children for the entertainment of the white men. She manages to keep herself calm only because of the children. They take their cues from her.
The morning on Bayou Darrow start
ed like any other, full of chores to perform, children to take care of, animals to water and feed, meals to be cooked, floors to scrub. Wednesday is bake day, and Emma was up before dawn, trying to get a jump on the heat. She has her apron on still, streaked with flour and small, curling bits of dried-out dough. The smells of yeast and freshly baked loaves linger in the air, smells she usually loves, but they no longer appeal. The cow refused milking this morning, a bad omen she should have recognized, but she packed up a dinner pail for Noby and watched him ride out in the wagon bound for first the icehouse and then the gravel pit on a paying job for Mr. Swafford. The day ran smoothly, flowing as she flowed, in harmony with her rhythm.
And then Jupiter, as lathered as the horse he rode in on, galloped onto the farm to deliver his breathless synopsis of Noby’s predicament. It took only a moment for Emma to comprehend that her world was irretrievably wrong side out, that her husband might still lose his life if they didn’t figure a way to smuggle him out of the parish. And now she stands facing the sheriff of Colfax, not sure what to say.
The sheriff is a big man, a man with a webbed network of broken capillaries along his ruddy cheeks and a nose that spreads across his face like melting ice cream. Emma knows him by sight. Everyone knows who the sheriff is, but she hasn’t dealt with him this close before. She is afraid of this white man standing with impunity in her doorway, with the power to do anything that crosses his mind. Behind the sheriff is another white man who gapes at her openly, as if she is a treed possum. He shifts from one foot to the other, the skin of his face bruised a mottled purple, with a freshly split lip, shockingly crimson and poorly tended. Unlike the sheriff, the man makes no pretense of cordiality, too angry and agitated to extend the least courtesy to the family of the colored man who dared strike him. Simon Hadnot is the most dangerous kind of white man there is, looking for any outlet. Farther out in the yard are six more mounted men, waiting with an assortment of shotguns and pistols, a hastily formed posse.
The sun is still strong, even this late in the afternoon, enough to throw a glare. Emma forces herself not to look in the direction where Jupiter rode off thirty minutes before. She summons an expression of slow-witted ignorance. Her daughter Martha Geneva twines herself in the long folds of Emma’s skirt, sucking at her thumb and slowly rubbing her nose with her index finger, peeking out while staying as far from the white man as she can, but unwilling to leave her mother’s side.
Married thirty-seven years, and the day Emma has dreaded since the wedding day is at hand. Noby is a good man, a good husband, but he has to fight hard to keep his temper from flaring if he feels disrespected. Pride and stubbornness are a deadly combination. Noby forces himself to smile as needed in order to get by, insincerely, the same as everyone else, but he has a brittle inner core, a rigid boundary of “no trespass.” Noby cannot tolerate being pushed around, and Emma has always prayed he would never forget himself in his dealings with whites, the one thing she feared most.
“No, Sheriff Clinton,” says Emma, “he ain’t here. I ain’t seen Noby since he left this morning. You can look if you want.”
Sheriff Clinton and Simon Hadnot enter the cabin. At one time, fifteen people lived under this roof, from babies in cloth diapers to aged grandparents, but it never seemed as crowded as at this very minute. These two white men fill the space in a way that they as a family never did. Emma positions herself in a corner and throws her arm around Martha Geneva’s trembling shoulder, pulling her daughter as deep into her skirts as she can.
Simon Hadnot upends the rocking chair in the front room. The spindly chair totters absurdly for an instant, as if it has gotten a second wind, but then it crashes to the floor and stays put.
“Simon,” Sheriff Clinton says, “go wait with the others outside. I’ll handle this by myself just fine.” He sounds weary but patient, as if scolding a disobedient puppy who doesn’t know any better than to chew up the master’s boots.
“This time the coon ain’t gonna get away,” declares Simon Hadnot.
“We know what happened at the quarry,” says Sheriff Clinton. “Go outside and let me do my job.”
Simon Hadnot throws a warning look in Emma’s direction, and the terror of that glance makes her go weak inside. Martha Geneva, who has been quiet up until that point, begins to cry. Not a full-throated wail but quiet sobs she tries, unsuccessfully, to choke back. She trembles against Emma, clutching hard through the skirt and holding her mother’s legs in a vise, pinching with her little fingers until she breaks the skin. Emma wraps her apron around Martha Geneva’s shoulders. It is all she can do.
Simon Hadnot reluctantly walks outside. Sheriff Clinton moves through the rooms of the house in a leisurely way, giving each a cursory inspection. Emma follows on his heels at a distance, not close enough for him to claim she is interfering with his search but not so far away as to lose the thread of what he is checking. She doesn’t know what to expect. When he comes to the children’s bedroom, Willie Robert sits on the cot, perfectly still. Her son stares at the sheriff with large, liquid eyes, and the sheriff nods as if acknowledging an unpleasant but necessary task. The civility of the small gesture throws Emma into confusion.
The sheriff moves on and enters the bedroom Noby and Emma share. He stoops to lift a corner of the beige chenille bedspread. Emma has sewn the spread generously, large enough to fall to the floorboards on both sides. The sheriff barely bends over far enough to take a reasonable look under the bed. He doesn’t upend the thin mattress, or examine under the overturned washtub on the sleeping porch, or so much as glance at several places large enough to hide a clever or desperate man, almost as if he doesn’t care whether he finds Noby or not. And yet he doesn’t leave. Sheriff Clinton stands, leans against the wall toward the rear of the cabin, pinches three fingersful of tobacco from the pouch he keeps in the pocket of his jacket, and fills his cheek.
It dawns on Emma that the sheriff is stalling. She isn’t sure if he thinks Noby might come riding home into their waiting arms for an easy capture, or if it is possible that he delays to convince those on the outside that he has performed a more thorough search. She prays to keep herself steady, prays for every extra minute that passes, time that might make the difference between Noby getting away and the men outside catching up to him.
After about ten minutes, Sheriff Clinton strolls to the front room. “Noby made a big mistake,” he says to Emma. “A shame. He’s a good man.”
Sheriff Clinton rejoins the posse outside, and they ride away. Where, Emma doesn’t know. Willie Robert comes into the front room, waiting for a sign, an explanation of what just happened and what comes next. Emma rights the rocking chair and sits down hard. She reaches for Martha Geneva and Willie Robert, gathers them beside her in the chair, and holds tight, letting the back-and-forth motion calm them all.
Emma knows that almost every colored person in The Bottom will help get her husband away if they can, but there is nothing more she can do directly. She holds on to her children and prays. The sheriff’s behavior seemed almost sympathetic, even though he heads the posse intent on hunting Noby down.
It is a puzzlement.
Figure 18. Willie Robert and
Martha Geneva Smith, Ellen
and Elmira Tademy
Figure 19. Emma Smith
Chapter
31
1918
The trip to Boyce underneath the load of stinking straw in the bowels of the roasting wagon is unbearable, but at least it is uneventful. Jackson and Amy keep off the main roads, cutting through isolated wooded areas where the wagon wheels dig grooves in the mud. The detours make the likelihood of running into a posse more remote, but the ride takes longer and the terrain is more bumpy. It seems to Noby as if days and not hours have passed between this jolting ride to the train station and the incident at the gravel pit. No matter what position he tries to assume, his ribs ache and his wounds throb in protest, draining what strength he has. The grasping ache behind his eyes makes it impossible to t
hink clearly, and the overpowering stench from the bales of straw makes it increasingly difficult to keep from either gagging or sneezing. Slowly, gradually, he begins to focus on the new parameters of his universe, recognizing with numbing certainty that the only two paths open to him now are death or exile.
He is in despair at the possibility of fleeing the only home he has ever known, leaving behind the Louisiana land his father so bitterly fought for, abandoning his wife, Emma, and his mother, Lucy, still scratching out a widow’s living in The Bottom. This dawning acceptance is far worse than all of his physical wounds. Noby is fifty-four years old, strong enough to competently perform in a sought-after young man’s job, a young white man’s job, delivering ice to the people of Colfax. He was tested early and established himself as a valued member in his colored community, a deacon in his church, trusted enough by the whites of Colfax to be in demand for steady cash work. He has brought thirteen children into the world and lived to see most of them already settled, married, with children of their own, and held on to a wife he is able to lie down alongside each night and look to each morning without regret. It isn’t fair, and he waits for the old familiar red to rise, but it is a puny thing now, dimmed, no longer carrying its previous power to cloud his mind and provoke him to strike out. The finality of his predicament dilutes the destructive force he has wrestled with and tried to control all his life. It leaves in its wake a man frightened of losing everything.
The wagon stops, and Noby hears the indistinct buzz of distant voices and the mechanical sounds of the apparatus of a train yard. Steam hissing, metal striking metal, lonesome voices calling out departures to places far away. He is familiar with all of it, so proud that two of his sons found positions at train stations that he once bought a ticket and rode in the colored car from Boyce to Alexandria and back again, just to be a part of the glory of their employment.
There is a bounce to the wagon when Jackson and Amy climb down from the bench seat, and Noby hears Jackson’s retreating footsteps as he walks into the train station. He assumes Jackson will survey the scene, look for members of a posse, assess the risk, and refine their plan. Waiting, Noby nods off more than once, each time waking to panic. He isn’t sure how long Jackson has been gone, only that the precision of time no longer works properly for him. Everything seems to float, and there are no new clues or comforting sounds he can identify to anchor his mind. Noby wonders if Amy is still beside the wagon or if she has gone away as well, leaving him alone. His cocoon under the hay drives him toward some form of madness, an unmooring. Just when he thinks he would undergo anything else rather than stay buried and ignorant of what is happening for one minute longer, he hears footsteps and another wagon rolling toward theirs, coming closer and stopping nearby. The familiar weight of Jackson and Amy on the front bench once more comforts him with the sense of someone in control of his destiny. Their wagon begins to move, slowly, away from the noises of the train station, the grinding sounds dimming with the steady clopping of the horse’s hooves and the clatter of another vehicle following.