One day, with the sun straight up, we saw a man on a wagon. I went out in the road and waved him down and asked him where we was. He told me the parish. I asked him if that meant I was still in Luzana. He said close as he could speculate I was right in the middle of Luzana. I asked him could we ride with him. He said we could—if we was going the same way he was. But since it didn’t look like we was, then he had to say no.
I had already throwed my bundle in the wagon; now I was helping Ned up on the wheel.
“Y’all look beat,” the man said to me.
His name was Job; the people told us later.
“We was going to Ohio,” I said. “My little friend here got tired.”
“He look it,” Job said.
Rednecks and Scalawags
Job took us to his house. Soon as his wife saw us in that wagon she started fussing. Tall and skinny—nothing but a sack of bones. Looked like she ought to been too weak to even open her mouth; but that woman started fussing when we drove in that yard and didn’t stop till we left there the next day.
“What you doing with them niggers?” she asked Job. “You ain’t had no money to go and buy no niggers, and you sure ain’t got nerve enough to steal none. If you brought them here to feed them you can turn around and take them right straight on back. Ain’t got enough food here for me to eat.”
“Let them stay here tonight,” Job said.
“In my house?” the woman said. “Stink up my place?”
It was a cabin, not a house. Old—leaning to one side. Job had even propped it up with fence posts to keep it from falling all the way down.
“They can sleep in the crib,” he said.
“That’s right,” his wife said. “Ain’t got nothing else in there. No corn, no punkins, no cushaw, no ’tatoes. Look at this old ground.” She stomped it with her foot. “Look at that garden. What garden? Where my turnips? Where my mustards? Look at them old dead mules. Look at this old ground.” She stomped again.
Job told us to stay in the wagon, and he got down and started unhitching the mules.
“Old no count,” his wife said. “That’s why you didn’t go to war like a man. Talking ’bout it ain’t your war, it’s their war. That’s why I ain’t got me no children. You no count. You just no count.” Then she started laughing.
Job told me and Ned to stay in the wagon till he came back. We sat out there two, maybe three hours. All that time we could hear that woman in the house fussing. They had a bayou behind the house and you could hear crickets and frogs on the bayou, but over all that noise you could hear that woman. When Job came back outside it was so dark we could hardly see him. He told us follow him to the crib. I had to wake up Ned and tell him come on. It was dark in the crib. The crib was hot and dry. I could feel dry grass under my feet, and the scent was strong. Job told us to go sit by the wall. I held my hand out till I touched the wall, then I sat down and pulled Ned down side me. Job was there now. I couldn’t see him too good, but I could smell him. His scent was strong as the grass scent.
“Here,” he said.
I reached my hand up in the dark and I touched his hand, than I took the piece of cornbread. It was wet on one end.
“Piece for him,” he said.
I gived Ned the piece I already had, then I reached for the piece Job was holding. He told us we could sleep there tonight, and tomorrow he was taking us somewhere else. We sat there in the dark eating the soggy bread. It had been dipped in pot liquor. Pot liquor that had been round couple days.
When Ned got through eating he laid down and went back to sleep. I sat against the wall listening to that crazy woman till way up in the night. The war had done that to lot of them, drove them crazy like that. More than once I started to wake Ned up and tell him let’s go. I even put my hand on his shoulder to shake him once. But he was so tired. And I was tired, too. I told myself I would just sit there and keep guard.
The next morning when Job woke us up I was still sitting there against the wall.
“Where we going?” I asked him.
“Y’all friend Bone,” he said.
“I don’t know nobody name no Bone,” I said.
Job didn’t say another word. We clambed in the wagon. The woman was standing in the door fussing. Looking the same way she looked the day before. Like she hadn’t gone to bed, like she hadn’t closed her eyes or closed her mouth a second. We could hear her saying “no count” and “niggers” till we got out of sight. When Job was sure she couldn’t see us no more he reached in his pocket and brought out some pecans. That’s what we had for breakfast and dinner that day—pecans.
I have seen some slow mules in my days, but the two pulling that wagon must have been the slowest yet. Two little brown mules not much bigger than Shetland ponies. You couldn’t even see them from the back of the wagon. Like the wagon was moving there slow and creaky all by itself. I wanted to sit on the board with Job, but he told me to get back. And a good thing I did because later that day we met up with two Secesh on horses. Before they got to us Job told us to stay quiet and let him do all the talking. When they got a little closer he pulled back on the mules to make them stop. He didn’t have to pull back hard.
“See you got some niggers there,” one Secesh told him.
“Yes,” Job said. “Can’t say they much, but you got to start with something, a fellow poor like me.”
“Feed them, they’ll grow up,” the Secesh told him.
“Will do,” Job said.
“And y’all mind, y’all hear?” the Secesh told us.
“They better,” Job said.
The Secesh rode off. Job shook the lines. Had to shake them twice to make them two little mules come up. He didn’t tell us who the riders was, but I knowed all the time they was nothing but Secesh.
Job went on eating pecans and dropping the peels in the wagon. Looked like he didn’t have strength enough to drop them out on the ground. And maybe he just didn’t care—with that crazy woman back there fussing at him all the time. Them mules didn’t care too much either; that wagon just creaked and creaked and wasn’t getting nowhere.
Almost sundown that evening we stopped at a crossroad. Job told us to get down and walk half a mile and we was coming up to a big house. Go knock on the door, front or back, and tell the man there we needed a home. “But don’t tell who brought you here,” he said.
We started down the road, and the wagon moved on. The crop was down, and I kept looking back over my shoulder at Job. I could hear the wagon creaking, but it was moving so slow it looked like it wasn’t moving at all. Now, all a sudden I remembered I hadn’t told Job thank you. Now, I wanted to run and catch that wagon and tell him how much I appreciated what he had done for us. But my poor little legs was so tired they couldn’t go nowhere. I wanted to holler, I wanted to wave, make some kind of sign, but I doubt if Job would have heard me or seen me. The way he was sitting there, gazing down at them two little brown mules, I doubt if he even seen or knowed where he was going.
We didn’t see the house till we made the bend. A big white house with a gallery on the front and the side. To the right of the house you had fruit orchard—oh, maybe two or three acres—maybe more. On the other side, the left side of the house, you had horses and cows in a pasture. Farther down was the quarters.
Listening to Job, I went up to the front door and knocked. A nigger came there and looked down at me. Right off, I could see I had done the wrong thing.
“Job brought y’all here?” he said.
“Who?” I said.
“You see them steps?” he said, pointing behind me. “Go right on back down, march round that house and knock on that back door. That or catch up with Job.”
I went round the back but I didn’t knock. I figured since he already knowed I was there, there was no need to knock. I stood there and stood there and stood there, but he never showed up. But soon as I knocked he opened the door and told me to come in.
“What you want?” he said.
“Mr. B
one live here?” I asked him.
He went up to the front. Little while later a white man came back in the kitchen. He was a big man with a red beard and blue eyes. And he had the biggest pair of hands I had ever seen.
“You too spare,” he said, looking down at me and shaking his head. He looked at Ned standing behind me. “That one over there ain’t weaned yet. I ain’t running no nursery here, I’m running a plantation. Y’all can stay here tonight and I’ll get somebody to take you to town in the morning. I can’t use you.”
“You mean work?” I said.
“That’s what I mean,” he said.
“I might be little and spare, but I can do any work them others can do,” I said.
“I got women in that field eat more for breakfast than you and that boy weigh together,” he said. “First thing y’all die on me and I have to answer to the beero.”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” I said. “But if we was ready to die we would have been dead long before we got here.”
“You ain’t been out there yet,” he said.
“That’s the only place I been,” I said.
“Yes?” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said. “Me and this little fellow here ain’t been doing nothing but walking and walking and walking ever since we heard of our freedom. Any of them out there can do more walking than that I like to see them.”
“You got to do more than just walk out in that field,” Bone said.
“I done pulled my share before,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
I told him.
“Your walking too,” he said.
I told him.
“All right, I’ll give you a try,” he said. “But you still spare and I won’t pay you more than six a month. Take it or leave it.”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful again,” I said. “What you paying them other women?”
Bone eyes opened just a little bit wider. Like he was ready to tell me, before he remembered I was nothing but a child, and a little black one at that. But if I was go’n work for him, maybe it was right for me to know.
“Ten,” he said. “But they happen to be women.”
“I’m a woman,” I said.
“Prove it out there,” Bone said. “Not in here. Fifty cents of that coming back to me to school that boy over there—if he wake up long enough. What he carrying them rocks for?”
“Secesh killed his mama. That’s what’s left.”
“Fifty cents to school him,” Bone said.
“If I keep up with the other women, I can get much as they get?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said.
He went in the front and came back with a feather and a sheet of paper. He handed me the feather and laid the sheet of paper on the table.
“Put a cross there,” he said, pointing at the paper. “One time that way, one time that way.”
“I know what a cross is,” I said. “What it’s for?”
Bone was still looking at the paper, but I knowed he wasn’t reading it, because I was looking up at his eyes and I could see they wasn’t moving. He was probably thinking he ought to take me by the neck and throw me outside. Then his eyes shifted from the paper to me. But he just looked at me like he was still thinking about something else.
“So I’ll know you somewhere in my field even if I can’t find you,” he said. “You’ll know I owe you five dollars and fifty cents.”
“Six dollars, Mr. Bone,” I said. “Then I give you back fifty cents.”
I stuck the point of the feather in my mouth and leaned on the table to make my cross. After I made it it looked so correct I just stood there looking at it a long time. I started to add another little curve or a dot or something, but Bone took the feather and paper from me.
“I said a mark, not a book.”
Bone called that nigger who had let us in the back door and told him to find somebody else to show us to the cabin. All we found in that cabin was two little beds and a firehalf. Beds was two wide boards nailed against the wall like a shelf. Mattress was dry grass sewed in ticking. We had no table, no chairs, no benches—you sat down on your bed or you sat down on the bare ground. After I had been there awhile I got the carpenter to make me a bench. Then I got him to make me a table. That was the only furniture I had for the next ten, twelve years.
We was clearing off the land. The land hadn’t been ’tended since the war, and weeds and shrubs covered everything. The women used axes and hoes, the men did the plowing and hauling. After I had been there about a month, Bone came out there and told me he was paying me ten dollars a month like he was paying the rest of the women because he didn’t want me killing myself. I wasn’t but ’leven or twelve, but I could do much work as any of them. And the ones who beat me had to do a lot of sweating to stay up there.
BOOK II
RECONSTRUCTION
A Flicker of Light; and Again Darkness
For a while there looked like everything was go’n be good for us. We had a little school on the place, the first cabin on your left when you came in the quarters. All the small children went to school in the day, the big children and the grown people who had to go in the field went to school at night. The teacher was a young colored man from the North. A good-looking brown-skin man, very good manners. The grown people just like the children all loved him. One day a week we had a special Teacher’s Day. When he went to somebody’s house and took dinner with them. Everybody tried to out-do everybody else. I didn’t have a chair in my house—the bench wasn’t good enough for the teacher to sit on—so I sent Ned out to borrow me a chair. When he got back with the chair I sent him out to borrow a fork and a plate. I got the fork and plate from the woman who worked at the big house, and she told Ned to tell me don’t be surprised if the teacher recognized them. Everybody else on the place had borrowed that same fork and that same plate before. Well, if he recognized them his manners kept him from saying he did. I didn’t eat with him and Ned, I was too ’shame to do so. I pretended I had some work to do, but all the time he was eating I was looking at him to see how he liked the food. After they got through eating he asked Ned if he wanted to read something for me. He got the book out his pocket—the only book they had at school—and Ned had to stand side him. And while he pointed to the words Ned spoke them out. I stood there listening and smiling. Before then I doubt if I had ever looked at Ned like he was my own. I had always looked at him like he was a little boy that needed me. But listening to him read I knowed if it wasn’t for me Ned wouldn’t be here now. And I felt I hadn’t just kept Ned from getting killed, I felt like I had born him out of my own body. After he went to bed that night, me and the teacher sat by the firehalf talking. He asked me why I didn’t come to school like the rest of the people. I told him when I came out the field at night I was tired, and long as Ned was getting a learning I was satisfied. We talked and talked. He had very good manners and everybody liked him—’specially the ladies. I liked him, too, and I went to school couple times just to be near him. But I told myself I had no business thinking about somebody like that, and after I had gone there maybe three times I didn’t go no more.
Then they had the colored politicians that used to come to the big house to hold meetings with Bone. They would come to the house once, maybe twice a week, stay couple hours and then leave. If they had anything important to tell us they would gather us at the school. This was church, too: school and church the same cabin. Most of the talk was about the Fedjal Gov’ment—’specially the Republican Party. It was the Republicans that had freed us, and it was the Republicans that had the Freedom Beero there to look after us. They wanted us to take interest in what was going on. They wanted us to vote—and vote Republican. The Democrat Party was for slavery, they said, and believe it or not, they said, there was niggers in the Democrat Party, too. You could always spot him, they said, because he had a white mouth and a tail. They told us they was go’n take us to Alexandria one day so we could see a nigger D
emocrat at work. The day came, they sent some colored troops to the plantation to bring us in town. The town square was full of people, white people and colored people. It was hot that day. People just standing there sweating and fanning. On the platform the people was giving their speeches. One after another, white and colored. Every now and then somebody would holler and call somebody else a damn liar, then the troops would have to step in to keep them apart. When a nigger Democrat got up on the platform, somebody hollered, “Pull his pants down, let’s see his tail. We done already seen he got a white mouth.” The nigger Democrat said, “I rather be a Democrat with a tail than a Republican that ain’t had no brains.” The people on the Democrat side laughed and clapped. The Democrats talked awhile, then the Republicans got up there and talked. The Democrats wanted the Yankees to get out so we could build on our own. The Republicans wanted the Yankees to stay. The Democrats said we wouldn’t have peace till the Yankees had gone. The Republicans said we didn’t have peace before they came there. The Republicans said every free man ought to have forty acres and a mule. The Democrats said that was strange coming from a Republican when a dirty scalawag had one of the biggest plantations in the parish. The Republicans said Bone had the plantation there to give people work who couldn’t go out and get work on their own.
It was burning up. The square packed. The arguing going on and on and on. Then somebody hauled back and hit somebody—and what he did that for? Looked like everybody was waiting for that one lick. I grabbed Ned and dragged him under the platform. I had to fight my way under there, because everybody who wasn’t fighting on top the platform or round the platform was trying to get under there just like I was.