The grueling days of spring and summer passed. Autumn was gone, and winter was settling in on the plantation. I thought of Pearl continually. It seemed that everything reminded me of her. Winter reminded me that she had no shoes when she died.
I was still wearing the same shoes they had given me over a year ago, and my toes were bent and crushed in them. I wore them without socks, and I wore my only trousers and shirt night and day.
My new chore of hitching up the wagon for the children to go to school became the most interesting point of my life at this time. I decided I wanted to go to school, too.
One day I gained courage enough to ask Master Beal if I could go to school. “Please, Massuh, suh,” I said in my best speech, “can I go to school, suh, please?”
Master Beal rocked on his heels in laughter. “You? You? You nigger slave boy, go to school? What work would they have for you to do there?”
I was lucky I didn’t get the back of his hand or the heel of his boot for annoying him with what he said was “dumb nigger botheration” and “damn uppity.”
Every morning I helped the children climb into the buggy with their lunch baskets and their books. I wanted to go to school more than anything.
I would wait for them to come home in the late afternoon.
“Teach me about book learning,” I’d beg Thomas, whom I played with the most because we were the same age. He would tell me what he had learned each day. He was the teacher and I the pupil. I drank every word in hungrily.
Juanita and Virginia would play school with me, too, and once in a while John would even join in. He was ten years old now, and his meanness was growing with each new year.
It was not long before I could count to ten and write some numbers. Juanita taught me how to write my name, which I thought was the most wonderful thing to be able to do. I would write ROBERT a hundred times a day in my mind.
They were good days. I can truthfully say that we enjoyed each other as children. I had no rights, but I enjoyed their wanting to play with me. I didn’t care about their hurting me—they were playing with me right then, and I liked that.
The winter of 1918 enfolded us. Sometimes the temperature dropped below freezing and twice that winter we had snow. I would go out to the woodpile to bring in the wood with my feet squeezed into my shoes, without socks, hat, or covering for my hands.
It was during the coldest part of the winter that Daisy, the house girl who helped Harriet, died. She had given birth to her third baby, and a few days later she was back working in the Big House and doing the laundry outside. Harriet didn’t want her doing heavy work and told her to rest. I watched Daisy as she burned up with the fever, and finally she couldn’t stand up on her feet. Big Mac carried her to the granny who delivered her baby in the quarter and I followed behind. Harriet and the granny boiled rags to keep hot on Daisy’s stomach while I held a cold rag on her head. They fed her thyme tea and corn silk, but the infection took her over, and a week later she was dead. Her baby was given to another nursing mother in the quarter to care for.
“Our Daisy done gone to be with Jesus,” Harriet told me, wiping her face of sweat and tears. It was then I figured out that Jesus didn’t live in heaven, since heaven was only for Whites. Jesus was colored like us! I didn’t ask any questions. I had figured everything out on my own.
I overheard the overseers in their dining room talking about her the day after Daisy died. “She woulda been a good nuff breeder,” I heard a rough voice say. “It’s a damn shame.”
Daisy had been born on the Beal Plantation and didn’t know any other life. She would have served the Beals another fifty years without complaining because she didn’t know any better. She was illiterate, obedient, brainwashed, and handsome. That’s why she could be given the tribute of being a “good breeder.” She thought that was part of life, too.
The many hours I spent each day in the kitchen were in dreaded fear of Mary Webb. She always had a bottle of whiskey nearby. The Beals liked her cooking and liked the way she ran her kitchen. Mary was mean to the bone, but never, ever sassy to the Beals. Oh, she was sweet to them, all dumb and grinning. She’d like to kiss the wormy white toes of Missus, but when Missus come in and give her orders, I’ve seen Mary suck in and come up with a wad of spit big as a turnip and blow it at her soon as she turned her back. Mary Webb, she was mean. And she didn’t like me one bit. I still carried the scars on my head from the biscuit pan she had heaved at me. Daisy had gotten along with Mary Webb. She knew how to stay out of her way and do as she was told.
One night while taking swipes at the kitchen floor with the long, clumsy straw broom, I muttered, “Massuh an his chillren don’t hardly care nohow that Daisy be daid now. How come they ain’t cryin on accounta Daisy was they friend? She love them chillrens, ekspecially that baby Anna.”
Big Mac heard me and whirled me around by the arm. With a hard look in his eye and in a cold, stern voice, he said, “Boy, you stop that kinda talk. It’s a fool nigger who talks like that. You take care a yoself, and that’s that. If a white man care about a black man, it’s a peculiar thing! I ain’t havin no nigger chile livin with me who’s lookin to make a friend out of the white man!”
He had never raised his voice to me before. I was so surprised, I stood with my mouth open staring at him. “Yoll learn to care for yoself, chile! They ain’t no place in this here worl’ for a weepy nigger!” His face was tense with emotion. “Yoll learn yoself to care yoself! If’n you love somebody, chile, shor nuff they take em from you, jes like they done tuk yor sister Pearl and sister Margie. Yoll jes be a lil ole child, but you gots to think like a man.”
A hush fell over the kitchen. Even Mary Webb was silent. Harriet, who felt real bad about Daisy, suddenly picked up her head and began to sing. I stood still, staring at Big Mac, who remained glaring at me, waiting for me to acknowledge what he’d said.
“. . . Yessuh,” I said faintly.
Harriet’s voice was deep and rich as she sang,
They’s a comin wi de chariot,
Ah know, ah know,
They’s a comin wi de chariot
To carry mah poor bones home. . . .
She was singing her last respects to a girl she loved. Mac’s words had touched her, and she knew all too well “they ain’t no place in this here worl’ for a weepy nigger.”
Ah done work and ah done sweat;
These ole bones is goin a rest,
Ole chariot
Carry me home to Jesus.
They’s a comin wi de chariot,
Ah know, ah know,
They’s a comin wi de chariot
To carry mah poor bones home. . . .
When she had finished the song, it was finished in her heart as well. She would never speak of Daisy again. At least not to me.
———
One afternoon when I was playing school with Thomas and Juanita, Master Beal appeared in the doorway. His eyes flashed.
“What’s goin on here?” he demanded.
Thomas answered innocently, “We are playing school, Daddy. I’m the teacher.”
“You learnin this nigger to read and write?”
“Yessuh,” answered Thomas proudly.
Master Beal grabbed a chair and threw it at Thomas. It just missed him.
“Git!” he shouted at me. I scrambled to my feet and fled from the room. Huddled in a corner of the porch, I could hear him shouting at the children.
“If I evah catch any of you learnin a nigger to read and write agin, I’ll whup you so’s you won’t set down for a month!” I heard the smack of his hand against their butts just hard enough to let them know he was serious, and it was good-bye to school learning for me.