The winter months dragged slowly along now that there was no more play school for me. The children avoided me, but I knew they missed our special times every day, too. I still tried to read their books, and I practiced writing my name, but I couldn’t do any more than that. It made me sad, and I moped around the house. Harriet saw me pouting one afternoon. “Why’s you sad in the mouth, chile? You feelin poorly?”
“No, Ma’am. I cain’t read and write and I don’t reckon I ever will.”
She sighed, folding her large arms across her chest. “Ain’t for you to know readin an writin. Thas white folks bi’ness. Yoll got some foolish thinkin up in yo haid.”
“George Murphy knows readin and writin,” I told her.
“George Murphy was no slave. He be a free man when he come here.”
I thought for a moment. “Is they really a law that say a man ain’t spose to own another man?”
Harriet’s face was thoughtful. “If they’s a law Massuh Beal ain’t knowin it.”
“George Murphy say a man spose to git paid regular wages fuh his work.”
“Humph. That George Murphy, he be big on the talkin side.”
“Harriet, what’s a law?”
“Wal, I dunno zackly for shure, but I do believe it is where they put a big sign up, and everybody what see the sign got to do like it say.”
“Is that all a law be?”
“I do believe that be all it be.”
“Wal, maybe Massuh Beal ain’t see’d the law!”
“Now you’s talkin uppity!”
It was very confusing to me, but I didn’t want to ask any more questions. “Uppity” is what they called George Murphy.
When the children came home from school, I would be waiting to unhitch the pony. Thomas began to toss off orders at me and talk crudely like he hadn’t done before. He grew less friendly and more mean and nasty.
John, who had always been mean, grew worse. One day he and Thomas lay waiting for me, and as I rounded a corner, carrying wood to the kitchen, they leaped at me to wrestle me, but I was taught not to fight back. This leaping out of nowhere at me became a habit. Since I was not allowed to fight back, I tried to cover my face with my hands and hunched my body to protect myself. Sometimes I would try to run, but they always caught me and wrestled me to the ground. They must have thought it was fun punching at me like a lifeless sack of flour, me being all limp and floppy and not fighting back.
One warm Sunday morning in early spring, more visitors arrived at the plantation. We had been preparing for their arrival for days. I watched them coming and then hurried alongside Big Mac to unhitch their buggy. They were a handsome family. The father was dressed fine, and he had dark hair combed straight back and slicked good, and the missus was stout with a round face and big hands. The three children were fat and looked very uncomfortable in shiny shoes with stockings up to their knees. I guessed they were around my age. Big Mac and I carried their bags and parcels up to their rooms in the Big House.
After their evening meal, the two families went strolling on the grounds outside. I heard Master call for me. “Robert! Come here!” I came running.
“Yessuh, Massuh Beal, suh!”
Then he turned eagerly to his sons. “Okay, boys, let’s have us a wrestlin match.”
He meant me and his boys, one at a time. Did he expect me to wrestle them? I didn’t know what to do, but one thing I had learned well was to do nothing. Thomas came at me first and I went down immediately. Massuh was yelling, “Harder, harder! Come on, Robert, show us what yer made of!” Before I knew it, I was yanked to my feet and there was a lot of cheering and yelling. Then John lunged at me, grabbing me around the neck. We rolled down in the dirt as he punched at me. Again, I was a sack of flour just waiting for it to be over. I could hear the others hollering, “Fight! Fight!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the faces of the visiting boys. The oldest one had spit running out of his mouth, and he was grinning a horrible grin. John kept hitting me and even though he was nowhere near as strong as me, I let him go on hitting
“Oh, gimme a lick at im!” shouted one of the boys. “Gimme a lick at im!”
There followed then a series of dirty punches and pinches. One of them pulled down my trousers. Another sat on me. I couldn’t help myself. I started crying.
When they were finished with their fun, they went skipping off, laughing and out of breath, to the stable to get horses for riding.
I could smell honeysuckle through the dust and blood in my nostrils and I could hear insects chirping happily in the grass. The sun was beginning to set and the sky was bright red. From the branches of a willow elm a few feet away I could hear the high, squeaky singing of a cowbird.
———
It was many days before I could walk without limping, and each day I dragged my body through my chores, trying not to cry or faint. It was July before I could move normally, although my body was learning how to never be normal again.
Harriet got two new girls to help her with the house, and I was given the added chores of tending the flower beds and keeping the lawn and yard clean. All other hands were in the fields.
One afternoon right out of the blue Master Beal announced, “Robert, you free to git to the quarter when yoll finish with yor chores in the evenings and on Sundays. Don’t do no good seein you lazin around here. But you better do your chores good! And you git back here by a proper time, hear?”
I was overjoyed. Oh, to play with children who were like me! I did my chores that day happily and eagerly. I finished early and ran with a jerky limp to tell Big Mac where I was going. He nodded and stuck some tobacco in his cheek. “Git then,” he said softly.
The squalor of the quarter looked beautiful to me as I approached the shanties. I walked along the dirt and mud around each shack drinking in the smells of salt pork frying and hoe cake baking in the ashes of hearths. I looked at the tiny gardens beside some of the shacks, with carrots, cabbage, and onions growing. The boards that made up the walls of the shacks were far enough apart to lay a dog. The setting sun spread across the land in gold and silver streaks, and the sweat and dirt on the faces shone in the light. My heart swelled to see the faces of my people. Sitting in the dirt or on the wooden planks before their doors, they were like angels—worn, beaten, beautiful angels.
“Robert!” I heard a voice call. I turned and saw Corrie Moore standing and talking with another woman.
“Robert, chile, I declare!”
I ran to her and she grabbed me in her arms. The smell of her was acrid, wet, and wonderful. She crushed me in the cotton of her dress, and I pressed my cheeks against the soft nap of her head.
“What you doin here?”
“Massuh said I can come every night when I finish my chores, and even on Sunday!”
“Wal, thank you, Jesus!” she said.
Soon she was calling people to come and meet me, and then I was surrounded by staring children and smiling grown-ups. Only St. Peter at the pearly gates where Jesus lived was missing.
The time went by quickly. Before I left to go back to the Big House, Corrie took me to her shack to see Buck and one other person. As I entered the shack, I saw Buck sitting on the bed and in his arms was the other person—a tiny newborn baby.
“We done got ourselves a boy-chile,” Corrie announced.
It was a warm and happy reunion. Only for a brief moment did my mind stray back to the last time I was in that cabin, when Pearl lay dying.
“Yoll lookin’ a little fat, chile,” Corrie exclaimed as we sat together in the few remaining moments.
“Ahz?”
“Yoll is.”
We laughed and hugged and I held their new little baby. Later that night back at the Big House my spirits were flying. That’s what love does to you. It feels like freedom.
Night after night I fled to the quarter. The days weren’t so bad because I had something to look forward to.
One Sunday afternoon after the Beals had left for one of their outings, I went to the quarter to play with the children. “Hear come that house nigger!” one of the children spat. I was stunned.
“Hear comes that Tom!”
It was the first time I was called that. It was a terrible insult. I recoiled and stood ready to defend myself.
“They feedin you vanilla cake and tapioca up there in the Big House?”
“Whitey’s favorite little niggerboy, huh!”
“Ha-ha-ha, Robert loves the paleface! Robert loves the paleface!”
I leaped at one of the boys and began to hit him. The other children joined in the fight, and I found myself wildly hitting and punching. I couldn’t fight the white boys in the yard of the Big House, but I could fight back now. I got hold of the boy who called me a Tom and pounded his head on the ground. My rage grew each time his head hit the ground. Then I felt myself being torn from him, and before I knew it I was dangling from the fist of a large Negro man I’d never seen before.
“You tryin to kill somebody, boy?” he growled. “Don’t you come around here causin no trouble, hear? Stay up at the Big House! Now git! Git!”
He dropped me from his grip, and I whirled around furiously, making words as best I could. “I ain’t no Tom! I’sa black nigger slave jes like yoll! Next one call me a Tom I gonna kill!”
I stood my ground and then slowly turned my back on them and walked toward the shacks. Nobody made a move to get me, but I knew what they were thinking. They really believed I was the white folks’ little black puppy and I came to spy on them.
The sun was hot and the air thick and humid. I knew how conspicuous I must have been, but inside me I believed that it was only here that I belonged. I refused to be a coward and run back to the Big House. I wandered around the shanties of the quarter listening to the sounds of the people: singing, babies crying, sounds of people living too close to each other, moving, living, loving, hating; there were smells of liquor, tobacco, sweat, and cabbage cooking.
Moving through the quarter, I looked at the faces of my people. Lined, streaked with sweat, they looked back at me with blank expressions. Word had gotten out that Master Beal had sent his puppy to the quarter to spy on them. But near the end of one row of shacks I saw a face that looked back at me and smiled.
“Hello, honey.” A woman with white hair tied up in a rag, wearing a calico dress and spotted apron, sat on the ground outside her shack.
“Hello, Ma’am,” I answered.
“Whey you from?”
“I be from the Big House, Ma’am.”
“From the Big House? Ohhh, then you up thar wi Harriet and wi lil Daisy who passed—”
“Yes’m.”
“That be Harriet’s shanty right over there.” She pointed to a small wood shack surrounded by grey dirt like all the others, and sitting in front were three small children—just sitting there staring. I wanted to go and talk to them, but I didn’t know what to say.
“Set down, boy,” offered the white-haired woman. Her eyes were kind and friendly.
I sat hesitantly in the dirt, looking across the path at the children in front of Harriet’s shanty. It was hard to imagine Harriet here in the shambles of the quarter when I had only seen her in the environment of the Beal household. I had never seen her with a black baby in her arms, and these little ones in the dirt looked like they were in desperate need of a Mammy to hold them.
The old woman saw me staring at the children.
“Jerry! Amos! Agatha! Come over here!”
The children looked up and with listless movements ambled over to where we were sitting. “Massuh done tuk me out the field and set me to keerin for the chillrens,” the woman told me. “These here babies is some a mah babies.” She folded them into her arms, and they seemed to melt into her. She kissed their heads and smoothed their cheeks with her bent and gnarled fingers.
“Whatcho name, chile?”
“Robert, Ma’am.”
“This here be Robert, chillren, he work wi yor Mammy up in the Big House.” The children brightened somewhat.
I stayed there for over an hour. The old woman’s name was Ceily. She seemed to be peaceful, and I found that I liked talking with her.
“You say yo prayers, chile?” she asked me off-handedly.
“Prayers?” I asked, surprised. “I don’t reckon so, Ma’am.”
“Yoll don’t pray?” she asked incredulously.
“No, Ma’am,” I answered, wondering if I had done something wrong.
“Well, I don’t reckon I know how you done lived this long,” she said. “Mus be the Lord savin you for the day when yoll look up at Him an shout, Hallelujah, Jesus!”
“Hunh?”
“Whey’s yo Mammy?”
“She daid, Ma’am.”
“Didn’t she never pray wid you, boy?”
I thought for a moment. A picture of my mother sailed through my head. I saw her fine high cheeks, her large sad eyes, her light brown skin. I heard her voice again singing softly in the hot, empty cabin.
I blinked and said in a low voice, “I reckon my Mama done prayed, Ma’am.”
“Yoll know what ah’m gonna do ri now?” Miss Ceily asked with a broad smile.
“No, Ma’am.”
“I’m gonna pray fo yoll. Right now. Ah’m gonna pray the good Lord come an show you how He died fo yor sins so’s you kin go to heaven when you die.”
“Heaven?” I said. “No, no. I ain’t goin to no heaven.”
“Chile! What you say!”
“No, heaven be fo white folk.”
“What you talking bout?”
“Me, I wants to go where my mama be, an Ella and Pearl—with Jesus.”
She looked at me funny. “Ef that don’t beat all.”
Amos wiggled in her arms and she kissed his cheek.
“I figured it out,” I said.
She lifted a hand and placed it on my head, and in a soft, droning voice prayed to a heavenly Father she seemed to know personally. “Lord, hepp this chile . . .”
She ran her fingers along my cheek, “Honey, who done tole you heaven is jes fo white folk?”
Her touch was sweet, gentle. I wasn’t used to such a touch. I stared at her.
“Chile, don’t you pay no mind to them lies.”
Her face was so kind, without teeth and with deep creases and milky eyes. “Ceily, do Jesus live in heaven?”
“Yes, chile. He do.”
“And do they be colored people in heaven?”
“Yes, chile. They be.”
She laughed and gave my head a rub. Jerry, Amos, and Agatha laughed with her.
I felt kind of light and happy inside. “Fo a fact?”
“I spect so, chile, I spect so.”
She prayed again for me. Prayed that I would come to know the Lord and serve Him. “Come back and see me, chile,” she said.
I left her there with Harriet’s children on her lap and made my way through the rows of shacks to the path leading to the Big House.
I deliberately passed the boys who had bullied me. If I ran from them, I’d never have face in the quarter. They watched me but didn’t do or say anything. I passed Buck and Corrie’s shanty, and they were sitting outside against the house in the heated shade. “Oh, Robert,” Corrie called as I came near. “I done forgot to tell yoll!”
“Ma’am?”
“Yoll be eight years old now!”