Jacksonville’s downtown district is set in a bend of the St. Johns River where the river turns eastward to join the Atlantic Ocean, some ten miles away. Buck and I walked the crowded hot streets, and then we turned into a building that a taxi driver told us was an agency hiring laborers. We climbed two flights of wooden steps and entered a small, hot waiting room with several benches lined up in rows, behind which were low swinging doors and some desks where a white woman and two white men were sitting.
There were no other men in the waiting room, and so Buck and I stood quietly waiting until one of the men called out, “Either one of you done cement work?” Buck answered quickly, “Oh yessuh, yessuh, we has.” I was surprised at his lie, but went along with it. For the next two years we worked mixing mortar for a building contractor.
We rented a room in a rooming house in south Jacksonville. Every weekend there was a party going on. I was very shy about being around people, but Buck encouraged me to go to the parties. “Come on, Robert, you needs some fun!”
“I don’t want to go to no party nohow.”
“Boy, you is crazy!”
“I don’t want to go to no party, Buck.”
When Buck would persist, I’d flare with frustration. “Buck, I been locked in a white man’s house most mah natural life! I been in prison in thet Big House! I was put out to the field an’ live like a animal— How’s yoll spect me to act right around wimmin and parties!”
“You forgit. You a human bean jes like everybody else. Jes watch ole Buck, thas all. Do like I does an’ yoll be fine.”
He would go to the parties, and I usually stayed in the room. Occasionally I would walk around south Jacksonville to get out, but I wasn’t used to freedom. I was always looking over my shoulder. The palm trees were beautiful, sweeping the sky with their long, slim fronds, and the air was sweet and fresh. It felt good to just look around. I bought ice cream almost every day and I would have lived on ice cream alone if I could have.
I thought of Mary Webb making ice cream for the Beal family. I was forbidden to go near the bowls of sliced peaches and the huge pans of cold, rich ice cream. I could remember the sick longing for just one tiny drop on the end of my tongue, and now here I was, eating peach ice cream to my heart’s content.
Bananas sold for a nickel a bunch, and I would buy them and eat as many as ten at once. I had never tasted bananas, or most fruits, having only gotten fruit once a year at Christmastime on the plantation, and then only hard oranges and soft peaches. I went on an all-out eating binge. Peanuts, candy, apples, oranges, pears, peaches, pineapple, pastries, and ice cream. Whatever I saw that looked good, I bought and ate. While I worked on my job I dreamed of the delicious treats that waited for me.
There was a young white clerk in a grocery store on Atlantic Avenue who waited on me one afternoon. He was a college student, I believe. I heard him laughing as I was leaving the store.
“Man,” he clucked, “it sure don’t take much to make a nigger happy. Just give him some candy and some ice cream and he thinks he’s in heaven!”
I discovered clothing stores, too. I bought shirts, pants, socks, underwear, a leather belt, a green cap, and a ring with a shiny blue stone. Underwear and socks were a luxury I couldn’t get used to. I felt silly wearing such unnecessary things. Inexperienced with buying clothes, I often brought consternation to the store clerks.
“Lemme have one of them red shirts.”
“Which shirt do you mean?”
“Any one. Jes so it’s red.”
“All right, what size do you wear?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“—You don’t know?”
“No. I’ll take any one.”
I needed some shoes. In the white stores Negroes weren’t allowed to try anything on so I chose the shoes that looked the shiniest and most impressive. I bought shoes that were much too small for me and pinched my feet terribly. When I got back to our room, I practiced tying the laces until I had it right and then wore those too-tight shoes until they were worn out. They left painful bumps and corns, but I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that shoes weren’t supposed to hurt.
Buck and I talked about getting back to Anderson, but every payday the money went out, and we never had enough to last from week to week. Buck became quite popular with the girls, and there were always one or two chasing him.
There was one girl in particular named Beulah who had Buck thinking he was the finest man on earth. I never cared for her, and she didn’t like me too well either. Beulah hung around Buck all the time like he was honey on a stick, and when Buck got to trusting her, she up and ran off with his paycheck and every stitch of his clothes. She even took his frying pan and his hair cream. He was stripped bare by the time Beulah was finished with him.
“Serves you right, Buck!” I laughed. “Parties and wimmin! ‘Jes watch ole Buck’!”
Finally in September of 1927, two years after we arrived in Jacksonville and three months after my sixteenth birthday, we boarded a train for South Carolina. We had two five-dollar bills between us. I was sixty pounds heavier and as round as a grapefruit. Buck was lean, strong, and handsome, and he knew it.
We rode in silence, and my mind went back to the Beal Plantation. I thought about Big Mac and wondered how he was doing. I tried to imagine him at work in the smokehouse or in the kitchen cooking for the hired hands. Buck saw the look on my face.
“Robert, where you is?”
“I’s jes thinkin, Buck.”
“Look like you studying on it mighty hard.”
“Uhm.”
I remembered Big Mac’s delight when I beat up the Beal boys that afternoon. “Law diddie law diddie, law dee ay . . .” Oh, Lord, some things are so hard to think on, a man would almost rather have the whip on his back than suffer certain remembrances in his mind.
“When you last see Big Mac?” I asked Buck suddenly.
“Hunh?”
“I ain’t laid eyes on him, Buck, not after they put me outa the Big House.”
“Don’t trouble your mind, Robert—”
“They gonna be a day I gonna see him agin, Buck. I has to see Mac agin!”
Buck was very serious then. He put his head down and said in a low voice, “Robert, they’s somethin’ I never done tole ye . . .”
I held my breath.
“I jes couldn’t tell ye, what with you bein in the bad spot you was in. I mean, we didn’t know if you was gonna be alive one sunup from the next . . .”
“Say what you has to say, Buck.”
“Wal, Robert, ye gotta understand that you was sech a young feller—hardly nothin’ but a dumb lil ole boy who tuk to stealin . . .”
“Buck, say it out.”
“Big Mac is dead, boy.”
“Lord!”
“I couldn’t tell ye!” Buck struggled to speak. “After you was sent out to the field, he jes died. They say it was of a fever. He had some bad burns on his body, and he was a old man. . . .”
There are certain feelings you get when your world is so low it hardly seems it could get lower. It’s like when your nose is broken so many times you’d almost look forward to breaking a foot. Or when you’ve done so much crying that laughter becomes pain. I didn’t speak again on the way to Greenville. If Buck spoke to me, I didn’t hear him. I looked out the window and saw only a black furrowed face with a long silver scar along one side.
In Greenville, Buck hugged me good-bye, and I watched him run down the hill toward town, past the bars and cafés, and around the bend along the twisting road to town. Corrie would be waiting. I stood alone on the platform for several minutes. I was sixteen years old, I couldn’t read or write, I had no place to go and no one to go to.
I walked slowly toward town with my grip in one hand and a paper bag of Florida oranges in the other. I walked until the paved streets ended and the dirt ones began. You can always tell when the pavement is behind you and the dust of the road hits your face that you’re in the colored section of town.
Remembering her street, I walked to Cousin Bessie’s where I had stayed before, but when I got to the door a stranger answered. “Bessie done moved to Charlotte,” a pleasant, round-faced black woman told me. “Her husband died and she just up and left for Charlotte. Who’re you?”
“I’m Robert Sadler, Bessie’s cousin.”
“She got a sister, Gertrude, living right down yonder,” she told me, and so I picked up my grip and oranges and walked in the direction she pointed.
Cousin Gertrude was a thin young woman with cinnamon skin. She wore a cotton print dress with an apron tied around her middle. I explained who I was, and she invited me in with a bright smile.
“Yoll must be plumb tuckered!” she exclaimed, and fixed me a meal of fried catfish, greens, corn bread, and hot coffee. “Eat aplenty now, hear?”
Cousin Gertrude was an avid church member and an enthusiastic Christian who believed in getting a person saved and sanctified immediately. She let me stay there and preached night and day to me. I listened politely, respecting my memories of Miss Ceily and the experiences I had worshiping the Lord with the others on the Beal Plantation. I remembered Ceily’s genuine love for God and her intensely personal relationship with Him.
“Robert, you needs to be saved! You come over to church with me to the meeting and get saved before it’s too late.”
I experienced the same feeling in Cousin Gertrude’s church as the day I sat by the water’s edge with Miss Ceily and the slaves on the Beal Plantation. The exuberant singing, the earnest and powerful prayers ringing through the air, the happy faces and swaying bodies—it all touched me deeply. I felt again the sweet presence of a living God, a God who cared and who was a giver of love and justice. I began to sing along with the rest of the people:
King Jesus is a-listenin all day long
That Gospel train is comin
A-rumblin through the land
But I hear them wheels a-hummin
Get ready to board that train!
I know I’ve been converted
I ain’t gon’ make no alarm
For my soul is bound for glory
And the devil can’t do me no harm
Glory! Jesus has made me new,
Glory! I’m alive in the heavenly land,
Glory! I know the Bible be true
The Lord hold me in His nail-scarred hand!
Soon I was weeping. The next thing I knew, I was on my knees at the tarrying bench at the front of the church.
There was much carrying on over me that night as the women sang and prayed over me. As I prayed, I felt the weight of bitterness and fear begin to slide away from me, and by the time I arrived home, I felt at peace with myself.
I helped Gertrude with the housework, doing things like washing floors and keeping things clean. The rest of the time I stayed by myself sitting on the porch smelling honeysuckle and watching the sun rise and set. The winding dirt road was peaceful and quiet in the heat at any time of day.
When I’d run an errand to the store, I’d pass the close-together wooden shanties, the people sitting on their porches, and I’d hear the friendly hellos. I’d smile back and I’d hear the birds and children’s voices at play. Outwardly the neighborhood was peaceful and quiet. But inside the heart of the neighborhood was a different story. Most of the wooden shacks had a mother and a bunch of children with no father. The grannies and granpappies living with them were supported by the breadwinning woman who washed clothes or scrubbed floors for white folks six days a week for fifty cents a day. Their diet was mainly salt pork, corn bread, chitlins, and greens. With their sweat they built and cared for the fancy homes of the white folks in town while their own homes were little better than shacks and their children ran barefoot and untended. Where was the freedom in freedom? I wondered.
I needed a job, and Gertrude suggested I go to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to her brother Caldojah. He was a preacher on weekends and a factory worker during the day at John Reynolds Tobacco Company. She called him on the telephone to ask if he might be able to help me get a job. I packed my grip with my red shirt and my socks on a Saturday morning in late October and boarded a Greyhound bus for Winston-Salem.
Cousin Caldojah was kind enough to meet me at the station in Winston-Salem. He was a heavy young man with a broad face and deep-set eyes. He welcomed me wholeheartedly and took me into his little shanty with his wife and seven children and treated me as though I were one of his own sons. The day after I arrived he brought me to the employment office at John Reynolds Tobacco Company, and I got a job in the lumberyard stacking lumber at ten dollars a week. That was more money than I ever held in my hand at one time.
Caldojah couldn’t read or write, but he sure could preach. The first Sunday I attended services at the little shack that had been converted into a meeting hall. A large woman they called Mother Shepherd swooped me into her arms and kissed me on the cheeks. “Praise the Lord!” she shouted in a voice that could have brought the Blue Ridge Mountains tumbling down upon us.
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said in a weak voice.
“Jesus is wonderful!” she boomed.
“Yes, Ma’am, He surely be,” I answered with a faint smile.
“Honey, we’re on our way to glory!” She gave me a squeeze, and if it had been any harder I would have departed for glory right then.
When I had caught my breath, I found a seat on one of the benches, and Mother Shepherd brought the people over to meet me one by one. I was made to feel very important and special. I loved Mother Shepherd immediately.
I thought the meeting was wonderful. The joy and acceptance I experienced were what I needed. Joy and love flooded that little ole shack. Caldojah preached with power and authority on Bible verses he had memorized, since he couldn’t read. He concluded his message with, “This here world gonna pass away, but Jesus, He gonna last forever!” The tiny congregation burst into claps and singing. I felt strengthened from heart to toe, and I thanked the Lord for bringing me to Winston-Salem.
Mother Shepherd tucked my arm under hers and told me with a broad smile,“Honey, I gone teach you God’s mo excellent way.”
Mother Shepherd became my closest friend. After work in the lumberyard I would go home, get me a good little wash-off right quick, change clothes, and go to her place. Usually there would be others there, too. We would talk about the Lord most of the night.
Mother Shepherd had a friend about seventy years old named Sister Agnes, who was blind. She would often be at Mother Shepherd’s, sitting straight as a stick in the wooden chair, and you could hear her strong, throaty voice a block away singing and praising the Lord.
On Saturday and Sunday afternoons Mother Shepherd and blind Sister Agnes would go out on the streets and preach to whoever would listen. When they asked me to come along with them I wondered, Do they really go out and preach on the street where people are? What will I do? I don’t speak right. I’m deaf in one ear. And besides, I feared white folk.
We must have made an amusing picture as we inched our way down the street, Mother Shepherd and I walking on either side of Sister Agnes, holding her arms and carrying Bibles which we couldn’t read. Sister Agnes would begin singing before we had even stopped anywhere. It didn’t matter where we were, she would bust out in song with her deep, throaty voice whenever she felt so moved.
The teenagers in the neighborhood made fun of me with these two old ladies. They’d tease me: “Why, Robert, you lil ole granny, you!” When they followed us, laughing and making deriding remarks, Sister Agnes would stop in her tracks, turn in the direction of their voices, and sing “Ole Devil Gonna Take You Soul” loud enough to be heard in Asheville.
Then Mother Shepherd, never missing an opportunity, would follow with a hair-raising sermon on the “mo excellent way.” Sister Agnes would shout loud amens at nearly every sentence, and sometimes she’d lift her heels and commence to dance.
I actually learned to look forward to those meetings on the street with Sister Agnes and Mother Shepherd. I didn’t care how ridiculous we must have looked, and I didn’t mind the teenagers teasing me. We prayed for each of them beforehand, and I was quite confident that the Lord was going to help them and save them.
One afternoon as we stood on a street corner, four of those teenage boys approached us and mocked, “Show us how to know Jesus and that mo excellent way, like you talkin about.” Mother Shepherd, with a heart as big as all heaven itself, took those boys in her arms and led each of them to the Lord right there on the street while Sister Agnes hummed and danced a little jig without tripping once.
How Mother Shepherd loved to pray! When she laid hands on people, sick people got well, people who were bound by demons were set free, and sad people became released from the grip of depression. I watched it all with admiration swelling up in me. Mother Shepherd really knew the God she talked about. She knew Him like a true friend and trusted Him to do what she asked of Him. He always seemed to answer her, too. I prayed that I could know the Lord like Mother Shepherd knew Him.
It came time to head back to Greenville. Mother Shepherd wept when I told her I had to go, and the day I left they had a little party for me. Sister Agnes, though she was blind, was a great cook, and she made fried chicken and grits, string beans, and my favorite, poke salad. Mother Shepherd baked sweet potato pie. There was hot coffee and iced tea to drink. We kept our conversation happy and light.
Mother Shepherd embraced me as I left, and kissed me. We both knew it was probably the last time we’d see each other. Tears burned my eyes as I walked up the dirt road toward town and the bus station. I could hear Sister Agnes and Mother Shepherd singing, their voices low, mournful, and sad, mingled with the sunshine and dust in the air,
Bye and bye, when the morning comes,
When the saints of God are gathered home,
We will tell the story of how we’ve overcome,
For we’ll understand it better bye and bye . . .