Little Big Man
Page 18
I says: “I saw a Cheyenne dark as you down on the Solomon’s Fork. They called him Mohkstavihi, which is the same name they give to any colored person like yourself.”
“Black Man?”
“No, Black White Man.”
He laughed out loud at that, then stopped short and nodded serious. “I got to burn leaves now,” he says and goes out. I wonder if I had hurt his feelings, but it was the truth, which is supposed to make you free.
However, back he come the following day, when Mrs. Pendrake had gone out shopping again and the Reverend was in his study, and this time Lavender never feared Lucy on account of he got bold enough to ask Pendrake’s permission to see me, which was granted.
He also took the chair without being asked, which was O.K. by me, for owing to my upbringing I never had no views on how fresh you should let a darky get, though that was a worrisome thing to plenty of whites in Missouri.
It turned out that Lavender was fascinated by Indians. I have said Mrs. P. listened that first day to my experiences, but that was the end of it, so I suppose she did then just to be mannerly. And anybody else I run into would have rather died than asked me about that subject, I reckon.
But Lavender couldn’t get enough of it. I would have thought he was going to write a book had he not been illiterate.
After a time he says: “That dark Indian you told me about seeing on the Solomon River, I been thinking on him, and I figure he might be kin.” Lavender was a smart fellow; he couldn’t read nor write and never had a day of schooling, but he knowed a great deal of things. He started talking now about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, who we hadn’t yet got around to in the school, for their names was new to me.
“Why,” he says, “them white men went up the river until it got so skinny they could stand with one foot on the right bank and one on the left, and then found the tiny hole it trickled out of, and could have stuck a finger in it and stopped it off, and you wouldn’t have had no more Missouri River but just a big ditch of mud two thousand miles long, dryin’ and crackin’ in the sun.”
I didn’t believe him, but later I heard it was true—I mean about Lewis and Clark being real people; whether they could have stopped off the Missouri with one finger was another thing.
“Captain Lewis and Captain Clark took along a colored man named York, and the Indians had never seen a colored man before and thought York was painted black, so would spit on their hands and try to rub York’s color off, and when they couldn’t, they’d tell all the other redskins for miles around and they would all come and try to rub the paint off him too.
“York was the most interesting thing the Indians found about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark. And you know what he done, for he was right humorous, he told them Indians he had started life as a wild animal and Captain Clark caught him in a snare and tamed him into a man. Then he roared and showed his teeth and the Indians would run away. But they took a great liking to York, give him presents and had him lay with their women so as to get some black babies.”
Lavender raised his eyebrows. He said: “Now it is likely if you was to go out there today you would run into some of his offspring, which it looks to me like you done. York was a first cousin to my granddaddy. I believe he was the most famous person in my family.”
“It could be,” says I.
“The more I think about it, the surer I am,” Lavender says, and then he leans over close to me, keeping his voice down: “I don’t mind telling you I’m fixing to go out there myself.… Now you go and mention that to Lucy and I’ll be in trouble.”
“You ain’t taking her along?”
“That’s my reason for leaving,” he whispers, while looking fearfully towards the doorway. “You let a woman catch you and you’ll have reason to be sorry for it every minute of the day. Now the Reverend bought me from my old master and he freed me according to law. I have heerd him say: ‘No man must own another.’ Then he makes me marry Lucy, for I expect he believe it’s all right for a woman to own a man. The way I look at it, I had one benefit from law and one defect, so I am even now and before I get to losing I want to go out where they don’t have any laws a-tall and are purely savage.”
“Maybe we should go together,” I said. Until that minute I never had thought of running away from the Pendrakes, for they had treated me well, but I had been in civilization for a couple of months now and still couldn’t see no sense to it whenever Mrs. P. wasn’t around. Now I was sick in this shameful way: you hadn’t ought to be made ill by the rain, which is a natural thing. What it meant was that I wasn’t living right. About the only time I felt proper in town is when I throwed that kid Luke English to the ground and went for my knife. And I believed my blood was getting watery from the lack of raw buffalo liver. The only thing I learned so far that seemed to take real root was lustful yearnings, and the Reverend told me they was wrong.
“If you can wait till I am better—” I began.
But Lavender frowned and said: “I ain’t going to listen to that talk. The difference between me and you is I am colored and you is a boy. Now nobody has no call to stop a colored man who ain’t a slave from running off, but if he takes a boy with him, he got trouble with the law again.”
“Listen,” says I, “once we get beyond Fort Leavenworth, I’ll be taking you.”
That hurt his pride and he mumbled some with his eyes down, and he allows: “Well, I’m going tonight, anyway. I would wait if I could, but I cain’t.”
“What difference would another few days make?” For I thought to be up within that time.
“Ever hour is a living agony,” says Lavender. “It is a monstrosity of nature for man to be ruled by woman.”
I figured he got them words from something Pendrake said, so I asked if Lucy give him so much trouble, why didn’t he get advice on it from the Reverend?
“Look here,” Lavender tells me, “I ain’t going to say nothing against your Daddy.”
“He is my Pa,” says I, “only in that law you was talking about, and it is a wondrous thing how a man can get himself new relatives by signing a piece of paper.” It made a real mark on Lavender that I never held a high opinion of law, either, and like himself was a victim of it, though not in his discomfort.
He sort of shrugs with his mouth and says in a low voice: “He ain’t going to get none in the usual way.”
My back started to ache from a twitch of muscle, and I shifted my position in bed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” But I knowed well enough, and my back felt worse at the new angle.
Lavender winced and drew back. “I don’t want to get me in trouble.”
“I thought you was going to run off tonight.”
He opened his eyes. “That’s right,” he says and grins in relief. “That’s right, I sure am.”
“You reach me over that paper and pencil on the desk, I’ll draw you a map of where to find the Cheyenne.” I told him quite a number of useful items on how to get along with the Indians, concluding with: “Now you can be friendly but don’t ever crawl on your belly before a Cheyenne no matter what he does, on account of he’ll do it worse then. I mention that because they have lately had a lot of trouble with whites and might carry a prejudice.”
“Against white men?”
“Of which you are a black-colored one,” I says. “I’m talking of what they believe, which is the truth when you live among them, like law is around here.”
I drawed that map, resting the paper against a book. Lavender couldn’t read, but he ought to be able to follow the lines of rivers.
“If you was going to wait a while, I’d teach you some of the sign talk and maybe Cheyenne as well,” I said.
“No,” he told me, “I cain’t tarry. But I thank you kindly.”
“Hold on,” I says as he starts to rise from the chair. “You never finished what you begun before about the Reverend.”
Lavender went out and looked up and down the hall, then he come back alongside my bed.
“You mean never?” I asks. “For I’ve knowed Indians who wouldn’t do it for a time because of a dream they had or before a war.”
“Never,” says Lavender. “Lucy see that in the yolk of an egg. She got the gift of a witch. That’s the reason I’m leaving. Every time I go with another woman, Lucy see it in an egg.”
Lavender didn’t run off that night. He come in to see me again the next day and never even apologized for not carrying out his plan. Instead he talked as if he meant the next night, and the same happened the next, and so on. People who talk instead of do give me a pain in the arse. I reckon Lavender just wanted somebody to complain to, and that’s all right, but I wish he would of admitted it. On the other hand, I guess you ought to have a different standard for judging a man who had been kept as slave until the age of twenty-two. It takes him a while to know what’s possible, and maybe he should be given credit for just having the idea of real freedom.
Anyways, I oughtn’t to protest his staying, for he was the only person in that town I could talk to with ease. That boy I whipped, Luke English, come around to visit while I was sick. He still hated my guts and figured he had been tricked rather than beaten outright—whites always believed that when licked by Indians—but his Pa wanted to suck up to the Pendrakes, so sent him over with a cake his Ma had made. Luke stopped somewhere on the way and tongued off all the icing; which didn’t matter none to me, though, because I was still off my feed and couldn’t have ate a cannonball like that when well.
As soon as Mrs. Pendrake, who had let him in, went downstairs, Luke started talking indecent. Him and the Reverend could have gone around with a tent show, holding debates on the topic, for they represented the long and short of it.
“Say,” Luke remarked, studying round my room with his mean eyes, “you got quite a wigwam here. Did you ever sneak a girl in?”
“Did you?” I asked him in scorn.
“I don’t have it so private. I got to bunk in with three brothers. My old man and old lady went at it so hard they have filled the house. I also got four sisters. The oldest is just eighteen. Some feller climbs in her bed every night and has his way with her. Pa don’t know what to do about it.”
I was taken in and dumb enough to ask: “Why don’t he shoot him?”
“Oh,” says Luke, cackling, “it’s her husband.”
He sits down on the foot of my bed. “What’s it like with an Indin squaw? I hear they got quite a strong smell. I hear you want one, you throw a bean across the fire and the one it lands near has to go with you even if she’s married to the chief. I never had an Indin woman. The ones I seen have been mighty ugly. I’d druther find me a fat sheep if I couldn’t get nothing else.
“Course I do all right as it is. The other day I come into the room while the darky girl was cleaning. Nobody else was upstairs at the time, though my Ma and sisters was down in the kitchen. So I was feeling like a piece, and I just throwed that black girl down and put it to her.…”
I never did like dirty tales, true or false; if they’re any good, they just make you wistful; if not, there’s nothing more boresome in the world, I reckon. As to Luke, the more he talked, the more I was convinced that his experience consisted solely of playing with himself to the point of idiocy.
Nonetheless when Mrs. Pendrake come up and asked us both if we’d like a glass of buttermilk and I says no and showed I was tired, and he says yes and she took him off to the kitchen, with him staring at her up and down soon as her head was turned, I was pretty jealous. For you take even a rotten-looking kid like that, he was of the male sex, and Mrs. P. knowed it. She couldn’t help reminding you she was a woman. I don’t mean she did one thing you could see with the naked eye, and as I have said she was downright cool to most men and acted as if they was standing in horse manure about ten feet below her location.
After enough time for him to have drunk a gallon, Luke come back upstairs, where he had forgot his cap. He was licking his thick lips, which I guess was reasonable enough on account of there was a margin of buttermilk around them. But I had my knife under the pillow, and I remember vowing that if he made one reference to Mrs. Pendrake, I would cut out his black heart.
But he just said: “Well, I’ll tell my Pa you ain’t going to die from that beating I give you. I ain’t got no hard feelings if you ain’t. When you get back on your feet I’ll innerduce you to a good whore down at Mrs. Lizzie’s.”
I had been a man before my time, and now I was being a baby after it, just laid there day after day and when I wasn’t being talked to, looked at the ceiling and saw a naked woman imprinted on it. Not Mrs. P., I hasten to say—nor the Indian females I had seen now and again without clothes though the Cheyenne is modest, and you take Nothing, had I come upon her bare it wouldn’t have been a striking experience—but rather a picture of a nude woman that used to hang back of the bar in the saloon in Evansville years before when my Pa preached there.
Now that is a funny thing that come back to me from a time when it didn’t mean nothing. They put a blanket over it during services, and I can recall Bill sniggering and my sisters blushing, but to me it had been right dull: she was fat as to breast and hip, and had one meaty haunch crossed over the other so as to hide her loins. Her nipples was purple, that was all I could have said at the age I had been then, because they reminded me of plums.
But here she was on the ceiling of my bedroom. It went along with everything else in that house, I suppose, the image and not the reality: Mrs. Pendrake’s motherhood, the Reverend’s spiritual authority, Lavender’s freedom, and my woman who had never existed.
At last I got strong enough to take outside walks so long as I dressed warmly, for it was winter now with a fall or two of snow while I had been laid up. And then one afternoon when we had finished our dinner, the Reverend having so far as I was concerned outdone even his own record in laying waste a turkey singlehanded—for Mrs. P. took very little and I was still on soup—Mrs. Pendrake says: “Dear, it might be diverting for you to walk downtown with me. We might take a glass of soda water and buy some new clothes.”
I won’t go into the shopping, which Mrs. P. accomplished in amazingly short time for a woman though she bought a big load of stuff for both herself and me. I reckon she was about clothes like the Reverend was concerning food: gluttonous but tidy. Nevertheless, I wasn’t any too robust yet and even when well I get dizzy in shops. So she noticed that and says: “Now we’ll have our soda water.”
I had never been in the place we went, which had just been opened up while I was sick, pretty fancy with little marble tables and wire chairs and some brasswork, and there was a big marble bar and on it a vessel like a funeral urn which was silver-plated, with a cupid sitting on top and two elephants’ heads projecting from the bowl. In the base of this structure was six or seven knobs under which they’d put your glass, squirt some flavor into it, then stick it beneath an elephant’s trunk, turn his ear, and out would come the soda water.
I took an immediate dislike to the fellow who run the place, for he thought quite a lot of himself, wore a brocade waistcoat and a artificial flower in his lapel, and was mighty tall. I guess you’d say he was handsome by the light of some, clean-shaven and with black curly hair. He sure thought so, anyhow. What I didn’t like was the snooty manner in which he run a place where women and children went for refreshment.
Now this fellow would draw the soda himself, then put the glasses on a silvered tray which a small colored boy who was dressed like a little Arab, turban and balloon pants, would tote to your table. I tipped the kid a penny the Reverend give me, and he wasn’t in the least grateful for it, just bit it to see if it was genuine, and put it in his curly-toed shoe. I done that because I wanted to play the grown man at this point and escort Mrs. P. rather than vice versa, for I was almost sixteen. I was shorter
than her while walking, but seated here we was about the same size.
She got the idea, for Mrs. Pendrake knew every minute the exact situation when it come to male and female, and without calling attention to it she slipped me a dollar so I could pay the bill when time came.
It was perfect for about two minutes, me and her together like that, and she called me “dear” a good deal and the cherry-flavored soda that she drunk left a flush on her underlip. I had never seen anything more lovely than her fair face between the fur hat and collar. She and I, we just cared for each other and hated everybody else in the soda shop and maybe the rest of the world thrown in.
Then over comes that bastardly proprietor sneering with his front teeth, though he means it as a smile I reckon, and says to Mrs. P.: “Maybe Buster would like to eat a cake.” He didn’t talk cultivated like her or ignorant like me, just cheap. He was also the first man I had ever saw who didn’t give way before Mrs. Pendrake, but looked at her insolent with his eyelids falling.
In return she faltered towards him, then said to me: “This is Mr. Kane, Jack.”
I knowed by then what was manners and stood up so as not to shame her, but he didn’t put out his hand nor acknowledge the introduction in any other wise, but went back to the marble counter and fixed a tray of cookies and sweetmeats and had them delivered before me by means of the little colored boy.
“Isn’t that kind,” said Mrs. Pendrake. She picked her muff from the spare chair. “I wonder, dear, whether while you are occupied with these, you might permit me to finish my shopping. I must make several more purchases and should not forgive myself for tiring you on your first day out.”
It was always such a pleasure for me to hear her speak, I sometimes failed to gather the sense of it. So it was now. I didn’t realize she was leaving me there until she touched my shoulder and went to the door, having to open it for herself, for that manager kept his back turned then, though a minute later when two ugly, scrawny females who I recognized as the wife of an elder of our church and her old-maid sister prepared to go, he sprang out and in his oily fashion bowed them on to the walk.