A Perilous Proposal

by Michael Phillips

  Again he stopped and stared every little boy and girl in the eyes. Most of them, just like young Jake’s, were by this time wide as round white saucers in the middle of their black faces. If Master Clarkson wanted them to be afraid, he had already succeeded. But he wasn’t done yet.

  “Just look how strong his jaws are,” he went on. “When a nigger don’t behave, all I got to do is just say the word and this here dog’ll grab hold of him and pull him to the ground and then he’ll just snap a nigger’s head right off as easy as I’d whack off a chicken’s head with an ax. He likes the taste of nigger young’uns best.”[1]

  By the time the master was finished, Jake and all the other children were scared to death. The master’s speech had exactly the effect he wanted. Fear of disobedience was the earliest and most important lesson he wanted to teach every slave. And white masters like Massa Clarkson had a thousand ways to teach it.

  The very thought of escape always brought to the minds of boys and girls like Jake reminders of the fangs of “Massa’s houn’ dog.” None of them had ever seen a dog take off a man’s leg, much less a head. But most had seen enough to know that a dog’s teeth could draw blood and leave a vicious scar on the calf. Half the men on the Clarkson plantation could pull up a ragged trouser leg to show proof of it.

  For generations before that time, since their ancestors had first been brought as captives from their African homeland, not too many slaves ever thought about trying to escape. A thousand men like Master Clarkson, with five thousand overseers and ten thousand whips and more ornery “nigger dogs” than you could count, had seen to that.

  But young Jake was growing up in the turbulent 1850s. Times were changing. Even in the Deep South of Alabama.

  Sounds of freedom were in the air.

  Those sounds of freedom took many forms. The white masters learned to recognize them and tried to stamp them out whenever they saw signs of them. But that wasn’t so easy. Once a people who have been oppressed get a notion of what freedom is like, they want it more and more. That’s how it was for the black slaves in America’s South. They started thinking about Moses and the children of Israel in their slavery in Egypt. They realized that they might someday have a Moses to deliver them too, or lots of Moseses working together. And they started talking and singing about their own promised land, and the day when they’d be free just like the Israelites.

  Though the white masters and their white families all went to their white churches all prim and proper every Sunday, when their Negro slaves started talking and singing about Israel and Moses and the Promised Land, they started to get nervous. They didn’t like their slaves getting too familiar with the white man’s religion because that could lead to only one thing—talk of freedom. That’s what salvation was, after all—freedom from sin . . . and maybe other kinds of freedom too.

  So it was outlawed throughout the South for Negroes to preach to other Negroes. Black churches had white preachers who preached to them about obedience and submission and the sin of rebellion. The most quoted verses of Scripture in those black churches were Ephesians 6:5—Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters—and Colossians 3:22—Servants, obey in all things your masters.

  For two centuries white masters had kept their black slaves mostly uneducated and illiterate. When a black man or woman taught himself or herself to read the Bible and to speak with sense and intelligence, there was nothing so threatening to the white man’s world.

  Most dangerous of all to their white masters were those uncommon blacks of strong religious conviction. They knew they could never subdue the spirits of such men and women. And that made them dangerous. Hardworking and obedient, taking whippings without complaint, their strength came from within. Such men were the most respected of all in the Negro community. As stirrings of freedom mounted, whites hated spiritual leaders more than every other kind of black. A fiery slave-prophet called Nat Turner had proved that in 1831. Ever since, whites had feared the appearance of his like again.

  Among black slaves there was rebellion and there was religion. Put the two together, and by the mid-1850s there were runaways everywhere. The white schoolteachers had their three Rs. But white masters had another “three Rs” they hated when they saw them among their slaves—rebellion, religion, and runaways. They were determined to get rid of them.

  They weren’t afraid of their slaves, like slaves were of their masters. But they were afraid of what might happen if enough blacks felt the stirrings of those first two Rs down in their hearts. And all the while, out in the fields more and more of the low melancholy music of freedom spirituals could be heard.

  [1]. This “nigger dog” description was recounted in the book Black Bondage: The Life of Slaves in the South, by Walter Goodman. Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1969.

  BOY, PAPA, AND MASTER

  3

  JAKE’S PAPA WAS ONE OF THOSE KINDS OF SPIRITUAL men that the white masters hated.

  He wasn’t what folks might call a “religious” man, he was a spiritual man. His faith was his own. He wasn’t interested in leading a slave rebellion. He knew well enough about Nat Turner and other black preachers who intermingled religion and rebellion.

  But that wasn’t his kind of spirituality. He knew the two passages from the Bible just like everyone else. But the difference was, he took them to heart. He believed that he really was supposed to obey his master. And not just the first part of the verses either—he believed he was supposed to obey the rest of them too, which said that slaves were to obey their masters cheerfully as if they were serving the Lord instead of a man.

  If you’d have asked him, he’d have said that all he wanted to do was do what Jesus Christ’s Father told him to do. He’d have said he could do that just as well being a slave as if he was free. He’d have preferred to be free. Who wouldn’t? But he wasn’t the kind of man who would fight for it. He was content to let God see to his needs, and his freedom too. He wanted to spend his energy just trying to obey the words of his Master.

  And by that he meant his spiritual master, not the white man who legally owned him. Even Jake could see that his father was a pretty unusual kind of man and most folks liked him for it.

  But Master Clarkson, whose plantation he worked on, came to hate soft-spoken Hank almost more than any of the rabble-rousers among his slaves. He was sure the quiet Negro would never lead a rebellion. For all he knew, if there was a rebellion he wouldn’t even go along with it. He might even try to stop it. But he also knew that Hank would never call any earthly man “master.”

  That simple fact gnawed away at the soul of Garfield Clarkson. Though every other black on his plantation dutifully referred to him as “Massa Clarkson,” every time he heard Jake’s father’s quiet “Mister Clarkson,” the proud white man silently seethed with resentment. He hated it that he could not break the proud fool’s spirit. In time he came to hate Hank all the more that he was hardworking, diligent, and obedient. He hated him because he knew that his obedience was only secondarily to him as his white owner. He could never tell what the ridiculous fellow might say. One minute he might be quoting some Scripture or another—as if any black man could presume to preach to his betters—and the next be working harder than any three of Clarkson’s other slaves.

  It incensed Clarkson all the more whenever Hank took his side in any dispute. In time he even came to despise the way he encouraged his fellow slaves to obey respectfully and without complaint. As if he needed such a man’s help! He had his whip and his dogs. They would do fine without any of the slave’s idiotic preaching. Men like Clarkson, contrary as it seems, didn’t like people he thought were too good. Maybe because he was mean himself, he was suspicious of anyone who wasn’t.

  If he could get rid of Hank, he would, thought Clarkson. But he was too valuable a man to lose. Clarkson knew that he would never get anything close to him to repay his value to the smooth functioning of his plantation. Though he hated him, he couldn’t deny, lanky though Hank was, that he wa
s strong as an ox and had a calming influence on the other slaves. And his uncanny ability with horses was like nothing Clarkson had ever seen—from the devil, no doubt.

  But in spite of Hank’s value, his master was on the lookout for some way to punish the proud fellow. He had to teach him his place. Threats of his “nigger dog” may have worked on children, but not on a man like Hank.

  Jake was too young to grasp what any of this meant. He liked nothing better than to sit on his father’s lap and feel his long strong arms around him, or to feel his father’s kiss and his big rough hand holding his little one. To listen to his father’s laughter when he told stories was just about the best thing there was. When he was with his father, it seemed that nothing in the whole world could be wrong. But Jake also knew that sometimes his father was the cause of trouble and angry outbursts from Master Clarkson, though he didn’t know why. Why would anyone get angry at his papa?

  Then one day his father did something Jake couldn’t understand.

  Jake had always been friends with the master’s son John. They played together while Jake’s mama watched over both little boys. But as they grew older, John slowly began to change. He talked more and more like the white men, while Jake’s speech became like his papa’s. By the time they were seven, little John started bossing Jake around.

  One day he told Jake to pick up a pile of firewood and move it about ten feet away.

  “Now why you tellin’ me ter do dat, Johnny?” said Jake. “Dat’s a silly thing ter do.”

  “Don’t call me that, Jake,” retorted the white boy. “From now on, I want you to call me Master John.”

  “Why dat?” laughed Jake.

  “Because I said so.”

  “You ain’t my massa.”

  “I’m white. That makes me your boss.”

  “No it don’t.”

  “It does too.”

  “It don’t!”

  “And I tell you it does. Whites are masters and coloreds have to do what they say.”

  “But dat wood dere don’t need ter be moved,” insisted Jake.

  “If I tell you to move it, then you have to move it. You’re a slave.”

  Still thinking Johnny was playing a game on him, Jake started laughing again.

  Angrily “Master John” picked up a long, thin stick from the woodpile and whacked it across Jake’s back.

  “What you do dat for!” yelled Jake. The game was suddenly over. He grabbed another stick to fight back.

  Before long they were hitting and fighting and yelling and rolling over each other on the ground. In the midst of the skirmish Jake’s papa came by. Immediately he put a stop to it. Expecting to be vindicated, Jake stood up, hot from the battle, with a smile of satisfaction on his face. But he was in for a surprise.

  Jake’s papa sent Johnny Clarkson on his way back home. Then he turned seriously to Jake.

  “Don’t you neber fight back, son,” he said. “Fightin’ back ain’t no way ter foller da master.”

  “But Johnny was bossin’ at me, Papa,” replied Jake.

  “Dat don’t matter, son,” said his father. “When sumbody from da big house duz sumfin ter you, or tells you ter do sumfin, you gots ter min’ what dey say.”

  “But it wuz jes’ Johnny.”

  “He be Mister Clarkson’s son, an’ so you gots ter min’ whateber Master John tell you ter do.”

  “But he tol’ me ter move dat pile er wood.”

  “Den you bes’ move it,” said his father.

  “But it don’t need ter be moved.”

  “Dat don’ matter, son. We gots ter obey what we’s tol’ ter do. Lots er what we’s tol’ don’ seem ter make sense. We gots ter obey neber da less. We’s slaves, an’ da Bible tells us ter obey.”

  Feeling betrayed by his own father, Jake set about moving the wood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Johnny watching from behind a tree with a smirk on his face. Jake didn’t know whom to be most angry at—Johnny or his own papa.

  Instead of trusting his father to know what was best, Jake let himself sulk about it. Then he let it fester in his thoughts and heart. And that tiny seed of anger began to grow inside young Jake’s heart.

  It wasn’t too long afterward, when he was still stewing about what his papa had done, that Jake came home one day from swimming in the creek with Johnny and some of the other children. He came around the corner of the shack and heard something he had never heard before in his life. His mother was speaking heatedly to his father.

  “Why can’t chu be like da other men an’ jes’ keep yo mouf shut?” she said. “Why you gots ter be such a talker? Don’ chu know Massa don’ want none er yer religious noshuns? An’ he don’ want none er yer help wiffen da other men neither, not nohow.”

  “I gots ter say what da Lawd gib me ter say,” said her husband calmly.

  “Eben effen it gits you whipped?”

  “Maybe sumtimes dat’s da way it gots ter be.”

  “Dat soun’s right foolish ter me. Why can’t chu jes’ let ever’body else be? You’s gwine git us all whupped one er dese days.”

  Hank did not reply immediately.

  Jake crept away and heard no more. He didn’t like seeing his mama upset. He could not have explained why, but the incident deepened his irritation toward his father.

  SEPARATIONS

  4

  GARFIELD CLARKSON WAS A CRUEL MAN.

  At last he devised a plan to get back at Jake’s father for his uppity ways. The very thought of it brought an evil smile to his lips.

  Jake was eight when his father disappeared. He came in from playing one day and found his mother crying in the shack they called home.

  “Why’s you cryin’, Mama?” he said.

  “Yer daddy’s gone” was her only reply. In her desire to mask her own pain, she unknowingly added more to her son’s. She felt bad that she’d argued with him about the very thing that got him sent away.

  “Why . . . where’d he go?” asked Jake. He was too young to realize the full truth.

  “Ah don’ know, Jake . . . ah don’ know,” she answered in a mournful tone. “He’s jes’ gone, dat’s all . . . he’s jes’ gone. Dey said Massa Clarkson dun sol’ him!”

  Jake’s father did not come back that evening. Nor ever again.

  The next time Jake saw the overseer in the field with the slave men, he walked up to him.

  “What do you want, boy?” said the man gruffly.

  “Please, suh . . . where’s my daddy?” asked Jake.

  “How should I know?” laughed the white man.

  “But he’s gone?”

  “That he is, boy—and he ain’t never coming back.”

  “But why’s he gone, suh?”

  The man seemed to think a few seconds, then stooped down and stared into Jake’s face. Slowly the hint of a grin came to his lips. “Didn’t they tell you, boy?” he asked.

  “No, suh.”

  “He left ’cause he couldn’t stand the sight of you no more,” said Master Clarkson’s foreman. “Yes, sir—he said to the master, ‘Marsa,’ he said, ‘dat boy ob mine’s jes’ too ugly an’ I can’ stan’ sight er him no mo. So I’z leavin’, I am. Effen you don’ sell me, den I’ll run away, I will. Dat’s how despert I be ter git away from dat boy.’ That’s what he said, and it must be the truth because Mister Clarkson sold him the very next day, and I know he wouldn’t have sold him if he hadn’t had a mighty good reason.”

  Jake swallowed, blinking hard to keep from crying in front of the white man. The more he tried to swallow, the bigger got the lump in his throat.

  Feeling his eyes starting to sting, he turned and walked away. Behind him he heard the sound of laughter. It followed him all the way until he was out of sight of the workers. He crept behind the trunk of a big oak, then sat down on the ground and cried and cried. Finally he cried himself to sleep.

  When he woke up the overseer’s laughter still rang in Jake’s ears. Though the thought that his father would want to leave beca
use of him was too painful to bear, he now remembered his mother’s tears from two days before. He thought of his mama’s pain. Again anger toward his father filled his heart. How could he do a thing like this to his mother!

  A week later Jake walked into the house and saw his mother packing up what few things they had to call their own.

  “What you doin’, Mama?” he asked.

  “We’s leavin’ here, Jake,” she said.

  “Is it ’cause er Papa?”

  “No, it ain’t got nuffin’ ter do wiff him. Now git yer clothes. We’s bein’ sold. Massa’s takin’ us ter da slave auction dis afternoon.”

  The words filled Jake with dread. But when the time came, it wasn’t as bad as he had expected. A few white men looked him over with mean expressions and stuck their fingers in his mouth and poked him in the stomach. They did the same to his mama, and a few men said things about her looks. In the end they were both sold to the same man, and Jake knew enough to know that all slave families weren’t so lucky.

  By late that same day they were on their way to their new home. His mama didn’t say much. She just held him in the wagon. He knew she was relieved they were still together.

  WORDS OF ANGER

  5

  JAKE WAS EIGHT, AND AT THE NEW PLANTATION HE was expected to work like a man.

  His mother never seemed the same after that. She didn’t talk as much, or sing around the house. As Jake grew, he gradually forgot his father, even forgot his face and what his voice sounded like. He came to realize that in a slave’s life, family was a luxury not everyone got to enjoy.

  In time Jake forgot the lips that had laughed and kissed and told him old slave stories and had soothed his hurts and fears. He forgot the expression and color of the eyes that had once looked upon him with tenderness and affection. But though he forgot the good, he allowed the resentment in his heart toward the man he’d once called Papa to smolder and grow. The faceless memory of his father became for him the cause and blame of everything that made life unpleasant. He blamed his father for every grievance he suffered at the hands of others. It made no sense. The resentments of children toward parents are often illogical. But irrational resentments eat away at the soul just as destructively as rational ones.