Adam, in an open-mouthed, bug-eyed daze, stood before a tall white man in a flat-topped straw hat that shadowed his face except for his long jaw. The man jerked him around and he saw a second white man in the doorway of the shedroom, holding a lantern in his hand. But his incomprehension of his situation was so complete that he could not move. The first white man, now holding him by the belt, cracked him over the head with a club saying, “Maybe that’ll wake you up—Goddamn you!”
It did help, Adam found. At least he knew now that his punishment was not a nightmare, but incredibly real. He was shoved out onto the back porch, where the man with the lantern set it down and pulled Adam’s hands behind his back and tied them together with a length of rope, which he had cut from a coil of new plow line he carried with him. In the dim light, Adam now saw that the tall man with the club had a silver badge on his right gallus strap and a pistol in the holster at his belt. Guessing that he must be the Law, Adam tried to speak, but he found his throat so dry and aching, his jaws so locked together that only a whisper came out.
They did not even notice it. They hustled him down the steps and around the house and out of the front gate, where there were other white men, carrying shotguns, guarding a mule-team and wagon. He was quickly boosted over a rear wheel and made to lie down in the wagon bed, where he found another bound negro already lying.
The night’s slow, broken, fearful ride, during which the wagon took on three more roped negroes, finally brought them to what he later learned to be the county jail—a square oak deal building, with barred windows in it. While the man with the lantern stood holding it above his head, they were all unloaded and led inside, where three other white men, like hell’s pale angels, stood guard in a bare front room from which a dark hall ran down, he felt sure, to a rope, firewood, and a tree.
The man wearing the silver badge stopped before a table just inside the entrance and said, “All full up?”
Across the table from him, a man with a gold badge on his galluses, and a revolver laying on the table beside him said in a dead voice, “Stand ‘em over there with the rest!” nodding over his shoulder toward the far side of the room.
There were four more negroes, with their hands tied behind them, standing with their faces to the wall there. Adam and his fellow passengers were pushed along over to the wall beside them. Here they all stood, the nine of them with a white man in the middle of the room holding a gun on them—stood, leaned against the wall, or slumped down on the floor, for the rest of the night.
Numb beyond any pain, except a perishing thirst and still without a hint of why he was there except that seemingly a white man, somehow, somewhere, had been killed, and almost mindless in his confused uncertainty and fear of what might be in store for him, he was still limply kneeling, and leaning against the wall six hours later, when day broke and the jailer entered with a big tin pot of coffee. Adam remembered that night, would always remember it, as the nearest thing to hell he could suffer on this earth.
The jailor had a negro boy with him, carrying a new tin cup. The boy held out the cup for the jailor to fill with coffee, then he held it up to each prisoner’s mouth while he drank it, each in turn. When they got to him, Adam had mustered up enough voice and desperation to croak, “Could yuh gimme jus’ a little bit of water, please suh?”
The jailor’s bloated face stiffened, like he wasn’t going to do it, then he shrugged. “Damn if you don’t look like you need it, all right!” he said and motioned the negro helper toward a cedar water bucket on the table by the entrance. That water had felt like hot lead running down his throat, at first. . .
The mule halted and Adam roused himself to see, in the gathering dark, that they had arrived at the first gate to the Hightower holding. He got out of the buggy to open it. He had known after he gulped down that tin cup-full of water that he was going to live and that even if later they did hang him, nothing else could be as bad as the night he had just passed through, nothing could ever happen to him again as bad as that had been! He lifted the latch and pushed the gate inward. It was hard for him to recall now just how he did find out all about the riot, Adam reflected, leading the mule through the gateway.
He had heard one of the white men in the jail read out what was in the newspaper. There was some talk amongst the prisoners during the two days that followed though they didn’t seem to know much about what happened—or wouldn’t tell it. The long tall deputy who arrested him—fellow named Smithson—had talked to him about it some. Then the Colonel told him, too. Any way you learned it, it was a hard thing to believe. It seemed that his people went plum crazy mad that Sunday afternoon. Of course Redeye was responsible for a large part of it—the popskull that the white men in the drugstores sold them. But there was more to it than that. The devil got control of that bunch of niggers. Not those under the arbor worshiping. It was the ones outside, drinking and gambling.
One nigger lost his watch to another nigger, but when he got ahead again, he wanted to buy it back. When the man who won it wouldn’t let him have it back he called the marshal, who arrested the one with the watch and started to take him to the jail. As they crossed a ditch on the way, this nigger tripped him and broke loose and ran. The marshal said later at the trial that he and his deputy fired up in the air to make the man stop running but there was so much confusion with all those black folks around that he didn’t know just what happened. Anyhow the running man got killed by a shot from somewhere and all those drunk niggers thought it was the marshals that did it and started after them.
The marshals ran and got out of the way. But by that time the black people had lost what little sense they ever had. The devil was driving them like a drove of wild hogs. Mad because they’d lost the marshals and mixed up and lost, they came—a thousand or more of them, in a mob—a running into town, looking for their meat. They rounded onto the main street and came running up it.
Another excursion train had just come and gone, bringing on it a young white boy from Pineville, son of a big rich Yankee sawmiller there. There was, also, at the depot a bunch of colored people. When this white boy, walking up the street, saw this mob running toward him, he looked back at the depot and saw the crowd there—it was just curious to see what was up—running toward him from the other direction, and he got scared and broke and ran, ran between a couple of stores.
That wild drove of niggers went after him—not having any better sense than to think he was one of the marshals they’d been chasing. They ran him into a big house where white people lived and started to burn the house down, but the white people let some of them come inside to search for him (not knowing the boy was in there) and they found him and dragged him out and killed him.
He, of course, never knew that poor white boy, never did see him; but he had always felt a peculiar sort of sympathy for him. The white boy was nineteen, too, and just happened to come in on one of those excursions. And he didn’t have a thing to do with all of that hell that a bunch of reckless white men and rioting black men made up there in Lancaster any more than Adam did. Poor boy! Not a thing! Those hell-headed niggers that day were yelling, “Kill white man, kill white man, but don’t kill Yankee!” when they cut that Northern boy’s throat.. .
Adam found the second gate, the gate to his own place, open and Bo standing beside it. The boy jumped up on the back of the buggy and Adam drove on down the lane. . .
At the trial the Colonel had stood up in that unfriendly courtroom and had told the judge that if he had a little time he believed he could prove Adam’s story that he was asleep on a shuck pile in a man’s house during the whole riot and did not know a thing about it, but the judge wouldn’t agree to it and the jury gave Adam a life sentence to the Mines, along with Trotlucky and the other sixteen on trial.
After the case was finished the Colonel had called him over from the benches where he was sitting with the other prisoners, to his table. That was the first time he ever got a good look at the Colonel. He was fuller faced then, with his san
dy, curly hair parted on the right and combed back smooth off his forehead, and was wide and smooth, too. But he had those little, real blue eyes that were as clear as a baby’s conscience.
He said to me standing there before him—even then he called me by name—he said: “Adam, they didn’t treat you right! And I couldn’t do anything about it, this time. An innocent white boy has been killed and feeling is running high. I can’t get you a fair trial in Coventry County now. But this is not the last of it.”
He didn’t take no oath, he didn’t make no promise, he didn’t raise his hand, he didn’t write no paper, he didn’t even riffle ‘em on the table, he just kept right on talking, putting one word after another, but I could see that he meant it. He said, “Adam, you go on up to the Mines and be a good boy and I’ll get you out. . .”
“Whut yuh sayin’, Paw?” Bo spoke up from behind him, interrupting his thoughts.
He had mumbled out loud! Adam shrugged and looked about him, peering through the dark. They were at the yard gate. He sniffed and cleared his throat. “I say, Git in the seat here and take the mule on to the barn! And make sure you give him twelve good ears of corn when you feed him!” Handing the reins to the boy, Adam got out of the buggy.
6.
NO FROWNING, but that hard scared look that will kill you, Adam decided, remembering the faces of the white people in the courtroom at Lancaster, as he eyed a green bay thicket by the road, the following morning.
He had beside him in the wagon the last load of lightwood of the season. He was on his way to Riverton to make his weekly report to Mrs. Hightower and to do his regular Saturday trading. Thoughts that had pursued him through the night were at him again, as his image of the old trial continued to haunt him. The thing was that those white people had denied him a human skin. And that was what he had seen again on the white men’s faces in lawyer Duke’s office!
Bringing the small rusty remnant of a tobacco plug out of his overalls pocket, he had brushed it off on his shirtsleeve and turned it about to find a place to bite off a chew. He would reckon it was because the Colonel did not look at him that way that he had believed him when he said he would get him out of the Mines. Adam took the chew and turned it over in his mouth. Of course, he was done on his way to the Mines, whether he believed the Colonel or not that morning!
He secured the tobacco in his jaw. There had been more reason for his belief in the Colonel than that, however. Although he had been a young man then and Mr. Atwell was already old and they didn’t look alike, there was something about the Colonel that had reminded him of the gray-bearded old master of the plantation to which his mother had returned when Freedom came and where he had grown up. There was something alike in the Colonel and old Mr. Adam—Mr. Adam, who knew the white blood in him and though it wasn’t any of his, had treated him almost like he was his own son. Adam couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about what the Colonel said that day like what Mr. Atwell might have said. But there was more to it even than that, than just the man. It was somehow the thing itself—somehow. Adam wagged his head. . .
When he first saw Lost Mountain Prison, it had scared him.
He and the other prisoners from Lancaster rode there in a cow car on a narrow-gauge railroad, from the last town where there was a regular railroad. There were a couple of fellows in the prisoner bunch who never worried about nothing, no time, and one of them was that Trotlucky Bostick. He just didn’t seem to care. And he and a big dark fellow called Luster were singing and joking and they got most of the crowd to singing with them on the way over there.
They had been traveling through the roughest, wildest mountain country he had ever seen, country without a sign of life in it, the whole afternoon. The sun had already dropped behind the peaks. Suddenly they rounded a woody slope and, there in a big hollow, filled with the gathering dark, on a low rise, sat a dead white city, a ghost settlement.
A hush fell on that crowd in the car, as they swarmed against the slatted side to look out. Adam, clamped to one of the slats, peering through a gap, grew weak behind his knees. Then that damn fool Trotlucky had come out with, “Gawd, hit look like a clabber cheese!”
They all quick found out it wasn’t. But the whole stockade—a big three-story jail, an eating hall and a guardhouse with a high plank fence around them—was kept white-washed.
Nothing else was. The prisoners were all colored men and the guards looked just as black as the niggers did, when they came out of the coal mines at night. And the whole time he was there Adam never saw anything that looked like daylight, but those white-washed walls. There was a little while of daylight on Sundays of course. The guards rattled the chains on the doors to the big long rooms they slept in at four o’clock in the morning and they were loaded in the cars and on their way underground by five-thirty, and it was evening dark when they came back up.
It was a rough, hard place. The eating was rough: cornbread, sowbelly and beans—mostly beans and the corn meal was sometimes moldy. The work was rough: there were twelve hours of it every day, except Sunday, and four men got killed in the mines while he was there. Rougher still were the men: there were a few mean white men among the guards, who liked to use the raw-hide; but meaner than the guards were the prisoners—some of them, and they could get at you more. Some of them had got so low down they had lost their nature. It was one of these trying to bugger him that had almost got him in trouble.
But the thing that was hardest to bear, the thing that you couldn’t forget, that followed you around like your shadow, that were in you like a pox, that tempted you most and ran some men crazy, were those bars in the windows, the chains on the doors, the day-after-day gun in your back, and those white-washed walls that cut you off from the rest of the world.
There was a lot of talk among the newcomers about breaking jail. It went on every night behind the chained doors in the sleeping halls. They didn’t hardly talk about anything else. And nobody stopped them. The old-timers didn’t join in. There were old-timers there who almost seemed to like it. At any rate they wouldn’t get stirred up about making a break, about how easy it would be to get out of the old rotten plank windows and over the plank fence. The warden didn’t even keep a pack of bloodhounds. But the old-timers, when the talk came up, just shook their heads and walked away. A little, one-eyed, bald-headed trusty on Adam’s hall told him once, “You kin git out, but yuh kain’t git nowheres else!”
The bunch of them out of the Lancaster riot took the lead in all the planning and plotting to break jail. They all claimed to have got a raw deal in the court. None of them would admit to having anything to do with killing the white boy, though one of them admitted to Trotlucky that he had gone in the house to search for him. And Trotlucky had told Adam once that he had been near enough in the crowd to see the boy when they drug him out. But none of them denied being drunk and mixed up in the ruckus, except himself, Adam. Yet they had all got the same sentence. To him this continued to be a reason for hope.
Except for Trotlucky, he didn’t know any of the men sent up from Lancaster and he didn’t talk with them much. He went ahead and did what the white bosses told him to do just like they were paying him good wages for it and come night he got in his bunk and went to sleep. It seemed to him like the best way to get along and he still held on to what the Colonel had told him in the courtroom.
The bunch talked every night after the lights were blown out and the trusties were asleep. They sent Trotlucky to him to get him to join in. Squatting there by his bunk in the dark of a night, trying to get him to go with him to the privy where the others were gathered, arguing with him in his up-and-down sandy whisper that crazy big-mouthed nigger began to break into Adam’s sleep. Why did he believe the Colonel would get him out? Adam dodged answering that question, because when he tried to put his answer into words they sounded silly.
Trotlucky came to his bunk four times. Finally he told Adam that it was his last chance to get in on the thing. If he changed his mind later,
they wouldn’t talk to him. Adam had been there almost two months then and he had not got word of any sort from anybody in the outside world and with Trotlucky disturbing him every other night with all sorts of persuasions and contentions, he had got to dreaming about his mother’s being sick, about her having to leave the Atwell plantation, and all sorts of things. But more than any of it, the white-washed walls got him. Trotlucky kept saying, “In another week we’ll be long gone from this here boneyard!” It made Adam’s blood leap to be gone with them and his heart ache at the thought of being left behind. On the last time that Trotlucky came to his bed, Adam went back to the privy with him to talk to the bunch.
A light was kept burning in the long narrow closet, bare of everything except white wash and a wall bench that ran the length of it. There were already five others there, sitting on the privy holes. He and Trotlucky pulled down their drawers and covered two more.
Trotlucky always looked like a scared goat, about to go stiff. He had wall eyes and even a little whiskers on his chin. He now rolled his eyes around the watching group, allowing them to come painfully to rest on Adam and said, “The onliest way a nigger kin git justice where we come from is to take it!” He lifted and shifted his head about, looking at the others, as if he might be about to jump off his perch and run the next minute, then came back to Adam. “Take it, and be long gone for somewhere else!”
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 7
