The Emancipation of Robert Sadler

by Robert Sadler

  “The big white school bus fly by so fast we almost got runned over.” They’d be grey with dust, their hair and clean dresses ruined with dirt. “Mama, why they do us like that?”

  “Girls, listen to me. There ain’t no dirt can grieve us til they buries us. And when that day come, we rise up on the glory side—so there ain’t no use to grumblin. Go wash up now.”

  One morning they came home crying so terribly I thought maybe the white children had beat on them. It was worse than that. They had been walking up the dusty road the two and a half miles to school when the white farmer we rented from approached Father.

  “Whar those chillren of yors goin, Jim?”

  “They’s goin to school, jes like yors.”

  “Oh no they ain’t, Jim. My chillren is goin to school, yor chillren is goin to the field!”

  From the look on his face, Father knew that he’d better send his children to the man’s field. Though they worked for nothing, he knew if they didn’t some mighty bad things could happen to him.

  “Git out the field, chillren,” he said.

  The crying lasted about a week. They never went back to school again because soon they were doing Mama’s work too. She didn’t have much energy, and she seemed to be having trouble catching her breath. Some days she could hardly get out of bed. But she went to work in the field nearly every day.

  Ella and I played in the clearing during the day with the other children too young to work the fields, waiting for our mamas to come for us. One day when we saw her coming for us, her forehead and fine high cheekbones shone with sweat. Her small but strong body stooped low and her walk was slow. As she drew near to us a broad smile spread across her face. We ran to her arms and kissed her wet face. Mama’s health was getting worse. Her breathing was more labored and she looked like she was in pain. I began to feel protective of her, and I worked hard at cleaning, sweeping, and feeding the chickens. My older sisters were working with Mama in the field so it was just Ella and me in the house.

  One night Leroy and Johnny moved out of the cabin to join the other brothers and get jobs. Mama said good-bye to them tearfully. As she embraced them, she looked as though she wanted to tell them something—something special, something that would make sense of everything and give it all a purpose and meaning. But instead she kissed them each quickly and said, “The Lord watch over you.”

  When they were gone, and the house was still, Mama sang to us. It was as though she was praying. She was part Indian and usually wore her long black hair in braids tied around her head. This night her hair hung loose and fuzzy around her shoulders, and I thought she looked like an angel. The other children must have thought so too, for we all sat real quiet, watching and listening as Mama sang to us. We joined in, too, and sang until it was time to go to bed.

  Jesus, shine your light, shine shine shine . . .

  As tender and loving as Mama was, Father was mean. His disposition was growing worse and worse. He came home that night drunk as usual. I heard him call for Mama. I crawled off the bed and watched from the shadows. He was teetering on his feet and in an ugly mood. Mama got out of bed and came into the kitchen where he stood. Without a word he raised his arm and struck her a blow across the head, and she was sent sprawling to the floor.

  I ran across the room with a scream and grabbed a stick. I leaped at my father and beat his legs with all my might. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” I screamed at him. “Don’t you hit Mama!”

  Before I knew it, he had me dangling from his hand in the air. Then with a howl he hurled me the length of the cabin into the wall, knocking me unconscious.

  Mama fussed over me for a couple of days, and I ached and hurt everywhere. She was afraid something had been broken inside my head because of the lump and bruises.

  Mama’s health continued to grow worse. By cotton-picking time she was unable to rise up out of the bed. She cried often for her children. I would hear her in the bed as I brought in the wood in the morning.

  “O Lord, have mercy. Have mercy. Take care of my chillren, Lord.”

  “Where you goin, Mama?” I would ask her.

  “Son, you gonna have to be mighty strong, hear? Yor Mama’s goin home soon.”

  “Goin home? But you are home, Mama.”

  “No, son. Mama means home in heaven. With the Lord—that’s real home.”

  “You leavin us, Mama?”

  “I believe so, son.”

  She had that look in her eye again—that look as though she had something very important to say. Something that would explain everything. Like why Father was so cruel, and why things were the way they were—things like that.

  “Lord, have mercy,” she said instead.

  I was sweeping out the cabin one afternoon and it began to rain. We dreaded rain because it poured in on everything, and the cabin was like a sieve. Work in the fields went on rain or shine. Mama lay on her bed with the rain dripping down on her pillow by her head. I stood near her bed watching her. She lay wheezing in the darkness of the afternoon, and I was afraid she might have been serious about leaving us and going to her real home. The cabin had been so gloomy since she took sick that there was little joy anywhere. Even Ella, who was always happy and laughing, became grave and sullen. There was no singing anymore without Mama to sing with us, and one day followed the other like a string of cold stones. The neighbor ladies prepared hot onion and potato soup and sarsaparilla and sage tea for Mama. They laid long strands of green and brown grasses on her chest, and they prayed.

  It rained for three days. Father took Janey, Pearl, and Margie to the field with him, and Ella and I stayed in the cabin with Mama until they came home at night. Ella got a fever and had to stay in bed, so I sat by myself on the step watching the rain and waiting for Mama to wake up.

  At the end of the third day of rain, I heard Mama calling for Father from her bed. “Jim . . . Jim . . .” Her voice was weak. I ran to her. “. . . Your father, honey. Git your father.” She was gasping like she had been running hard and couldn’t catch her breath.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” I said and raced out of the cabin to get my father. When I found him in the barn bent over a broken wagon wheel I shouted almost hysterically, “Mama! Mama! It’s Mama! She wants you! She’s real sick, Father! She’s callin for you!” He didn’t even look up as he worked. Finally he muttered, “I can’t come, boy. Gotta finish this here busted axle.”

  By the time Father arrived at Mama’s bedside that evening, she had slipped into unconsciousness. She never spoke or opened her eyes again. In another day she was dead.

  The days which followed were a daze. The funeral was held in a little church on the hill about a mile away. I saw her lying in the box they had built, and I wanted to scream, “Mama, get up. Get up! Mama, why you lyin there like that?”

  The only one of the family who wasn’t at the funeral was Ella. She was still sick. A friend of Mama’s sat with her during the service giving her catnip tea on a spoon. The little church was crowded with Mama’s friends and some of our relatives. My older brothers were there, brothers I had hardly even seen. I stared at them, wondering what life off the farm could be like. Did they know how to read and write? There were many things I wanted to ask them, but as it was I didn’t get a chance to speak with them at all because they left right after the service. I don’t think they were even aware that I was their little brother. They didn’t even wait for the lemonade and sugar cookies that came later.

  “Yoll eat aplenty, Robert,” my sister Margie told me. “It’ll be a long time before we see cookies agin!” I took two cookies and some lemonade and brought them home to Ella.

  “Ella, how long you gonna lay up in that bed?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Well, Mama’s daid now.”

  “I know it. What’re you fixin to do?”

  I looked at her face and was startled to see how thin it had become. She was small for her age to begin with, but now she looked so tiny and so helpless. I felt panic rise within me.r />
  “Ella!” I shouted.

  “What you shoutin on, Robert?”

  “Are you gonna die, Ella? Are you gonna die?”

  Ella’s condition didn’t get any better. Margie gave her what was left of Mama’s cabbage juice tonic; she made a paste of hot clay and cabbage leaves and spread it on her, but she didn’t get well. Soon she couldn’t eat anything, and it was only one month after my mother died that Ella was dead, too.

  All I had in the whole world was gone—Mama, the light of our life, and now my only friend, Ella.

  Father worked extra jobs as a basket maker and a blacksmith, but every cent he made he spent on liquor, and there were days when there was not a crumb of food in the house. One day Margie and I were coming back from the mill with the sack of cornmeal in the back of the buggy, and we saw an old apple core on the side of the road. I held the reins and Margie made a dive for the apple core, and we ate it right there. The rest of the way home we looked hungrily for more apple cores.

  Margie and Pearl were good to me. They played with me, talked to me, put me to sleep in the bed with them, and tried to show me love. Margie brought singing back into the cabin, and at night we would sing around the fire; or else, lying in the bed, we’d sing to the moon peeking through the boards of the roof.

  Father was home less and less. Whenever we did see him he would be drunk. Then one day he came home and announced that he was fixing to take himself a new wife, so that spring Father, Pearl, Margie, and I left our little cabin and moved to the north side of Anderson to live in our new mama’s home. It was a little nicer than our cabin, but it, too, was unpainted and had no finished ceiling, floor coverings, window glass, or screens, and the yard was grey dirt. Standing beside the porch were two boys, younger than us. The thing that interested me the most was that both children were fat. If they were fat, then maybe we would get some good food to eat.

  “Them’s Rosie’s chillren,” Father told us. “Yor new brothers.”

  Our life in Rosie’s shanty with her two children was not what we expected. Rosie hated us. She pulled Margie’s hair, screamed at Pearl, and would hit us at any time. While she ate at the one table in the house with her own children, we had to eat our food on our laps in the corner. She said there wasn’t room for us.

  The hopes of getting good food or enough to eat were quickly squelched. We got only what they didn’t want. Some days we would get just one bowl of grits. We were hungrier at our stepmother’s house than we had been before.

  One night when Rosie had cooked up some chicken backs and corn bread for a church dinner, Margie and Pearl ran into the kitchen, tossed some pieces of chicken into their aprons, and ran out again. We ate the chicken backs behind the shed, bones and all. Rosie threw a fit and told Father that night that we were thieves. We were outside, but we could hear her screaming at Father about us.

  “Lazy, thas what! Don’t do no work! Now they stealin food as well. Since you brought them three no-accounts into mah house, it’s been jes trouble.”

  We were certain that Father wouldn’t listen to her lies. He knew we were good children and hard workers, and surely he would figure out that we took the food because she wasn’t feeding us.

  But when he called us in to him, we could see right away he had sided with Rosie. One by one he whupped us with the buggy trace for stealing.

  It got worse. Father began staying out all night drinking. When he’d come home, he’d be so drunk that he would sleep all day. He started keeping company with other women, and Rosie took her fury out on us. She would beat us for no reason whatsoever.

  “They don’t mind me nohow, Jim, hear? They don’t mind me nohow! They good-for-nothin no-accounts, each one of em, them two girls and that useless boy.”

  As he listened to Rosie’s lying accusations, Father began to form a plan in his mind. It was plowing time. One terrible day he came into the room where my sisters and I slept together and woke us up, ordering us to get into the wagon outside. We quickly scrambled out of bed into the cool morning air and climbed into the wagon, never dreaming what was in store for us. In fact, we thought it was a special treat to be receiving any attention from Father. Maybe we were going to town to pick up seed; maybe we were going to the blacksmith’s where Father worked. We were so glad to be getting away from Rosie and her two boys that we didn’t really care where we were going.

  Little was said during our ride down the Abbeville Road, through Anderson and on south. The morning air was cool and damp, and my sisters and I huddled together in the corner of the wagon, bouncing against the rough boards as we rolled across the deep ruts and holes in the road. Wherever Father was going, he was mighty intent on it. His face was grim and his back stiff and straight, like he maybe needed to belch.

  Soon we passed the cabin where all of us had been born. I held my breath as I looked at the old deserted shanty. Margie and Pearl looked as though they might cry, but they held their chins stiff. The door of the shanty was open, and inside it was dark and empty. How I longed to jump from the wagon and run down the path into Mama’s arms. If only Ella’s little round face would appear from around the side of the sloping porch, and I could run to her and squeal and laugh again and then sit at Mama’s knee and hear her sing to us. As we passed over the top of the hill, I began to cry. Pearl pinched my arm in case Father would turn and give me a lick for crying.

  We bumped along the road without a word for more than an hour. Finally Pearl said to Father, “Where we goin?” He sat almost motionless on the small seat at the front of the wagon. He did not so much as whisk a hair at her question. His silence meant don’t ask questions.

  We grew hungry as the morning wore on, and a little sore from the bumpy ride. Still, we said nothing as we watched the South Carolina countryside slowly pass by us, the heat rising up from the earth like hot fingers. Finally, we left the main road and turned into a long driveway. On top of a hill was a large, beautiful house, the biggest I had ever seen. I wondered why Father was turning in here. It wasn’t the home of anybody we knew, and obviously it belonged to a white man. We saw several shanties near the back of the property like our cabin. Father halted the mule, got out of the wagon, and started for the back door.

  “Why we stoppin here? Who lives in that big house?” I asked. Margie and Pearl didn’t answer, for those same questions were in their minds.

  The dogs in the yard barked as Father made his way to the back door. He took off his large brimmed hat and held it in his hand. He looked tall and shabby standing there on the step; his black hair and the dark skin of his face shone in the early morning sun. Soon the door was opened by a white man as tall as Father. They talked for a while and then Father turned and pointed to us. He turned several times, pointing to us, and then he and the white man went inside the house. When they came out, Father ordered us to get out of the wagon. Margie and Pearl jumped down first and then helped me down. We stood in our bare feet on the cold ground staring at the white man, Mr. Tom Billings, a cotton farmer.

  “Y’say the boy is only five years old?” the man asked.

  “Yessuh. Five years old, suh,” my father answered.

  “Hmmm . . . I don’t like em so young.”

  “Take em all or take none,” my father said.

  The man narrowed his eyes, then said, “OK, I’ll take em.”

  “Git over there by the house and stand still!” he ordered us roughly. We did as we were told and when we turned around, Father was in the wagon and spiraling it back the way we had come. I called out to him, but he didn’t turn his head. Then Pearl called, “Father, wait! Don’t leave us!” and she ran after the wagon. It was no use. Father didn’t even look at her. His fierce gaze was on the road ahead of him, and he didn’t pay any mind to our cries and pleas.

  The wagon disappeared down the driveway and onto the main road. Pearl and Margie and I stood trembling against the side of the house, our feet digging into the cold earth. It was spring of 1917 and my sisters and I had just been sold as slaves
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  3

  Margie and Pearl held onto my hands so tight it hurt. When I looked up at them, they were both crying. The white man stood in front of us, looking at us with cold, hard eyes. Then, without a word, he disappeared into the kitchen. In a moment a large black woman hurried out of the door and bustled over to where we were cowering against the side of the house. She reached for our hands and said in a soft voice, “You chillren come along.” Hesitantly, we followed her. The sun was shining hot overhead, and I could hear the sound of birds twittering in the trees.

  “My name is Sarah, what’s yours?” the soft-spoken woman asked. Margie told her our names, and in the clamoring heat, I began to shiver and tremble. Pearl put her arms around me and held me against her knees.

  “You’ll help me with the washing,” Sarah told my sisters. “And what’s this?” she said, looking at me. “How old is this here child?”

  “Five years, Ma’am,” Margie answered.

  “Can’t he talk?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Margie said.

  “Well?” She looked at me, waiting, like I was supposed to say something. I couldn’t get my mouth to open. She bent down and put her face next to mine. “Chile, can you sweep with a broom?” I nodded dumbly.

  “Yes, Ma’am, he can sweep, sure enough,” Margie said. Sarah straightened, handed me a broom, and explained that the porch had to be swept and kept clean every day. Then she took my sisters with her inside the house. Margie squeezed my hand. “We’ll be back, Robert, hear?”

  I watched them leave me, and then standing alone on the large wooden porch, I began to cry. I was afraid I’d get a whupping for not doing what I was told, but I was too scared to move. When I turned around, a blond-haired young lady dressed in a pink and white dress was standing in the doorway. I stared at her, frightened, and she stared back at me, amused.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I tried to answer, but no words came out.