The Emancipation of Robert Sadler

by Robert Sadler

  The squalor of the quarter looked beautiful to me as I approached the shanties. I walked along the dirt and mud around each shack drinking in the smells of salt pork frying and hoe cake baking in the ashes of hearths. I looked at the tiny gardens beside some of the shacks, with carrots, cabbage, and onions growing. The boards that made up the walls of the shacks were far enough apart to lay a dog. The setting sun spread across the land in gold and silver streaks, and the sweat and dirt on the faces shone in the light. My heart swelled to see the faces of my people. Sitting in the dirt or on the wooden planks before their doors, they were like angels—worn, beaten, beautiful angels.

  “Robert!” I heard a voice call. I turned and saw Corrie Moore standing and talking with another woman.

  “Robert, chile, I declare!”

  I ran to her and she grabbed me in her arms. The smell of her was acrid, wet, and wonderful. She crushed me in the cotton of her dress, and I pressed my cheeks against the soft nap of her head.

  “What you doin here?”

  “Massuh said I can come every night when I finish my chores, and even on Sunday!”

  “Wal, thank you, Jesus!” she said.

  Soon she was calling people to come and meet me, and then I was surrounded by staring children and smiling grown-ups. Only St. Peter at the pearly gates where Jesus lived was missing.

  The time went by quickly. Before I left to go back to the Big House, Corrie took me to her shack to see Buck and one other person. As I entered the shack, I saw Buck sitting on the bed and in his arms was the other person—a tiny newborn baby.

  “We done got ourselves a boy-chile,” Corrie announced.

  It was a warm and happy reunion. Only for a brief moment did my mind stray back to the last time I was in that cabin, when Pearl lay dying.

  “Yoll lookin’ a little fat, chile,” Corrie exclaimed as we sat together in the few remaining moments.

  “Ahz?”

  “Yoll is.”

  We laughed and hugged and I held their new little baby. Later that night back at the Big House my spirits were flying. That’s what love does to you. It feels like freedom.

  Night after night I fled to the quarter. The days weren’t so bad because I had something to look forward to.

  One Sunday afternoon after the Beals had left for one of their outings, I went to the quarter to play with the children. “Hear come that house nigger!” one of the children spat. I was stunned.

  “Hear comes that Tom!”

  It was the first time I was called that. It was a terrible insult. I recoiled and stood ready to defend myself.

  “They feedin you vanilla cake and tapioca up there in the Big House?”

  “Whitey’s favorite little niggerboy, huh!”

  “Ha-ha-ha, Robert loves the paleface! Robert loves the paleface!”

  I leaped at one of the boys and began to hit him. The other children joined in the fight, and I found myself wildly hitting and punching. I couldn’t fight the white boys in the yard of the Big House, but I could fight back now. I got hold of the boy who called me a Tom and pounded his head on the ground. My rage grew each time his head hit the ground. Then I felt myself being torn from him, and before I knew it I was dangling from the fist of a large Negro man I’d never seen before.

  “You tryin to kill somebody, boy?” he growled. “Don’t you come around here causin no trouble, hear? Stay up at the Big House! Now git! Git!”

  He dropped me from his grip, and I whirled around furiously, making words as best I could. “I ain’t no Tom! I’sa black nigger slave jes like yoll! Next one call me a Tom I gonna kill!”

  I stood my ground and then slowly turned my back on them and walked toward the shacks. Nobody made a move to get me, but I knew what they were thinking. They really believed I was the white folks’ little black puppy and I came to spy on them.

  The sun was hot and the air thick and humid. I knew how conspicuous I must have been, but inside me I believed that it was only here that I belonged. I refused to be a coward and run back to the Big House. I wandered around the shanties of the quarter listening to the sounds of the people: singing, babies crying, sounds of people living too close to each other, moving, living, loving, hating; there were smells of liquor, tobacco, sweat, and cabbage cooking.

  Moving through the quarter, I looked at the faces of my people. Lined, streaked with sweat, they looked back at me with blank expressions. Word had gotten out that Master Beal had sent his puppy to the quarter to spy on them. But near the end of one row of shacks I saw a face that looked back at me and smiled.

  “Hello, honey.” A woman with white hair tied up in a rag, wearing a calico dress and spotted apron, sat on the ground outside her shack.

  “Hello, Ma’am,” I answered.

  “Whey you from?”

  “I be from the Big House, Ma’am.”

  “From the Big House? Ohhh, then you up thar wi Harriet and wi lil Daisy who passed—”

  “Yes’m.”

  “That be Harriet’s shanty right over there.” She pointed to a small wood shack surrounded by grey dirt like all the others, and sitting in front were three small children—just sitting there staring. I wanted to go and talk to them, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “Set down, boy,” offered the white-haired woman. Her eyes were kind and friendly.

  I sat hesitantly in the dirt, looking across the path at the children in front of Harriet’s shanty. It was hard to imagine Harriet here in the shambles of the quarter when I had only seen her in the environment of the Beal household. I had never seen her with a black baby in her arms, and these little ones in the dirt looked like they were in desperate need of a Mammy to hold them.

  The old woman saw me staring at the children.

  “Jerry! Amos! Agatha! Come over here!”

  The children looked up and with listless movements ambled over to where we were sitting. “Massuh done tuk me out the field and set me to keerin for the chillrens,” the woman told me. “These here babies is some a mah babies.” She folded them into her arms, and they seemed to melt into her. She kissed their heads and smoothed their cheeks with her bent and gnarled fingers.

  “Whatcho name, chile?”

  “Robert, Ma’am.”

  “This here be Robert, chillren, he work wi yor Mammy up in the Big House.” The children brightened somewhat.

  I stayed there for over an hour. The old woman’s name was Ceily. She seemed to be peaceful, and I found that I liked talking with her.

  “You say yo prayers, chile?” she asked me off-handedly.

  “Prayers?” I asked, surprised. “I don’t reckon so, Ma’am.”

  “Yoll don’t pray?” she asked incredulously.

  “No, Ma’am,” I answered, wondering if I had done something wrong.

  “Well, I don’t reckon I know how you done lived this long,” she said. “Mus be the Lord savin you for the day when yoll look up at Him an shout, Hallelujah, Jesus!”

  “Hunh?”

  “Whey’s yo Mammy?”

  “She daid, Ma’am.”

  “Didn’t she never pray wid you, boy?”

  I thought for a moment. A picture of my mother sailed through my head. I saw her fine high cheeks, her large sad eyes, her light brown skin. I heard her voice again singing softly in the hot, empty cabin.

  I blinked and said in a low voice, “I reckon my Mama done prayed, Ma’am.”

  “Yoll know what ah’m gonna do ri now?” Miss Ceily asked with a broad smile.

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “I’m gonna pray fo yoll. Right now. Ah’m gonna pray the good Lord come an show you how He died fo yor sins so’s you kin go to heaven when you die.”

  “Heaven?” I said. “No, no. I ain’t goin to no heaven.”

  “Chile! What you say!”

  “No, heaven be fo white folk.”

  “What you talking bout?”

  “Me, I wants to go where my mama be, an Ella and Pearl—with Jesus.”

  She looked
at me funny. “Ef that don’t beat all.”

  Amos wiggled in her arms and she kissed his cheek.

  “I figured it out,” I said.

  She lifted a hand and placed it on my head, and in a soft, droning voice prayed to a heavenly Father she seemed to know personally. “Lord, hepp this chile . . .”

  She ran her fingers along my cheek, “Honey, who done tole you heaven is jes fo white folk?”

  Her touch was sweet, gentle. I wasn’t used to such a touch. I stared at her.

  “Chile, don’t you pay no mind to them lies.”

  Her face was so kind, without teeth and with deep creases and milky eyes. “Ceily, do Jesus live in heaven?”

  “Yes, chile. He do.”

  “And do they be colored people in heaven?”

  “Yes, chile. They be.”

  She laughed and gave my head a rub. Jerry, Amos, and Agatha laughed with her.

  I felt kind of light and happy inside. “Fo a fact?”

  “I spect so, chile, I spect so.”

  She prayed again for me. Prayed that I would come to know the Lord and serve Him. “Come back and see me, chile,” she said.

  I left her there with Harriet’s children on her lap and made my way through the rows of shacks to the path leading to the Big House.

  I deliberately passed the boys who had bullied me. If I ran from them, I’d never have face in the quarter. They watched me but didn’t do or say anything. I passed Buck and Corrie’s shanty, and they were sitting outside against the house in the heated shade. “Oh, Robert,” Corrie called as I came near. “I done forgot to tell yoll!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yoll be eight years old now!”

  14

  I was not too eager to return to the quarter after the fight with the colored boys. I didn’t want any more trouble, and I knew what happened to spies or traitors. I wondered if that’s not why Master Beal allowed me to go to the quarter, so I’d spy for him and get killed for doing it. I was no spy. I was no traitor. I’d just stay away from the quarter. I began, instead, to take long walks around the plantation. I discovered the location of the dreaded overseers’ houses. To my amazement, they were little better than the shacks the slaves lived in. Thrasher’s house was a small white-washed cabin with a tiny garden growing alongside it and a small shed for his horse and tools. I saw Mrs. Thrasher hanging out clothes on the clothesline, and playing around her were some raggedy babies.

  On the afternoons I’d hide in the tall weeds and watch the slaves in the field hoeing cotton. I saw the whip rise and fall and I heard the low, mournful voices singing and groaning as they labored.

  There was never a time when I left the Big House that Big Mac didn’t know it. Sometimes he would be in the yard cleaning fish or in the back kitchen putting up pork, but he always knew when I was gone. When I returned, he’d be waiting for me. “Watch yo’self, boy,” he’d warn me. And if Master was drunk or in an evil temper, this was what I needed to know to keep out of his way.

  One day as I returned from a walk in the woods alongside the far field, Mac was pulling water from the well on the porch. With one look, I knew there was danger in the kitchen. I ran from the porch and hid alongside the house, and from there I could hear Mistress beating the new house girl who had not pleased her in some chore.

  The girl was about thirteen, pretty, with very black skin and a strong body. Her name was Tennessee. Mistress didn’t take to her and she didn’t like her name; she took to calling her Carolina instead. Tennessee didn’t like the name Carolina because, she said, “My mama done name me Tennessee, that’s where I be borned,” and she refused to answer to Carolina.

  “You in Carolina now, girl!” Missus hollered, but Tennessee didn’t flinch. She looked like she was bored when Missus hollered at her.

  Tennessee never moved quickly enough and never seemed to be afraid of Master or Mistress. Whenever Mistress screamed at her or hit her, she just sneered or looked at her with that cold look in her eye. There was nothing Mistress could do to break her.

  Then one afternoon when Master was in the house, Tennessee sat down at the white folks’ table and buttered herself a piece of bread. Even Mary Webb was shocked. She reached for a knife to throw, but as she did, Master entered the room. “I’ll handle this!” Tennessee didn’t even look up. She just took a bite of the bread and sat chomping on it. Master watched her eat the whole thing and didn’t say a word. I thought sure there’d be a whupping. But Master Beal just turned, left, and didn’t even say one word.

  Living in the house that summer was like sitting on a keg of dynamite. There were always fights. Mistress and Master fought and yelled at one another whenever they were together. The overseers fought, too, because there was a lot of rivalry and jealousy among them.

  I got up the courage to run to the quarter during these months to see Miss Ceily. She was always happy to see me. I would help her with the children in her charge if I could. One of Tennessee’s chores was to carry the large caldron of corn mush at noontime for the children, and she would linger a moment to talk. Miss Ceily was so filled with compassion and mercy that Tennessee warmed up to her right away.

  One of Miss Ceily’s sons was sick in bed. His name was John Henry, and he was about eighteen years old. He had worked in the field since he was eleven. The bed he lay in was only a 12-inch slab of wood with a little pile of sticks for a pillow. In the humidity and heat, the floor of the shanty smelled of wet earth. I sat with John Henry and dipped cool water on his face. He had the fever and moaned all day. Ceily prayed over him and didn’t seem to be at all worried about his condition. “The Lord’s healin is on him,” she said confidently.

  One day when Tennessee came with the mush for the children, she had a jar of honey tucked under her skirts, which she presented to Ceily. “It’s for yo son who be ailin, Ma’am,” she said.

  Ceily took it, and they came into the cabin to John Henry’s bedside, where I was sitting. I saw John’s face when he saw Tennessee. It was as though a little light went on in his eyes.

  John Henry got well just like Ceily said he would and was back picking cotton in a couple of days.

  Every chance Tennessee got, she would be at Ceily’s shanty or else John Henry would be at the shanty where Tennessee lived. I noticed that Tennessee was becoming a little more lively.

  On a bright August morning when the slaves were all in the field and I was helping peel apples in the kitchen, I was given charge of baby Anna again. I wasn’t very happy about it.

  “Why can’t Tennessee or one of the girls mind Anna?”

  “Yors ain’t to question, Robert. Massuh done gived the order.”

  I wanted to dislike the blond-haired girl. I had no intention of treating her with any kindness.

  “Go ’head an’ climb up on Robert’s lap, honey,” Miss Harriet prodded.

  Anna looked up at me with sparkling blue eyes and a shy smile, and then she threw open her arms and climbed into my lap. Her arms went around my neck, and she giggled softly close to my cheek.

  Her face was filled with trust, and she had no mischief in her eyes.

  “Robert’s gonna mind yoll now, hear?”

  Little Anna giggled and seemed very pleased with the idea.

  With her trusting look, happy nature, and loving personality, Anna brought back memories of my own little sister, Ella. I found myself playing the games Ella and I had played, and once again I had the love and trust of a small child.

  I was embarrassed to be Anna’s “maid” though, and I hated it when other slaves saw me minding her. I knew they were calling me a sissy and a Tom. It made me angry. Sometimes I took this anger out on Anna.

  “Come here, Anna!”

  “Whatchoo want, Robert?”

  “I’m gonna whup yor hide.”

  “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

  I’d scare her practically out of her wits, but then I would never hurt her. If she cried, I’d feel a certain sense of fulfillment.

  One Sunday afternoo
n when the Beal family was gone, I went down to the quarter to visit Miss Ceily. She was praying for her son, Little William, when I got there. Little William was about twelve years old and his mind didn’t seem right. He would take to yelling at the air or kicking and throwing his body around as though something invisible were attacking him.

  I sat with her outside the shanty with John Henry, and I got to talking about Anna. Miss Ceily heard our talk and she didn’t like the part about my bullying her around.

  “Child, you need Jesus.”

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “Did you ever ast Jesus to fill yor heart and forgive yor sins?”

  “Not to my rememberin.”

  “Well, that’s what you need to do. You need salvation, that’s what you need. You is doin an evil thing up there in that Big House scarin that chile, and the Lord want you to repent of it and ast Him to save you so’s you kin be His boy instead of the devil’s. A man’s revenge don’t mean nothin, chile. It’s the Lord who do the revengin. He know how better’n any man know.”

  “Revengin?”

  “I want you to git on yor knees, boy, and I’m gonna learn yoll how to pray.”

  I did as she said, and I heard myself talking to an invisible person, Jesus. John Henry quietly prayed beside me on his knees.

  Something happened to me that day. I knew even then that something had taken place, something mysterious. Ceily told me to pray every day, and she began to teach me what she called the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Our Father which awt in heav’n . . .”

  Cotton-picking time was the worst time of year for the slaves because they were driven so hard. After they returned to their homes at night, they had the cooking for the family to do and the tending of their own tiny gardens. They had only a few hours in which to sleep at night—oversleeping meant a whupping.

  Then something terrible happened. Ceily’s boy, Little William, turned on his mama. Ceily found out he took money from the overseers to give information about the folk in the quarter. Nobody realized Little William was sneaking around listening to conversations and trying to find out if anybody was planning on escaping or if anyone was saying bad things about the master.