“His mind is tore up,” Ceily lamented. “Jesus, hepp him, hepp him.”
Then, all of a sudden, Little William disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to him. Some said he escaped. He was missing for several days when finally he was found in the swamp under a cypress tree. His throat had been sliced from one ear to the other, and birds had already begun to eat on him.
When they lowered Little William into the grave, Miss Ceily said quietly under her breath, “Jesus done answered my prayer. He helped him. He’s in glory now.”
Autumn was on its way. It was time for the white children to return to school. I had heard about a Negro school not far from us, and I once again began begging to go to school. It was hopeless. Master wouldn’t hear of it. “Schoolin and learnin ain’t for niggers!”
Having charge of Anna all day long made it almost impossible to get to the quarter. I had to stay near the Big House with her. The only time I could escape the prison of the Big House was on Sundays if the Beal family went visiting.
Thomas and John continued to enjoy their sport of jumping me. One cool Sunday afternoon they both jumped me right outside the kitchen door. I drew up with every bit of energy in me, took them both by their straight, slippery hair and with a swift surge of strength crashed their heads together. They fell to the ground, and I then pulled them up one at a time and smacked them in the belly and chest with my fists. When they got up I hit John so hard he went flying across the dirt. When Thomas saw that, he took off running. I knew I would get a terrible beating from Master Beal for what I did, but I knew I could lick both of those boys, and I didn’t care.
Big Mac had seen the whole thing from the smokehouse, where he had been working. When he came into the kitchen later he was whistling, and then he hopped around doing a little dance.
Tell me, Jim, whatcha got in tha bag,
Oh Mary, Oh Mary,
Saw a nigger whup the massuh’s boys,
Law diddie, Law diddie, Law dee day.
Saw that nigger done whup they hide,
Oh Mary, Oh Mary,
Massuh goin whup that nigger tonight.
Law diddie, Law diddie, Law dee day.
I joined him in his whimsical dance.
I whup em once, and I’ll whup em again,
Oh Mary, Oh Mary . . .
I was delighted to see Big Mac’s approval of what I had done. It was worth the whuppin I was going to receive.
It came sometime after supper. Master Beal dragged me out behind the barn and made me lie down on my belly. He whupped me just once with the buggy trace. I pushed my face down hard in the ground so I wouldn’t cry out. As I followed him back to the house I still felt good about having taken his two boys. When we got halfway across the yard, Master turned to me, and with a funny kind of gesture he said, “I don’t like to whup you, boy; mind yo’self so’s I don’t have to do it again. I’ll turn Thrasher on yoll next time.”
I thought for just the tiniest second that he was trying to tell me he didn’t like hitting me, not because it wore him out but because he liked me. The idea was crazy, but I kept it in my mind and I studied on it.
The winter of 1919 passed, as did the frenzied spring of 1920 with cultivating and planting. That spring Tennessee gave birth to a baby boy in her little shack by the house, and she named him Amos because she had heard that her father’s name was Amos. Master moved Tennessee and the baby to a cabin away from the Big House. I think he was afraid Mistress knew the baby had a white daddy and would try to do something evil to them.
The summer of 1920 was hot and long, and I was given permission to take Anna to the creek to wade and play. “Do you gots a mama, Robert?” Anna asked me one day.
I looked at her large blue eyes. “No, chile, I don’t got no mama. My mama daid.”
“Do you gots a daddy?” For a minute I saw white lights pass before my eyes, like lightning. The thought of my father aroused in me a sudden, unexpected fury.
“Hunh?”
“Do you gots a daddy?”
“. . . Ah reckon ah gots a daddy, Miz Anna.”
“Do he be a nice man like my daddy be?”
I looked at her little upturned face, the round cheeks just right for tweaking. “Ah reckon so, yes, ah reckon so. My daddy be jes right nice like yo daddy be.”
I sat at the edge of the creek, my feet stretched out into the water. Anna sat close to me digging her toes in the mud.
“Robert, you knows what?”
“Uh.”
“Robert, you be’s my honey baby. I love you!” She threw her arms around me, laughing happily.
Anna would tell me what she learned in Sunday school each week.
“Jesus, He come down to be the Savior,” Anna explained.
“Whey’d He come from?”
“He come from the heaven. He come because He want the people to love God. It say so in the Bible.”
“Some day, Anna, you’ll be able to read the Bible, and then you can teach me all about Jesus.”
Anna sang a little song that went
He washed my sins away,
He washed my sins away,
Now I’m white, white like snow,
for He washed my sins away.
These words haunted me. I remembered what Mistress Beal had said about the sins black people had committed that made our skins black and forever in debt to the white folk as their slaves. I wondered if there was a way for me to get my sins washed away and be made white as snow. But why would God make a sinner like me white and not Miss Ceily? She was a praying lady. Surely she would be the first one He would wash til she was white.
Miss Ceily calmed me on the matter.
“Honey, you is washed clean jes for the astin,” she told me. “When yoll ast Jesus to forgive yor sins, He does it. That means you is washed clean from yor sins. Don’t mean no color of yor skin; it mean the color of yor soul. Sin make the soul full of darkness. Full of the shadowy substance. But when the love of Jesus come through and you gits forgiveness from yor sins, then you is washed clean—yor soul is white as snow.”
“Uh. But a colored person ain’t got no soul.”
Miss Ceily reeled on her heels. “Lissen to me, chile, don’t you lissen to them lies, you hear me? Don’t you lissen to them lies! When the white man tell you them lies, yoll jes wag yor head, ‘Yes’m, Nossuh, Yes’m,’ but don’t you pay them no mind. They’s a-lyin to you!”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Ceily explained to me that God loved me and cared about me. It was very hard to understand, and I didn’t grasp most of what she told me. She prayed over me and asked God to show me that He cared about this “poor lil ole nigger chile.”
In the shanty farthest down the line, behind a clump of trees, a party was in full swing. I could hear the music and the singing and the slapping of feet on the dirt floor. When I left Miss Ceily, I walked toward the bleached wooden shack where the party was going on. Somebody had a homemade banjo, somebody else played the sticks, and there was a drum made out of a piece of tree trunk with a skin stretched across it, and above it all were the loud, exuberant sounds of singing.
I stood in the doorway and peered into the shack lit only by one kerosene lamp. I watched as the men and women stomped and danced together, laughing and hooting. Children were lined along the walls, too, as well as outside the shanty. The air was thick with the smells of whiskey, tobacco, and sweat. I stood riveted in place watching the bodies of the men and women twirl and whirl and strut and jump in the dim light of the room. I felt a thrill inside like I’d never felt. I couldn’t help but dance, too.
There was a formal kind of dance that had to be learned when we “set the floor.” It was done with a glass of water on the head. Then we’d do another dance inside a circle trying not to go outside the lines. I forgot all time and stayed until way past midnight learning the dances and feeling myself let loose.
The next morning I asked Big Mac if I could go to the little church that the slaves attended. He wasn’t too
happy about my leaving the house. He made it very clear I had to be back before Master and the family returned from the church they attended, which was only about a mile down the road.
I scrubbed my face and put on my only clothes. Harriet had shown me how to clean myself and wash my teeth with salt. I washed my clothes about once a month, and I bathed without soap whenever I went to the creek.
I walked to the meeting place with Miss Ceily and her sons, John Henry, Isaiah, Jerry-Ben, Fred, and Boot. We walked slowly and silently in the morning sun. The smell of honeysuckle was thick and sweet, and insects sang their loud earth songs along the path as though heralding us on our way. Miss Ceily wore a black dress with a worn, lacy collar. The boys wore clean overalls and tow shirts. All of us were barefoot.
The church was a shack made out of logs with hay and mud stuffed in the cracks. There were two openings for windows with wooden boards that pulled across them when they needed to be closed. Inside were wooden benches to sit on and a pulpit for the preacher. Because it was such a lovely day, the door this morning was closed and we filed by, following a path leading to the narrow creek that flowed into the Savannah River.
There was a cluster of people already gathered by the little creek in a shaded clearing when we arrived. There were many warm greetings and embraces. The meeting began with singing. The singing went on and on. I felt elevated in the music, lifted far beyond anything I had ever experienced. Even better than the music last night.
There were songs filled with ecstasy and joy, songs that were lamenting and sad. They were a part of me, a part of everything I felt and knew. In the dark and untapped places of my mind that day, I began to understand who I was and what I was made of.
There might have been a hundred of us there, I didn’t know: maybe ten, twenty. I only knew the joy of belonging and the closeness of the God Miss Ceily had been telling me about.
I didn’t get back to the Big House until afternoon. Big Mac was angry. “Massuh’s been back for two hours! Chile, I ought to whup you!”
The excitement of the morning faded as I went to find Anna and begin my work around the Big House. I wanted to tell Big Mac all about the meeting in the woods. I wanted to tell him how the Negro preacher had told us that one day we wouldn’t have any more troubles and that Jesus would take all our troubles from us. One day. He told us that God would help us be strong and He was with us through all our trials. I guessed that if Master Beal knew that the Negro preacher was telling us things like that, he’d have him strung up high on a tree. I prayed that the Lord wouldn’t allow that to happen. And then I prayed something very strange. I prayed that the Lord would forgive Master Beal.
15
In 1921 I turned ten years old. On a starry Saturday night in September, the Beals were invited to a party at another plantation. Master Beal was now the proud owner of a new automobile.
That Saturday night when I saw Buck Moore walk through the kitchen door of the Big House, I jumped with surprise.
“Buck!”
“Hello, Robert.”
“What you doin here?”
“I is Massuh Beal’s chauffeur now. He done come down and give me this new job. Even give us a cabin closer to the house so’s I can be right near when he need me.”
Buck and Corrie near the house! That night he chauffeured the Beals to their party. I watched from the parlor window as they drove off, and I trembled with excitement. I had never seen such a fine automobile, and to see Buck sitting up so clean and slick driving it made me very proud. He was wearing clean overalls, and he looked young and strong.
While Master Beal was at the party, Tennessee escaped from the plantation. She ran off with John Henry and the baby.
Master Beal didn’t realize she was gone until late Sunday afternoon. He went crazy when he found out. The hounds were sent out after them, and he hollered for Buck to drive him to the train station in town. His friends rallied together, and the search was on. I prayed with all my heart that they wouldn’t catch them.
“Please, please, can I go to Miss Ceily?” I begged Big Mac.
“Yoll ain’t goin no place,” Big Mac exclaimed, his jaw tight, and I knew it was a dangerous time for all of us, and we’d all have to lay low and wait for news of Tennessee and John Henry.
The hours went by. Juanita and Virginia, the Beals’ daughters, played tea party on the lawn beside the summer porch. Their laughter, like high-pitched bells, could be heard above the oppressive silence in the house. Mary Webb was overly busy in the kitchen preparing sweet potato pies and baking a ham for the white folks’ supper, and Harriet had run down to the quarter to be with her children. Big Mac sat in the shadows of the kitchen porch by the well rolling Master’s cigarettes.
If Tennessee and John Henry were to make it to freedom safely, it would be a victory for every slave on the plantation. We would each know a little greatness for a time. But if they were captured, their torture would belong to all of us, and we would moan on our pallets sharing their defeat. Sweat rolled down my body as I waited by the window in the children’s bedroom while Miss Anna took her afternoon nap.
Evening came and Mistress Beal ate the sweet potato pie and baked ham with her children without Master. There was no word at all. Mistress behaved oddly, and I heard Mary Webb say she was drunk. When they had finished eating, she took the children into the music room, and we heard the piano playing simple two-part melodies. I knew Juanita was performing. She played haltingly, studying the music every time the position of her fingers changed.
Nightfall came. Juanita played on and on. The stop-and-start sounds wore on everyone’s nerves, especially Mistress Beal’s. She paced the floor of the parlor like a cat. I dressed Anna in her soft cotton nightgown and held her on my lap before putting her into her bed for the night.
“Robert,” she cooed, snuggling her face against my chest, “Robert, when I get big—”
“Yes, Miz Anna?”
“When I get big, will you marry me?”
I laughed until tears came. I was afraid I might burst into sobbing and so I lifted her from my lap, set her down firmly on the floor, and said without courage, “I declare, chile!”
“Don’t you love me, Robert?”
“Well, I ’spect I do.”
“Then we can get married!”
I didn’t answer her, and she bubbled on. “I’ll have to have a pretty dress and pretty white shoes, you know. Then I’ll tell my chillren to be very, very quiet and you kin kiss me, too.”
“Uhm.”
“I love you, my Robert. I love you bestest in all the world. You’s my honey baby.”
It was after midnight when the sound of horses’ hooves woke me. I sat upright, listening. The other children didn’t stir. I slid out of my bed and walked across the bare floor to the window. I could see nothing. I tiptoed out of the room and down the hall to the dining room. The room smelled of stale smoke and liquor. From the window I could see the driveway plainly in the moonlight.
There were at least ten horses. The moon was full and shone on the forms on the horses. My heart pounded in my chest when I saw the riders. They looked like monsters from hell, like ghosts, apparitions of the dead. I held my breath for fear one of them might see me through the window and slay me with one evil look. They were all in white, like sails of ships that I had seen in the children’s books. Their faces were covered with hoods, and they all carried rifles and sticks. It could have been the end of the world, and I wouldn’t have been more terrified. So this is what I had heard about and never seen—this was the Ku Klux—the devil himself.
Shaking, I held on to the edge of the curtain. They were shouting back and forth. One of the apparitions descended from his horse and strode to the front door. I froze where I was. The knocker sounded. It was loud and unmistakable. I didn’t move from where I was. Who would answer the door? Mistress surely wouldn’t. Big Mac was sleeping in the back of the house. I was the only servant around.
The knocking continued. “Sam!”
a voice shouted. “Sam Beal!”
Then I heard a sound behind me. My heart stopped. I turned slowly, without breathing. A man was sitting across the room from me in a straight-backed chair with his elbows on the dining room table. It was Master Beal! He must have been there when I crept in to watch out the window.
“Answer the door, boy,” he said in a growling whisper.
“Yessuh, Massuh Beal, suh.”
I hurried to the door and, with shaking hands, opened it.
“Whey the boss man?” asked the robed form before me. Speechless, I simply pointed toward the dining room. The form marched into the house.
“Ain’t you got no lights here?” the creature asked.
“Light the lamp, boy,” Master said.
I scrambled for the kerosene lamp by the door. My fingers were trembling, and I could hardly hold the match.
Seeing Sam Beal, the figure announced, “We got the man down by the hollow.”
“What about the girl?”
“Nah. Jes him. You want to hang him tonight or tomorrow?”
“Tonight! Hang the devil tonight!”
I could hardly keep myself from crying out. Caught! Lord, no!
I was so frightened I nearly fainted. I wanted to scream, to protest, but it would have been useless.
“I want that nigger dead,” Master Beal said quietly.
When they left the house, Master Beal could hardly walk. He stumbled over his own feet in a drunken attempt to move quickly.
“We’ll take my car!”
Somewhere between the house and the hollow where poor John Henry awaited his fate, Master Beal donned his white Ku Klux regalia. I ran to the back of the house to rouse Big Mac. I cried out to God for mercy and clung to Big Mac, trying not to sob. When the sound of the horses and the engine of the car died in the distance, I flew out of the house, down the driveway, around the yard, and onto the path leading to the quarter. When I arrived at Miss Ceily’s cabin, I found her on her knees in front of the hearth. Her face was drawn and wet with tears. She had not stopped praying since John Henry and Tennessee had fled.
The Emancipation of Robert Sadler Page 9
