The Emancipation of Robert Sadler

by Robert Sadler

  She didn’t know he had been captured.

  “Miz Ceily! Oh, Miz Ceily!” I cried when I found her.

  She turned and opened her arms to me. The other boys were fast asleep, and the cabin was still. I ran to her, crying.

  She held me in her long, hard arms and said, “Son, the Lord hisself jes spoke to me. He tole me John Henry will be all right.”

  I began to sob uncontrollably. Poor Miss Ceily. The noise awakened the other boys.

  “Is John Henry all right?” Isaiah asked, frightened.

  “Yes, son, yes,” answered Ceily. “The Lord has jes tole me he is all right.”

  I cried so hard, the other boys were suspicious. “Has you heard something?” Isaiah asked finally, drawing near to me and kneeling down where I was sitting on the floor.

  Between sobs, I explained that they had caught John Henry and had him down in the hollow.

  “They’s gonna hang him tonight!” I cried.

  Miss Ceily’s face did not move a tick.

  Isaiah pounded his fist on the dirt floor. There was nothing any of us could do. There was nobody to turn to for help.

  Except One.

  “The Lord has done said John Henry is all right,” Miss Ceily repeated. “Until they carry a dead man through this door and lay him at my feet and tell me, ‘This is yor son, John Henry,’ ah am gonna believe God!”

  I stayed for about an hour; then Isaiah insisted I go back to the Big House. “It’s dangerous for you to be here,” he told me. “Theys killin in the air!” He was right. If I got caught between the house and the quarter, they could justify anything by saying I was trying to escape or I was stealing or conspiring.

  I fell into a fitful sleep when the dawn was just beginning to brush across the tops of the trees outside the children’s bedroom window. I slept only a few moments before it was time to rise and begin the day’s work. I hurried through my tasks. The overseers marched in for breakfast in their dining room, and I hung around near the door to hear their conversation. Surely they would talk about the hanging last night. They didn’t talk at all this morning, though, and the only sounds I heard were forks scraping plates, lips smacking, chewing and gulping.

  When they left for the fields, I was confused. Why didn’t they talk about the hanging? Surely they knew!

  Finally, we heard the master’s car pull into the drive. Master Beal wasn’t driving. Buck was. Big Mac hurried around the car, opened the door, and stood looking inside. I watched from the porch steps.

  “He’s passed out,” Buck told Big Mac. “Here, help me get him upstairs.” Together the two men lifted the drunk form of Master Beal out of the car and carried him inside. When Buck and Big Mac came to the kitchen, there was nobody there but Mary Webb and me.

  “Set yourself down,” Big Mac told Buck. We went to the slaves’ table and bench. “This story you jes ain’t gonna believe,” Buck began. “You jes ain’t gonna believe it. The likes of it ain’t never happened in this here world.”

  “What is it?” Mary brought the men hot cups of coffee.

  Buck wagged his head and then began. “Las night the master and the Kluxes went down to the hollow to string up John Henry. See, they found him jes outside of Belton walkin along the railroad track. Tennessee had got on the train and was far gone.” He took a swallow of the coffee.

  “They was no way of catchin up with her. John Henry, he had only nuff money to buy one ticket, so he put Tennessee and her baby on the train, and he took to walkin.”

  He held the cup with both hands and shook his head. “Guess Massuh knowed they’d try to get on a train, so he went to the stations right off. Well, when they picked up John Henry, they beat him and tole him they was gonna kill him. They carried him to the hollow over by Savannah River to hang him.”

  He paused. “And so I spect we knows the rest,” Mary Webb said.

  “But here’s the part you ain’t gonna believe,” Buck said, his voice going lower. “Ah declare, I never see’d nothin like it.”

  “Come on, man, tell us!” Big Mac’s face said he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what Buck had to say, but he might as well say it and get it done with.

  Buck took another swallow of coffee and licked his lips. “How it went was, Massuh come back home to get some whiskey or somethin or another, and then he come an wake me up an tell me to drive the car to the hollow. Wal, we gits to the hollow, and I sees John Henry lyin there on the ground. They done beat him all right, and he ain’t making no sound; he is jes lyin there, quiet-like. I’m thinking mebbe he daid already. Massah, he actin crazy. He holler at John Henry lyin there. ‘Where she go? Where she at?’ I stay in the car, shut my eyes. I don’t want to see him beat on John Henry no more.”

  I started to feel sick to my stomach. Buck shook his head again and gave a sigh. “So Massuh sez, he sez he don’t want to hang him here; he sez, ‘We’ll hang him on the hill by my horse barn. That way all my other niggers will see him.’ So he tells his friends to throw John Henry in the trunk of his car. They throws John Henry in the trunk of the car, and then they gits on their horses and ride off.

  “Massuh tells me to drive, and so I starts drivin. ‘Faster! Faster!’ he yells at me, so I drives faster. ‘Can’t you make this devil go no faster?’ he yells, and so I say ‘Yessuh,’ and I come down on the pedal hard. ‘Faster! Faster!’ Massuh yells, and we jes rippin up the road. I don’t know where he’s havin me drive to because we long past his farm. But we go faster and faster and he yellin and cursin and pullin on his whiskey. Then he tells me to git back, and so I turn and we rip back to the farm for to hang John Henry.”

  Big Mac’s face had turned grey in the early morning light.

  “You ain’t gonna believe this now,” Buck went on. “We gits out of the car. The other men are waiting in those white sheets of theirs. They open the trunk and look inside the trunk—and they ain’t no John Henry!”

  “Wal now!” Big Mac exclaimed. Mary Webb slapped her hips.

  “Thet John Henry is jes plumb gone outa that trunk! Look like it opened while we was ripping along, and John Henry he musta roll on out. We went back to look for him, but he be long gone now.”

  I hooted with joy. “Hallelujah!” I shouted. “John Henry be a free man!”

  “An’ I reckon he’ll stay free this time,” Big Mac said, pounding his knee with a cackle.

  “If’n he got to town, he’ll be all right. No hounds’ll pick him up there.”

  “I declare,” Big Mac sighed. “I do declare, God hisself musta come an open that there trunk and let that boy out.”

  “I believe so,” I said.

  16

  Harvesttime of 1921 saw plenty of work on the plantation. The men and women were in the fields before dawn, ready to work. The work in the Big House began before dawn, too, and I was given added chores. Carrying water to the overseers in the fields was the hardest. I tried hard not to spill as I climbed the hill and stumbled along the uneven dirt paths the quarter of a mile or more to the overseers, but more often than not water spilled out of the pails and I would be punished.

  When I arrived at my destination, breathless and dripping wet with sweat, with the heavy two-gallon buckets, Thrasher would sometimes tip them over, dumping the water on the ground, and order me to go and fill them up again. “Don’t spill any this time!” he would cackle.

  I’d fight tears of anger as I struggled toting those buckets. It was a job I had for nearly three years.

  I had eaten my supper one night when an awful pain in my jaw made me gasp. “You ailin, boy?” Big Mac asked, without looking up from his dish.

  “I believe my tooth is ailin.”

  And ail it did. In a week’s time my face was swollen twice its normal size, and I was dizzy with pain. Big Mac told Master Beal about it, and he came into the kitchen to see it.

  “Ain’t nothin I can do except take you to the dentist in Anderson, I reckon,” he said. To the dentist! It sounded so wonderful to me, I wanted to throw my hands in t
he air and shout for joy. That meant a trip in the buggy, or possibly the new car! I hadn’t been off the plantation since I had been bought by Master Beal.

  He called me the next morning after he had been to the field for a couple of hours. “Git in the buggy,” he commanded. I hurried outside, fetched the horse, hitched her up to the buggy, and then climbed aboard and waited. Master Beal came out soon, and we started on the journey to Anderson. I stayed near him because the road was filled with holes and very bumpy. When it got really bad, I took hold of his coattail and hung on for dear life. He never did slap my hand away. This simple gesture of holding his coattail meant as much to me as a warm embrace and a kiss. After all, he didn’t push me away from him, and he was taking me to the dentist! Maybe he cared about me!

  The town of Anderson bristled with activity. I gazed with wide eyes at the store-lined Market Street. The sun shone on the low buildings as we drove up the sloping hill and pulled in front of a large, white corner building.

  The dentist was a young white man with what seemed to be a kindly face.

  “Well, where’s the Hudson today, Sam?”

  “My man is picking cotton,” Master explained. “Need him more in the field than in the car.”

  The dentist smiled and nodded his head in understanding.

  “What have we here?” he asked.

  “This here boy got a toothache, Doc, and I’d like you to fix him up.”

  “Sure enough, Sam. Come here, boy.”

  I went into a small room with a window that overlooked a grassy empty lot. “Open your mouth,” the dentist told me.

  “Uh oh. You got yorself an abscess. I’ll have to pull out the tooth and let the poison drain out.”

  He strapped my arms to the chair and then he took a tool like a blacksmith’s pliers from his drawer, clamped hold of my tooth, and began to yank. It was a chipping and yanking and grinding process and I screamed and howled and wailed miserably until he finally got the tooth out. Master Beal had told him he didn’t have more money for a pain killer because, after all, I was a nigger.

  I hobbled out of the office somehow with cotton wadding stuffed into my mouth to catch the blood and pus. Master Beal did consent to some medication for me, but with great reluctance. “If he doesn’t take this, the poison could spread through his body and then you’ll have a bigger problem on yor hands,” the dentist explained.

  “All right, give me the stuff. I’ll see that he takes it.”

  The ride home was agony. I wept bitterly in the back of the buggy. This pain was worse than a hundred whuppings with the cow lash.

  Once back at the plantation, Master ordered me to get the water to the men in the field. My face was fiery hot, and my entire body ached. I couldn’t speak at all. I wouldn’t even try to form words in my mouth.

  Thrasher saw my face and laughed his mean laugh. “Somebody ought to shoot you and put you out of your misery.”

  “Yeah,” mocked one of the drivers, “why don’t you shoot him right through the haid now?”

  “Maybe this boy would like a bullet through the head; would you, boy?”

  “Oh, come on now, Thrasher,” jibed the driver. “Give him a chance! Let him at least run for his life!”

  Thrasher laughed, “Yeah!” He pulled his rifle out of the saddle and cocked it.

  “OK, Robert, get runnin! Let’s see if you can outrun this bullet!”

  I twirled around, grabbing the buckets, and began to run with every bit of strength I had. I heard the gun fire, and I screamed and threw myself on the ground between cotton plants, sending the buckets tumbling. I heard their laughter.

  “Git going!” Thrasher shouted. I began to crawl frantically toward the buckets. I couldn’t lose those. When I had retrieved them, I tried crawling in the direction of the trees at the edge of the field. Thrasher fired again. I was almost insane with terror, and it was only after about six shots were fired that I realized he was shooting into the air. The cruel laughter rang across the field. I felt like a fool. I rose to my feet and ran for all I was worth, and when I was safe in the trees, I fell on the ground and lay there until I had regained enough strength to continue back.

  As I lay in the shade of the trees, I remembered Miss Ceily praying for John Henry when he was sick and how the Lord had answered her prayer. I looked up into the leaves of the trees. “Lord,” I prayed, “plee—” I wanted so badly for the pain to subside. I was dizzy and nauseous and could not form words.

  A few minutes later a tiny, cool breeze blew across my face. It was so refreshing and sweet that I wanted to smile. I sat up, feeling a little better. By the time I got back to the Big House, the pain was almost gone.

  When Master Beal came in from the field that day, the swelling had vanished from my face, and I was suffering no pain at all.

  “Take your medicine, boy,” Master called to me when he saw me bringing a load of clean towels upstairs. I stopped on the stairs and smiled broadly. “Oh, suh,” I exclaimed, “I was in sech terrible pain I thought I was dyin for sure. Then I looked up to the Lord, and I begged Him to take the pain away an heal me.”

  Master Beal grunted.

  I continued. “They won’t be no need for the medicine from the dentist, suh. I got the medicine straight from the Lord!”

  Master Beal’s eyes narrowed, and he drew closer to the stairs.

  “Come here,” he ordered. I obeyed and jumped down to where he could see my face better.

  The look on him was one of complete consternation.

  “Open your mouth.”

  In the place where the tooth had been pulled, there was a smooth, gaping hole with no sign of swelling or infection.

  “Well, I’ll be damned—”

  “Oh, suh!”

  “I’ll be—”

  “The Lord done it, suh, sure enough! I prayed and ast Him to heal me! A breeze come over me from yonder, and He healed me!”

  Master Beal stared at me for a few seconds, and then with a grunt said, “That dentist is better’n I thought.”

  17

  The thrill over the healing of my mouth stayed with me for many days. I whistled, sang, and hopped around the house doing my chores, pleased about everything. Most of the ugliness and the pressures escaped my notice during the harvest because I had discovered that God actually cared about colored folks. Furthermore, I knew for sure that He cared about me—me! It was hard to believe, but I knew it was true.

  That autumn Miss Anna started school. I helped her get ready on her first day. I was sure this would be the end of our friendship. At school she would learn to hate me just like her brothers and sisters had learned. She hugged me and took her lunch box, which Mary Webb had packed for her.

  Anna was distressed about the whole idea and wanted to stay home with me. In those early weeks of attending school, she often awoke in the morning fitfully sick. She would complain dramatically of a stomach ache or a headache or a sore throat. Once she insisted she had the pneumonia. As soon as the buggy was gone, she would miraculously recover.

  “I’s hungry,” she’d tell me with a grin. Then after breakfast we would head for outdoors, and I would take her riding on her pony or we would catch frogs by the creek or pick wild flowers.

  When Master Beal got wind of Anna’s missing so much school, he ordered her to go to school, sick or not. Anna cried and wailed so pathetically, Master picked her up in his arms and cooed, “Tell Daddy what would make you happy, honey.”

  Between sniffs, Anna said, “I wants Robert to come to school with me!” Master was not pleased. He tossed me an angry squint of the eye.

  “He kin go with you jes once, and thassall!” he snarled.

  I could hardly sleep that night. I finished my chores well before daybreak the next morning and had my breakfast with Big Mac in the kitchen while it was yet dark out. I was given a chunk of corn bread for my lunch, which I wrapped up in a piece of brown paper. Big Mac didn’t realize that I thought I’d be going inside the school.

  I sc
rubbed my face and put on my trousers and shirt and then waited for the children to wake up. Harriet was not at all happy about my going with them.

  “This ain’t a good idee, boy,” she warned me in a whisper. I was too happy to listen to any warnings. God had shown me He cared about me, and now I was going to school!

  We climbed into the buggy at last. I sat in the back on the end. Anna talked and giggled in front with her sisters. The ride was slow, and the early smells of the day were fresh and clean and sweet. I breathed in and watched the wisps of clouds in the bright blue sky overhead. The bumpy road was lined with dogwood, wild violets, and Joe-Pye weed. Before long we drove up to the schoolhouse.

  It was a small red building, well built with even boards, and it had windows with glass and a door with hinges and a knocker. There was a hitching post for the horses.

  I walked up the path with Miss Anna. She wore a blue dress and a white pinafore. She had white button-up shoes, which weren’t quite buttoned up. Her curly blond hair looked uncombed, even though it had been carefully brushed and put into place, and it blew in her face and eyes. She stayed close to me, and we neared the big door.

  At last we were inside. I stood staring, my heart pounding loudly. The room was so clean, so neat, so polished. The rows of desks were clean and orderly. The walls were wood paneled with pictures of white men and a big map hanging on them. In the front of the room was a wooden platform and on it a wood desk. A white lady was sitting at the desk, and she smiled at the children as they took their seats. When her eye caught mine, the smile on her face faded.

  “I’m afraid you’re in the wrong school, boy,” she said, shocked at the sight of me.

  “Oh, uh—I come wi Miz Anna an Thomas an John an—”

  “Anna, dear, take your seat,” the lady instructed.

  Anna obeyed happily after depositing her lunch box with the others against the wall by the door.

  I stood awkwardly by the door holding the corn bread wrapped in brown paper in two hands, digging my toes into the cracks of the wooden floor. The children took their seats and were quiet. The teacher rose to her feet. She was a stout woman and wore a blue dress with puffy sleeves and a black shawl over her shoulders. She peered at me over her glasses.