The Emancipation of Robert Sadler

by Robert Sadler

  Master turned angrily to the two boys. “Strip off their clothes!” he ordered. Then he made them squat down naked, and he whupped them with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Then he had them lie down flat and he whupped the bottoms of their feet.

  When it was finished, Master wiped his mouth and turned to the people. “Any of yoll evah steal from me, there’ll be some dead niggers around here.” Then he turned to Mrs. Edwards. “OK, Auntie? They yors to learn them some sense.”

  He gave me a shove, and we left the quarter. Back at the Big House, Big Mac was stretched out on a bench in the kitchen with leaf poultices laid on his back and shoulders. Master stood looking at him. “Huh! I hates to whup a good man, you know that, Mac.” Big Mac didn’t move or turn his head to acknowledge his boss.

  Master sighed and called for Mary Webb. “Give Mac some of yer whiskey, hear?” He sat down on the bench next to Mac. “Hurry up with that whiskey!” Mary, full of shock and fear, didn’t know what she should do. She’d been stealing Massuh’s whiskey for years. She brought Mac a tin cup with Massuh’s whiskey.

  “Give it here,” Master Beal ordered. He took the cup and pulled a swallow. Giving a shudder, he squinted up at her. “Whey you git this?” Mary Webb looked like she might just faint on the floor right there.

  “It be moonshine, suh,” she lied.

  “Wal, ain’t you the sneaky cat. Show me the jug.” It looked like this might be the worst night ever when he found out Mary Webb had been stealing his whiskey. She inched her way to the pantry and I held my breath. I could feel Big Mac suck in his breath as he lay miserable on the bench covered in leaves. Mary came back with a cracked old brown jug. She was too smart not to pour his whiskey in her own jug. Master Beal tipped the jug to his mouth and took a pull.

  He wiped his mouth, looked up at her, and was quiet. I figured this was it. Mary was done for.

  “Damn ef you ain’t drinkin better whiskey’n I got! Whey yoll get this here moonshine?”

  Mary Webb’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. “Git me some o this here moonshine, Mary,” he belched. “I don’t keer who be makin it, git me some.”

  “Yessuh,” Mary Webb mumbled, but being the clever woman she was, added, “But Massuh, yoll know it cost.”

  “How much?”

  “One dollar, suh.”

  So Mary Webb began her business of selling Master Beal his own whiskey.

  He handed Mac the cup. Then, looking at me, he said in a disgusted voice, “Yoll got a new home now, boy. You be movin to the quarter. Mac, carry this thievin boy outa this here house and set him to work in the fields tomorrow. You hear me? I don’t want to see his thievin face no more round this house!”

  How long I had wanted to hear these words, and now they were my death warrant.

  “Give him to Thrasher and set him to work with a mule and a plow.”

  I didn’t sleep that night, and when I arose before dawn, the bed was wet with tears. I wanted to take a last look at Anna, maybe feel her little arms around my neck once more and kiss her round, smooth cheeks again, but when I saw the iron-jawed face of Big Mac in the doorway, I didn’t dare do anything but follow him.

  There was a slab of cold fried corn pone and a hot cup of sassafras tea waiting for me on the kitchen table. I ate and drank in a daze. Then Big Mac handed me a small brown sack. “This is to eat at noon.”

  “Thank you, suh,” I said softly, longing for a smile from him, some sign of forgiveness. There was none.

  He walked slowly and deliberately. I followed him, crying miserably. “Mac—” I whispered. He stiffened and refused to answer. “Big Mac—I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” There was no answer.

  “Kin I fetch the wood before we go? Kin I—”

  It was no use. Big Mac wouldn’t answer.

  His agony was intense. He had watched over me since I was five years old. He had cared for me and I betrayed him.

  We reached the quarter, and I could see dark forms emerging from doors to line up for the fields. Big Mac brought me to a shanty in the center of the quarter. We went inside. There was a man and a woman there.

  “Massuh done sent this here boy to live. He be put to work today plowin with a mule,” Mac told them. The man and the woman stared at me. Their expressions were chilly and unfriendly.

  Then, without so much as a glance at me, Big Mac turned and left the shanty. I ran after him. “Mac!” I sobbed. “Big Mac!” He wouldn’t turn. “Please, Big Mac, don’t leave me!” I held onto his shirt sleeve. I saw the caked blood on his neck and back that had soaked through his shirt. “Please, please—” I sobbed. Big Mac would not look at me, and I saw in the dim light of early morning that his scarred face was covered with tears.

  18

  The lines of workers were already streaming toward the tool sheds and fields. I had no idea of where to go, and so I followed behind a young man heading toward a tool shed. I walked along in the darkness feeling cold and sick. My ear still ached from the blow Mistress Beal gave me. Master had put me out of the house and sent me to the quarter. He must have known they’d kill me just like they done Little William.

  I pictured Big Mac’s face in my mind. There was no person so dear to me, but he, too, must’ve known I was a dead boy.

  We stood in a line at the shed, and I saw the forms of the overseers up ahead. There was no mistaking the hulking form of Thrasher atop his clumsy horse he called Trigger. The boy ahead of me brought a steel walking plow out of the shed. Thrasher spied me as he clopped near us on his horse.

  “I knowed yoll’d be here this morning, Robert,” he gloated. “Yoll git yonder with a plow. Tomorry yoll git yer mule ready to go by the horn! Jed! Git him ready!”

  The boy named Jed showed me how to hitch the mule to the plow and tie the reins over my shoulders. He helped me get a firm grip on the handles of the plow and showed me ridges between water furrows, where I was supposed to run the blade of the plow. I was completely dumbfounded by everything. To make matters worse, there were women behind me with bags slung around their necks filled with cotton seed. They were to drop the seeds into the place where I had plowed. And to make it even worse than that, there were more workers behind these women with heavy wood furrows for covering up the seed. All this to plant a row of cotton.

  Naturally, if I did a poor job, the whole line of us got the lash. This would make the other workers so furious, they’d be fit to kill the one who was at fault. This was the way the overseers made sure the slaves worked their hardest.

  I blindly began to manipulate the plow, my head swimming. I made an awful mess. The mule knew I didn’t know what I was doing, and I couldn’t get him to obey. It’s a wonder I didn’t get killed that first morning. The lash came down again and again. Some of the women were nursing mothers, some of them grandmothers. It was so cruel to make them pay the penalty for my blundering.

  By noon the sun was high overhead, and it baked our bodies as we labored. I had no covering for my head, and the constant beating of the sun’s rays made me nauseous. Then came a lovely sound—the horn that announced noon eating time. The workers left their places and moved slowly to shady spots at the edge of the field for their meal.

  I began to follow them, but found I couldn’t walk. Then I saw a grey wall coming toward me. I fell broadside into its cushion-like softness, and all was black and very quiet. When I awoke, I was lying beneath a tree at the edge of the field. Someone sat near me. I opened my eyes and saw Corrie Moore.

  “Oh Corrie, Ma’am,” I moaned.

  “Robert, you is with the fever for sure.”

  “Where the mule and the plow be?”

  “I drug yoll here, Robert, and Thrasher done put another man on that plow.”

  “Ohhh, Lord.”

  “Buck ’n me heard what a fix yoll is in, and we thinks mebbe we kin work it so’s yoll live with us till the air clears. ’Sides, you bein with the fever ain’t no good nohow.”

  “Corrie!” I gasped. “It don’t make no difference. I is a dead boy. J
es leave me be an let it happen.”

  “Wal, we’ll jes see about that, Robert. We’ll jes see. Now come on wi’ me. I done got permission from Thrasher to git you offen the field.”

  I tried to get to my feet but I couldn’t. The grey wall came at me again, and once more I entered its very black and quiet interior.

  Corrie managed to drag me to her cabin while I was unconscious. Often I have marveled at her strength. She was a little woman, and yet she had the strength of a man. I woke long enough to drink a swallow of warm water.

  Corrie had lifted me onto their bed. I lay there, unaware of where I was, when through the darkness I saw a face. I heard laughter. The face came closer to me. Bathed in sunlight, smooth and lovely, it was Pearl. She smiled and reached out to me. I ran to her. But I couldn’t reach her. The harder I ran, the farther away she was. “Pearl! Pearl!” She looked wonderfully happy and radiant. Farther and farther away she moved and then she was gone.

  I stood alone calling her when suddenly I heard a voice beside me. I recognized it but couldn’t immediately identify it. It was as beautiful and sweet as the smell of honeysuckle. “Honey,” the voice called. I turned. The sight was so glorious I cried out in joy. “Mama!” I ran to her, but she put up a hand to stop me. “Honey,” she repeated, “everything is going to be all right.” Her words were no sooner spoken than I felt a cool balm cover my body. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  Then she vanished, but not before I saw the small figure beside her—Ella, my Ella! And she was gone.

  Later, when I opened my eyes and looked around the darkened shanty, the memory of the dream was fresh in my mind. The bed against the rough wall, the crunch of the shucks in the mattress, the wash bucket on the table and a low fire in the hearth—all was in sharp contrast to the peace and bright beauty I had just seen. “Mama,” I said in the darkness.

  Crawling from the bed, I groped along the wall to the wooden table in the center of the room. Then slowly, across the wet dirt floor, I moved to the hearth and lifted the tea kettle from the wire hanger which hung across the dying coals. I set the kettle down on the table and stood trying to catch my breath. Then I filled a tin cup with the hot water, drank a swallow, and returned to the bed.

  There was a piece of fatback hanging from a hook by the hearth and a bag of cornmeal in the corner. Since there was no garden near the house, I knew this was their only food. I was hungry, and I saw near me the brown paper wrapper Big Mac had wrapped my lunch in. Opening it I found corn bread and a—could it be? Maybe my sickness was making me peculiar in the head. Right beside the corn bread was a baked chicken leg! I ate it slowly, enjoying every bite. The thought that Mac had done such a wonderful thing for me made me feel better. I fell asleep then and didn’t wake until much later when Buck came home.

  The fever had not subsided, and the pain was terrible in my ear and head. Buck poured some salt in the water from the kettle. He mixed it up and then poured some of it into my ear. Then he took some ashes from the hearth, wrapped them in a palmetto leaf and, dampening it with hot water, told me to lie with my head on it.

  I knew something had burst or broken in my ear when Mrs. Beal hit me, and Buck’s remedies didn’t help.

  Buck and Corrie’s weekly allowance of cornmeal and fatback barely fed them and their little boy. Now there was me to feed, too. They never complained about me being there, though, and they shared what they had without a second thought.

  I prayed daily for the Lord to kill me. He had already healed me miraculously once with the abscessed tooth, and now I begged Him to kill me or heal me of the terrible pain in my ear.

  In about a week’s time, the pain began to subside. To my dismay, however, I discovered I couldn’t hear out of the injured ear. I never did regain the hearing in that ear. Now I found myself with two disabilities—slurred speech and one deaf ear.

  Buck decided to try some more cures. Once he poked some axle grease inside my ear, and another time he squashed an enormous bug on the table and squeezed its blood and insides into my ear. Every night I slept with my head on the ashes wrapped in the palmetto leaf. Once we even put a few drops of urine into my ear thinking it might open it up. Of course nothing worked. I was feeling stronger, though, and it was time for me to get to the field, with or without two ears.

  The first summer as a field slave was the longest summer of my life. Each day was grueling misery. I could not get the knack of handling the mule and plow.

  One day after work, I was putting the mule back in the barn, and I remembered that when the hot weather came, I was always a year older. I knew I had been eleven, but I didn’t know what came after it. “Mule,” I asked the mule, “is you eleven or eight? I been a studyin and I believe I am twenty years of age, now.”

  Corrie informed me, however, that my birthday was June 27 and that I was now twelve years old. “It was Pearl’s wish that yoll know when you was born, and that yoll know yor age. You is now twelve years old, chile.”

  While hoeing cotton, I was able to think about being twelve years old. I felt the whip swinging above my back often because I’d plow right into the cotton plants, which were now about a foot high. It didn’t help much to be twelve—I still was no good in the field—good only for the lash.

  Every night I fell asleep weary and aching. I slept on the floor of the shanty, wrapped in a tattered, lice-infested blanket. Buck made a wall of cardboard out of several smaller pieces and stuck them together as a partition so he and Corrie and their little boy could have some privacy. I had my own private room for the first time in my life. It was only a corner without windows and only one blanket on the floor, but it was mine.

  Saturday night was payday. We didn’t get paid but it was still called payday. I kept my head down though I tried to get a glimpse of Big Mac. I couldn’t find him. I saw Miss Ceily’s son, Isaiah, out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to ask him about Miss Ceily, but I didn’t dare draw any attention to myself. Isaiah worked a different field than I, and I never saw him. When I had received my provisions and was heading back to the shanty, he took hold of my arm.

  “Robert,” he said flatly. “You enjoyin bein a field slave?”

  “Shure. It’s fine. Jes fine.”

  “Yeah. It’s fine, jes fine all right.”

  That’s all he said to me. He turned his face away.

  “Isaiah,” I urged quietly, “please tell yor mama, tell Miz Ceily that Master woulda killed Big Mac if’n I hadn’t brought him to Mitt and Waxy—”

  With a quick jerk, Isaiah turned away from me.

  I knew it was useless to try to defend myself. What I had done was my fault and my fault alone. There was a price to pay for making mistakes, and I had to pay mine.

  The days were endlessly long and the nights far too short. Sometimes we wouldn’t be finished working until way past dark. Then we’d drag our bodies from rest at 4:00 a.m. to begin all over again. There was constant muttering and grumbling. Hatred, bitterness, and suffering were all we knew. The parties in the quarter, with energetic dancing and noisemaking, gave little relief.

  Master Beal supplied whiskey to his slaves, but in drunkenness there was no relief. There was nothing to help forget the anguish and torture we were bound to. Sometimes the hopelessness became too much to bear, and the mind of the tormented slave would crack. Violence and suicide were often the result.

  The church meetings where we sang our stories to the Lord were our only solace and hope. Hearing words from the Bible strengthened us and we tried to find peace in the fact that this earthly life is short. Our suffering would end forever on that Great Day in the Morning, and for a half hour we’d sing verse after verse of the song:

  In that great gettin up mornin,

  Fare you well! Fare you well!

  In that great gettin up morning,

  Fare you well! Fare you well!

  There’s a better day a-comin

  Fare you well! Fare you well!

  When my Lord speaks to His Faduh


  Fare you well! Fare you well!

  Says Faduh I’m tired o’ bearin

  Fare you well! Fare you well!

  Tired o bearin fo poor sinners

  Fare you well! Fare you well!

  Gabriel would blow his horn, judgment would fall, and we’d sing farewell to our troubles forever.

  Swing that chariot, Lord

  and let me ride.

  Swing that chariot, Lord

  and let me ride.

  Ohhh, rock me, Lord.

  Rock me, Lord,

  calm and easy.

  I’ve got a home.

  (I’ve got a home)

  I’ve got a home.

  (I’ve got a home)

  I’ve got a home

  on the other side.

  I heard how things used to be worse for the Negro, how the slaves wore chains and had to have church in the dark of night in the woods on account of the white man didn’t believe we had souls. I couldn’t understand how the older slaves had lasted through the years.

  “Robert, you be twelve years old now, and you almost a man. Yoll not a chile no more,” Miss Ceily told me, walking back to the quarter from church. She recognized that my heart was turning more detached and bitter. “You needs to make some room in yor heart for Jesus.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “The Lord don’t need no twelve-year-old thinkin like no sorry babychile.”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  I’d be thinking how all this good land to grow crops was more than enough for all. Yet the black folk on this place had to plow with their bones and grit and blood; they hoed, chopped, picked with empty bellies all to make the white man fat. Then the harvest come and they carried the cotton and the corn, the soybean and the tobacco, and their own dead babies. Dead babies, dead mamas, dead brothers and sisters—men broken like kindling til they couldn’t move to pick no more cotton. O Lord, O Lord, they’s got to be a just God.

  I couldn’t forget the kindness of Big Mac and the blood and sweat he gave to Sam Beal for so many years. I could still see Master Beal’s determined face as he laid the red hot poking iron on Mac’s back like he was merely carving his name on a tree.