by Richard Dry
Marcus reached out and tore the remaining thorn off the rose. Without a place to throw it, he dabbed its point onto the tip of his finger, testing its sharpness.
“She was just jealous of all the attention you give him. That’s what she told me.”
Ruby took a deep breath and stared at him. He couldn’t tell if she was waiting for more or just contemplating whether to believe him.
“She came to me because I treated her special,” he added. “She always felt like you loved him more than her. That’s what she told me, at least,” which was part of the truth, so he was able to look her in the eye.
She stood up in front of the photographs with her back to Marcus. There was a long silence as she studied the pictures. She reached up and straightened the one of Easton, then Corbet’s and her own, as if she had thrown the whole lot of them off center by moving just one. Marcus wasn’t sure if she planned on answering him or had even heard his response.
“I guess I see how that might be,” she finally said. “It was always hard for me to look at Lida without thinking of Ronald and bein pained, and maybe that’s why I didn’t show her ’nough how I love her.”
“Well, I can understand that. I’m sure she could understand that.” He threw the thorn in the jam jar, then stood up and brushed off his hands. Ruby turned back to him.
“That can’t be all of it, though. I mean, she didn’t just hate me, she hated him, too.”
“Sure.”
“So what he do?”
“Well, he wasn’t all that nice to her always.”
“How wasn’t he nice? How so?”
“You know how it is between family.”
“What he do? He yell at her? He yell at everyone now and then. She can’t hold none a that against him. It must a been something.”
“She just wanted to feel special, that’s all.”
Ruby shook her head and took another sip of water. She looked out the front window, through the new white lace curtains, at the faceless shapes passing on the sidewalk, the bright sun behind them. The light wasn’t too bright to look at when it came in filtered by those curtains. It was softer and colored the room with a tolerable glow.
“I guess I could see how I loved my brother too much,” she said. “That’s a sin I can live with. I guess I sinned ’cause I thought he was perfect. Nobody is perfect, the Lawd knows that. It won’t hurt me none to think of him as more human. I can live that way. I don’t see why Lida can’t even hear his name no more, though. But comin from her position, I guess she think he could do no wrong in my mind.”
“That’s how it is,” Marcus said. He watched the thorn float in the water.
“I’m sure my grandson gonna do some wrong someday too, but he have a much better chance comin up in this home than out in that small place of yours.” She sat back down in her chair.
“That’s all I care about.”
“Yes. I can see how I was always leavin her with Love E and she think I don’t love her ’nough. Well he gone now. I guess I got to go on with the living. You got to let her know I won’t say his name ’round her if I can help it.”
“I will do that. I will. You think we might move in here tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Ruby sat up in her chair and put her hand to her collar. “You believe she might want to come back so soon?”
“Well, with all you said.”
Ruby stood up and went to the bottom of the stairs as if she were on her way to do a chore, then paced over to the front door and back to the couch.
“I guess that’s fine if she want to come.”
“Now don’t be surprised when she comes in. She’s not feeling so well. Promise you won’t say anything about how she looks sick or anything. She’s just getting ready to have our child.”
“All right. All right. I just have to go into her room and dust off. I kept everything the same for her, but she may not want all her old things in there from before.” She turned to Marcus with her hands clasped in front of her, almost reaching out to him. “It seem as if someone finally hear me up there. Let me ask you, Marcus, what do you think of callin your chile Ronal, after his grandaddy?”
“That was the other name we were thinking about.”
“Never mind, it’s no matter.” She had turned before he’d even answered and started up the stairs again.
“Don’t go to no trouble, Mrs. Washington. She’ll just be so happy to come home.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs and looked down at him. “You think so?”
“Sure.”
“All right.” Ruby nodded and walked slowly toward Lida’s room. “You go ahead and let yourself out,” she yelled behind her. “Your house too, now, I suppose.”
SANTA RITA JAIL
I’LL READ A 1905 oral narrative collected in The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves:
I am a Negro and was born sometime during the war in Elbert County, Ga., and I reckon by this time I must be a little over forty years old. My mother was not married when I was born, and I never knew who my father was or anything about him. Shortly after the war my mother died, and I was left to the care of my uncle. All this happened before I was eight years old, and so I can’t remember very much about it.…
I was a man nearly grown before I knew how to count from one to one hundred. I was a man nearly grown before I ever saw a colored teacher. I never went to school a day in my life. Today I can’t write my own name, though I can read a little. I was a man nearly grown before I ever rode on a railroad train, and then I went on an excursion from Elberton to Athens. What was true of me was true of hundreds of other Negroes around me—’way off there in the country, fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest town.
When I reached twenty-one the Captain told me I was a free man, but he urged me to stay with him. He said he would treat me right, and pay me as much as anybody else would. The Captain’s son and I were about the same age, and the Captain said that, as he had owned my mother and uncle during slavery, and as his son didn’t want me to leave them (since I had been with them so long), he wanted me to stay with the old family. And I stayed. I signed a contract—that is, I made my mark—for one year. The Captain was to give me $3.50 a week, and furnish me a little house on the plantation—a one-room log cabin similar to those used by his other laborers.
During that year I married Mandy. For several years Mandy had been the house-servant for the Captain, his wife, his son and his three daughters, and they all seemed to think a good deal of her. As an evidence of their regard they gave us a suite of furniture, which cost about $25, and we set up housekeeping in one of the Captain’s two-room shanties. I thought I was the biggest man in Georgia. Mandy still kept her place in the “Big House” after our marriage. We did so well for the first year that I renewed my contract for the second year, and for the third, fourth and fifth year I did the same thing. Before the end of the fifth year the Captain had died, and his son, who had married some two or three years before, took charge of the plantation. Also, for two or three years, this son had been serving at Atlanta in some big office to which he had been elected. I think it was in the Legislature or something of that sort—anyhow, all the people called him Senator. At the end of the fifth year the Senator suggested that I sign up a contract for ten years; then, he said, we wouldn’t have to fix up papers every year. I asked my wife about it; she consented; and so I made a ten-year contract.
Not long afterward the Senator had a long, low shanty built on his place. A great big chimney, with a wide, open fireplace, was built at one end of it and on each side of the house, running lengthwise, there was a row of frames or stalls just large enough to hold a single mattress. The places for these mattresses were fixed one above the other; so that there was a double row of these stalls or pens on each side. They looked for all the world like stalls for horses. Since then I have seen cabooses similarly arranged as sleeping quarters for railroad laborers.
Nobody seemed to know what the Senator
was fixing for. All doubts were put aside one bright day in April when about forty able-bodied Negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them handcuffed, were brought out to the Senator’s farm in three big wagons. They were quartered in the long, low shanty, and it was afterward called the stockade. This was the beginning of the Senator’s convict camp. These men were prisoners who had been leased by the Senator from the State of Georgia at about $200 each per year, the State agreeing to pay for guards and physicians, for necessary inspection, for inquests, all rewards for escaped convicts, the cost of litigation and all other incidental expenses.
When I saw these men in shackles, and the guards with their guns, I was scared nearly to death. I felt like running away, but I didn’t know where to go. And if there had been any place to go to, I would have had to leave my wife and child behind. We free laborers held a meeting. We all wanted to quit. We sent a man to tell the Senator about it. Word came back that we were all under contract for ten years and that the Senator would hold us to the letter of that contract, or put us in chains and lock us up—the same as the other prisoners. It was made plain to us by some white people we talked to that in the contracts we had signed we had all agreed to be locked up in a stockade at night or at any other time that our employer saw fit; further, we learned that we could not lawfully break our contract for any reason and go and hire ourselves to somebody else without the consent of our employer; and, more than that, if we got mad and ran away, we could be run down by bloodhounds, arrested without process of the law, and be returned to our employer, who, according to the contract, might beat us brutally or administer any kind of punishment that he thought proper. In other words, we had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could we do about it? The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money, and nearly all the land—and we had only our ignorance, our poverty and our empty hands. We decided that the best thing to do was to shut our mouths, say nothing, and go back to work. And most of us worked side by side with those convicts during the remainder of the ten years.…
The troubles of the free laborers began at the close of the ten-year period. To a man they all refused to sign new contracts—even for one year, not to say anything of ten years. And just when we thought that our bondage was at an end we found that it had really just begun. Two or three years before, or about a year and a half after the Senator had started his camp, he had established a large store, which was called the commissary. All of us free laborers were compelled to buy our supplies—food, clothing, etc.—from that store. We never used any money in our dealings with the commissary, only tickets or orders, and we had a general settlement once each year, in October. In this store we were charged all sorts of high prices for goods, because every year we would come out in debt to our employer. If not that, we seldom had more than $5 or $10 coming to us—and that for a whole year’s work. Well, at the close of the tenth year, when we kicked and meant to leave the Senator, he said to some of us with a smile (and I never will forget that smile—I can see it now):
“Boys, I’m sorry you’re going to leave me. I hope you will do well in your new places—so well that you will be able to pay me the little balances which most of you owe me.”
Word was sent out for all of us to meet him at the commissary at 2 o’clock. There he told us that, after we had signed what he called a written acknowledgment of our debts, we might go and look for new places. The storekeeper took us one by one and read to us statements of our accounts. According to the books there was no man of us who owed the Senator less than $100; some of us were put down for as much as $200. I owed $165, according to the bookkeeper. These debts were not accumulated during one year, but ran back for three and four years, so we were told—in spite of the fact that we understood that we had had a full settlement at the end of each year. But no one of us would have dared to dispute a white man’s word—oh, no; not in those days. Besides, we fellows didn’t care anything about the amounts—we were after getting away; and we had been told that we might too, if we signed the acknowledgment. We would have signed anything, just to get away. So we stepped up, we did, and made our marks. That same night we were rounded up by a constable and ten or twelve white men, who aided him, and we were locked up, every one of us, in one of the Senator’s stockades. The next morning it was explained to us by the two guards appointed to watch us that, in the papers we had signed the day before, we had not only made acknowledgment of our indebtedness, but that we had also agreed to work for the Senator until the debts were paid by hard labor. And from that day forward we were treated just like convicts. Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves, or peons, as the laws called us. But call it slavery, peonage, or what not, the truth is we lived in a hell on earth what time we spent in the Senator’s peon camp.…
When I was first put in the stockade my wife was still kept for a while in the “Big House,” but my little boy, who was only nine years old, was given away to a Negro family across the river in South Carolina, and I never saw or heard of him after that. When I left the camp my wife had had two children by some one of the white bosses, and she was living in a fairly good shape in a little house off to herself.…
Today, I am told, there are six or seven of these private camps in Georgia—that is to say, camps where most of the convicts are leased from the State of Georgia. But there are hundreds and hundreds of farms all over the State where Negroes, and in some cases poor white folks, are held in bondage on the ground that they are working out debts, or where the contracts which they have made hold them in a kind of perpetual bondage, because, under those contracts they may not quit one employer and hire out to another except by and with the knowledge and consent of the former employer.
One of the usual ways to secure laborers for a large peonage camp is for the proprietor to send out an agent to the little courts in the towns and villages, and where a man charged with some petty offense has no friends or money the agent will urge him to plead guilty, with the understanding that the agent will pay his fine, and in that way save him from the disgrace of being sent to jail or the chain-gang! For this high favor the man must sign beforehand a paper signifying his willingness to go to the farm and work out the amount of the fine imposed. When he reaches the farm he has to be fed and clothed, to be sure, and these things are charged up to his account. By the time he has worked out his first debt another is hanging over his head, and so on and so on, by a sort of endless chain, for an indefinite period, as in every case the indebtedness is arbitrarily arranged by the employer. In many cases it is very evident that the court officials are in collusion with the proprietors or agents, and that they divide the “graft” among themselves.…
But I didn’t tell you how I got out. I didn’t get out—they put me out. When I had served as a peon for nearly three years—and you remember that they claimed I owed them only $165—when I had served for nearly three years one of the bosses came to me and said that my time was up. He happened to be the one who was said to be living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of overalls, which cost about seventy-five cents, took me in a buggy and carried me across the Broad River into South Carolina, set me down and told me to “git.” I didn’t have a cent of money, and I wasn’t feeling well, but somehow I managed to get a move on me. I begged my way to Columbia. In two or three days I ran across a man looking for laborers to carry to Birmingham, and I joined his gang. I have been here in the Birmingham district since they released me, and I reckon I’ll die either in a coal mine or an iron furnace. It don’t make much difference which. Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a peon camp is hell itself!
CHAPTER 3
MARCH 1965 • LOVE EASTON 19, ELISE 53
EASTON SLEPT IN his car by the side of the road and in the morning drove from Selma to South Carolina, seventeen miles past Aiken toward Orangeburg, across the Edisto River, and onto the small white sand roads of Norma. On both sides, pine trees hid the tract houses
in the backwoods. Just after a low grass field on the right, he turned in to a driveway by the black cast-iron mailbox. Here there was no number on the mailbox or the house, for all the families and homes were well known to the postman. He drove slowly, the sand and pebbles crackling under his tires. Nothing seemed to have changed in his five-year absence: the NO TRESPASSING sign still lay on its side from the time he and Ronald shot the post out from under it with Papa Samuel’s shotgun; the rusted iron horseshoe spike stood by the dogwood tree; even the patterns of shadows seemed familiar as they shifted in the slight breeze over the windshield of his car.
A deer stood in the middle of the road, looked up at him, and slowly walked into the thicket, rubbing its antlers on the low myrtle branches. Then the tunnel of pines gave way to the house and the adjacent cotton field. The field had died long ago, and hollow thistles stood up in the dried grass.
There was no car parked out front, but there never had been. Elise had never owned a car, and Papa Samuel took his tractor when he left. Easton pulled right up to the steps below the porch. It looked older than he’d remembered it; the thin grayed wood had splintered, and the roof had blanched. The front doorknob was still missing.
He turned off the engine. Though he’d come all this way to see it, he had no desire to enter the old house. He got out of the car and stood beside it.
“Mama?” he yelled. There was a slam, which Easton knew to be the breeze opening and shutting the back door. He put his foot up on the first step leading to the porch as Ronald used to do talking to Ruby, and it felt strange to know he was now nearly the same age as Ronald had been then.
“Mama?” he yelled again.
She wouldn’t be home in the middle of a weekday; she’d be in town selling her dresses or tending to the feed shop. He gladly turned away from the house and looked across the field to the trees that hid the river. It was still bright, though the cold evening was coming and in the thicket the darkness could overtake you swiftly. He walked across the field. His head no longer hurt, but he still felt a cloudiness as he walked, like a thought had just escaped him. The field went on for fifty yards and then turned into tall weeds and small saplings. The path to the river was still clearly beaten down, though branches had grown across at shoulder height, or perhaps those branches had always been there and he’d been too short to notice before. As the woods grew thicker, the air became damp, and he could hear the river rushing in the distance like a breeze blowing through leaves. He walked more quickly, swiping branches out of the way with impatience. It had been warm earlier in the week, so the water would be high. The pine needles crunched beneath his feet and hidden animals ran in the side brush. He knew he was close to the river when he passed a piece of barbed-wire fence: two posts stuck in the ground to the side of the path with one rusty wire between them.
