“Did you live there?” Bonnie asked him once.
“No, I didn’t, and don’t ask foolish questions,” Robert said.
“Moses’ wife works there, and I’ve heard her tell about it in the kitchen.” He said this grudgingly.
One Monday a preacher came and spoke to them in the morning in the big auditorium. He told them about the Lord’s goodness, and the sins of people who did not thank him every day for his goodness.
Going home that day Robert did not say much. When they reached the bridge he stopped there and looked down into the stream that ran under it. Bonnie was glad to stop. On the sides of the stream there were white and yellow violets, and from the trees yellow jessamine hung down. The deep yellow trumpets filled the air just around them with a startling fragrance.
She sat down at the edge of the stream when she heard Robert speak out loud angrily to John.
“I don’t believe in God,” he said.
“Why?” John asked him.
“I don’t believe, that’s all.”
“Then you’ll go to hell.”
“Hell’s a better place than earth.”
“You haven’t been there.”
“How do you know I’ll go to hell?”
“The preacher says so.”
“Then the preacher lies.”
Looking up from the violets she was picking, Bonnie saw Robert give a defiant look at John and walk away over the bridge and on up the road.
“Wait for me, John,” she begged. But when she caught up with him and they walked along some distance behind Robert she had no word to say. But the words they had said on the bridge disturbed her.
At the steps leading from the road up the high embankment to his house, Robert stopped until they came up.
“Come in,” he said commandingly.
He opened the front door and took them into the hallway. There was a scuffling in the front room at the right. He pushed them back and waited, standing in front of them and watching the door. Bonnie heard something dragging slowly across the floor. It made her heart beat up to wait for the unknown thing to show itself.
When it reached the door she saw it was a girl like any other. She had a healthy face, like Robert’s. But she came walking on all fours like an animal, and behind her knees she dragged two useless legs, like sticks. When she saw them she sat up, resting both hands on the floor.
“This is my sister, Mary Louise,” Robert said. He looked at them as if he dared them to say anything except what he wanted.
“Howdy, Mary Louise,” Bonnie said, for she knew that was manners.
“She can read,” Robert said. “I taught her.”
He reached over and took John’s reader and opened it at the back, far beyond the place where John had learned.
“Read that, Mary Louise,” he said and handed the book down to her. She balanced herself with one hand, and with the other held the book near her eyes; and read the whole page without hesitating once.
Robert looked at them. Probably he expected them to say words in praise, but they could only look back at him, and with wonder at the girl. He was satisfied with their silent admiration.
“She’s smart,” he said and gave the book back to John. “Now go back to your room, Mary Louise,” he told her, and the girl scuffled back across the door sill.
In the kitchen Robert put food on the table that Moses, who cooked for him, had left in a pot on the slow fire.
“You see,” he said to John, “if there was a God he couldn’t make my sister like that. They say God is Love, and Love couldn’t do anything cruel like that.”
“Maybe hit’s a punishment,” Bonnie said very softly. She was almost afraid to speak out with Robert. But something must be said for religion.
“What do you mean?” Robert stood up. His face was white and his eyes grew round and threatening. They seemed to blow out sparks. “If you mean my mother you can go out that door and never come back.”
“I didn’t mean a thing,” Bonnie said. “Not a thing.”
She looked frightened and sorry for what she had said. There was no doubt of that.
“Then it’s all right,” Robert told her. “But you understand my mother is not to be talked about. I licked four boys at school just for that. Everybody knows they can’t say anything about my mother.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SUMMER came very quickly. After months of work in the fields, Granpap was bent over like an old man. He had a misery in his back that would catch him in the fields so that he was forced to take a little time off and rest. John and Bonnie, since school was out, worked in the fields all day.
Sweat poured from Bonnie’s face into her eyes, as she leaned over the long rows. She came back at the end of the first days exhausted. After that her back learned to bend without aching, though she was always ready for bed at the end of a day out there, and John was the same. They took a bucket of fresh water from the well to the field with them. And Bonnie found that if they tied up their heads in wet rags and put the straw hats Emma had bought in town for five cents over these, the sun did not give headaches. But nothing could keep it from their backs. They had worked in the sun up in the hills. It was never so hot up there even in the middle of the day. There was a saying that the sun beat down. And it was exactly what the sun did on the backs of people working in the fields. It came like a red hot hand across their backs, then went away as if to get strength for another blow and down it came again, a hot fire.
There were Negroes working in the Phillips’ fields across the road, for Moses often hired the children of share-croppers to work for Mrs. Phillips. An old Negro woman, Aunt Sarah, bent with rheumatism, brought her five grandchildren to the fields. She laid the baby—its mother cooked for a white woman in the town—on a croker sack between the rows. The other children, even the five-year-old, chopped cotton. Bonnie could hear them when they came to the end of the rows near the road, over there. While she was thinning out the fresh young plants that snuggled together in a row and measuring with her eye in order to leave the healthiest plant at the right distance from the last one, she heard Aunt Sarah urging the young ones to stop playing and get to work. She always threatened them with a whipping from their mother. “Ne’ mind,” she called out to them, “ne’ mind”—in a threatening voice, very high and cracked.
Granpap kept after them just as Aunt Sarah kept after her young ones. When the bright nights came, because of the moon, he took John and Bonnie into the fields to work at night.
Emma wanted the young ones to have some rest. “Hit’s easier,” Granpap said, “with no sun, and we rest longer in the middle of the day when the sun’s hottest.”
“But hit’s like the mill,” Emma said. “We’re making the young sweat.”
“If hit wasn’t here, hit would be in the mill. Better for them to sweat for themselves—for the land will be theirs, Emma, if we earn hit.”
Emma wanted to go out in the moonlight when they went to work. She was too worn out for that. It was like a circle, she said. If she didn’t rest, she couldn’t work, and if she couldn’t work, they couldn’t eat, and if she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t work. “So,” she told Bonnie, “I’ve got to have rest.”
Then there was the redness on her hands. “I thought at first hit was the seven years itch,” she told Bonnie. “You never know if you’re touching a place in the mill whether somebody with the itch hasn’t been there before ye. So many have the itch.”
She wanted very much for Bonnie to understand what working in the mill meant. The farm was their life, but the mill was hers.
“Frank’s working in the weave room now,” she said. “He’s still got his cough. And there’s a man next him with the consumption.”
She often talked to Bonnie when they cleared up the dishes together, but all the time she knew that Bonnie was living another life and though she tried to listen didn’t even hear. Bonnie and John were not even much interested when Emma told them Ora was coming for Sunday dinner. S
ix of the chickens from the first setting had escaped sickness and hawks and grown big enough to eat, and Emma planned to fry two of them for that dinner. She bought sweet potatoes and rice, and a whole sack of flour, and a can of lard. On Saturday Granpap borrowed a wagon and harness from Moses and driving his own horse (for it seemed his own, though really it belonged to Mr. Ashley who owned the place) he drove into town with John and brought back the supplies Emma had bought, along with some oats for the horse.
Emma had long since stopped paying insurance, but she was still paying Ora a little each week for the board she had not paid. Ora had said, “Shucks, Emma. What’s over is over.” But Ora was having the doctor for the baby, and needed the money. Now, with Ora almost paid, Emma had hopes of catching up. This was why she felt rich enough to buy flour and lard.
She was almost praying for that Sunday to be full of sunshine and peace, for then Ora could see the cotton in full bloom in the sun. Her regret was that she had no garden of fresh vegetables. Granpap had plowed the ground and she had planted. Then they had all neglected the garden, for cotton was everything. The garden fence was almost gone, and there was no money with which to buy new fencing, so the chickens ate up most of the vegetables that came up, and then laid only a few eggs in return.
That Sunday came in with plenty of sunshine just as Emma had hoped. John and Bonnie, up to now indifferent, became excited about the fact that company was coming and there was to be a fine dinner.
Granpap stayed in bed until late to give his back time to catch up with the week’s work. He had coffee in bed just like a rich man, he said, when Emma brought it to him. Emma cleaned up the front room, even washing the floor first thing in the morning after breakfast. The bed there was covered with her best quilt. There was no table yet, but the Bible was on the mantel-piece, and above it hung the picture of Kirk. Two chairs sat in the room, though they would be taken into the kitchen when it was time to eat. Bonnie had brought in some late wild honeysuckle and sweet william. The honeysuckle was a deep pink and its thick stems stood up in a bottle on the table in the kitchen. The sweet william Emma put in a cup on the mantel, and the pink flowers hung over the side of the cup and trailed on the shelf as if they were growing there.
“They’ll be late,” Emma said to Bonnie. “For hit’s a long way the first time you walk it. Now I don’t notice so much going back and forth every day like I do.”
The family came just as Emma finished cutting out the biscuits. The chicken was ready to fry and the potatoes and rice were cooking.
Ora sat down to rest in the front room and nursed the baby that fretted every minute it was not at her breast. All her young ones stayed nearby, for they smelled the cooking in the next room.
“Keep the young ones here,” Emma called out to Ora, “for dinner’s most ready.”
“You couldn’t get them away if you took a stick after them,” Ora called back.
“I can’t hear ye.” The sizzling of the frying chicken in the pan before her was all Emma could hear clearly.
“Hit’ll wait,” Ora said comfortably.
After the full meal, all the older ones with the youngest went to look at the cotton. Esther and Bonnie washed dishes in the kitchen and ate scraps, though there were not many left. John waited for Young Frank who was hesitating between following Granpap and Frank and staying around the kitchen.
“Want to come with me?” he asked Young Frank. “I’m a-going across the road.”
“I want by myself,” Young Frank said, and John left him.
Emma and Ora walked some distance behind Granpap and Frank. They had to pass along the road to reach the cotton patch further up.
“He’s getting bent over like an old man sure enough,” Ora said looking ahead at Granpap who walked as if he was continually looking for something on the ground.
“Hit’s his back and leaning over to plow and chop. He don’t know when to say stop to himself. Hit’s cotton, cotton, day in, day out. T’d like to make a bale an acre,’ he says. Mrs. Phillip’s black man, Moses, says it has been done, but not often. Yet everybody will work themselves sick to try.”
“Because it brings in money.”
“Yes. And I’m glad except that Granpap’s wearing himself out . . . . Look! Ora,” Emma spoke in a whisper. “There’s Mrs. Phillips.”
Mrs. Phillips came down the steps of the white house across the road. She was a buxom woman in a fine white dress.
“You can’t see her face for that big hat,” Emma whispered. “But she’s real pretty, with a bright color. That’s the doctor with her. I think that’s his automobile, though maybe it’s hers, for she’s rich.”
“And she just comes every week to see her young ones?” Ora asked.
“Yes, she’s got some kind of business in town. I told you. Now she’s going back there.”
“What business would keep a mother away from her young ones?” Ora asked.
“I reckon the same kind that keeps us from ours, making money to live on.” This quieted Ora. Only she thought to herself, “If I had a house like that I’d think myself rich enough to stay at home.”
John looked back again from across the road. He was waiting until Mrs. Phillips would get in the car and drive away. Then he and Robert would be free to go where they pleased. Frank was still in the yard, and had probably decided to stay near the girls. So, if he liked girls better, then he was welcome to them.
Robert was waiting at the back of the house. He had a special place for them to go. “The chain gang is camped up the road,” he said. “Let’s go and watch.”
It was further than John had thought, for he knew Emma would be looking for him to be there when Ora and the others left. Yet when Robert once wanted to do a thing it was hard to say no to him; and John kept on walking. It was almost sundown when they reached the spot. The gang was camped in an open place near the schoolhouse.
“Come in here,” Robert said mysteriously, and dragged John into some blackjacks. They sat down to watch, with no one in the camp suspecting they were there. It looked as if the men had just finished supper, for at one side under a tent a black man in stripes was cleaning tin dishes and piling them on a table to dry. Beyond the tent there were two long cages on wheels, with rows of shelves inside.
“They sleep in those cages, Moses says,” Robert whispered to John. “And they’re chained together so they can’t get away.”
About thirty men sat on the ground. Some of them looked to be white, but most were full black. They sat pressed close together and the stripes of their clothes ran into each other and made a long ring of stripes as if the wide black lines were a fence to hold them in. Behind the circle on a sort of stool sat the guard with his big gun under his arm. At his feet were two hounds with long drooping ears. He held them by a chain that gave out a clank when the hounds moved.
The guard raised his gun a little way in the air and pointed with it at one of the black men.
“All right, Sam,” he said. “Begin.”
Sam stood up. “He’s a trusty,” Robert said, very low. “You see he hasn’t any chains hanging to his legs.”
All together the men raised their voices and sang. There were two hymns that John had never heard before. Then Sam began, “Nearer my God to Thee.”
This one John knew, and all the men seemed to know it well. Their deep mournful voices mixed with the heavy feeling of night just coming, and went up toward the heavens where stars were coming out.
When this third song was finished, the guard gave an order and another guard with a gun came from a small tent at the right of the cages. The men in stripes rose up and walked, one behind the other, to the cages. Their black heads became part of the night, but the stripes stood out in the one light that was fixed on a tree in the center. It looked as if only stripes were moving around in the shadows, as they marched toward the cages. But there was the sound of heavy chains rubbing together. Two of the trusties stood aside waiting for the others to pass into the cages. John saw the first ca
ge fill up with stripes lying flat on the shelves, and in places between the bars of the cages he could see white eyes shining in the light from the lantern. There were some murmurs, then again the clanking of chains as the men climbed into the second cage. The voices of guards sounded sharp and rasping.
“Get in there; quick now. Get in there.”
Then something went wrong. The guard’s voice called out. “Get in there you black—” There was a scuffle and the guard brought his gun down heavily.
“Bring him out,” he called. The other guard and a black man who was unchained stooped and dragged one of the convicts into the light.
“Get a wheelbarrow,” the guard said to the other trusty, and the man ran fast to do as he was told.
The guard and the black man laid the convict across the wheelbarrow face down and stripped him to the waist. There was a silence, terrible like that between bright lightning and a heavy crash of thunder, only it lasted longer.
The convict on the wheelbarrow had a gash across his forehead, and the blood dripped from it to the ground. The others were waiting for something, and while they waited the man cried out. “Boss,” he said, “I didn’t mean it. Oh, Boss, I didn’t mean to be impudent. You don’t understand.”
The white guard came from the tent with a long leather whip.
“Thirty licks,” the other one said, the one who held the hounds. “Lie down,” he said to the hounds, who began to howl dismally. “Lie down.” And he touched one of them with the end of his gun. The dogs quieted.
The leather came down on the back of the convict. The sound of the leather cutting his back went up into the heavens as the sound of the hymn had gone up. And another sound went up. As the leather came down the man lying across the wheelbarrow groaned. The lashes never stopped, for when the white guard tired he handed the whip to the black man and ordered him to go on with the punishment.
“One,” Robert counted in a whisper. “Two.” And kept on counting.
Groans came from the man on the wheelbarrow. They grew fainter, then there came a groan from the cages, and another. Robert counted, “Twenty, twenty-one . . .” The groans accumulated into one sound. They swelled up until they were louder than the song had been. And they were one groan made of the groans of those who were lying on the shelves in the cages.
To Make My Bread Page 27
