The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  The king not only forbade, he enforced: there were laws passed that made it a death sentence to be caught with a rich man’s property, but Gideon Franklin was tired of hearing his mother and siblings whimper in hunger. His father rubbing his powerless hands. One night Gideon took a bow and arrow to the lands of a rich earl who delighted in serving his equally rich friends venison, for it had become more succulent with the knowledge that it was forbidden to the poverty-stricken. When Gideon was arrested two days after he killed the earl’s deer, Gideon was consoled that at least his parents, brothers, and sisters had already eaten the meat. The bones had already been buried. The only evidence had been the skin that his mother had begun to cure, in hopes of making rough coverings for the feet of her children. When the earl’s men burst through the weak-hinged door of his home, Gideon had readily stepped forward. Even after the justice of the peace had sentenced him to death, Gideon did not believe this was how it would end. He was a cheerful, optimistic lad of nineteen, and he believed that God watched over him. And indeed, five days after his sentencing, the justice gave him a choice: execution for theft, or transport to His Majesty’s lands, over the ocean. Naturally, Gideon chose the latter.

  On the Anne, James Oglethorpe had brought others of his own elite class. When he emerged from his cabin in his extravagant clothes and shiny boots, he smiled vaguely at his own cohort, and ignored those his project had saved from death. Yet Gideon met other new colonists like himself. Like him, they vomited over the side of the ship, or in buckets below in the tight, filthy quarters, and ate the sometimes-spoiled food. But when Gideon arrived in the land that was called Georgia, he discovered that, after his seven-year term of indentured servitude was up, he would be given his own parcel of fifty acres of land. Our land.

  Gideon did not question whom the land had been taken from. He saw it as a free boon, as free as the deer, and Gideon had developed a permanent taste for roasted venison. The master who owned his indenture was mild-mannered, and not a nobleman. For him, Gideon performed menial labor, clearing off land, and helping to build a cabin that he was not allowed to sleep in—Gideon slept in a lean-to shed—but he was proud that he had work to do. And the master allowed Gideon to make a bow and arrow and kill as many deer as he wished, so long as he shared a portion of the meat with his master. In his first year, Gideon glutted himself on the venison and learned to sew clothes from the cured skin. He found blackberries in the forest during the summer and picked buckets for himself and his master. And by the end of his indenture, Gideon had gained weight, and had forgotten his outrage at men in power, for he was now a white Georgian with property of his own, instead of a hungry lad gaping at the well-fed rich. And the people—our people—whom the English called Indians were now beneath Gideon. Finally, Gideon Franklin could look down on someone else, instead of being the most despised himself.

  As a landowner, Gideon was no longer close to power, he possessed it, and even more so when Oglethorpe’s wish of a colony without slavery was violated. And as the years passed, and enslaved Negroes were brought into the colony, though Gideon remained poor, he had pride in his freedom. His optimism grew, as well as his belief that God had blessed him with special grace. And why not? On our land, which the English had stolen from our people, Gideon was a white man. And even the poorest of white men was better than the Indian and the slave.

  This optimism was transferred to Gideon’s children, when he married and propagated with a young woman who had been accused of prostitution, a charge that she’d spiritedly negated. His youngest son would marry another young woman who’d been forced to choose between debtors’ prison in England and transport to Georgia. But by the time this youngest son’s children reached adulthood, the original parcel of land allotted to Gideon had been sliced into mere strips. And one of Gideon’s many adult grandchildren, the man named Aidan, decided to make his own way. Aidan entered the Georgia land lottery, won by the grace of his god, and took his second wife, his many children, and his inherited optimism across the Oconee River. Along the way, he met Samuel Pinchard.

  Yet that Franklin optimism would die with Aidan. Only the sense of superiority would remain, that being white was a blessing in Georgia. And this superiority would combine with the hopelessness of poverty to breed a distinct ruthlessness. And it would be so with other white men who had arrived in the years of Oglethorpe’s worthy project as well. Those who killed too many deer and stuffed themselves with the meat.

  A Hunter of the People

  These would be the men who hunted our people in the time of Andrew Jackson, one hundred years after Oglethorpe’s ship anchored in what would become Savannah, Georgia. And Jackson would be called Indian Killer. And in the time after all those broken treaties with our people, there was the final Removal Act. When our people were forced from our land in the 1830s.

  We don’t want to remember how our people looked back as they walked away.

  How they mourned us, while drinking in the beauty of the pine, the oak, the pecan, the cedar. The heaviness of plums and peaches that contained a solacing flavor. Blackberries enticing snakes from their hiding places. The deer that watched with large eyes that seemed to understand. When someone or something dies, at least there is an ending, a resolution, no matter how mournful. Yet with our people, there was no ending, for as the last groups began to walk west to Oklahoma, they knew that our land was alive. And so their longing would never abate.

  Yet there were a few of our people who remained on our earth. And the white men who were hungry for our land began to seek out the people who refused to leave on wagons, and the descendant of that worthy Franklin was one of these men. This was Jeremiah, the oldest son of Carson, who was the great-grandson of Gideon.

  During the time after the Removal of the Creek, Jeremiah became a hunter of our people. Whatever Jeremiah found, he claimed as his own, and either kept it or sold it. Yet the plunder and the bounties weren’t the only pleasures for him. He loved the viciousness of the people hunt.

  In a neighboring county, there had been a stubborn Creek mestizo who refused to leave during the Removal. He’d stayed after things became dangerous, and hearing about this man, Jeremiah had snuck up on the man in his field of vegetables, hitting him with a large staff. The mestizo staggered about, recovering enough to charge Jeremiah with his hoe, but Jeremiah managed to beat the man to unconsciousness with the staff. He used the hoe to chop the mestizo’s body into pieces, and then walked to the cabin. However, the mestizo’s wife had spirit. She charged him, but he hit her with the bloody staff, then struck at her throat with the hoe, killing her.

  This turn of events annoyed Jeremiah, for he considered himself an honorable man. Jeremiah enjoyed killing men, but not women. He didn’t like rape, either; his brothers did, but they weren’t with him that day. When the wife fell, her two daughters looked at each other. One could escape Jeremiah, but the other would fall. Thus, Jeremiah feigned breathlessness and sat down on the dirt floor. He did not pursue the daughters when they ran out the front of the cabin, though he could have grabbed at their long skirts. After they were gone, he bounced up quickly. After that, he went through the cabin’s belongings: a teakettle, a pot, two pans, three petticoats, a set of colorfully beaded boots made from the skin of deer. Also, the dead man’s rifle and a horse and pig in the barn.

  Soon, the few remaining Creek people hid themselves in the woods. If they were mestizos, their white skin could often hide their lineage. If mulattoes, they were enslaved as Negroes. Jeremiah’s appetite for blood had not been sated, however, and he became a slave patroller for Putnam County, the new boundary that had been established after the land lotteries. This patrolling gave Jeremiah an income, since he made no money as a farmer, as he owed everything he made to Samuel Pinchard, who owned the land. Jeremiah lived in a small cabin next to that of his father and four other cabins populated by his brothers and their wives. All were built in the shadow of the mound, the landmark that was despised by his family.

  So
when the only beloved person in Samuel Pinchard’s life ran away, Samuel sent word to Jeremiah, saying he wanted Nick returned, but he did not want him hurt. It was the morning when Samuel sent word, and Jeremiah arrived promptly with the hound dogs he had raised from pups, who heeded his voice and signals. The men working with Jeremiah were his younger brothers, and they admired Jeremiah’s coldness when dealing with Negroes and his lack of obsequiousness when standing in the dirt in the front of the steps of a wealthy, condescending white man’s big house.

  “Your nigger might be in the area. Then again, mayhap not. But if he is, we gone find him. You best believe it.” Yet it had begun to rain, and Jeremiah failed to say that would hinder Nick’s retrieval. He was not about to educate his landlord on hunting slaves, for he was being paid ten dollars up front to find Nick.

  But even before the rain, the trail had been lost. For in the daylight before the evening that Nick ran away, Aggie and her gaggle of Quarters-children had walked into the woods. She’d carried a burlap sack and a large jug. After telling them of her game, she reached into a sack of wild onions and passed them out. She told them, run and throw. Run and throw. And they did, with enchanted calls.

  Before they returned, Aggie uncorked the jug and began to walk, sprinkling along her way. She saved her nighttime water for many purposes. This time, she hoped that when Samuel sent word to the patrollers, their hounds would run in confusion. The scent of wild onions and night water were obfuscation enough, but the rain was the final blessing.

  A Marriage

  Samuel was disappointed that Nick could not be found, but he kept Jeremiah Franklin on a monthly retainer of ten dollars; perhaps there would be a breakthrough. Jeremiah warned Samuel that the trail was gone, but he took the money with no contrition on his trips to Samuel’s store, where he picked up supplies for his farm. Often times, he brought his baby sister. Approaching seventeen, and exceedingly buxom, Grace Franklin was too mature to catch Samuel’s eye. Grace was unremarkable in looks, but Samuel spoke to her as if she were most splendid. He gave her an extra yard of calico for free on one of her visits and a small package of candy on another. He advised her to place strips of linsey-woolsey inside her shoes. The extra layer would warm her feet in the wintertime and keep her soles from blistering. Confused by his employer’s conduct, Jeremiah reminded his sister that Samuel was a married man. She could take his calico and candy, but she should stop letting him hold her hand for so long.

  Like his father, Jeremiah knew about the little girls that Samuel imprisoned in the left cabin. He did not feel sorry for the little girls, however, any more than he felt sorry for a pig, a dog, a horse, or a cow. He had very little compassion to begin with, and certainly he could not waste it on a Negress, and a child at that. So neither Jeremiah nor his father were bothered when his landlord proposed to his overseer there should be a marriage. Carson readily agreed.

  Though it was walking distance, Samuel had ridden his horse to Carson’s cabin, sat down to accept the barebones hospitality of the overseer’s wife, and then quickly offered the proposal. His son was back from the university. Victor was of an age to marry, but too shy for sparking. Perhaps Carson might speak to Grace on his behalf?

  “I’m gone have to ask her,” Carson said.

  He was lying. Grace would do as she was told. Carson had his eye on buying back his father’s original parcel of land, and what better way to do that than to marry his daughter to his landlord’s son? And after he bought back the land, he would attend to the destruction of the mound. Not only did Carson not warn Grace about the goings-on with little girls in their landlord’s left cabin, he didn’t tell her that her intended groom didn’t like to lie with females: Carson had seen Victor in the midst with the now-dead Quarters-boy.

  Samuel was unaware that his son’s secret was known. He thought he’d been careful by sending Victor to the university in North Carolina. There hadn’t been any romantic scandals, however. Claudius had started a business at the university, amassing a nest egg by writing poems for Victor’s classmates to send to their (female) sweethearts. They’d paid Claudius a dime apiece to write his quixotic verses, and before Victor had graduated, Claudius had slipped away in the night, never to be heard from again, aided by his store of dimes.

  As for Grace, she was thrilled about the prospect of being married into the Pinchard family. Her life was not fearful. Her brothers did not abuse her or try to catch glimpses of her as she undressed in the one room her younger, unmarried siblings shared. Yet like Gideon, her long-ago ancestor, Grace saw how the rich men in her sights lived, how their wives were dressed in finery when they visited Samuel Pinchard’s general store. Even the wives of the yeomen who patronized the store were better off than the Franklins, for they had somehow hung on to the acres they’d won in the land lottery and owned one or two slaves.

  The wedding of Victor and Grace was unimpressive, much to Samuel’s dismay. He had invited the two other richest men in the county, along with their wives, but both couples had sent their social regrets along with two silver platters, beautiful and redundant. The only guests were the region’s yeomen, their wives, and the Franklin clan, all of whom were dressed in church clothes a mere step above their daily rags. However, Grace was ecstatic, in the green everyday dress and matching shoes that Samuel had purchased, which was fancier than anything she’d ever owned.

  After her wedding, Grace began to comprehend that she’d been given a pig in a poke. One fine day, when she sat alone in a rocking chair on the second-floor gallery, she caught a look over the left cabin’s fence, where she saw Samuel bend down and kiss a luxuriously clothed pickaninny full on the mouth. And most nights, she slept alone in the bed she should have shared with Victor, if he had not made a pallet elsewhere. Yet Grace was reconciled, in part because her mother-in-law embraced her with fervor.

  Although another woman of Creek lineage might have been upset at her son marrying the baby sister of a hunter of our people, Lady was happy to have new friends and flattered that her affections toward Grace were returned. Even more: Grace was obsequious to her mother-in-law. In various ways, she would seek Lady’s counsel on her manners, dress, and speech. When Grace sat in the parlor of the big house and her sister-in-law Gloria made her usual blunt statements, Grace would not seem surprised or act with condescension. Rather, Grace would answer with a warm smile, which endeared her to her mother-in-law; for many years, she had feared that Gloria would be a source of ridicule. And though Lady was certain that Grace’s grandfather and father had been aware of her Creek heritage—if not her African blood—Grace did not speak of this lineage. And Lady was grateful to finally sit in her parlor and be treated as the white wife of a wealthy man. If someone had reminded her that she had taken on the desires of her mother—Mahala’s lifelong craving to throw off her Indian history—Lady would have been adamant in her denials.

  Yet indeed, Grace was aware of her mother-in-law’s Creek background. This information had been bandied about many nights in her parents’ tiny cabin. But Grace didn’t care about Lady’s heritage. Grace lived in the big house now, and if her husband slept someplace else, at least he did not force himself on her. She was content when she lay on the feather mattress on a four-poster bed that took up all but a few inches of space in her bedroom, a bed that, when Samuel passed on, would be given to her children after she and Victor moved into the extra-large bedroom. For now, she had a fireplace in her room, which she’d never imagined. On cold nights, she did not have to pile quilts on her bed to keep warm.

  And Grace began to take on airs. When she sat on the gallery with Lady and Gloria, she began to ignore the waves of her father and brothers when they walked to the yard of the Pinchard big house. If they shouted her name, Grace would shut her decorative fan, telling her in-laws she believed she would go inside and rest.

  Though a woman, Grace had more power than any male in her family, for she was no longer a Franklin, forced to scrabble in the dirt and hunt runaways. Grace was a Pinchard
now. She’d come up in the world.

  X

  We can only be interested in men by knowing them—knowing them directly, thoroughly, intimately; and this knowing leads ever to the greatest of human discoveries,—the recognization of one’s self in the image of one’s neighbor; the sudden, startling revelation, “This is another ME, that thinks as I think, feels as I feel, suffers even as I suffer.” This is the beginning, and only the true beginning, of the social conscience.

  —W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Individual and Social Conscience”

  The Peculiar Institution

  I’d done well my first year in the master’s program: I earned As in all my classes, and unless I choked, I was pretty sure I’d continue to excel. But before my second year began, I had a decision to make: whether I’d continue on to the doctoral program and stay where I was or apply elsewhere. Before I made my decision, I called up Dr. Oludara. She told me if I wanted to attend another university for my doctorate, she had my letter of recommendation already written. And when I finished my doctorate, she’d be ready to support me on the job market, too.

  “I mean, unless you do something crazy, Ailey, I have your back for life. And I’ve known you for a decade, so I don’t think that’s happening.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Oludara. But you know . . .”

  “I told you it would be lonely, Ailey.”

  “It’s not that. I mean, I have a Black friend.”