That’s when I began to get sick. Dreaming about becoming someone I could never be made me sick, but not on the outside. On the outside I was strong and young and could last all day out in the sun, in the field, but inside something was breaking, going dark even under the sun. When it happened I got cold inside like it was winter even when I was working in the fields. I’d be sweating on the outside but all ice inside, like chills and then fever, from dreaming things that could never be, would never be cause I was a nigger, and niggers ain’t supposed to dream.
The sickness got real bad after Mama and I had a run-in with some white man in Spartanburg. We had gone into town for supplies and were walking in the road that morning with the sun glaring down, so I could barely make out the people walking close by, up on a wooden sidewalk. I remember Mama was gripping my hand hard like she was worried someone would steal me, and with me being small my hand was higher than my head, which made my arm and shoulder ache. It was hot and my eyes stung with sweat. I felt like a sack of corn being pulled along.
Suddenly a shadow came across the sun and a white man stepped off the sidewalk and down into the road, right down onto my foot.
“Damn!” I yelled in pain.
“Elijah!” Mama hissed. “You better watch your mouth!”
“Nigger!” the man spat. “Why don’t you watch where you’re goin, boy?”
I thought the pain in my arm and shoulder was bad, but it was nothing compared to what I felt in my gut. I spent most of my time at home, where nobody ever used that word, and this was the first time I remembered hearing it. But the way he said it cut like a knife, deep inside so you couldn’t see the hurt. I felt hot tears on my cheeks, and everything got blurry.
Mama’s grip got even tighter. She spun me around and we walked back the way we’d come. When we got to the wagon and got in, Mama reached down, and with a hard flick of her wrists and the snap of the reins the mules woke up. She turned us round and got us out of town, never saying a word along the way, but there was a stiffness to her body like she used too much starch in her dress and it had gone into her bones.
What I can’t forget is Mama talking to me when we got home. When we got inside where there was shelter, her holding my face in her rough warm hands like she was praying, I felt how warm it was and safe to be there in her hands. Nothing could hurt me in that shelter that was hands and love, and she said, “Elijah, you forget that man, he nothin to you or to me or your daddy. But you ain’t nothin, cause I didn’t work a day and a half bringin nothin into this world. I didn’t bleed tears or sweat blood bringin nothin into my life. You could never be nothin, you could never be anyone’s nigger. You my boy Elijah, you my son, and my son ain’t a nigger, and your daddy ain’t a nigger, and I ain’t a nigger, and it don’t matter how much it get said, don’t make it true.
“That man’s cussin somethin inside him, somethin he hates inside him, but not you cause he don’t even know who you are, Elijah. Cause what I’m holdin in my hands is somethin good and kind, and I know you’ll never be a nigger unless you forget who you are!”
That’s what Mama said, so I never try to be something I ain’t, and I ain’t ever been a nigger. But I’m Seminole and I’m colored, just like sundown I’m colored, like dirt that’s warm and black and red too, like the sun’s been shining so long the dirt remembers all that light and holds on to it. It takes a lot of sunsets to turn the ground red down deep, but I guess there’s been plenty of sunsets since the beginning, and there weren’t no niggers then. Niggers came later.
But knowing I wasn’t a nigger made me sick, cause white folks treated me like something I wasn’t. When I got older I corrected them, I told them who I was. I said, “Elijah Yancy’s my name, what’s your name?” I didn’t really care if they told me. What mattered was that they knew who I was. I could’ve been saying I was God, I said it with such pride. I believed my mama when she said Elijah Yancy is God’s child, her child, a boy who’s got a mother and a father, people who love him, and love ain’t nothing. It matters like water matters, or the sun.
So I held on to my dreams even though they hurt my hands, my mind, my soul. It would have been easier to let go, but I was stronger than the pain, love made me stronger, and so I held on even tighter. Deep down there was bleeding I never let anyone see, and maybe it don’t matter how much you bleed in the night if the blood’s all gone by sunup. But the sheets would be cold with my sweat cause that fever had taken me. Dreams are fire and they’ll burn you dry.
The Horse’s Paces Walk, Trot, and Canter
Close the legs and communicate a sufficient impulse to carry him forward without giving the hand; for if you do, the head and neck may relapse into a position which will defy the control of the hand.
from Cavalry Tactics
sundays
If there’s a good day in the week, I remember it being Sunday. Sunday meant just a few chores, like chopping wood for the fire and bathing. Mama said she liked to be able to see me at least once a week, and she figured if I bathed it might be easier for God to recognize me in church.
Sunday meant sleeping a little bit longer, but not too much. Long enough that when you got up, your bed was so warm it just pulled you back down again, and you went without a struggle.
And Sunday usually meant Mama’s fried chicken. That fried chicken convinced me that chickens were created by God so they could be cooked by my mama for me to eat. I could eat her chicken for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, but it was only for Sunday cause Sunday was different.
My daddy never really relaxed, but there was a shadow of relaxation about him on Sundays. He looked different, and something about him felt different. He seemed to know deep in his body that he wouldn’t be in the field that day. All of him just sagged, but in a good way, on Sundays.
Sunday wasn’t so much a time but a feeling inside, a feeling you could only get on that day, leastways for me. Mama used to say that life was just what happened leading up to Sunday, and the things that happened after. For her it was all about Sunday, even when it wasn’t Sunday. She said, “Elijah, Sunday’s not a day of the week, it’s somethin in your heart, and as long as you know that, then you don’t have to die and go to heaven to find God, cause God is always waitin for you right here.” And she’d gently touch my chest with her hand.
As the time would get closer for going to church, Mama would begin to hum a little, and I don’t remember her ever singing except on Sunday mornings. There was just a calm about her all day that you couldn’t even find an echo of any other time.
Sunday meant washing, though, washing till my skin felt like it was going to peel off. And the water had to be hot, which is why I was chopping wood in the first place. Even when I was little, Mama would wash me so hard I thought she was trying to polish my bones, she pressed down so hard, scrubbing and scrubbing. No child could ever be that dirty, but Mama said I tried all week to be that dirty and generally succeeded.
After we were all clean, “clean enough to be before God” is how Mama put it, we’d put one more log in the woodstove if it was wintertime, to keep the cabin warm for Grandma Sara. She never went to church, even though she’d raised my mama to love God and to be faithful. Grandma Sara had her own way of talking to God.
I can still see us in our Sunday finery, which meant clothes that were clean and without patches. Daddy would always wear his one “good” hat and Mama had white cotton gloves she only wore then. If it was hot she’d have her little umbrella to keep the sun off. On a cold winter day, she’d be huddled under a thick wool blanket. Either way she’d be sitting tall and straight in the wagon, Daddy next to her happy as he could be. He was always in a better mood when he was next to Mama. I spent a lot of my childhood trying to figure out ways to get them together so he could be in a better mood.
The church where colored folks went wasn’t in Spartanburg but a bit outside, so you had to leave the main road into town and follow a little dirt road off to one side. The church was just a wooden shack bu
t it was clean and neat, and everyone going inside it was clean and neat. I remember the deacon sounded like what I thought God must sound like, and the deacon’s wife was as close to the word elegant as my young self ever saw. It wasn’t what she was wearing, it was something inside her that wasn’t touched by the rest of the week. She was Sunday come to life.
When the deacon gave his sermon, he seemed to be telling us he could feel what we’d been feeling the week before, but all that pain and struggle was gone now and the struggle and pain ahead hadn’t got here yet, cause this was the Lord’s day and a time to rejoice. I don’t really remember anything in particular that was said in church, but I can’t forget how I felt listening to what was said, and watching people I only ever saw on Sunday.
The girls always acted like they was all grown up, wearing dresses like their mamas but smaller, and they sat just as straight, behaving respectfully like they should, but the boys were usually squirming on those hard oak benches, struggling for freedom under ironed white collars and shirts buttoned to breathless. Most of them couldn’t wait to get back outside and play. We could play on Sunday afternoons after church, cause usually there would be food people brought to share, and the adults would start talking about news and such. There was no way they could talk and mind where the children were at the same time, so we’d run around like there was no tomorrow, no having to get back to everyday hard work starting before dawn.
There were Goodloes and Andersons and Browns and Joneses and Washingtons and McCarthys and Smiths, more folks than I can remember the names of, just families having a good time. And it didn’t matter if it was cloudy or rainy, Sunday afternoons were always the one bright time of the week.
But Sunday mornings we spent indoors. The women with their fans waving at the hot stuffy air, white dresses crackling like a fire when they moved. The fathers stiff as wet sheets left out all night in January, sitting next to their women, their heads bobbing up and down in rhythm to the deacon’s words. I remember the singing . . .
Do Lord, oh do Lord
Do remember me
Do Lord, oh do Lord
Do remember me
Do Lord, oh do Lord
Do remember me
Goin way beyond the blue
I got a home in Gloryland
That outshines the sun
I got a home in Gloryland
That outshines the sun
I got a home in Gloryland
That Outshines the sun
Goin way beyond the blue
While we were singing we weren’t there no more, not in South Carolina, not in Spartanburg, not even in that church. We were someplace bigger than anywhere else, someplace safe and warm and peaceful. The singing went on and on, and sometimes I’d run out of breath for it. Sitting there trying to get my breath back, I could feel I was part of something bigger than my family, bigger than anything I knew. It was a good feeling, how a forest tree must feel being rooted in the ground and all its roots touching other roots, but they all hidden in the ground, and their touching hidden too.
Daddy once said, “Elijah, you can learn a lot by learnin from plants. They rooted, so you should be that way too. If you know the names of everything that’s green and rooted around you, then you always home and you always belong. When some plants is young, they green and move easy in the air, so they don’t break in a storm, and that’s another thing you can learn. No matter how big a wind is on you, just remember to bend so you don’t break, you hear me, boy?”
And I would say “yessir!” like always. But Daddy was right, cause I remembered what he said and I always tried to learn the names of what was growing round me and let the plants be my teachers. When I was older and a soldier in Yosemite, I would see the young red firs doubled over with the weight of snow, but not broken, and I’d think about what Daddy said, how to bend under the pressure, give in to it, knowing that the burden would lift one day. You gotta outlast the weight so you can rise like those fir trees rise when the snow has melted.
All those colored people, my family and our neighbors, they were using Sundays like trees use the sun. Letting their burdens melt away under the heat of the deacon’s sermon, so they could walk out of that building taller than they walked in. Letting their roots tangle up with their neighbors’. Letting the wind of their singing carry their hearts home. Sundays weren’t about heaven at all, they were about learning how to be right here on this earth. They were more necessary than air or food. You can live weeks without food and days without water, but we couldn’t live at all without Sundays.
The hard thing is to take Sunday with you if you end up going to a place without Sunday.
Patrol report on Yosemite Park stationery, under “Remarks,” Wawona, Cal., July 14, 1903
A party of (4) men and (4) horses from San Francisco passed through as tourists. No arms of any kind.
Very Respectfully,
William Alexander,
Sgt. “L”, 9 Cavy.
Commanding Detachment
voting
I remember Daddy getting up before the sun, or the sound of him getting up, the sound of him breathing and speaking to himself or someone besides Mama, and I remember thinking, Who could that be? There’s just the four of us, and you couldn’t really have a conversation with Grandma Sara. You just nodded and listened to what she had to say, and then she’d say afterward, “I’m glad we had ourselves this little talk!” Like someone else had been talking besides her.
But now it was just Daddy breathing hard in the dark of the cabin, the cotton outside making a noise in the wind like a running creek. I could hear him getting his shoes, putting on the cold like it was overalls, and him saying under his breath, “Man got a right, got a right to . . .” He said it over and over, as if the room was big enough to have an echo, but it wasn’t so he made one up. Like that would give him some room for an idea of his that was too big for our little cabin. Freedom can’t fit in here, no room for it, but that’s what he wants. Only he couldn’t tell me about it cause he never had it.
Then in that blue cold he said, “Elijah, boy, you better get on up and get those mules ready, cause sure to God it won’t happen with you lyin there.”
And I moved in the warmth of my blankets like I was swimming in Big Creek after the sun been on it all day, and it was hard to pull up out of it and get my breath. I could see my breath coming up in the cabin, and I knew without asking that I had to make the fire in our raggedy old stove.
I swung my bare feet down onto the dirt that covered the wood floor cause the walls didn’t come all the way down to the floor in some places. No matter how often Mama told me to sweep it up, it just kept coming back. I got up onto it naked and found my overalls. There was just the wind, the sound of my mama breathing, and now my daddy complaining how the dawn always come too quick. Daddy’s always saying something unkind about daylight. I think he got problems with the sun cause it showed him how much work was left to do. When it’s dark you can’t see nothing, which is all right when your fingers is raw and your back is telling you how poorly you treated it all day. I don’t know, I just gotta get up, get moving, get that wood.
I did and the fire got going good. The fire was the first nice thing that happened that morning and I wanted to stay a little longer inside the heat, but I wanted to live a little longer too, so I knew I better get on with the mules cause daddy wouldn’t find it funny, me standing over the stove like a mule at a trough. I opened the cabin door and stepped out into the morning, so black with just a bit of red through the trees, sunup having as hard a time as me getting out into the world.
I got the mules fed and watered and harnessed up to the wagon, which didn’t take much time. The cold made it longer, but by the time I finished it was lightening up good and a breeze with a little fire in it was starting to flow at my back, and when all was ready, I went back up the step into the warm room. Daddy was standing there, taller than his shadow, which was stooped against the wall like it was too tired to stand up a
longside him. He was looking at me like I was supposed to say something, so I thought it best to start talking.
“Wagon’s ready, sir,” was all I said, but it must’ve been the right thing, cause he just nodded and then sat down in his chair for a bit, like this was one of those times you might need to sit and think about something before you did it. The way he was sitting there made me think of fog on a hill, how it covers up trees and ground but it ain’t really there at all, cause you can walk through it, breathe it in and out, nothing much in your way but cold damp air.
Mama said it’s God’s breath when you get that low fog on the ground. “God’s close now, so you better be thinkin good thoughts, boy, cause he can hear you now!”
“Daniel,” I heard Mama say from the back of the cabin. “Daniel, you still goin through with this?” Her voice seemed to be saying that Daddy was planning on setting himself on fire or walking stark naked through Spartanburg.
“Sure as this sunup, I’m goin to that courthouse,” he said, and his voice was hard as anger and coiled tighter than a rattler before it strikes.
“Then,” Mama went on, “you better take Elijah with you. A boy should be there to see his daddy when he’s so sure of himself, cause I ain’t so sure, you hear me, Daniel? I ain’t sure at all!”
“We talked bout this last night,” Daddy said, “and I told you I was goin round sunup, and it’s sunup and I’m goin.”
Gloryland Page 2
