Gloryland

by Shelton Johnson

  But I wasn’t there yet, didn’t understand. I’d had enough of keeping my head down, and I thought I’d figured out a way to take a stand on something yet live to tell about it. I figured all I had to do was remember to smile with my head up, remember my manners. So I got up one morning when the sky was red with day, put my clothes on, got a fire going in the woodstove, and crept out of the cabin with an idea fixed in my head about walking on a sidewalk.

  There was this wooden sidewalk in Spartanburg, running right through town along either side of the main street. The sidewalk lay under the shade trees where white folks walked after church on Sundays. Colored men built it and tended it, but colored folks had to walk in the dirt of the street, and that never made any sense to me. Why build something you could never use?

  The path into town from our cabin was kinda overgrown, but you could find it if you knew it was there. I walked without really seeing it, my hands in my pockets trying to keep them warm, and my head held high. Figured I should get some practice before I got to town. I was terrified, but one thing I’d learned from horses and mules was to never let them sense your fear. There had to be no doubt who was in charge and who wasn’t.

  I had recently turned eighteen, and Daddy had given me a Sunday free of chores as a gift. That was about all we could afford. Since that night in the woods I’d been thinking about what had happened to Mr. Washington and to Daddy and to Grandma Sara in the war against the Seminoles, thinking about all the things in this world I could never change and what I maybe could change. And that’s when it come to me to go walk on that sidewalk in town. I remembered watching a group of colored men fixing part of that sidewalk, and when I was younger, I thought it was strange they would do that. Now I felt anger over my fear.

  Every abuse I’d ever suffered or seen, every curse, every sour look, every mean gesture or pointed finger or raised eyebrow or jutted chin, every joke that wasn’t funny, even the compliments that sat in your gut like a stone, all those were some of the many sick ways of hearing and feeling the word no. I started to think that no matter what rule I followed, no matter how many times I smiled or lowered my eyes, I would always be guilty of doing the wrong thing. So I might as well try doing something right, even if it killed me. If I died, I’d at least know what it felt like to be a man, and if I lived I could always remember that I’d once been a man, and all I had to do to get there was go for a walk.

  The morning was quiet and getting brighter all the time. Shadows under the elms made the ground look as if it were gone, like I was walking on nothing. It was all right for me to spend my life walking on this nothing, but not on that sidewalk in town.

  Pretty soon I could feel the ground getting harder and hear town getting closer. Someone’s dog was barking, a door slammed, and somewheres off, a rooster was letting everyone know that I was coming. It’s strange how when you’re going somewhere you really shouldn’t be going, you get there mighty quick. Part of me wished I hadn’t got there so fast. But something made me keep walking, keep my feet moving toward that sidewalk up ahead, but I was so afraid that I dropped my head now, and watched my dirty shoes go forward on their own, pulling me along.

  People were already walking there cause church had just let out. I could feel the stares, which were empty like the black shadows under elm trees, but colder. I caught the scents of manure and hay from a livery stable to my right, but I didn’t look at it. I knew it was there, like the beauty shop on my left that colored women couldn’t use.

  I kept walking and I knew when I was beside the butcher shop that wouldn’t take credit from colored people, no, I didn’t need to smell blood to know where death kept a business, or maybe it was the funeral parlor up ahead that only served whites, though Mama once told me we’re all the same color to worms. I stared at that shop wondering who would make my coffin on the day I died, and maybe this was the day. I kept looking even after I passed, so I didn’t notice I’d turned slightly toward the sidewalk till my right foot bumped up against something hard.

  I lifted that foot and put it down squarely on the sidewalk. I leaned forward, pushed off, and brought my left foot up right next to it. Then I was standing on the sidewalk where no colored person was supposed to stand. It was just a few inches off the ground but the sky seemed closer and bluer. I felt if I reached up with my hands, they would turn blue cause the sky was so close. I felt giddy, but I didn’t know if it was fear or being up so high. It was just a few inches, the distance between where I’d been and where I was, but it could have been a mountain.

  I didn’t move right away. Looking down, I could see each sunlit pine plank and how they fit together like they’d always been lined up side by side, like the sidewalk came whole from a mill and colored men had nothing to do with it at all. The sweat of the men who had built it was soaked into the ground under those boards, where eyes couldn’t see. There must’ve been pools of blackness down there, but only insects could taste the salt.

  I looked up and saw Spartanburg like it had just come out of the air. The fear hit me again and made my head too heavy to keep up. The trees whispered as I began to walk, head bowed. In front of me and behind me were white people, but they were just bright pieces moving in a fog of perfume, branches, shadows, and light. I could smell them and hear them moving all around me. Eyes were going through me cause I wasn’t there, I was a shadow under the magnolias.

  I could feel my breath pick up as my feet went up, down, up, down. I was walking on whiteness all broken up under the shade, the trees breaking up the sun and casting it down to silence. I was looking at feet, lots of feet moving toward me or away from me, and a few shoes not moving cause their owners were sitting on benches off to the side, pairs of them just sitting there, nice shoes pointed at me as I walked by. Black trousers, white dresses, scuffing of boots along the sidewalk, tap and scrape of a cane, knees bending, creases on pant legs, dust staining cotton dresses long enough to sweep any darkness off the sidewalk, white enough to bleach any stain out of it.

  “Who’s that boy?” I heard someone ask behind me.

  I didn’t turn around, just kept walking. But I looked up quickly then and smiled at the person walking toward me, about to brush past me. He didn’t smile back but looked at me the way you look at a stray dog.

  “Crazy nigger,” someone else said, “probably drunk.”

  This voice was older, grayer. If I didn’t act like I noticed, maybe it would be all right. Just keep walking. If I could tell someone was coming right at me, I moved out of the way. Sometimes I couldn’t tell till it was too late and I got shoved aside, violently one time, but I kept going, hands tight as stones in my pockets, sweat slipping down my back like a cold river.

  And then something happened in me, and my head, which had been pulled down for so long, was no longer stone, no longer iron. It became so light it began to pull on the rest of me, until my whole self was straight like I’d never bent over before, or ever used my knees to reach down. With my head up, I looked straight ahead and side to side, at everything there was to be seen.

  The fear didn’t matter anymore. I felt a strength in my blood, and every part of me drank it in like a plant that had gone months without water and suddenly received rain. Something in my body was remembering the reason for blood, the river that joins the living to the dead. All the ancestors in my blood had given me the strength to raise my head and make me smile. It was they who put laughter on my lips, told me to mind my manners and walk like it was the most natural thing on earth.

  I remembered to smile, tip my hat, mind my manners as the white folks passed me by. But I couldn’t help noticing all the cracks in the wooden planks. Pretty soon, I thought, some colored man will have to fix all those cracks. He’ll seal up each one, trapping his own blackness inside with the rot, and when he’s done, he won’t be allowed back to feel his own work under his feet. Can’t use what you make, can’t touch what you hold.

  How long could this sidewalk be? I didn’t know I was breathing hard, but I
started to notice how hard it was to breathe, how hot it had become even under those magnolias, the air thick and sweet like the trees were sweating molasses.

  Finally the sidewalk ran out. My knee twinged as I stepped off the whiteness into the soft give of ground, and I was all right, but I could hear people whispering even louder than the magnolias. I still had to walk back through town, but now I was afraid, really afraid. I turned and started walking along the sidewalk in the dirt, feeling my shoulders slump, my back begin to ache. Then I remembered why I was there and looked up again, into all of those faces looking down at me, those cold white faces. I looked right back and smiled up at them. It wasn’t funny, nothing was funny, but I smiled anyway.

  I got back up on the sidewalk like I had every right to, and I didn’t even say “pardon” or “excuse me.” I walked back through town and people talked, well, it was more like yelling without being loud, but I didn’t care what they were saying, cause now I was going home. I was leaving this town, their looks, their words, leaving everything behind me, and when I made it off that sidewalk again, stepping onto dirt was such a relief. It was as close to a blessing as I’ve ever felt, the feel and give of the dirt on this Sunday. It seemed to welcome me home. The same ground that held those magnolias high above me kept me standing and walking high above the world too. I’d never felt so alive before, and all it took was stepping up just a few inches onto that sidewalk.

  As I went out of town on the same road, I could feel people still watching me, so I kept walking where I should. As soon as I thought I was out of sight, I headed off the road and into the shade of trees. I was still breathing hard, but my heart was slowing down. I found a place that looked like someone’s old garden, but abandoned. A few bees were droning round roses, lilacs, strawberries. It felt so peaceful and safe that I lay down in the grass and went to sleep almost right away. When I woke up it was the middle of a warm summer night. The moon was almost full. Crickets were chirping, and Big Creek wasn’t too far off, cause I could hear frogs singing.

  I got up to pee. When I lay back down, I thought how worried Mama and Daddy must be, but I went to sleep anyway. Something pulled me down to the earth and kept me there through the night. At some point there was a clatter of horses cantering by, but since they never stopped, I didn’t worry too much. There was no trail to this spot, though it was just off the road.

  The sun woke me, coming down through the branches of a live oak, and everything it touched turned yellow. I got up and carefully made my way back to the road. There was no one in sight when I peered up and down, so I headed home, stopping a few times to look back. I expected the sheriff would come after me, or worse, but no one did. Maybe they thought they’d imagined me walking on the sidewalk that bright Sunday morning. Maybe I was just a shadow moving, and they mistook me for a boy named Elijah Yancy. Maybe I never slept in the woods beside the road to Spartanburg.

  That’s what I was thinking when I got to the place in the road where a narrow lane, barely big enough for a wagon, wound to the left, which was the way to the cabin. The sun was getting high again. Another morning almost done, and I could feel the heat of the day in my clothes. I glanced back again: no one, so I turned onto the road Daddy had cleared before I was even born. I felt light, light enough to get a lift from the air. Soon my feet found the footpath to our cabin, then the doorstep.

  I started up into the cabin, and a shadow fell across me. It was big, but it wasn’t no tree.

  “Elijah,” I heard Daddy say, “where you been, boy?”

  I looked up cause I had to. Daddy filled up the doorway, making it look small and uncomfortable. When he moved away from it, closer to me, the doorway looked relieved. I knew how it felt.

  “Just walkin, sir,” I replied.

  He looked through me the way he could when he was angry, like there was something on the other side that was worth looking at but it wasn’t me. “Walkin,” he said with a grunt. “Where? Greenville? You been gone since yesterday! Your mama and I been worried sick!” There was a vein in Daddy’s neck that got big whenever he got angry, and it looked like it was about to burst. “I’d say you were walkin, all right, but in the wrong place. Yeah, we heard about you bein in Spartanburg.”

  If I’d had any doubt that he was angry, it was gone. But my daddy was good at being angry and not showing it. It was like thunder trying to be polite. You didn’t need to hear thunder to know the lightning was close.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “but I just got to thinkin bout that sidewalk in town, bout how we’re treated, how it ain’t fair that even when we go to town we got to walk in the dirt!”

  I was looking at him straight on, not afraid or maybe just more foolish than I’d ever been. He looked down at me and I couldn’t read him no more. I didn’t know what kind of expression he had on cause I’d never seen it before.

  “Elijah,” he said, in a voice that had all the stiffness hammered out of it. “Boy, you don’t need to tell me bout dirt. I seen enough of it, been livin in it, you might even say it keeps me company. Dirt put those clothes on you. Dirt keeps you from gettin hungry. And one day, I hope a long, long time from this day, dirt is gonna put you to sleep.” He still had a fire in him, and his voice rose as he talked, got faster, hotter, the words bits of hot iron cast off and too bright to look at without my eyes blurring.

  “Just got tired of it, sir,” I sputtered. “I believe I had a right to walk there since colored men built that sidewalk. I was just walkin, sir, doin nothin but walkin.”

  He laughed, low and deep, but there was iron on the edge of that laugh, and I could feel its weight and bite. “Boy, most people when they’re tired, they just go to sleep. Lord, I got me a child when he gets too tired, well, he goes walkin where no colored child should ever be walkin.”

  Then he turned, stooped like he did before going inside, and went in the cabin. He went over to the table that was halfway set for dinner and sat down. I couldn’t see Mama anywhere.

  “Elijah, come in here,” Daddy ordered, with a sigh emptying his chest of air. “Come on in and take a seat.” I knew by how he said “Elijah” that I was in trouble. He stretched out the “li” so much I thought my name might snap in two.

  “Elijah,” he began, “how long you been colored?”

  I was taken back a bit. I didn’t know what to say and was too afraid to open my mouth.

  “Well,” he went on, “I been colored most of my life, and in that time I’ve learned a few things. First is, I know I’m in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and in Spartanburg, Elijah, colored people know their place if they want to have a place, you understand what I’m sayin?”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “‘Yessir,’ you say, so you hear me, but you ain’t listenin at all, are you? If you’d been listenin to me every day you been alive in this house, you’d know that only a crazy fool would do what you did.”

  Now he was standing over me, tall like one of those magnolias in town, but there was just the smell of sweat and mules on him. The chair was lying on the floor behind him. I never heard it hit the floor, but it lay there on its side, still rocking a bit. Except for that sound, it was too quiet for a cabin with two wide-awake people in it.

  I tried to open my mouth, tried to speak, but nothing happened. I held in everything I didn’t dare say. And then I saw the light in his eyes begin to cool, and Daddy sighed. His shoulders eased closer to his body, and he seemed suddenly sorrowful, as if the weight of all the days he’d spent living in Spartanburg County had suddenly fallen upon him. He bent over, picked up his chair, set it right, and sat down again, letting out another long breath.

  He put his hands out for me to see, turning them over so I could see his palms. They were lined with deep creases, cracked and blistered, the hands of a man who had worked hard every day of his grown life. The fields outside our cabin were there because of those hands and their strength. You didn’t need to hear him talk about yesterday or last week or last year, all you had to do w
as look at his hands. My daddy’s hands were torn up by something no one should hold for so long, it had opened them up and tilled them like a plow opens the earth, and what was ever put in those rows to grow, those dark lines in my daddy’s hands?

  “Look at these, boy,” he said. “Look hard and long at them.”

  He raised his hands closer to my face, so close I felt their warmth. Then he dropped them and took my hands in his, their roughness like broke leather. I saw how small I was in his hands, my smooth hands almost nothing in his.

  “These,” he spoke again, “were the first hands that held you when you was born.” He looked at me again like he was remembering that day. “You and your mother are the only things I ever held that were good and sweet to hold. These hands have held things I pray you never have to, and there’s nothin I’m afraid to hold if it means keepin you and your mama safe and whole. But . . .” He stopped, looked out the window. Listened.

  “There’s one thing,” he said firmly, “no man should ever have to hold. You see, holdin you when you was born, that’s my right as your father, but I got no right to hold you when you die. That’s for someone else. And I hope when my time comes it’ll be your hands helpin me along to a better place. That’s your right.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I don’t understand.”

  “Understand this, Elijah,” he said, his voice getting hard again. “If you keep on not understandin your place in this world, then these hands will be holdin you, but you won’t feel them cause you won’t be here no more. You’ll be dead. You’ll have spoken your mind, you’ll get it off your chest, this pain you got, and all you’ll get back for it is a rope round your neck. So if death is what you want, well, you keep talkin and walkin, and Death’ll find you. But I’ll be the one have to put you in the grave, and I’ve had to carry a load or two in this life, but I’m tellin you that’s one load I don’t want to carry. Not you in my arms, not my boy, not that way!”