“Say, boy,” he called to me, “run get a bucket of water for my men from down at the stream.”
As politely as I knew how, I told him I was doing an errand for my mother, and I had to be moving on. Well, this just infuriated him. Before I could move, he grabbed my shirt and pulled me toward him. I started struggling to get away, and the shirt tore all to pieces. He kicked the bucket of milk and butter from my hand, spilling everything over the ground. I was so frightened about what Mama would do to me for not getting to this neighbor what she’d sent that I actually reached down to try and scoop the butter back into the bucket.
The millowner kicked me. His boot thudded against my ear and sent me falling over backward. He was coming after me again when I managed to scramble back up on my feet, just in time to feel his fist smash against my mouth. I fell down again, so dizzy now I could scarcely see. The voices of other men filtered into the haze that was rapidly taking over my senses, and when I could see at all, someone had lifted me up to my feet. Some of the millworkers were holding the owner, and the man who’d helped me up was yelling to me to take off and get on home or wherever I was going. There was blood on my face now, but I refused to cry. This I couldn’t do, even though my head was aching. . . .
But there were tears in my eyes when I finally reached our little cabin several minutes later. Papa was out in the fields and wouldn’t be home until after dark. Mama was in the front yard with the girls, washing clothes in a big iron tub they had set down over a fire. The girls jumped away when they saw me, and Mama took one look and dropped all the clothes she had and rushed over to me.
“Who did this to you, Michael?” she asked, her voice very low and tight. “Who was it?”
I was too shaken up to speak and just stood there, trembling over the thought of Mama whipping me for not getting my errand finished. “Michael!” she screamed. “Who did this?”
Moments later we were retracing my steps back to the mill. Mama had a grip on my wrist that squeezed like an iron vise, and I’d never in my young life seen a look in her eyes as cold, as furious as the one that was there now. When we reached the mill, I tried to pull back away from her. The millowner was standing right out in front of the place, laughing with some of his men about the lesson he’d taught that “smart-ass little nigger.”
Mama pulled me along with her and stopped right in front of him. The men around the millowner stopped laughing. They looked from me to my mother and then to the millowner. He had a big grin spread out all over his face. Mama stared straight into his eyes.
“Did you do this to my child?” she asked. My torn shirt was hanging loose off my shoulders, and the blood was drying around my mouth.
“Woman!” the millowner yelled. “You lost your mind? Get the hell outta here before I—”
“Did you do this to my child!” Mama screamed.
“Yeah,” the millowner answered. “And so what about it? You got somethin’ to say? What is it?”
I had never seen my mother move so quickly. She leaped at this man, dug her shoulder into his middle and knocked him back against the side of the mill shed. My mother had worked all of her life, she was powerfully built and had the strength of any man. The millowner was shocked. He tried to grab hold of her, but she tripped him up and he fell to the ground. Oh, Lord, what did he do that for? Mama jumped down on him, pounding away at his face. Some of the mill hands tried to get her off the man, but she punched one of them right in his mouth so hard he spun around and stumbled back, looking as if he’d never been hit that hard in his life. The millowner pushed and turned, but he couldn’t get Mama off him. She raised up and brought both her fists down across his nose, and blood spurted out of his face all over the ground. Then she got up. The other men had moved back a little. She stared at them. Her eyes were like coals blazing out of their sockets.
“You can kill me!” she shouted. “But if you put a hand on a child of mine, you’ll answer.”
She stood her ground and the millowner got to his feet, watching closely as Mama balled up her fists again. But the man just pointed at us. “Get off my land. Next time you come around here, we’ll see who answers. Now git!”
I was scared somebody would pull out a gun and shoot us down. But Mama knew better. Too many people had seen how it all had happened. The only way the millowner could live it down was just to say no more about it, just let it go. He sure didn’t want it around that a farm woman had come up to his mill and whipped him in a fair fight. He knew none of his workers were going to say anything. They had their jobs to think about. So when Mama pulled me away from the mill, I think most of the people there just wanted to pretend that what they’d seen had never happened.
Mama cleaned off my face when we got back home and had my sister Woodie hold a cool, damp cloth against the bruise near my mouth. “If your papa asks you,” said Mama, “you just tell him you got to playin’ and fell down, you hear, Michael?”
Then she explained to me that any talk about this could mean death. And I knew she was serious. I knew that Negroes had been killed for a lot less. I carried a memory of this.
But word of this man’s hurting me somehow did get to my father. He lost control of himself, grabbed his old rifle from above the door of our cabin, and rushed off to the mill. Mama couldn’t stop him; he just brushed her aside. That was the last we saw of Papa for several months, and the very first time I saw, firsthand, the face of a mob. That night, some men on horses came riding up to our place with rifles in their hands. Mama sent us all into hiding behind the cabin. She talked to them, and we heard one of the men say that Papa had come over to the mill and vowed to shoot the man who’d touched his son. But the millowner wasn’t there and Papa left. Somebody told him, before he could get back home, that a group of men in Stockbridge were gathering up to get him. He didn’t want any shooting around us, and he took off into the woods, carrying his rifle with him in case anybody followed.
The men rode off, but one of them, an uncle of my old friend Jay, came back out the next morning and told me to get a message to my father. “Tell him to stay out of sight until this all blows over. They’ll forget all about it in a few months, but there could be some danger to him in the meanwhile.”
We lived in great fear for the next weeks. Food was very scarce, and we were advised not to go into the commissary, a company store operated by the Cotton Trade, while this heat was still hanging in the air.
A little over six weeks went by, and one night I heard Papa, whistling the way he’d taught me one day while he was taking my brothers and me hunting. I recognized it right away, got up from my bedroll, and ran out to the woods to see him.
“Why didn’t you tell me that man hit you?” he asked me.
“Mama told me not to say anything, that it could mean death, Papa.”
“I’m gonna blow one of these crackers’ heads off before I leave here,” Papa told me. There was whiskey on his breath.
“Papa, my friend Jay’s uncle said this all gon’ blow over soon if you just stay outta sight. Told me to say you should give it all time to cool down. . . .”
He hated running from them. I could see it as he spoke. Little by little they took pieces of his life away from him, and now they took him away from his kin. He was fighting every day, I realized, with no rest at all. And I was so afraid they’d kill him, I started to shake all over.
“Keep still!” shouted Papa. “You lookin’ out for things?”
“Tryin,’ Papa.”
“You better,” he told me. “You just better.” We sat there in the night for several minutes more. Then Papa got up, and without another word he disappeared back into the woods.
Mama was feeling poorly when fall came around. My brothers and sisters worked with me; we all did the best we could, but we just weren’t experienced enough to handle the farm, and things sank down a long way. A deep chill was in the air when Papa finally did come on back. He couldn’t save much, though. The cotton turned out bad. We hardly got pennies for it. We
picked the vegetables too late, and most of them spoiled. Papa just stayed angry at us, and started drinking more and more. He and Mama argued a lot now. Every day there was something to start him yelling at her. Whenever he left the house, he carried his rifle along, but he didn’t take any of us with him. My brother Joel was about the best shot around Stockbridge, but Papa left him home, and went out by himself. With all that whiskey in him, he couldn’t see to hit anything. There was hardly any rabbit or any other meat in the house after that. And whenever Papa got back, he was staggering from his liquor.
When the mill incident was finally over with, Jay’s uncle was the one who came out and told us. Things had kind of eased back to normal, he said. I wondered just what was normal for us, and how long we could expect it to last.
THREE
On those farms in Georgia when I was growing up, a child was always looked upon first as a worker, then as a youngster. The large family was a rule much more than it was an exception. Many hands were needed to complete the hard, constant work that was so central to life in the country. As a result, school became a luxury around Stockbridge. I don’t remember going for more than three months during any single year. An old shack had served for more years than anyone could remember as the school for Negro kids, and there was one teacher for all of us, young ones and older alike. The wife of Floyd Chapel’s preacher, Mrs. Low, taught us, working as hard as one person could to bring us an education in that cold and damp little building. We had no books, no materials to write with, and no blackboard for her to use in instructing us. But I loved going, particularly when we began learning numbers, which always had a fascination for me.
Mama was very encouraging so far as my schooling was concerned. Although she’d never learned to read or write herself, there was a great sense of the value of learning within her. She was just the opposite of my father in this respect. He never saw the value of education. And he made going to school difficult for me by insisting I carry out all my chores early in the morning before I left the house, during those periods, mainly in the winter, when Mrs. Low taught her classes. So I got up early, fed chickens and pigs when we had them, carried water, got firewood. I saved my favorite chore for last—currying the mule. I loved animals, and so this part of the work was something I actually looked forward to, even with my eyes still half shut on all those chilly, dark winter mornings. It was a mule, in a roundabout way, that gave me one of my very first true tests of self-confidence at school. All the other kids teased me constantly. They’d see me currying our mule near our shed first thing every morning, and by the time I reached the school yard, the guys who knew me would be chanting stuff like, “Here comes the fool, he smells just like a mule!” And I put up with it. The mule did have a way of clinging to me long after I’d left him. But one day when I’d had enough of all this chanting, when they’d even gotten some of the girls to join in, which really upset me, I just yelled back: “Hey, I may smell like a mule, but I sure don’t think like one!”
They shut up. No more chants were heard for a good while.
It was at school, small and broken down as it was, that I learned of the world beyond the farm. Mrs. Low told stories as a way of keeping our attention, and she was very good at it. My imagination just began to soar when she talked about big cities and even bigger countries, trains that traveled across the whole country, not just past Stockbridge on the way to Macon. I wanted to go to one of those cities and stay. I memorized all the places she talked about. And when she talked about numbers and planets, and other times in history, I learned everything by heart. I’d walk around saying the multiplication tables, doing long division as I made it up, humming the lessons, saying them over and over as I ran through the woods playing or just walking home from school.
Soon all I was thinking about was leaving the country, becoming a teacher myself, or a builder, or a railroad engineer—anything that would get me away.
Sometimes I shared these dreams with Mama. She’d laugh and tell me not to run off and leave without telling her first. It was hard to think about it all, though, wanting to go away from there and find another kind of life. How could I go and leave my mother behind?
“Michael,” she’d say, “if you have to leave this place, you just go right on and leave, you hear? When the time comes, and you’re grown, don’t you worry about anything. Go on and live your life, son.”
How could I do both, though, I’d find myself thinking. Make Mama happy, and myself, too? And then I’d think, When you get older, these things work themselves out in some grown-up way. I knew they’d work themselves out for me, too, just as Mama said: When the time comes . . .
One harvest, when I was about twelve years old, Papa finally gave in to my pleading with him to take me to the Cotton Trade for that day when he got payment for his crop. I’d never been before; this was grown-folks’ business, Papa always told me; more than that, it was man’s business. “Well,” Papa said, “all right. This time.” He figured, I guess, that a twelve-year-old was ready to see some of the ways of the world. So we jumped on his wagon and rode on into Stockbridge with the last part of our cotton crop. I was very excited about seeing all those people and all the transactions that would be taking place. And I knew that my head for numbers was a whole lot better than Papa’s. He’d probably thank me for helping him add everything up as fast as I knew how to do by that time.
We got to the Cotton Trade, and Old Man Graves, the man who owned the land we lived on, waved Papa on over to the scales, told him to bring the rest of our crop over for the final weighing process that would determine how much my father had earned for all that work he’d done over the year.
As we started over, Papa looked down at me beside him on the wagon and said, “Boy, you just watch and listen and keep your mouth shut.”
I figured he wanted me to learn as much as I could and not miss anything by talking too much. But there was a lot more to his warning, as I soon found out.
Graves was known to the farmers and the traders as “Settle Up,” the man who gave you the price for your cotton and paid you. He also ran the commissary, where you bought tools and supplies, and he kept the books on how much everybody owed in there, because that amount would be subtracted at the end of each harvest from the money a man had coming for his crops. All the figures were kept by “Settle Up,” his word was the final one on every business deal. Nobody—and especially nobody who was black—could go against him without getting into serious trouble.
Papa unloaded the wagon along with some of “Settle Up”’s men, and they checked to see how much he’d brought in already. It usually took a few trips to bring everything down to the Cotton Trade on those little wagons we had, but I’d watched my father put everything on each trip before he left our place, and I’d been keeping track of just how much he’d brought in.
Well, all these men around the scales and the loading platforms got to joking and laughing with Papa. “Jim,” they’d say, “why, boy, you done right well this year. Got you a few dollars comin’ what you gon’ do with all that cash? Get good an’ drunk, I’ll bet!” Everybody was laughing, and Papa just smiled a little and went on about his business. I could feel something all around, something that didn’t feel too good to me. I wasn’t sure what it was, I just didn’t feel that things were going the way they should. But I remembered what my father had told me about watching and listening. There was plenty I could learn if I kept my eyes and ears open.
Old Man Graves, “Settle Up,” weighed my daddy’s cotton and told him how much money he had coming; it was around thirty dollars. “Papa,” I said . . .
“Now, you just hush up, boy!” he whispered to me. He went over and got his slip from the commissary, which showed how much he owed there, and came back to “Settle Up.” “Mr. Graves,” he said, “I b’lieve my bill over to the commissary leaves me a small piece of money comin.’”
“Settle Up” smiled. “Why, you did right good this year, boy,” he told my father. “Tell you what I’m
fixin’ to do. ’Bout time you had a chance at that bottomland out by the sawmill. It’s yours, Jim boy, start on it quick as you can.”
I was standing with Papa’s wagon and mules. A few of the other farmers around me started to get restless. “Come on, ‘Settle Up,’” they shouted. “Give that nigger what he got comin.’ There’s white folks here to tend to business, you know.”
“Settle Up” reached into his pocket and counted out eighteen dollars for my daddy, which was what he was supposed to get after the man at the commissary totaled up what Papa owed for the year.
“Papa,” I said again.
“Boy, I told you to keep quiet!”
“But Papa,” I finally was able to call out to him, “ain’t nothin’ been said ’bout the cotton seed!”
Suddenly, everything and everybody got quiet. Even the horses and the mules, the dogs that had been running all around, just seemed to stop and stand quietly.
“Boy,” my father snapped at me, “what did I tell you to do?”
I looked past him to the platform where “Settle Up” stood. The veins on his neck seemed like they were about to pop right out. His face was turning beet-red. “You better get that sassy little nigger outta here, Jim,” he said to my father, “’fore I kick his little butt!”
My father stiffened. He looked up at “Settle Up” and said, very quietly: “Naw, Mr. Graves, it can’t be like that, now.”
“Settle Up”’s eyes got big. “What?” he roared at my father, who just stared the man right back in the eye.
“Don’t nobody touch my boy, Mr. Graves. Anything need to be done to him, I’ll take care of it.”
Graves jumped down from his platform and stepped right up next to my father. “Who the hell you think you talkin’ to, nigger?” he said.
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