They were both always laughing and grinning, except on the afternoon of the second day. That was when John asked Eighty-four about her babies.
"Tell me about your children, Tweenie," he said out of the blue. We were working on our eighth bag of cotton.
"I cain't talk about it," Eighty-four said with a tear in her voice. "It's a hurt in my heart."
"But maybe if you talk about it," John pressed, "then maybe you could stop it from hurtin'."
"You think so?" she asked. "'Cause you know I be thinkin' 'bout them all the time."
John stopped walking and even set down the half-filled sack of cotton. He put his hands on Eighty-four's shoulders and she went down on her knees like I've seen some women do when Brother Bob touched someone, saying that they were now one with the Holy Spirit.
John went down on his knees too and I looked around to make sure that no white man or Mud Albert was anywhere to see. I wanted to keep pulling cotton so that we didn't get in trouble but the hurt in Eighty-four's face made me mute.
"Dey's LeRoy an' Abraham," Eighty-four said softly. Tears were cascading down her berry black cheeks. "Dat's what I named 'em even though I knew that evil-hearted Mr. Stewart meant to take'em from me. Dey was so pretty... an' each time I give birth when I seed LeRoy, an' latah Abraham, I loved 'em so much that it hurt. An' den, when dey took 'em away, it hurt so bad I was sho I'd die. Dey was so young, but Mama Flore said dat dey new master's be good to 'em 'cause dey'd grow up into mens that'd be good workers."
Eighty-four began to howl then and John took her into his arms. I was sad for Eighty-four's loss and I was scared that somebody would hear her and punish us for malingering. And I was also amazed because John was crying along with Eighty-four. It was then that I realized that he felt lost in the same way that Abraham and LeRoy were lost.
The next morning Mud Albert had me take John out to the west field to see if there were any ripe peaches on a tree that the slaves had found out around there. Mud Albert called that tree his private orchard. John and I took a shortcut past the hanging tree.
On the way John was in a good mood. He was talking to me about my future.
"One day," he said, "many years from now you will think back on these days and say that it all must have been a bad dream. . . ."
He didn't finish because when we got close to that tree
he grabbed his head and fell to the ground just as if Champ Noland had cuffed him. He screamed in pain.
"What is this place?" he pleaded. He writhed on the ground and white foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. "Why has there been so much suffering here?"
I got down on my knees and grabbed him by the shoulders.
"This is where they hangs killers an' robbers an' slaves gone wrong," I said. "What's the mattuh?"
He pointed up at the branch where I had once seen Tommy Brown hanging with his neck broken and his fat tongue sticking through dead lips. They hung Tommy for stealing a chicken from the Master's henhouse.
I had also seen Billy Lukas, slave Number Six, swinging in a breeze from that branch. They hanged Billy because Loretta McLaughry, a white woman, had said that he was leering at her as she was riding down the road in her buggy.
John yelled again and then begged me to take him out from there. I did what he asked.
"More than a hundred men have been murdered under that tree," he said when we were far from there. "Murdered."
10.
John, Eighty-four, and I picked cotton for the next days. On my last day in the slave cabin all the men gathered around John because they were used to him entertaining them with some wild and unpredictable talk.
"If you so smart," Silent Sam, slave Number Forty-six, asked John, "why'd you give yourself up to be one'a Mas-tuh Tobias's slaves?"
"I don't know about you," John replied, "but I ain't no slave."
"You ain't?"
"No, suh I ain't."
"Den what you doin' pickin' cotton like a slave?"
"I'm pickin' cotton 'cause I wanna pick cotton, of course."
Upon hearing this every man in the cabin, including me, broke out into laughter.
"So that mean if you didn't wanna pick cotton you wouldn't have to," Sam speculated.
"Dat's right."
"An' how you gonna get away wit' that?"
"No gettin' away to it, brothah. If I didn't wanna pick cotton I jes' wouldn't do it."
"But then they gonna beat you."
"That's what freedom's all about," John said in a serious voice. "Free is when you say yea or nay about what you will and will not do. Nobody can give you freedom. All freedom is, is you."
There was no more laughing that night. I could see in the men's faces that they were wondering about John's words. Many of them had thought the same words that he spoke out loud.
I turned in with the rest and went to sleep, not realizing that that was to be my last night as a slave.
"Lemme take this next bag, John," Eighty-four said when my friend reached down to get our next sack the next day. We had filled four bags of cotton already.
"Thas okay, Tweenie," John said as he threw the sack over his shoulder. "Me'n Forty-seven have to go in the afternoon so I might as well tote till then."
"Where you goin'?" she asked. There was the pain of loss in her voice.
"Tobias wanna see me."
It was the first I'd heard of it.
"Mastuh?" Eighty-four asked.
"Tobias," John said again.
"What you got to do wit' him?"
"Maybe if he ain't lookin'," John said instead of answering her question, "I'll grab some sugar an' put it in my pocket. An' the next time they send me out here I'll give that sugar to you for bein' so sweet."
For a second there I thought that there was something wrong with Eighty-four's face but then I realized that she was grinning. One of her lower teeth was missing but m was still a nice smile. The power to bring happiness into that sad slave's face was greater than healing my hands, taming the master's dogs, and putting the plantation to sleep all rolled together.
"You the one sweet," Eighty-four said to John.
I must have been smiling too because Eighty-four frowned again and said, "What you laughin' at, fool?"
Her sudden anger caught me off guard but luckily I didn't have time to speak and make things worse because just at that moment Mud Albert could be heard calling.
"Forty-seven!" he cried. "Numbah Twelve!"
I cocked my head as if listening for more and, in doing so, I was able to avoid Eighty-four's angry question.
"Got to go," I said to John.
"Bye, Tweenie," John said. He dropped the burlap sack and smiled.
She grabbed onto his arm and looked into his eyes beseechingly.
"You come on back, heah?" she said.
And there again was the power of my new friend. We had only been in the fields with Eighty-four for a few days
but she was already heartbroken at the prospect of his departure.
I understood her pain. I would feel the same way when John was gone from the Corinthian Plantation. And I was sure that he would be gone one day. I knew in my heart that a person as beautiful and smart as John was not destined to remain a slave on some backwater farm.
But John wasn't gone yet. He and I ran down a rough path through the cotton bushes. Along the way we saw dozens of slaves bent over in half toting giant sacks of cotton. Flies zipped around them and the sun beat down like Satan's hammer on their backs.
About half the way to where Mud Albert was John stopped and looked out at the slaves.
"We cain't waste time, John," I said. "Albert expect us ta hump it."
"I'm just looking," John said.
"Slave ain't s'posed t'be lookin'," I told him. "Slave s'posed to be doin' sumpin so that the mastuh don't have t'beat him."
"I have no master, Forty-seven. No master but the power that keeps my feet on the ground."
"Come on," I said, grabbing him by the arm.
> I yanked but he wouldn't budge.
"Do you think that it's fair for those people to be forced to work day in and day out for their entire lives?" John asked.
"We gotta go," I replied.
"Answer my question and we can go."
I could tell that John wasn't going to move until I responded.
" 'Course I hate it that we slaves but what else we gonna do? Who would take care of us an' feed us if'n we didn't have no mastuh?"
"You could take care of yourselves," he said. "Buy your own farms, raise your own food."
Nobody had ever said anything like this to me before. The idea scared me. How could I do all the things that white people did? All I knew was how to be lazy and how to work like a dog.
"Let's go," I whispered.
On the way Tall John changed moods again. He made silly faces and did cartwheels as we ran. I got out of my serious mood and even laughed.
When we got to the open field that Mud Albert called his office we found the aged slave sitting on an empty molasses barrel as if it were a throne.
"What you grinnin' about, boy?" he asked me.
"Am I grinnin', Mud Albert, suh?"
"You sure is, niggah," he said. "You an' this red-eyed joker heah."
I thought that Tall John might try to correct Albert's use of the word nigger but all my friend did was smile.
"I's sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry for laughin', boy. There sure is little enough of it in a nigger's lifetime."
I bowed my head because a tear came to my eye. For the first time I truly knew the sadness of Mud Albert's life. Slaving from the time he could walk until the day we wrap him in burlap and slap the dust from our hands.
I loved Mud Albert and I regretted his unfair lot.
"I got word from the house that Mastuh Tobias wanna see this new boy right away," Albert said. "You ready to go up there, Laughin' John?"
"Yessuh," John shouted.
"Go on then. Forty-seven'll show you the way. He'll wait for you too so that you don't get lost comin' back."
As we ran between the bright green leaves I asked John, "Why'd you give Eighty-four a name and you still call me Forty-seven?"
Up until then we'd been making our way quickstep through the bushes. But then John stopped and looked at me. His big eyes were filled with sorrow so deep that I felt my heart wrench.
"What?" I asked when he didn't speak.
"Your name is set," he said. "Wrought in metal and sent °n a great ship on the long journey across the sky. One day you may decide on another name. But for the rest of time my people and even the Upper Level will know you by the number given you at the Corinthian Plantation."
"What you talkin' 'bout?" I asked. His words were so wild that they felt like mosquitoes buzzing around my ears. "You, Forty-seven. You," John said. "Didn't I tell you that I've been searching for you all this time?"
"But how you gonna know to look for me?" I asked. "How you even know I was here?"
"I have always known that you would be here one day, Forty-seven. Long before men made iron tools, when terror birds and mastodons roamed the land we knew that you were coming. I waited and wandered and searched until I came upon the Corinthian. I searched for centuries but never once did I give up hope. I never doubted the promise."
"What promise?"
"You, Forty-seven. You are the promise. Your blood is capable of great power, your heart is free from hatred, and your mind dares to consider new ways."
We stared into each other's eyes and a profound feeling passed between us. There was a promise and an obligation that we both recognized. Then we grinned and ran off toward Tobias's home.
10.
"You wait out on the back porch until the Master is through with Number Twelve," Fred Chocolate, Master Tobias's haughty manservant, said to me.
Fred was a tall man, thin and blacker than nighttime. He had great white eyes and a perpetual disdainful sneer on his lips. He wore a black suit with big lapels and a white shirt with a string tie. His shoes looked like black glass they were so shiny and his white gloves made his hands look like cabbage butterflies in a black forest.
Before meeting Tall John I believed that Fred Chocolate was the most elegant colored man in the entire world the luckiest too.
Fred Chocolate was named by Tobias's wife when she was just a child. She called him Fred Chocolate after a character in a child's book and the name stuck to him. He was such a favorite of the Master that Tobias allowed the butler to have a shack to live in and a wife, Mabel Chocolate, to live in it with him. Mabel Chocolate was also one of Miss Eloise's maids.
Fred spoke for the Master when he was away and even gave orders to the white workers, all except Mr. Stewart. So when Fred told me to go to the back porch I ran around the house to the little platform built behind the slave's entrance.
I sat down on the stoop there and watched the little black ants make their way, in long lines, from the house to their nest under the honeysuckle bushes. Those ants had been making that journey as long as I could remember. Many a day I had sat on those steps watching them, vassals to a fat queen that lived under the ground. I thought that the slaves were like those ants: Flore and Albert and Pritchard and all the slaves on our plantation and all the slaves on all the plantations in all of Georgia. I looked around to see if there was an ant sitting on a pebble looking at everybody else like I was doing. But I never saw a lazy ant. Even they were better than I that's what I thought back then.
"Hi, babychile," a voice said.
Big Mama Flore had come up behind me and was looking down on my head.
I frowned and grabbed a stick to hit those ants with. But when I was about to strike them I looked down and thought about how I would feel if some hard-hearted person was to strike me and my friends for no reason. So instead I threw the stick into the bushes and turned toward Flore. "Why'd you shet that do' on me, Big Mama?" I cried. She knelt down next to me and wrapped me in her arms. I had been waiting for that loving embrace for many a day. When she hugged me I started to cry and she did too. She
kissed my cheek and our tears rolled together. She pulled the burrs out of my hair.
She didn't answer my question but it wasn't necessary. In my heart I knew why she turned me away. I had to be a field slave if that was what Tobias wanted. I had to do what the Master decreed.
Neither master nor nigger be, the words came to me as they would time and again over the many years of my long life. John had given me a gift that was also a danger if I ever said it out loud.
"How's it goin' out there with Mud Albert and Champ?" Flore asked me.
It was just a simple question. One word would have sufficed for the answer. But it opened the floodgates of my pain and labor. I told Flore about Pritchard branding me and about Champ's beating of him. I told her about the cotton and Eighty-four's pinches and the chiggers and biting gnats, I talked about Tall John but I didn't tell her about the wonderful things he could do. I didn't tell because I was worried that if Master knew about John's powers he might take him away and I'd never see him again. "Lemme see yo hands," Flore said at one point. I held up my palms.
"They all healed," she said. "Mud Albert said that you had real bad cuts. How'd they get bettah?"
I hunched my shoulders. I really didn't know what John had done.
"I guess I jes heal quick," I said.
We talked for a long time and at the end Flore wrapped, four molasses cookies in a napkin that she pinned to the inside of my work shirt. Not long after that Fred Chocolate showed up with Tall John in tow.
"Go back to work," the haughty manservant said. Flore kissed my cheek. Then she looked at my new friend and said, "So you the new boy?" "Yes ma'am," John said brightly. "My baby here likes you," she added. "He is a fine person, Number Forty-seven is," John answered. "The finest the human race has to offer."
"Watch your mouth," Fred Chocolate said as he slapped the top of John's head.
But my friend didn't cower or
wince. He kept Flore's eye and she looked at him in wonder and maybe even with a little fear.
"It was nice to meet you, young man," she said then. "I'm afraid you'll be seein' more of him than you want to," Fred said. "Mastuh seems to think that this copper-colored piece'a trash can help Miss Eloise." "He has the touch?" Flore asked. "Mastuh think so." "Do you?" Flore asked John.
"My people know a great deal about herbs and healing," he said. "We've been curing disease for longer than even we can remember."
"That's the lies he tole Mastuh," Chocolate said. "Now we have to smell his field stink all over our house."
11 .
I heard all the words but I didn't really care about anything but the insinuation that Miss Eloise was sick.
Back then in my s/avemind, as John called it, I thought that Eloise was the closest thing you could come to an angel here on Earth. She was to me the most beautiful girl in all the world. I loved her in my heart as Brother Bob told us we had to love the Lord. Every night when I remembered to say my prayers I asked Him to keep her safe. I felt that if anything happened to Miss Eloise that I would die too.
Eloise was a beautiful child, that's for sure. And I learned later that she was a good person too. But now I realize that I loved her whiteness when I was still a slave because that whiteness meant freedom, and freedom was what I wanted more than anything in the world even though I didn't know it.
As soon as John and I were away from the back door of the mansion I asked him, "Did you see Miss Eloise?"
He didn't answer me right off. Instead he walked with me in silence until we got to a fence behind the chicken coop. We climbed up and over the few rungs and went maybe a dozen paces into the bushes. There, behind a big bramble bush, was a downed cottonwood tree that made a perfect seat for someone who needed to take a load off without being seen. I had never known about that resting place and I wondered how John knew to walk right to it. But I was too upset about Miss Eloise to question him about it.
"Did you see her?" I asked again.
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