by Bill Harris
He said, “And when I walk up to that house and holler through the front door, ‘Come out, get what you got coming,’ and that man and that woman and little sawed-off Beasley ask me where I been, I’ll tell them.”
He picked up the mojo and held it in his palm.
“Tell them I been to freedom. And after I watch you die I’m going back again,” he said with axe-edge bluntness and clarity and certainty. “Tell them I been to freedom, and I’m going back again,” he repeated. “Then going to sit down and tell tales about how they done me wrong.”
They watched him, waiting.
The rain had stopped again.
It was time. At last it was time. And Eph knew it. And he was ready. Ready to steal his body off. For good this time. Ready to try to find his self. See if he was a man in full.
So
5
Mr. Wilcox
Spring 1928
1
Cotty hadn’t slept good. He’d done his usual Saturday double shift and this was his only day off and he’d woken up early after he hadn’t slept good.
Jenny wasn’t for sure if it was the ache in that rotting back tooth again, or the grumbling of his stomach all night, but she was sure trying to pay attention to what he was saying while hurrying up to get the twins, Lollie Mae and Sallie Mae, dressed and ready for service.
But for right then he was satisfied with his coffee and his cigarette and going on about how he’d got slighted by Mister P. W. Anderson, who he couldn’t hardly stand, and how close he’d been to getting him told for good, or worse.
She didn’t remember from his telling now if P. W. Anderson was government or corporation, or which, but he was a high-up boss for sure.
“He’s a white man same as me,” Cotty circled back around again to what Jenny thought was his point, “but thinking he could treat me like I’m nothing more than some nig—some—schoolboy who’d showed up without his lessons learnt.”
Sitting side of the bed, one foot pale as parchment top of the other, hair mussed, eyes red, but still a good-looking man, she’d tell anybody. The Mae’s humming the tune quietly back and forth between them, antsy to leave.
And in front of the nigger, or niggers, she wasn’t sure.
He had his finger in his mouth worrying at the tooth.
That in front of the nigger, or niggers, was new, she thought. He hadn’t said that before, she was pretty sure of that.
The Mae’s, being too fast, were giving her eye signals about going out of the door.
That just might put it in a new light about the niggers. She made a disapproving sound, but one he would know she meant as in agreement with his grievance.
The Mae’s, each one looking more like the other one than herself, silently presented themselves to him in their new Mama-made dresses as ready, and he nodded his approval and smiled at them, which made her smile, as they told their daddy, Bye Daddy, like she told them, and he Bubbbbbbed through his lips like the Boogey man, waggled his stumped fingers at them and blew smoke, and they laughed, and she sent them to the porch with strict instructions, but he continued, not ready for her to go.
This was something about pride, she reckoned. Mister P. W. Anderson evidently must’ve had chastised Cotty, or appeared to, just-like he was some ignorant schoolboy who’d showed up for class without his lessons done, he repeated, clearer this time, his fingers out of his mouth, and had did it within sight or hearing of that nigger Mule, looked like he was snarling all the time, lip pulled back from his teeth like a mule braying.
“I’ll tell you what’s sad. Showed just how little Mister Anderson knowed about handling niggers. That was the first thing.”
She nodded, waiting for the second thing, and listened to them being quiet on the porch.
“Rich did not make you savvy about handling niggers.”
It did certainly not; she shook her head and looked at him.
Too quiet?
It most certainly did not.
At the beginning, Jenny knew, Cotty thought of it as a job he was glad to have, was even grateful for. And them, the niggers, they were just the necessary part of it. It wasn’t his fault they were there under his watch. They may have been down on their luck or whatever, but they had broken a law. And he more and more realized he always had to be on his guard against their trying to shirk or slough off their duty, calling for stricter and stricter supervision, making his job harder, so he had, little by little, eroded any leniency he might have shown towards them, until, without even knowing it, he resented them to the point that there was no limit to his indifference to their welfare, because . . .
“If he wasn’t scared to get his white shoes dusty,” Cotty said, cutting off her thought, “and spend one shift seeing over them niggers, no, one hour, see what it takes to do what I do. Would be all it’d take to show him a thing or two, see how his belly churned after a night of that.”
He wiped at his eyes and shook his head as if he was trying to wipe away the memory of his conversing with the boss man.
“Give him a chance to see exactly what kind of animal it is I’m standing shotgun over.”
That had been Cotty’s whole point.
The Mae’s were out there humming the hymn, practicing, bless them.
And seem like, Cotty was saying, Mister P. W. Anderson didn’t have no better sense, no race pride, he reckoned, no respect for what’s proper before niggers, and what’s common practice white man to white man, being betters before their kind. He didn’t know what went on between white people up north wherever P. W. Anderson was from, but . . .
Jesus loved them, yes they knew . . .
“Mule tried to make like he didn’t hear or see nothing, pretending, with that blind, deaf, and dumb nigger-do—now that’s one thing they good at, hiding a lie and play-acting before white people, but they see everything, don’t miss nothing, least little slip and they on it like a duck on a June bug, let it be the least little sign of lapse—”
His cigarette butt hissed in the slops coffee can by his feet.
Cotty said he knew the nigger Mule, who’d seen that Mister P. W. Anderson look like he’d cut Cotty off when he’d invited him to come back that night—would think that was what had happened—that it was intended on that Mister P. W. Anderson’s part to be a slight, and that’s how the snarling-looking nigger would tell it to the others when they got off to they-selves after lights out in the lock-down house. And his version of it was how it would be passed around between them, like it was a pint of bonded whiskey they’d lap their lips over and laugh.
Now Jenny had a full understanding of it.
He took a long look down into his half-empty coffee cup.
Because the Bible told them so . . .
“And whether it was like that or not, all that grinning, eavesdropping nigger needed to know was two white men was talking there. See that, know it’s time to shut his earflaps down, time to turn his eyeballs inside out and be through with it. Period. Know that, and that I’m on top over him. Top-over-him. Was, is, and always will always be. Irregardless. Bible time Genesis, to Exodus, Leviticus clean to Haggai, Zachariah to Malachi . . . till today and tomorrow. Period. Mister P. W. Anderson needed to understand and respect that same as Mule, or they’ll see what’ll happen. Seen it already, mightily well told. Reason why he in them chains and I ain’t. That is the nature of things.”
She didn’t want to be late, but neither did she want to hurry him.
“The nature of rules is, if you want to talk about rules, and you got to, because there’s got to be rules. Or it’s them or us. Some-body’s got to rule and somebody’s got to be ruled. And there was but two choices, the stick or the whip.”
The Mae’s scuffling around out on the porch were being as patient as they could be.
“That’s the order of it. The superior over the inferior. See if when you go there directly he don’t tell you your Bible tells you that. Proverbs. See, your laws, they’ve got to be enforced—otherwise, it’s back to
the law of the jungle.”
Cotty knew Mister P. W. Anderson shouldn’t be let to leave Kimbrough Works plantation without learning something he couldn’t check off on a form, was what Cotty was thinking. If they would just once see them for his self, was what Cotty’d been trying to get him to see.
Let him see for his high-toned self; if only he’d come down off his high horse. Could show him better than trying to explain it in words. Then there’d be no question of the importance of the job he was doing or the talent it took.
When he’d invited Mister P. W. Anderson to see for his self, he’d said he was “disinclined.”
Cotty was rubbing at his jaw, irritated.
What did disinclined mean? He would tell her what it meant. It meant hedging and hemming and muddy-mouthed is what it meant, and he wasn’t no business-man, like Mister P. W. Anderson, but he knew that wasn’t no way to do business. Period.
She needed to tell him that she needed to be going in a minute if she was going to get there in any kind of time for the Mae’s to sing, them out there shooing the chickens by stamping their feet, her wanting to holler out at them about not raising no dust and dirtying themselves, but listening instead as he said he reckoned they’d savage and throat slash through the night, Mister P. W. Anderson had his way.
She nodded, reckoning so.
At least the Mae’s didn’t have old Sketter to chase and rassle at and worry any more.
He sighed. She sighed.
He still hadn’t said it and she still couldn’t go.
“Proverbs, King James, 13 and 24th,” he said. Something he bet Mister P. W. Anderson’d never read in his life. Probably most of his time with nose in an accounts ledger never looked up to see what it took to get a decent day’s work out of a squad of them—it wasn’t by having them stand around listening at one white men tell another what Mister P. W. Anderson’d ’s told him, that’s for sure.
Skeeter’d been good at protecting the chickens and the house from other predators but then had taken to killing hens his self. Cotty’d tied a dead one around the dog’s neck to break him of it, but it hadn’t helped.
Cotty nodded and she took it as his sign that she could go.
She asked him to remember not—when he said, “Do you know what he told me? Had the flat out gall—?”
She didn’t shake her head; she just looked at him, waiting. Knowing he was at the point of it.
“To go easy on them.”
Their pause throbbed with indignation.
“And you know what he meant.” It wasn’t a question. “Spare the lash.”
He closed his eyes and put his hand gingerly to his jaw as if cradling the aching tooth.
This was it. What he had been building to.
“It’s my kind that’s protecting his kind.” He looked directly at her. “I’m the lean yard dog that was against the gray eyes and bared teeth at the edge of the night woods, watching after the fat sows with their snouts deepest in the trough.”
She nodded, trying to ascertain her agreement with him. The rivulets had flowed together into the main stream.
“You have to treat a dog like a dog—or it’ll all go to the dogs.”
It wasn’t his tooth that was paining him.
“He that spareth his rod hateth his son . . .” He paused as if he wanted her to recite it with him, but she did not know it. “But he that loveth him chastenth him betimes.”
Mister P. W. Anderson hadn’t—couldn’t even look Cotty in the eye when he said “go easy on them” where that Mule could hear him—he’d said it like he was swatting away a gnat, a wasp.
2
Abraham, who hated being in harness, in a trot.
For the Bible told them so, the Mae’s sang in their sweet, harmonious voices.
It was in the Bible, wasn’t it? He had asked her. Well he would know better than her. Yes—far as she knew. Least she didn’t know it wasn’t in there. Reverend Rhodes would know—if she would ask him, but she wouldn’t. Cotty’d said it, so—
Jenny did not know what she thought of it, his sparing the lash or not.
He hadn’t told her anything of them she didn’t think. No. She didn’t think anything of it because she didn’t know of it to think of it, which was fine with her.
It’d been that nagging toothache had him so he couldn’t think straight. And that and somebody that high up in the company and from the headquarters up north surprising him like he’d done. Till Cotty couldn’t say what it was at the core of his feeling. What it was was confusion. She knew. It was whether or no the slight had been intended, or was it just ignorance on Mister P. W. Anderson’s part? Cotty hadn’t said that was it, but she felt it for him.
The Mae’s knew He loved them, they sang above the creaking of the wagon and the clopping of Abraham’s hooves.
Jenny’d been a farmer’s daughter. Her step-daddy Mister Morris’d worked shares same as Cotton Wilcox when she’d met him. Put something in the ground and pray it pays to pull it up, but Cotty’d never cared for farming and after his working at the mill came to no good, first and second knuckles of the last two fingers of his left hand whacked off, and the preaching’d petered out, and when the Kimbrough Works company job come open he did what he had to do—what was always done—what had to be. He’d took to the guard job like a hog to slop, and her and him and the Mae’s’d been right happy ever since.
6
The Mae’s
Spring 1928
Lollie Mae and Sallie Mae quiet out on the porch or stirring hushed in the yard and waiting on their mama to Please hurry up Mama, as they took turns looking at the closed door with arms folded, foot patting, face in a pout while the other walked in circles around the wash pot, but it didn’t help, maybe because Mama was listening so serious to Daddy talking up a blue streak about something their little pitchers’ ears weren’t big enough to be hearing, or, because they were somewhat distracted by the faint sound, and ever worrisome smell, of the smoke and wet ashes from the fire up the hill and at the gin and saw mills from a long time ago. So long ago they didn’t even know how long ago, but back, way back before the States’ Rights War, back when all niggers were still slaves.
It was the sound and the smell, that nobody else but them could smell, that had to do with their never wanting to play at the top of the hill, which would have been a perfect place to play, weaving in and out of the burned columns, or to run up to the top and to roll down from, but they didn’t, without even being warned against it.
The sound, loud enough on some nights to make them sleep with the covers over their heads and their hands over their ears against the jumbled nigger-like whispering and the low whimpering, and sometimes wailing of a white woman, like it was washing down from up the hill, or mumble rumbling from a long, long way, both in distance and time. Either the sound or the smell could come up so strong that, without a signal from either one, it would make them break out singing.
When the odor or the noise came didn’t have anything to do with moonlight or seasons or weather conditions, or any pattern the Mae’s could reckon. It could as likely be broad open daylight or sunset or a Thursday morning.
It was like when Old Skeeter used to just break out barking out at the dark when no-body else heard a thing and he’d keep barking till Daddy hollered at him to Hush up that yapping, Skeeter! And he’d give one or two more woofs like he was getting the last word in, or giving his last warning to what-ever it was he knew was out there—but old Skeeter had one on the Mae’s because even though they heard it or smelled it or both they didn’t have a clue what it was or why it was that they knew it was out there.
The Mae’s had slipped and told of them once or twice but had learned not to speak on it too much, or at all if they could help it (but never about the crying of their would-have-been older brother that miscarried even though the nigger midwife was there in time. Mama and their daddy never spoke of it, though the Mae’s knew of it anyway), but when the sensation did come to them their o
nly defense was to sing, and when they were asked what they were singing about or why, they got that look on their faces like niggers who knew something but wouldn’t admit to knowing it, wouldn’t even, under threat of penalty, admit to knowing anything of it, no matter what.
Whatever, it made their mother nervous as a moth at a lantern, and their daddy go quiet as iron.
Haunted, hell! Some of the rough, barefoot boys at school cussed, bragging under their breaths. They went exploring up at the burnt-down big old house on the hill. Claimed they played tag among the blackened columns, burnt rafters, shattered glass, and busted bricks. The boldest, in direct contradiction to what they’d said earlier, claimed they’d discovered things of so scary and secret of a nature they couldn’t tell, to protect those who didn’t know of such things from the very horror of hearing them. Some nights it was full of haints and spooks, and other nights, niggers doing nigger-what-all up there.
Such as what?
Such as raising the dead, and casting spells on white folks. The carrot-haired one with the scabs swore he’d seen it and lived to tell it. The Mae’s just looked at one another. That wasn’t any more help in dispersing the smell or the sounds than when Mama tried to fan away the heat at church.
It was Mama had once assured them that what they thought they heard was just the wind in the trees or smoke from the fireplace. Yes, ma’am they said, thinking together that there was no wind, just like there was no trees anymore for a wind to be in, Mama. Just hundreds and hundreds of stumps their daddy said he had helped to cut down when they’d quit planting cotton, leaving nothing but little foot-high tables for sprites.
Nobody who couldn’t hear or smell it could explain it or explain it away any more than they, Lollie Mae and Sallie Mae, had even a flickering notion of what they were on the fringe of, in the same way they had never put their ear to a seashell or heard the hum of electrical current through a wire, and wouldn’t have had the words for it even if they had.
