“But I needs him.”
Just what I was supposed to say to that I don’t know. I was saved from having to figure that out by a big fellow from the camp who came over and took Maylene by the arm. The man was called by the name of Johnny B. “Girl, whatcha doin’ talkin’ t’ this white nigger?” Johnny B. demanded, but then didn’t give Maylene a chance to answer before he snatched her up. “There’s plenty of other fellas needin’ yo’ company.”
At that Maylene got her backbone up. “But maybe I wantin’ his.”
“You wantin’ a white man, girl, you best be gettin’ yo’self the real thing.”
Maylene jerked from Johnny B.’s hold. “One thing I do know is I ain’t wantin’ you!”
Johnny B. took hold of her again, rougher this time. The last thing I wanted to do was get in a fight with this fellow, but I figured I had to take up for Maylene; after all, she had been sitting with me. I stood. “The lady made it clear she’s not interested in your company right now, so I think it’s best you let go of her arm.”
The big fellow laughed. “Come on from behind that table, boy, and you jus’ make me do that little thing!”
Johnny B.’s challenge was so loud that the music stopped. I came from behind the barrel to stand in front of Johnny B. The room grew quiet, and Mitchell took notice. “ ’Ey, Paul!” he called. “What’s goin’ on over there?”
“This here man been grabbin’ on me!” hollered Maylene.
Mitchell pushed away from the bar. “That a fact?”
“And he won’t let go!”
“Oh, I think he will,” said Mitchell.
“Now, you stay outa this, Mitchell!” warned Johnny B. “This here’s between me and this white nigger!”
“And that there young lady,” Mitchell added, making his way over. “Seem like t’ me, ya got a mighty tight hold on her arm there.”
“Seem like t’ me,” said Johnny B., “ya buttin’ into somethin’ ya got no business.” He motioned slightly toward me with his head. “How comes ya wanna take his part anyways?”
“Well, ya see,” said Mitchell, when he stood directly in front of Johnny B., “we’re brothers. Yeah, that’s right. Not that it’s any of yo’ business, but his daddy and mine was different, anybody can see that. But we’re brothers just the same. He come out white; I come out black. So what ya got t’ say t’ that?”
There was again, for a moment, silence at Miz Mary’s.
Johnny B. broke it. “Well, he still ain’t like he one of us!”
“That’s sho’ right!” one of the other loggers spoke up. “Set-tin’ over there in that corner, too good t’ socialize!”
I challenged the man. “Why’d you come here from the camp?” I asked.
The man seemed taken aback for a moment. “What’s that?”
“I came here to get away from the camp after a week’s work. Figure maybe you did the same.”
“Yeah,” said Johnny B. “But all you doin’ is sittin’ up there in that corner, all to yo’self!”
“No,” I said quietly. “I wasn’t all to myself. Miss Maylene there was sitting with me, keeping me company.”
Maylene laughed at that, angering Johnny B. further, and he suddenly hauled off and slapped her so hard, she fell back against the barrel upon which I’d been writing. Mitchell grabbed Johnny B. and knocked him down. I helped Maylene up, then looked around just in time to see a man coming behind Mitchell with a broken bottle. I jumped the man and knocked the bottle from his grip. Mitchell turned at the commotion, but then had his hands full again as Johnny B. got up and lunged at him. The two of them then went at it. Another fellow came at me, but I held my own. Two more of the men from the camp jumped into the fray; the rest stayed out of it. Miz Mary herself broke it up. She fired off a shotgun. She ordered Mitchell and me out. Maylene went with us. The rest, Miz Mary said, had better stay put and not follow us if they wanted to set foot in her place again.
Once we were down the road, Mitchell went off with Maylene. I returned to the camp, but I didn’t go directly to the sleeping quarters. Instead, I walked the wooded slopes. Even though I figured the shanty to be empty most of the night, I didn’t want to be cooped up inside. I hurt from the fight and I moved slowly, but I needed to be in the open, where the chill of the night and the cleanliness of it could clear my head. After a while I sat upon a stump, breathed deep of the night air, and stared out at the clouds drifting across a full moon. I felt the cold beginning to shroud me, but I stayed where I was. I figured to stay there all night in the cold, if I had to. I had a lot of thinking to do.
Back when Mitchell and I had first left out of East Texas on that train, I had it in my mind that one day I’d go west. Mitchell didn’t much care where he went, and when Miz Hattie Crenshaw, the woman who with her daughters had hidden us with their skirts on the train, offered us work and a place to stay, we took it. I figured we could save a little money while with them, then move on. But as it turned out, we ended up staying on at Miz Crenshaw’s place near Laurel for almost two years. I trained Miz Crenshaw’s horses, took care of them, and sometimes raced them, while Mitchell mainly did whatever needed doing around the place.
Now, I’ve got to admit that Miz Crenshaw was always fair by me, even though she had plenty of questions to ask. Mitchell and I, however, never told Miz Crenshaw or anybody else much about ourselves. We’d decided from the beginning to keep what was past to ourselves; we didn’t want folks, including our daddies, coming after us. When we first started staying with the Crenshaws, they all seemed a bit curious about us, as they had a right to be, and Miz Creshaw was one of the most curious. Once, in fact, she said to me, “That gentleman you were working for, Paul, the one you came with to East Texas, were you with him long?”
I remember looking at Miz Crenshaw and wondering why she was asking me that. I replied to her, “I was born on his place.”
“He’s the one responsible for having educated you?”
I answered her brusquely. “He saw to it.”
“That was mighty generous of him,” Miz Crenshaw observed. “Almost like a daddy.” She then studied me without speaking further, but I knew she sensed the connection between my daddy and me. After all, she’d seen us together, and except for the differences in our height, I greatly favored my daddy.
“Miz Crenshaw,” I said, deciding on a sudden to confide one thing to her, “you ever see him again, I mean like at a horse fair or anything, he can’t know where I am. Mitchell either.”
Miz Crenshaw kept her eyes on me, then slowly nodded. “If that’s what you want, Paul, you needn’t worry. My girls and I won’t say a thing.” That’s all she said and she didn’t ask me anything more about my daddy, not then or later.
Though Mitchell and I otherwise remained pretty closemouthed, Miz Crenshaw seemed not to take offense and was always giving us her advice, and particularly to me, since Mitchell showed no interest whatsoever in following any she gave him. When she discovered I had book learning, she encouraged me to read and was always bringing books she thought would be good for me. Later on she arranged for me to do some teaching to other folks of color in the area, and when she learned of my carpentry skills, she took that in hand too. She had some carpentry tools she let me use, and I built her two small lamp tables. She paid me extra to fix things for her, and even sent me up to a man in the area to do further apprenticing.
“You can use this talent too, Paul,” she instructed me. “You could go into business for yourself if you wanted. Enterprising men of color are doing that now, I hear. You ever decide to go into the furniture business, I know a good person to see is a man by the name of Mister Luke Sawyer in Vicksburg. He’s had skilled wood craftsmen working for him before. He runs a mercantile, and he’s a fair man. You could get a good start with him. But you’ve got other possibilities as well. You could go to school. There are great opportunities for young folks like yourself these days. Why, you could go to one of the colored schools here in Mississippi or even north
to study. You could become one of the great educators of your people or maybe a lawyer or a doctor to them. You could do it, Paul. You’ve already got the foundation, and you’re certainly bright enough. You could do it easy.”
Maybe that was so, but I wasn’t interested in being a doctor or a lawyer or an educator. I knew Miz Crenshaw meant well, but I never told her what I truly wanted. That I told only to Mitchell. What I wanted was land. I wanted land like my daddy’s. In a way, I suppose, I was driven by the thought of having land of my own. In my early years, before I truly realized my two worlds, I had figured that I’d always live on my daddy’s land, that my daddy’s land would be mine and I’d always be a part of it. When I discovered that wouldn’t be, I created my own land in my mind. I knew that land was what I had to have.
During the time Mitchell and I stayed at Miz Crenshaw’s place, the will to have my own land grew. Although Miz Crenshaw and her daughters and eventually her daughters’ husbands treated Mitchell and me fair, I recognized I was no more than a hired hand, working at somebody else’s say-so, and I knew I had no real future there. As a boy, even though I worked for my daddy, I felt my soul was vested in all I did. It wasn’t that way on the Crenshaw farm. As nice as they were, the Crenshaws were strangers, and what was theirs would stay theirs; they weren’t about to share any of it with me.
Besides that, once Miz Crenshaw’s oldest daughters married, their husbands made it quite clear that things would be taking on a change. One of them, in fact, told Mitchell and me outright, “I know you boys have gotten pretty accustomed to having the run of the place. Over the years since her husband and her boys died in the war, Miz Crenshaw’s had to depend on a number of folks to keep this place running. Now that she’s got menfolks in the family again, she and her daughters won’t have the burden of all that worry. You have questions about the place, you come to us. No need to worry them. One other thing too. You boys stay ’way from inside the main house. There be things to discuss, they can be talked about outside those walls. Understood?”
It was understood, all right. Though Mitchell and I were grateful to Miz Crenshaw and her daughters, it wasn’t long after that Mitchell and I took to the road, and mostly we stayed to it. I still sometimes dreamed of going west and maybe meeting up with George. I also dreamed of meeting my granddaddy Kanati’s people, but none of that happened. Mitchell and I took on jobs and ended up staying for the most part in Mississippi and Louisiana.
First job we took on was in a turpentine camp. In the turpentine camps men of color, many times having their womenfolks with them, set up families and worked in woods far removed from other people. The men were mostly rough, sometimes coming into the camps from whatever they were running from. Some admitted to being escaped convicts. Some even admitted to murder. The bosses didn’t care. They just wanted workers. Besides, sometimes the bosses were murderers or convicts too. In the turpentine camps the men, called chippers, chipped the pines year after year draining from them all that was good, resin for turpentine, resin for tar, resin for medicine. Then, when there was only a shell of the tree left after five years or so, the camp moved on. I didn’t like what was done to the trees. They were hacked out to a slow death, drained of all their treasures until they were worthless. They couldn’t be used for lumber and were left like ghosts to stand hollow and fragile until knocked down in a storm, or a fire consumed them.
Mitchell and I were only seventeen and sixteen years old when we joined up with the turpentine camp, and we thought we knew more than we did. We soon found out differently. The white boss man was in full control. What he said was absolute law and usually there was no other law around. Even if there had been, it would have made no difference. Whatever the white boss man said, the white law would have gone along with him. Once we saw one man of color kill another man of color in the middle of a dispute. The boss man told the chippers to bury the dead man and sent the other man on back to work, and that was all there was to it. He didn’t care. But then there came the day a boy of color not much older than Mitchell and me beat one of the white operators of the camp until he was bloody, then ran away. The bosses and their hounds hunted that boy down, killed him, dragged him back to the camp, and left him there to rot. They wouldn’t even let us bury him. They wanted us to be reminded daily of who was in charge. Mitchell and I got out of that camp as soon as we could, and we didn’t make the mistake of working again in the turpentine camps.
After that, I took on teaching jobs and carpentry work, and sometimes I trained and raced horses. But mostly, Mitchell and I went lumbering, working long hours in the Louisiana and Mississippi lumber camps. I didn’t have to go to the camps to find work. I went because of Mitchell. He liked the camps, the excitement of them, and the danger. When Mitchell asked me to work in a camp with him, I did so because he asked, and Mitchell was now family to me, the only person near I could count on. I was the only person Mitchell could count on too.
Now, being small built and so white-looking, I always had to prove myself in the camps, and I worked as hard as any man to pull my own load and didn’t let anybody beat me. Mitchell had no problem in pulling his own. He was tall and muscular, a good-looking young man to the womenfolks, and other men respected him on sight. Mitchell was just that kind of person. However, he still had his quick temper and sullen ways, and that meant trouble too many times. Seeing that Mitchell and I always backed each other up, like at Miz Mary’s place, I sometimes found myself in a fight when the matter had nothing at all to do with me and many times made no sense to me either. I didn’t like brawling, and I figured the best way to stay out of needless trouble was to stay out of places like Miz Mary’s. Now I was angry at myself for letting Mitchell talk me into going there in the first place.
The longer I sat on that stump in that night chill, I thought that maybe it was a good thing I had been caught up in another senseless fight. Maybe it was a good thing the boss man Jessup had taken such a strong dislike to me and pushed me into working for him for nothing. Maybe I needed this anger that had built up in me to get me moving in another direction. It was my nature to always look at what seemed a setback as being something from which I was supposed to learn. I figured everything that happened was supposed to be telling me something, and I always figured there was something good that was supposed to come out of the something bad, if I just took the time to study on what it was. Well, I was taking the time now, and I had made up my mind about one thing. This kind of life wasn’t what I wanted, and it was time for me to move on.
I rose from the stump. I’d been sitting there for the better part of the night, but I had things figured now. First thing I did was gather up some firewood, then I headed back with it to the shanty. No one was there. It was dark and cold in the shanty, with not even the fire that dimly lit the room on work nights. There wasn’t even moonlight shining in, for there were no windows. I laid the wood on the floor, then tacked back the tarp over the door to bring the moonlight in. I found my bedroll packed with my gear. I unrolled it and took out one of the blankets. I placed logs in that blanket, rolled it carefully up again, and tied it with rope, so that it looked as if all my gear was still inside. I did the same with Mitchell’s gear, then placed the blanket-wrapped logs where our bedrolls had been. I re-rolled the rest of our gear and took it with me back to the woods, where I hid it in the brush. Then, without a blanket or a fire to warm me, I settled on the damp ground and went to sleep.
That morning I rose with an aching head and a swollen jaw. It was another foggy morning, and though I had on long johns under my pants and wore a coat over the heavier of my two work shirts, I shivered uncontrollably. My body was stiff from sleeping in the damp, but I took up my axe from the tool shed and headed for the slope. It being Sunday, there was no breakfast. The cook had the day off. When I got to the chopping line, I found Mitchell sitting on a stump, waiting for me.
“What you doing here?” I said.
“Waitin’ on you. Time t’ go t’ work.”
“This is my load,” I contended. “It’s not on you.”
“Not on me? You know Jessup just used me bein’ away the other night as an excuse to come down on you. ’Sides, anythin’ on you, it’s on me. You know that.”
I knew that, all right. I had expected Mitchell to come sooner or later, for if the situation were switched, I would have been there for him. I acknowledged his words with a nod, then said, “I decided, Mitchell.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t stay working here.”
Mitchell jumped up. “Then let’s go! We get our gear and head outa here right now!”
“Can’t do that, not yet. Jessup’ll be watching, and he won’t hesitate to put the sheriff after us.”
“Then what we do? Work here all day for nothin’?”
“That’s right.”
“Ah, naw—”
“We put in this day’s work, Jessup won’t figure us to be going off come nightfall. He would be figuring if I were going to run, I’d’ve done it last night. If we leave at nightfall headed back toward Miz Mary’s, nobody’ll question us. Lot of the men’ll be staying up at Miz Mary’s sleeping the night through, so there’ll be no question either about us not being in camp come nightfall. Now, I figure we can both work this day if it means putting some ten or more hours between us and them.”
Mitchell nodded, mulling over what I was saying. “Thing is, I just don’t like the idea of givin’ this man a day’s work for nothin’.”
“It’s either that or we take off right now and end up with Jessup’s dogs chasing after and most likely catching us.”
Mitchell conceded to my thinking. “Well, I ain’t leavin’ without my gear.”
The Land Page 14