Duke came out of his chair as if he had been touched by a hot poker. “Why don’t you?” he shot back, in more vigor than sense; then he added quickly, “The land belongs to Mrs. Hightower—my clients are not involved—it would be highly improper. . . .”
Adam saw the white men sit back down in their seats, saw their faces stiffen—around the circle, saw only the eyes of strangers. And in their eyes rose a familiar hostility—a community of hostility—a hostility that strangely he could not bear. He shrugged, feeling his backbone give way. He smiled submissively and moved away from the door, out into the room toward them. He said jokingly, though there was a quaver in his voice, “Maybe y’all better had let me look at them land lines ag’in!”
5.
THE LONG, LEAN, BLACK MAN, wearing a slick back serge suit and a celluloid collar without a tie, got out of Adam’s buggy at the mail box. He and Adam had halted on the side of the deep-rutted sandy road that crooked its way out of a flat stretch of stunted oak and pine and palmetto. The man faced about and Adam handed an oblong, corrugated cardboard box over the wheels to him, saying, “Here yuh liquor, Kiger!”
He took it, steadying himself with a spread-legged swagger. The dull black pigmentation of his long face faded into large ash-white freckles on the front of his cheeks and on the bridge of his big, pointed, pock-marked nose, which, as he now lifted it, gave him a little the look of a shark, breaking through dark, foam-crested waters. This similarity was sharpened when he opened his wide, toothy mouth, flashing two gold front teeth. “Maybe a feller of color wid so much business wid de buckra oughter have another drink!” Kiger said, in a high-pitched voice, pulling a quart bottle out of the box.
A reddish tinge in his cheeks and his eyes glittering, Adam shook his head, then smiling said, “Shut yuh mouth, Kiger!”
Kiger was unaffected by this half-hearted rebuke, turning the bottle, three-quarters full, about in his hand, gazing at it. “Soloman’s Supreme, aged in the Rock of Ages!” he said. “I’d be pleased to give yuh another one. How ‘bout it?”
Sitting a little stiffly in his seat, still smiling, Adam took the bottle, swung it above his mouth for a swig and handed it back. Then he slapped the reins over his red mule’s rump and the nervous animal jerked the buggy into the road and was gone, Adam waving goodbye over his shoulder.
The drink was Adam’s fourth and that was more than he ordinarily took—except on special occasions. He slapped the lines over the mule’s back again when she showed signs of slowing down. The special occasion, he told himself, was Kiger Steele’s getting his monthly shipment of liquor under Georgia’s prohibition law. But that, he knew bitterly, despite the warm surge of alcohol in his veins and the soothing blur on his brain, had not been the special occasion for him. He had felt completely washed out when he got away from the white men in lawyer Duke’s office. He damn sure had needed a drink, and he was only too willing to help Kiger sample the new supply. He had been glad to give him the lift home. Kiger was at the hitching racks, across the street from Duke’s office and had seen them when they all came out together.
His passenger was a brother in the Corinthian Lodge, and Adam was glad to have his company, along with his liquor, even though Kiger had tried to pick him about it over their drinks on the way out. Of course, he hadn’t told him a damn thing. He wouldn’t talk before a man of Kiger’s kidney, or mouth!
As the mule trotted along over the firm road of the flatwoods, Adam, sitting lithely forward on the cushions, diverted himself by flicking leaves off the bushes along the way with his buggy whip. But after a time the road ran out of flat country upon sandhills that brought the animal to a dead walk. The sound of the buggy wheels in the sandy ruts was like ashes in his ears; the slow pace made him sluggish, and he put up the whip and slipped down in the seat to doze.
But he did not sleep. Quickly, the cat’s clay of conscience pricked his brain. He hadn’t answered Kiger’s prying, sweet-tongued questions, but he had acted like a bank-walker! He had let Kiger and his liquor puff him up! The red-rayed sun was setting and there was now little warmth from it, but a cloud of dust hung over the sparsely covered hills and seemed to hold the heat upon them. Adam began to sweat profusely and felt a touch of nausea at the pit of his stomach. Nobody had less room to be puffed up than Adam Atwell, in these risky, April-fool days! At best the round at the lawyer’s office was a dogfall for him. They think they have got me, he told himself—and I did come pretty near to knuckling under!—still they’re not sure, and that makes a damned shaky situation out of it!
Dropping the reins over the dashboard, he came out of his overalls jumper. As he was unbuttoning his shirt collar, the question struck him, struck him with sudden aching clarity: What do you mean, trying to buck all of those white men? Don’t you know you’re just a nigger? He stared at the red mule’s rump, as if addressing it. Banker Littleton and the Colonel’s brother John and Peter Bright! And, why, why, why? To do yourself out of the best piece of cotton land in the county! Have you gone slap dab crazy? He pulled a bandanna handkerchief out of his hip pocket and mopped his face and, putting his feet up on the dashboard, he discontentedly lowered his head between his knees.
After a time he perceived that the rig had begun to go downhill and, pushing back in his seat, he pulled up the reins and the mule broke into a trot. Could he have kept the field? Hinshaw Slappy was the only other man who knew where the true line lay. He, Adam, could fall in with Hinshaw’s fraud about the line and get to farm the Wyche field for another ten years—maybe longer! And the boy, when he grew up, might never even look for the clay deposits! A lot could happen in ten years!
Passing a grove of oaks in front of a double-pen log house, Adam was seized with wonderment at how he had let himself get crossed up with those white men. He searched the clean sandy ground to discover his answer there. What had made him swell up and get so stiff-necked? An image of the white men, confronting him around the tongue-and-groove walls rose thinly before the trees. What was it, looking into the white men’s faces, there, and them trying to ease him into a lie—what was it that had made him balk? It seemed now to him as if there had been some kind of pushing game between them—like, like they were trying to push their electric lamp onto him—and him, trying to push it back at them—by just thinking about it and wishing it hard, not saying anything out loud. He shrugged and mopped his face again with the red cloth. Somehow, in not taking their bait, he had held out against them—and if he’d swallowed it, there would have been a hook and line to it—they would own him now!
They were together against him from the start, but they didn’t get mad till he charged about the county surveyor. Why the hell did he have to do that? Quick as a wink they all froze, froze into one look and he was no longer Adam Atwell to them, but just a nigger who had offended them, white men all together and they hated him!
The image before Adam grew achingly vivid. His insides were rising into his throat. He jerked the mule to a halt. They were now on top of another sandhill, and, pulling out of the road, he drove a little way among the scattering of blackjack oaks and sage brush in the dusk and, leaping from the buggy, began to retch. He vomited heavily. Finally he wiped his face and eyes and restored his handkerchief. Leading his mule out into the road again, he got back in the buggy.
He had seen that look on a crowd of white men’s faces once before. And, only one time before: after the riot in Lancaster that sent him to the Mines, thirty years ago! The white men in the courtroom at Lancaster—and there weren’t any niggers there, except the cowed little bunch of which he was one—had had that same look on their faces. The courtroom was packed full; however, deputies, walking up and down the aisles with clubs in their hands, kept everybody quiet. But they all had the same look on their faces. The white men who sat in the jury box had it, and, in front of the jury, the white men at the other table that the Colonel said were the prosecuting lawyers, even the judge behind the big desk looking down on them from his throne—all of them had it!
Every white man had had that look on his face, except the big, calm, young red-headed lawyer, who was Colonel Hightower, and the judge had appointed him to represent the niggers.
Adam had been in Georgia only six weeks when he got mixed up in the Lancaster riot. He was only nineteen years old then. He had run away from his old home in North Carolina, or as good as run away, not even letting ma know he was going! He told himself that he was leaving the old Atwell place, coming off down here to get to fresh turpentine woods. The truth was that he was trying to be on his own, and it was more to get away from his mother and old man Atwell, the white man he was named after, that he came. It didn’t take him long to be sorry of it!
He had been boxing trees for Mr. Christian DeBow at Riverton for five weeks, when he went on the excursion to Lancaster—mostly for the ride, though they aimed to make the big brush-arbor meeting at Samson’s Grove—he and two more turpentine hands—and one of them was that fool they called Trotlucky and old man Ezra, their uncle, who had come from up around that part of the country.
“My Gawd, whut a swarm of blackbirds!” old man Ezra said, when the train had stopped at Lancaster and he looked out the window—and he was black as any of them, himself! It was then about seven o’clock in the morning and excursions had been bringing them in all night. There must have been a couple of thousand of colored people there around the depot and on main street. They were everywhere: prancing up and down and jostling each other about, sitting on the station platform and on the stacks of cross-ties along the track, on the benches under the covered sidewalks to the stores, which lined the far side of each of the streets running alongside the railroad track that split the town open.
His memory of the fateful crowd came back to Adam so vividly now that he felt a strange sense of awe of it. He could hear again the buzz of that good-humored talk and laughter, as it had reached him that morning, before he got off the train. A lot of them had brought baskets of victuals or at least something in a sack for breakfast. They were eating and strewing baked sweet potato peelings and egg shells and watermelon rinds about the street. A lot of them were dressed up in fine long-tailed hand-me-down coats and second-hand silk dresses and even at that early hour were strutting up and down to show off their clothes. Everybody seemed as easy and amiable as folks could be.
Some of them were heading out toward the Grove, which was a mile beyond the town, but most of them were waiting for the drug stores to open, because that was where liquor was sold in Lancaster then. There were nine liquor-selling drug stores there that day, he had been told.
He and two other boys and their Uncle Ezra waited, too. They did not have any breakfast with them and they had not had much sleep the night before and old man Ezra said he needed a dram the worst sort.
At that time, he, Adam, didn’t know the taste of liquor. The only thing he had ever had was a little scuppernong wine. But he was powerful curious to test it out. The other boys were older than he was and had been around such things more—especially Trotlucky Bostick—but, of course, he wouldn’t let on that he was just breaking in on it.
The drug stores opened at nine o’clock. There was such a crowd, however, that Ezra didn’t get his bottle till an hour later, and it was past eleven and the morning meeting had started when they finally got to the Grove. They had stopped three times along the way to have a drink and they had tried to find some breakfast somewhere, though without any luck. He, Adam, had managed to get down his drink all right each time they passed the bottle. He kept on smacking his lips as if he liked the stuff, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from watering. By the time they got to the brush arbor he was already feeling the liquor too much, but he still had a hold on himself and could walk straight.
A long way off the beat of a bass drum reached his ears. The steady measured booming came out of a clump of woods that, off there beyond the rows of houses and open fields, looked to him like a dark green cloud on the horizon. The top pitch of singing voices and a faint riffle of tambourines came to him between the beats. He was just a smooth-faced boy then, and the strange sound of it made his eyes bug out at his companions—though it was Trotlucky who spoke up: “Man, listen at that thing!” Everybody he could see in the broad stream of bobbing heads and shoulders on ahead of them seemed to be moving faster and not talking, set on getting to the Grove. The sound grew inside him and made cold chills run up and down his back. The pop-skull from the inside and the drum skill from the outside had him half-scared to death by the time he got to the meeting.
He was shocked, too, by the size of the brush arbor. It spread out and out and on and on, between the scattering oak trees—that ran up through the sparkleberry and persimmon brush of the roof to make it look like a big burrow—the biggest in the world! And packed full of singing and shouting people.
Uncle Ezra said, “Boys, we better bust up and each man find him a hole!” And they scattered without so much as thinking of how they would get back together. Adam stumbled down an aisle on the far right-hand side, and found a perch on the end of one of the benches.
The music stopped just after he sat down and the people down the row from him nodded to him in a friendly way.
The ground sloped toward a hollow in front of them, where beyond the benches there was a low platform built out of new planks. In the middle of it, raised upon a throne and sitting behind a fine furniture-store pulpit, in a highback chair of the same sort, sat a big bright-skinned woman, in white robes. She looked like she might have been cut out of marble, she was so smooth and calm.
Next to him on the bench somebody leaned over and whispered in his ear, “That’s Mother Mary Magdalene Call—Mother Mary, herself!” He turned to find the broad, brass-spectacled smiling face of a middle-aged dark woman.
He nodded and began to look around him, suddenly feeling the closeness of the place. It was August and sultry under that arbor and there must have been a million palmetto fans, making a breeze back and forth, all around the big semicircle of heads and shoulders and moving arms, but he couldn’t feel it. Sweat popped out all over him and began to run down his face and his grip on his head began to slip. His stomach seemed to swell and quiver, then it turned a flip and he could taste the liquor in his throat again. A trembling nausea took him.
At this juncture the singing began again. Men dressed in white clothes stood up on the platform to lead it and in the middle in front of the pulpit sat the man beating the bass drum he had heard on his way and on either side of him were women, shaking tambourines, high and low, and dancing about as they shook them. The singing swelled and people, here, there, and yonder, down front began to shout.
Then somebody beyond Adam on the bench was making his way out to the aisle to shout, and when Adam tried to move his knees out of the way he slipped off the end and hit the ground. Heaving, but holding his liquor down, he got to his feet to find that the pulpit was pitching and rearing and the whole place was beginning to spin. He knew he had better get out from under the arbor as fast as he could, so he headed about and started back up the aisle. But now the aisle was weaving and twisting and he couldn’t follow it and found himself mixed up against people’s knees between the benches and his feet slipped out from under him and he went down.
They right kindly—he realized even as scared and sick as he was—helped him up and with somebody on either side of him, heaving and choking, he got out from under the arbor. And, after they were out in the light and the fresh air and walking around, he got enough of the water out of his eyes to see who it was. There was the old woman in the brass spectacles on one side and a skinny, shrivel-faced, man on the other. The old man shook his gray head and said, “Son, if she wants to come up, let ‘er come—hit’ll make yuh feel better!”
It was the first time and the liquor threw him hard. He had never known anything like it before. He was so weak when he got through vomiting, he could scarcely walk, and still drunk, too. The old man had hung around for him to get straightened out, and when he saw that
Adam still couldn’t walk right, he led him back down the road to his house, which was only a quarter of a mile away.
Everything before Adam’s eyes on that journey was painful and weaving and blurred and he could not tell much about it. The man, he remembered, took him to an old batten-and-board house behind a rail fence, and on the back porch the old man pumped water on his head, then led him into a shedroom with a big pile of shucks on the floor. Here Adam had collapsed on the whirling shuck pile, soon to be tossed into a black and dreamless sleep.
When Adam was awakened that evening, coming to foggily at first and choking and suspended in air, a baleful dim light somewhere behind him, he thought, maybe, he had gone to hell and was about to be thrown into the sulphur pit. Nothing had happened to him later that night, nor during the next three days for that matter, did anything to lighten or clear up that impression!
Soon he realized that a hard fist had hold of his shirt, was twisting the collar to choke him, while pulling him to his feet. In the blur of voices he distinguished the cold bitter tones of a white man saying, “Yes, yore belly full of red-eye, after you’ve ripped and roared around—gone dog mad and killed a white man, why you just lay down like the beast that you are and sleep it off!” Then as Adam tried to scramble to his feet, he shook him hard, twisting the collar till the button popped off, barking, “Git on yore feet, you yaller-skin son-of-a-bitch!”
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 6