It was on a chilly Friday afternoon in the latter months of 1930 when Janson came home at a time when his shift should have just begun. There was a note in his hand, a note that had been attached to his pay envelope, a note he had not had to be able to read to know what it had meant.
The mill had cut back to two shifts.
Janson Sanders was unemployed.
PART TWO
Chapter Seven
What do I do now?—the words kept repeating themselves in Janson’s mind, demanding an answer, when he could think of none.
He trudged home along the hard-packed clay road on a November day less than a week after he had lost his job, pulling his coat closer against the chill air. His steps were slow, his mind filled with worry. He had gotten a ride into Cedar Flatts, hoping to find work at the small cotton mill there, but he’d had no luck, just as he’d had no luck at the overall factory in Pine, at Abernathy’s Feed and Seed, or any other place he had checked, including a trip he had already made up to the county seat of Wylie. Every day they stayed on in the mill house now was a day of going into debt to the Easons, and he would not be owing and beholden to the Easons for anything.
There was always Gran’ma and Gran’pa, but he could not dump his entire family on his grandparents, or on anyone else in the family, though Deborah and Tom Sanders had already offered them shelter, as had Janson’s Uncle Wayne and Aunt Rachel. Families were always there for each other, in the hard times as well as the better, but he could not allow his family to be a burden to anyone. Elise, Henry, little Catherine, Sissy, and his brother-in-law, Stan, were his responsibility and he had to look after them—there had to be something a man could put his hands to, something to earn an honest wage, but where was it? There seemed to be ten men for every opening; ten men who also had families to feed, children to support; ten men who needed the job just as badly as he.
For the first time Janson Sanders allowed himself the thought of sharecropping—but Elise, his Elise, as a sharecropper’s wife. Henry and Catherine living in a drafty shanty with the wind whistling through the cracks in the board walls—he had grown up knowing children like that. Not all landowners had houses for their sharecroppers that were as sound as the one his grandparents lived in, or the ones on Whitley’s place back in Georgia. Most were small one-to-three-room shacks with rusty tin roofs, poorly hung windows, and ill-fitting walls. He could not imagine taking Elise to a place like that, raising their children in a house like that—and, yet, for the first time in his life, he had to consider it.
But even sharecropping was closed to him for the present. It would take nearly a year for a crop; it was only November, and he knew they would never survive the winter without a wage coming in.
He did not hear the car coming until it was almost on him, and it ground to a halt at his side, too close, making him step away. A man leaned across the seat of the old flivver and peered out at him. “Hi, ya, boy, you need a ride?”
Janson caught himself almost instinctively saying no as he looked in at the man, but instead said, “Yeah, thanks,” just before he got into the vehicle. The man was one he had seen in town a few times, at Brown’s Grocery and at Abernathy’s Feed and Seed. He had heard the name, but could not remember it as he shut the door and settled back in the Tin Lizzie.
The man smelled heavily of sweat and stale cigar smoke, his nearness to Janson making the air inside the car almost unbreathable. Janson knew that he did not like the man, and could remember not liking him from the first minute he had seen him, though he could not now remember the reason, but he needed a ride back into town, and this was as good as any. He leaned his head back, exhausted, and stared straight ahead at the road.
“I seen you in town some. M’ name’s Floyd Goode, boy,” the man held out a dirty hand across the seat, bringing Janson’s eyes to him.
“Janson Sanders—” The hand was sweaty when he shook it, with black grime caked under the fingernails, making Janson want to wipe his own palm along the leg of his dungarees when the handshake was over.
“Yeah, I seen you an’ your wife an’ young’n’s in town several times—she’s a right handsome woman, your wife. How’s she doin’?”
Janson stared at him, not liking the tone in his voice, then answered deliberately: “My family’s fine.”
“That’s good.” The man nodded, staring straight ahead as the car made its way slowly toward Pine. “My woman’s gone off visitin’ her sister down in Montgomery; you don’t miss ’em ’til they ain’t there, you know; ain’t had a decent meal in a week—but I ain’t lackin’ for company, if you know what I mean.” Goode grinned, and suddenly Janson liked him even less. “Plenty ’a women for what I got—too much for my woman by herself, I always say, so I spread it around t’ make it easy on her an’ give th’ others some. They always say a man can take care ’a slew ’a women, you know, same as a bull an’ cows—” He seemed pleased with what he had said, laughing with a rattling sound coming from the massive chest. He moved one hand to scratch at the belly that protruded over his belt, the buttons on his grimy shirt near to bursting over it, then reached up to run the hand along the heavy stubble at his chin. “What’re you doin’ s’ far from home, boy? That pretty woman ’a yours thrown you out?”
Janson clenched his fist at his side and took a deep breath of the fetid air within the car, trying to calm his temper before he spoke, but his words came out angry anyway. “I was lookin’ for work.”
Goode seemed to take note of the tone, for he glanced quickly at Janson. “You got a bee up your ass, boy?”
Janson did not answer, but remained silent, looking straight ahead, expecting to be put out of the car at any moment. Goode returned his eyes to the road.
“You get laid off at th’ mill?”
“Yeah.”
For a moment Goode did not speak, but reached up to rub his chin again before returning the hand to the steering wheel. “You have any luck findin’ a job?”
“Not yet.”
There was silence again, then: “Me, I got me a good size place right on th’ edge ’a town. Ain’t too close t’ folks, so I can do pretty much like I want. It’s a little too much work for just me an’ my boy, Lionel, now that my older boys’re all gone—I could use somebody t’ work aroun’ th’ place, takin’ care ’a th’ livestock, cleanin’ out th’ chicken houses, fixin’ up some, doin’ some plowin’ an’ plantin’—” His words stopped and he seemed to be waiting. When Janson just stared, he continued, his tone more formal. “I could maybe use you—you ain’t gonna be able t’ stay on in a mill house an’ not be workin’ for th’ mill, an’ me, I got a little place you could stay in. I’ll give you a few dollars on th’ side, too, along with th’ rent. Maybe a little more, if your woman could do some cookin’ an’—”
“My wife works at home. We got two children; she don’t do no work for nobody else.”
“Well, we’ll see—you interested, boy?”
A place to live, maybe a few dollars with it—but the offer did not feel right. Something in the man’s tone, perhaps in his very presence there in the car, made Janson want to say no. He did not want to work for this man. He did not want Elise or Sissy anywhere near him—but did they have a choice?
“It’s just a little place, where my oldest boy stayed for a while before he got—” he paused for a second, then continued, “before he left. Two rooms, ain’t got no furnishin’s, but I guess you got that. You could move in right off.” He waited for a moment, then his voice came again, impatient and demanding. “Well, you want it or not, boy? Men’s a dime a dozen right now, an’ most’d jump at a place t’ live an’ some money comin’ in. I can get anybody—”
Janson’s mind raced, turning over the possibilities, the chance of other work.
“Well?”
He opened his mouth to say no, but the image came to him of hungry faces looking up at him. Winter was coming on; they
would have to have warm clothing for the children, food.
He clenched his fist so tightly that his nails dug deeply into his palm, causing pain—but he did not release it. He held it only tighter. “I’ll take it,” he said, then repeated the words, as if to assure himself that he had said them. “I’ll take it.”
They moved into the house on Goode’s property a few days later, crowding themselves and all they owned into two small rooms. Janson told himself that it would only be until he could find better—but there were no jobs to be had, though he continued to look. He had not felt right about the decision to take the house and job, and it worried him that his fears might be justified, for Goode seemed to drop by the house at all times during the day, making Janson swear again that the man would never find either Elise or Sissy alone.
Money was unbearably tight. The wage Goode paid was pitiably small, and it became a struggle each week just to feed the family. There was little call for Elise’s sewing, so tight were things with most people in the county, that they could not even count on that little money coming in. Sissy had left school, and Stan had graduated, but neither could find a job, leaving them both at the house during the day to help with the two small children, or to work with Janson on the chores Goode required to be done.
The work took very little of each day with several of them to help, leaving Janson with time on his hands, so he sought whatever work he could find elsewhere. He at last had time he could spend with Elise and the children, but he felt so useless. His dream of the land seemed further from him now than at any time in the past, in the light of the daily need for food and shelter for the family, the daily worry of what lay just ahead. He took an hour’s work for himself and Stan where he could find it, two hours, half a day, to patch a roof, burn out a chimney, bottom a chair, or repair a door—anything, just to earn a few extra cents, a hen, vegetables, or eggs in barter for chores done. He walked from door to door, carrying baskets he had made from white oak splits, selling them for whatever someone might be willing to pay. He walked the railroad tracks, picking up coal that had fallen from passing rail cars and taking it home to help heat the little house. He gathered wild plants in the woods, foods his mother and his grandmother had shown him, and taught Elise how to prepare things she had never dreamed to feed her children. He fished and he hunted, teaching Stan to hunt as well, bringing home deer meat, rabbit, and squirrel, or going out at night in the hope of bringing in a possum he could keep in a chicken coop and feed buttermilk to until it could be killed to provide meat for the family—but there was never enough that he could do.
Times were bad. There were so many out of work, so many in desperate circumstances, and so few to help. Gifts of food and hand-me-downs came from relatives and from members of the Holiness church his grandparents attended, and occasionally from the Baptist church in the village that the family had attended until they moved. With each gift that came, Janson felt only worse—he should be the one to support his family; they should not have to live on the charity of others, no matter how small the charity or how well intentioned—so he searched all the harder for work, scrubbing floors in an office for a day, moving machinery at the newspaper building, but often days went by with no work to be had. It was almost Christmas, but there would be little Christmas in their house this year, and that hurt, for Henry was two-and-a-half years old now and he looked at the world with such expectant eyes.
Janson began to check daily at Brown’s Grocery for work, stocking shelves, delivering groceries, washing windows, and it seemed more often than not that Edgar Brown could find something for him to do, or that he would have a name for him, and directions to the home of someone else who might have work for him or for Stan. Janson wondered at times if the grocer only masked charity with work that he would normally have done himself, but, if that were true, the older man never gave any sign that he was doing so.
It was on a cold December day a week before Christmas that Janson was cleaning out the storeroom in the back of the grocery, bringing up merchandise to be put on the shelves. Mr. Brown had found work Stan could do for the day as well, sitting Janson’s brother-in-law behind the counter at the front of the store with ledger books where the grocer kept track of charges made. Janson had heard them talking during his several trips toward the front, but it was Buddy Eason’s voice that came to him this time as he knelt to place tin cans of peas on a shelf.
“I want some tobacco, old man—” Buddy said, his voice rough, demanding. Janson stopped where he was to listen, not returning to the rear of the store and the storeroom as he had been about to.
“I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Eason. I’m almost finished with—”
“You’ll take care ’a me now.” The voice was even more demanding, and Janson moved to the end of the shelves so that he could see the front of the store. Buddy stood before the counter, glaring at Mr. Brown across the countertop. A young Negro woman stood nearby, a small girl of about Henry’s age clinging to her skirt. The child’s thumb went to her mouth as she stared from her mother to Buddy Eason. Janson could see Stan where he sat behind the counter, his brother-in-law now turned around in his chair with his eyes on the exchange as well.
“I said I’d be with you in a minute,” the grocer said, though his voice did not change, then brought his eyes back to the young woman. “Now that was a pound of sugar and a—”
“Now, old man,” Buddy said, his voice rising, setting the little girl to crying where she clung to her mother’s skirts. “I ain’t gonna be waited on behind no nigger.”
“Go ahead, I can wait,” the young woman said, picking the child up into her arms and trying to quieten her crying as she stepped back and away from the counter and Buddy Eason. Buddy turned on her even as she backed away, bringing one finger to point at the child in her arms, and setting the little girl into even louder wails as she found his eyes now on her.
“Shut that goddamn little pickaninny up or I’ll break it’s neck—and I don’t need some nigger gal’s okay to be waited on,” he said, then looked back at the grocer. “Now, give me some tobacco, old man.”
Mr. Brown looked to the young woman, clear apology in expression. “I’ll finish your order in a—” he began, speaking to the woman, but he was grabbed by the collar before he could complete the words as Buddy reached across the countertop to draw him up short.
Janson started forward, but the grocer, his eyes meeting Janson’s over the distance, quickly shook his head at the same moment he held a hand back to stop Stan.
“You’ve wasted enough time with that nigger—now give me my tobacco.” He released the grocer with a shove. The young woman started for the door, and Mr. Brown watched her go, until at last the door closed behind her. Then he turned an angry look on Buddy Eason. Janson had never seen the grocer angry before, and the look on the older man’s face surprised him.
“You ran my customer off,” Mr. Brown said, his eyes never leaving Buddy Eason.
“She wasn’t nothing but a goddamn nigger—now, get my—”
“She’s a good customer, and she pays her bill, which is more than I can say for you.”
“You better watch your words, old man.” Buddy’s tone changed. There was clear threat in his voice.
“I’ll watch my words, all right. I’ll say something to you that ought to have been said years ago,” Mr. Brown said, coming around the counter to stare up at Buddy Eason. “You’re nothing but a bully, no better than you were when you were a little boy, and it’s a disgrace that you’re Mr. Walter’s only grandson, because you’re not even fit to have his name—and you’re no longer welcome in this store. Now, get out.” The grocer stared up at Buddy Eason, the older man breathing heavily, his eyes never leaving Buddy’s face.
“You better think about that, old man,” Buddy said quietly.
“I’ve thought all I—”
“You old nigger-lover,” Buddy said, interrupting his wor
ds. “You’d rather deal with niggers than white folks.”
“I’d rather deal with the devil than you—now, get out of my store!” The grocer shouted, pointing toward the door for emphasis. “And don’t come back.”
Buddy looked at him for a moment longer, then reached across the counter and took a tin of Prince Albert from the display there. He walked toward the door slowly, but turned back only a moment later. “You’re gonna be sorry you said that, old man,” he said, staring at him from the doorway.
“Just get out!” Mr. Brown yelled the words at him, but they did not seem to matter to Buddy Eason.
“I’ll be back, old man; don’t you worry about that. I’ll be back,” Buddy said. Then he turned at last and left the store.
“Damn old nigger lover—” Buddy said later that afternoon, drawing deeply on the cigarette he had just rolled. The house was quiet, his mother gone for the day, his sisters probably off with a couple of men, his father at the mill—he, Richard Deeds, and Carl Miles had the house to themselves, but Buddy was restless. Few men had ever dared to talk to him as the old grocer had done, and he knew he would have to do something about it. “Damn old nigger lover,” he said again, studying the end of his cigarette.
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