The Emancipation of Robert Sadler

by Robert Sadler

  One afternoon toward the end of the summer of 1925 Buck paid me a visit at my cousin’s. I was overjoyed to see him. “Man! You doin OK!” he exclaimed when he saw me. “Them bones is sure fatter than when I saw yoll last!”

  He told me about a job opportunity in Florida he was all excited about. “They needs workers!” he told me. “They’s astin for men to go and work, and they’ll pay the fare and take it outa the wages later on.”

  It sounded like a good deal, and it was an opportunity to get farther away from Sam Beal. I finished the week at my window washing job, said good-bye to Bessie, and boarded the train with Buck to Vero Beach, Florida.

  The train was crowded. The car we rode in was jammed with Negro men of all ages going to Florida, where—the promotion told us—work and riches waited for us. Our hopes were built up big. For us, who had never hoped for anything at all, it was a new and unfamiliar feeling we weren’t sure about.

  Vero Beach was one big undevelopment. Forest, swamp, sand, and ocean was almost all there was to it. Buck and I got hired by a big land company, and our job was to work clearing the land for development.

  I stayed close to Buck and wherever he went, I went. One day we got separated, and I was sent to a different section of land to work. “Watch out for them rattlers!” a worker warned me. I shrugged and said, “Yessuh,” but I honestly didn’t know what he meant.

  I took my scrub hoe and began digging up palmetto trees. I was in a spot all by myself when I heard a rattling noise. I turned and saw the biggest, longest, and fattest snake I had ever seen. Its fangs were ripping, ready to dig into me. I screamed frantically, and some of the men came running. They tore at that snake with their hoes and killed it. Then they dug up its hole and found about twenty little baby rattlers which they killed too.

  “Thank you, Jesus” was about all I could say. I was so scared that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was too scared to work because of the rattlers, and I was too scared not to work. I was so backward and naïve that I didn’t dare open my mouth.

  On payday we found that the train fare had been deducted, which was a violation of the agreement that said they would wait to deduct the fare for at least three paychecks. Buck was unhappy about the situation.

  “Come on, Robert,” he growled. I followed him to the highway. “You and me, we done had nuff a white men robbin us,” he said, and he had had enough of Vero Beach and getting rich; he was going back to Corrie and his boy. “Reckon yoll stay or come on with me, Robert?” Naturally, I’d go back with him.

  We hitchhiked some, but mostly walked. Day after day we walked. A white man in a Ford sedan picked us up outside of Sebastian and carried us to Melbourne. He had a greasy face and eyes that kept rolling back and forth from us to the road. He asked questions about sex and black anatomy from the time we got into the car until we got out. It made me sick, but Buck said it was nothing unusual. “Them white mens, they think all us Negro mens is studs, and they want to know all about it.”

  We slept outside by the roadside at night. We walked over sixty miles and reached Daytona Beach worn out and hungry. We went to a house near the highway and asked if maybe they could spare a little food. The white lady, probably in her early twenties, said, “Sure! Set youselves down on the porch and I’ll be fixin yoll some food.”

  She served us chicken noodle soup, white bread with butter, and black coffee. Then she gave us both a piece of blueberry pie. I had never tasted blueberry pie and gobbled it up practically without chewing. When we had finished eating, she sat down on the porch with us. She had a smile on her face.

  “Yoll look plumb tuckered.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Best linger on the porch awhile and rest yourselves.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  “I just want you to know that I’m all for you folks.”

  “Hunh?”

  “I believe all the trouble with the Ku Klux Klan is a crying shame, I do. All that fuss because families want to be free. Killings, hangings, tarrings, whuppings, brandings, tearing down property—it’s a crying shame.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “I think Mr. DuBois has the right idea, if you want my opinion. Oh, you people have such talent, too! I have a Victrola and I listen to records. I listen to Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, Bix Beiderbecke—of course, he’s white.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  The young woman, who had very green eyes that looked directly at a person, paused for a moment. Then she said brightly, “You know, I just loved reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I just cried and cried.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just want yoll to know that I’m all for you folks.” She sighed and stood to her feet. Turning, she said, “I want yoll to know it has been an honor to have you eat on my porch today.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  “Now yoll just rest, and I’ll be taking my leave.”

  When she went inside, I looked at Buck and he looked as scared as I felt. We were too tired to go anywhere, though, and we fell asleep in the cool shade of the porch, leaning against the steps. When we awoke, there were about six little white children standing and staring at us. It might sound crazy for two grown men to be terrified of a few small children, but we were. They were staring at us and when we opened our eyes, one of them squealed, and another one jumped up and down, acting foolish. The young woman came running out of the back door.

  “What’s going on here?” she demanded, waving her arms at us.

  One of the children smiled at me and stepped toward me, holding her hand out. I smiled back at her.

  “Ginger Amy! Don’t you touch him!”

  Buck and I recoiled against the porch. “Don’t you try anything!” the woman said. She was very frightened. The veins in her forehead were standing out and her face was red.

  “And to think I cried when Booker T. Washington died!”

  “Ma’am, we didn’t mean no harm—”

  Just then there was a man’s voice from inside the house. “Rosemary, what’s going on out there?”

  Buck jerked away from the porch. “Thank you kindly for the meal, Ma’am,” and he turned and hightailed it for the field adjoining the house. I followed on his heels.

  We could hear the children cheering and the man’s voice from the porch. “My gawd, Rosemary, was those Negroes?”

  Later that night as Buck and I lay on our backs looking up at the stars, I asked him, “Why for that woman be so kindly and then change and act so poorly to us?”

  Buck studied on it. “The way I sees it, Robert,” he said, “is that she be big on the talkin side but short on the bein side.”

  We got out of Daytona Beach and walked until we reached Ormond Beach. There we found a place on the sand near the water to rest our feet. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sound of the ocean rolling upon the shore was soothing and calming, like a sweet lullaby.

  A colored family in a pickup truck stopped for us and carried us to Saint Augustine. From there we walked to Jacksonville. We had very little money left, and Buck decided we would have to find jobs and get some money up before we could make it the rest of the way back to South Carolina.

  “With two of us, it won’t take no time hardly at all,” he said confidently.

  But it took two years.

  22

  Jacksonville’s downtown district is set in a bend of the St. Johns River where the river turns eastward to join the Atlantic Ocean, some ten miles away. Buck and I walked the crowded hot streets, and then we turned into a building that a taxi driver told us was an agency hiring laborers. We climbed two flights of wooden steps and entered a small, hot waiting room with several benches lined up in rows, behind which were low swinging doors and some desks where a white woman and two white men were sitting.

  There were no other men in the waiting room, and so Buck and I stood quietly waiting until one of the men called out, “Either one of you done cement work?” Buck answ
ered quickly, “Oh yessuh, yessuh, we has.” I was surprised at his lie, but went along with it. For the next two years we worked mixing mortar for a building contractor.

  We rented a room in a rooming house in south Jacksonville. Every weekend there was a party going on. I was very shy about being around people, but Buck encouraged me to go to the parties. “Come on, Robert, you needs some fun!”

  “I don’t want to go to no party nohow.”

  “Boy, you is crazy!”

  “I don’t want to go to no party, Buck.”

  When Buck would persist, I’d flare with frustration. “Buck, I been locked in a white man’s house most mah natural life! I been in prison in thet Big House! I was put out to the field an’ live like a animal— How’s yoll spect me to act right around wimmin and parties!”

  “You forgit. You a human bean jes like everybody else. Jes watch ole Buck, thas all. Do like I does an’ yoll be fine.”

  He would go to the parties, and I usually stayed in the room. Occasionally I would walk around south Jacksonville to get out, but I wasn’t used to freedom. I was always looking over my shoulder. The palm trees were beautiful, sweeping the sky with their long, slim fronds, and the air was sweet and fresh. It felt good to just look around. I bought ice cream almost every day and I would have lived on ice cream alone if I could have.

  I thought of Mary Webb making ice cream for the Beal family. I was forbidden to go near the bowls of sliced peaches and the huge pans of cold, rich ice cream. I could remember the sick longing for just one tiny drop on the end of my tongue, and now here I was, eating peach ice cream to my heart’s content.

  Bananas sold for a nickel a bunch, and I would buy them and eat as many as ten at once. I had never tasted bananas, or most fruits, having only gotten fruit once a year at Christmastime on the plantation, and then only hard oranges and soft peaches. I went on an all-out eating binge. Peanuts, candy, apples, oranges, pears, peaches, pineapple, pastries, and ice cream. Whatever I saw that looked good, I bought and ate. While I worked on my job I dreamed of the delicious treats that waited for me.

  There was a young white clerk in a grocery store on Atlantic Avenue who waited on me one afternoon. He was a college student, I believe. I heard him laughing as I was leaving the store.

  “Man,” he clucked, “it sure don’t take much to make a nigger happy. Just give him some candy and some ice cream and he thinks he’s in heaven!”

  I discovered clothing stores, too. I bought shirts, pants, socks, underwear, a leather belt, a green cap, and a ring with a shiny blue stone. Underwear and socks were a luxury I couldn’t get used to. I felt silly wearing such unnecessary things. Inexperienced with buying clothes, I often brought consternation to the store clerks.

  “Lemme have one of them red shirts.”

  “Which shirt do you mean?”

  “Any one. Jes so it’s red.”

  “All right, what size do you wear?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “—You don’t know?”

  “No. I’ll take any one.”

  I needed some shoes. In the white stores Negroes weren’t allowed to try anything on so I chose the shoes that looked the shiniest and most impressive. I bought shoes that were much too small for me and pinched my feet terribly. When I got back to our room, I practiced tying the laces until I had it right and then wore those too-tight shoes until they were worn out. They left painful bumps and corns, but I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that shoes weren’t supposed to hurt.

  Buck and I talked about getting back to Anderson, but every payday the money went out, and we never had enough to last from week to week. Buck became quite popular with the girls, and there were always one or two chasing him.

  There was one girl in particular named Beulah who had Buck thinking he was the finest man on earth. I never cared for her, and she didn’t like me too well either. Beulah hung around Buck all the time like he was honey on a stick, and when Buck got to trusting her, she up and ran off with his paycheck and every stitch of his clothes. She even took his frying pan and his hair cream. He was stripped bare by the time Beulah was finished with him.

  “Serves you right, Buck!” I laughed. “Parties and wimmin! ‘Jes watch ole Buck’!”

  Finally in September of 1927, two years after we arrived in Jacksonville and three months after my sixteenth birthday, we boarded a train for South Carolina. We had two five-dollar bills between us. I was sixty pounds heavier and as round as a grapefruit. Buck was lean, strong, and handsome, and he knew it.

  We rode in silence, and my mind went back to the Beal Plantation. I thought about Big Mac and wondered how he was doing. I tried to imagine him at work in the smokehouse or in the kitchen cooking for the hired hands. Buck saw the look on my face.

  “Robert, where you is?”

  “I’s jes thinkin, Buck.”

  “Look like you studying on it mighty hard.”

  “Uhm.”

  I remembered Big Mac’s delight when I beat up the Beal boys that afternoon. “Law diddie law diddie, law dee ay . . .” Oh, Lord, some things are so hard to think on, a man would almost rather have the whip on his back than suffer certain remembrances in his mind.

  “When you last see Big Mac?” I asked Buck suddenly.

  “Hunh?”

  “I ain’t laid eyes on him, Buck, not after they put me outa the Big House.”

  “Don’t trouble your mind, Robert—”

  “They gonna be a day I gonna see him agin, Buck. I has to see Mac agin!”

  Buck was very serious then. He put his head down and said in a low voice, “Robert, they’s somethin’ I never done tole ye . . .”

  I held my breath.

  “I jes couldn’t tell ye, what with you bein in the bad spot you was in. I mean, we didn’t know if you was gonna be alive one sunup from the next . . .”

  “Say what you has to say, Buck.”

  “Wal, Robert, ye gotta understand that you was sech a young feller—hardly nothin’ but a dumb lil ole boy who tuk to stealin . . .”

  “Buck, say it out.”

  “Big Mac is dead, boy.”

  “Lord!”

  “I couldn’t tell ye!” Buck struggled to speak. “After you was sent out to the field, he jes died. They say it was of a fever. He had some bad burns on his body, and he was a old man. . . .”

  There are certain feelings you get when your world is so low it hardly seems it could get lower. It’s like when your nose is broken so many times you’d almost look forward to breaking a foot. Or when you’ve done so much crying that laughter becomes pain. I didn’t speak again on the way to Greenville. If Buck spoke to me, I didn’t hear him. I looked out the window and saw only a black furrowed face with a long silver scar along one side.

  In Greenville, Buck hugged me good-bye, and I watched him run down the hill toward town, past the bars and cafés, and around the bend along the twisting road to town. Corrie would be waiting. I stood alone on the platform for several minutes. I was sixteen years old, I couldn’t read or write, I had no place to go and no one to go to.

  I walked slowly toward town with my grip in one hand and a paper bag of Florida oranges in the other. I walked until the paved streets ended and the dirt ones began. You can always tell when the pavement is behind you and the dust of the road hits your face that you’re in the colored section of town.

  Remembering her street, I walked to Cousin Bessie’s where I had stayed before, but when I got to the door a stranger answered. “Bessie done moved to Charlotte,” a pleasant, round-faced black woman told me. “Her husband died and she just up and left for Charlotte. Who’re you?”

  “I’m Robert Sadler, Bessie’s cousin.”

  “She got a sister, Gertrude, living right down yonder,” she told me, and so I picked up my grip and oranges and walked in the direction she pointed.

  Cousin Gertrude was a thin young woman with cinnamon skin. She wore a cotton print dress with an apron tied around her middle. I explained who
I was, and she invited me in with a bright smile.

  “Yoll must be plumb tuckered!” she exclaimed, and fixed me a meal of fried catfish, greens, corn bread, and hot coffee. “Eat aplenty now, hear?”

  Cousin Gertrude was an avid church member and an enthusiastic Christian who believed in getting a person saved and sanctified immediately. She let me stay there and preached night and day to me. I listened politely, respecting my memories of Miss Ceily and the experiences I had worshiping the Lord with the others on the Beal Plantation. I remembered Ceily’s genuine love for God and her intensely personal relationship with Him.

  “Robert, you needs to be saved! You come over to church with me to the meeting and get saved before it’s too late.”

  I experienced the same feeling in Cousin Gertrude’s church as the day I sat by the water’s edge with Miss Ceily and the slaves on the Beal Plantation. The exuberant singing, the earnest and powerful prayers ringing through the air, the happy faces and swaying bodies—it all touched me deeply. I felt again the sweet presence of a living God, a God who cared and who was a giver of love and justice. I began to sing along with the rest of the people:

  King Jesus is a-listenin all day long

  That Gospel train is comin

  A-rumblin through the land

  But I hear them wheels a-hummin

  Get ready to board that train!

  I know I’ve been converted

  I ain’t gon’ make no alarm

  For my soul is bound for glory

  And the devil can’t do me no harm

  Glory! Jesus has made me new,

  Glory! I’m alive in the heavenly land,

  Glory! I know the Bible be true

  The Lord hold me in His nail-scarred hand!

  Soon I was weeping. The next thing I knew, I was on my knees at the tarrying bench at the front of the church.

  There was much carrying on over me that night as the women sang and prayed over me. As I prayed, I felt the weight of bitterness and fear begin to slide away from me, and by the time I arrived home, I felt at peace with myself.

  I helped Gertrude with the housework, doing things like washing floors and keeping things clean. The rest of the time I stayed by myself sitting on the porch smelling honeysuckle and watching the sun rise and set. The winding dirt road was peaceful and quiet in the heat at any time of day.