“No, sir,” John said.
“Well, don’t just stand there.”
“Now, right now, you want me to go?”
“Course right now. Just go in the post office and say you come for the Spraig mail. That don’t take big-road walkin’ sense.” The three of them looked at him.
He stared back at them, then slowly got up off the dirt and turned to go.
“Get back here ’fore it turns dark or you’ll miss supper.”
John began walking through the cotton plants in the direction of the road in the distance. “How far—” But he said it in such a small voice, they didn’t hear him, and he was too embarrassed to turn and go back to them and ask.
He walked on toward the dirt road that ran between fence lines separating two fields. When he got to the fence, instead of crawling through, he stood on the bottom wire, holding on to a fence post, to look back at what were now the small figures of Uncle Luther and Little Luther still sitting in the field on fertilizer sacks. He climbed over the wire and hopped down to the other side onto the road. This must have been the one they had taken with Judge Vance’s driver. There were deeply eroded tread paths that might have been the same ones they had bounced over that first night. Now that night seemed months ago.
John looked down at his hands. The skin was still peeling from around the fingers, but the blisters on the palms were beginning to callus over. He was to go all the way into town and back by himself, a thing he had never imagined his mother letting him do when he lived in Bainbridge. In the space of a few weeks, he had never in his life been so restricted and so set free.
From time to time, he would hop up on one of the low barbed wires to make sure Uncle Luther was still there and that he, John, was where he was supposed to be.
When he had walked two miles or so, the asphalt road appeared out of nowhere in between rows of cotton on both sides. There was no road sign to start one or end the other. He sat down on the edge of the paved road to empty the dirt out of his shoes, then got up, turned right, and began to walk along the edge of the blacktop highway. He had never actually walked on a highway before. He had ridden over one many times but never actually touched one. He studied the loose pieces of asphalt on the edges of the road baking to the point of melting in the sun, the debris left by other travelers, puffs of cotton fallen off some gin-bound wagon, discarded cigarette packs. He stepped on each of the Lucky Strike packages he saw and repeated the old rhyme his next-door neighbor in Bainbridge had taught him. “One, two, three, luck for me.” He hoped it might help in some way.
Queen Anne’s lace and yellow daisies grew in intermittent patches. Every so often, he could see, off in the flat distance, a car or truck coming toward him or he could hear one coming up behind. They passed in a swirl of wind, kicking up loose gravel and dust. He kept his head down, the better to go unnoticed.
After what seemed another mile or so, he came over a small rise in the land, and off in the distance were the trees and houses of Lower Peach Tree. The town meandered off to his right, built almost perpendicular to the road he stood on. Like everything else he had seen in this country, it seemed to have been born out of an accommodation to the surrounding land. There was a concentration of businesses and churches on the main road. As he walked closer, he counted four church steeples. Houses were built around connecting roads that thinned themselves out at the edge of town, until they gave way once again to the rolling fields. The Texaco station was right where Uncle Luther had placed it, situated across the highway, facing the main street. He turned right onto the sidewalk that began at this point. A man in a Texaco shirt and khaki trousers watched him as he passed. John got as far as raising the fingers of his left hand to wave, then thought better of it and kept his arms at his side. A few cars were parked in the painted slots that ran out from the sidewalk. He passed Eller’s Five and Dime and the Piggly Wiggly. McKinna’s Hardware had a new Dumont television displayed in the window. Three people, one white and two colored, stood watching vague figures on a snowy black-and-white screen. John watched for a minute, couldn’t make out what the picture was supposed to be, then kept walking in the direction of the post office. The few people, white and black, who were on the street seemed to notice him but didn’t speak, and he felt no obligation, either.
In times past, she had always had him speak to everyone he knew. In those days, he would have rushed to open the door for the lady he saw coming out of the Piggly Wiggly, arms loaded with groceries. He heard a faraway train whistle. The station must be somewhere on the other end of town. He crossed the street to gain the post office two blocks away.
On every corner there was a church: first the Baptist, then the Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, even a small Church of Christ. This town was tiny compared with the town he used to live in, but it seemed to have just as many churches.
A square brick building that sat under a large oak tree, the post office gave notice to the outside world that the town of Lower Peach Tree did in fact exist. There was the official town sign, and the official U.S. flag run up the official U.S. flagpole. He was about to open the heavy glass door, when the person coming out beat him to it. He recognized her immediately as the woman he had met with her husband on the train coming to Lower Peach Tree, and without thinking, he said, “Afternoon, Mrs. Vance.” And she, without thinking, returned his greeting. It was only after they had passed that they became aware of each other. He stopped at the door and turned to watch her walking down to the sidewalk.
She felt his eyes and turned slowly. “Who is this?” She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun. “Do I know you, honey?”
He closed the door without answering.
The mailman handed him two advertisements, a church bulletin, and notice of an antiques auction at the Trash-n-Treasure over in Selma. He left to start the walk back home, but not before he made sure Mrs. Vance had gone.
Right before he pulled the heavy glass door open, he gave a start and jumped back, noticing a figure reflected in the glass. It was no one he knew, possibly a stranger, coming up behind him. He hurried on past the door to begin the long walk home.
The Bend
FROM the time Tuway was a child, she had prepared him for the day when he would go off to Tuskegee. He had not been old enough to know what the word meant when he first heard it. She had talked about Tuskegee so much that he had always thought of it as something that was inevitable.
It was not until he was fifteen that he began to question her. Why did he have to go? He hated the way people stared at him when they saw him for the first time. This would be a strange place full of strangers. They would all stare.
She would try to placate him. “Peoples might stare at first, but that don’t matter. After awhile, they get used to you. You gonna like it. Be just like here at the Bend. Why, look here,” she said. “You remember that time last month we went to town, that Saturday—we went in and had us some barbecue at The Store. Nobody paid us no mind.”
He noticed she failed to mention that on Saturdays in Lower Peach Tree there were only colored people in town anyway and on that Saturday a good number of them were neighbors from the Bend.
He would try to argue with her, but she always had an answer for all of his objections. After a time, he would give up, until, on some later occasion, the subject would surface again and he could feel his jaw clinching.
“What about clothes?” he had asked. “I ain’t gonna have clothes enough to stay there. I probably ain’t got the right kinda clothes anyhow.”
She looked at him with a sly smile. “You sit down right there.” She motioned him to sit down at the kitchen table and then disappeared into her bedroom. She came back minutes later carrying two shirts. “Done made up these here with cloth I got from the rollin’ store.” She held up the shirts made of dark green cotton cloth, then brought them closer for him to examine. “Look at that sewin’. Nearly ’bout put my eyes out with that stitchin’. Them stitches so small, you can’t see’m.” She p
ulled the kerosene light on the table closer so he might get a better look. “And I’m gonna do more once I get some different-colored cloth. By the time I finish, you be better dressed than any man at Tuskegee.”
“That’s nice, Mama,” he said. That was all he could say as he sat there trying to pretend interest in the tiny stitching, trying to make himself appreciate her hard work. Once again, he let the subject drop.
When he was sixteen, he had taken a more belligerent attitude. “Ain’t no reason for me to go on off up there. Jimmy and Calvin, they my same age, they ain’t thinkin’ ’bout goin’. Calvin’s daddy say he wouldn’t let him go off and get outta all the work needs to get done.”
The arguments always seemed to start at the kitchen table. This time, they were eating supper. He took a piece of cornbread and dipped it in his bowl of stew. “Who gonna keep firewood, fix the roof, all them things need to be done?” He took a bite of cornbread. “No, can’t go and leave all them things. People be sayin’ I’m not doin’ my duty. Can’t do it.”
“Yes you can, and you gonna do it. How you think I got along before you come? I done it then and I can do it now. Besides”—she looked at him and smiled—“you gonna do them things when you come home on vacation. Tuskegee so close,” she said, “you ain’t gonna be more than a day away.”
He ate his stew in silence.
She had made all the inquiries. She had spent hours sitting at the kitchen table at night in the light of the kerosene lantern, writing and rewriting a letter to Tuskegee. The more she did, the more determined he became not to go.
Finally, on the week before he was to leave, she started packing his clothes. She had saved up to buy him a suitcase made of heavy cardboard, and when he came in from working in the fields of a neighbor, she had the suitcase full of his belongings.
He was tired and hot and the sight made him furious. He walked over and slammed down the top. “I never said I was goin’ and I ain’t goin’.” They stared at each other. “I’m a grown man and I ain’t goin’,” he said, and walked out to the basin on the porch to clean off the day’s dirt. When he finished drying his face and hands, he came back to sit at the kitchen table and wait for his supper.
It was a long time before she came out of his room. When she did, she didn’t make a move to get his supper, but sat down opposite him at the table. She took the kerosene lantern that was between them, moved it to one side, and rested her hands flat out on the table.
“I wanta tell you somethin’.” Her hands felt the wood table, looking for the right words. “Guess I was too shamed to tell you before, thought you might be shamed of me if you knew.” She paused again, watching her hands. “You know everybody always sayin’ Mama Tuway knows this and Mama Tuway can do that. Everybody always askin’ me what to do, how to do it.”
He looked down at the table. This wasn’t going to be like the other times when they had argued. Her voice was low. She seemed self-conscious and uncomfortable, shifting in her chair from side to side. She cleared her throat.
“It was a long time ago. I was a little older than you right now.”
She stopped and waited for him to look up at her.
“Remember how I used to tell you stories about my farmin’ days, when I was a girl married to James?”
“Yes’m.” He kept his eyes on the table but sat back in his chair and rested his hands inside the top of his bib overalls.
“Told you all ’bout makin’ a crop. We had that one mule, Sadie. We would commence plowin’ before light and stay out in the fields ’til the sun was settin’.” She smiled, remembering. “Me and James would go to church ever Sunday and pray for rain once we got them seeds in the ground, and then we’d go on back and pray for it to stop once them seeds was up and sproutin’.”
“Yes’m,” he said.
“Then after that, we lived in them fields, choppin’ and hoein’ dawn to dark.” She kept her hands out on the table, running them over the rough surface. “I ain’t sayin’ we wasn’t happy. We was happy as can be, even if we was workin’ hard every day. We knew if the weather treated us right and the weevils didn’t come, we had us a chance to make somethin’.”
“Yes’m, you told me ’bout that.”
“One summer—it was the summer before James passed—everything was goin’ right. The rain come when it should and the sun come out when it should. The bolls on them cotton plants was so thick, look like decorated Christmas trees with all them white balls poppin’ open.
“We picked cotton ’til we could hardly stand up, but we was so excited ’bout the crop, didn’t even cross our minds it was hard work. Had to borrow two extra wagons to take it all to the gin; our wagon wasn’t enough. Started out at midnight so we could be close to the front of the line when the gin opened in the mornin’.
“I can still see me sittin’ there on that gin wagon, goin’ down the road in the moonlight, so proud, tears was wellin’ up in my eyes.
“Gettin’ there, seein’ all that white bein’ sucked up in the ginnin’ house. Made up a whole five-hundred-pound bale. We went around and watched it roll out of the back of the gin onto the loadin’ platform.
“ ’Bout then, we went on inside the office and ask the man, ‘What you givin’?’” She looked up at the ceiling and pressed her lips together. “And he say”—she was shaking her head now—“and he say, ‘See it wrote up there on the board. I’m givin’ twenty-nine and a quarter, best price in the county.’ That’s how he had it wrote out on the board, twenty-nine and a quarter, not the numbers, but wrote out. And he say, ‘That’s what I’m gonna give you, twenty-nine times that fine five-hundred-pound bale you got out there.’ He counted out the cash; then he say, ‘And here’s your quarter,’ and he give us a twenty-five-cent piece.”
“What?” Tuway looked up at her face.
“I was all of nineteen years old, had maybe three years of schoolin’, and I didn’t know no better. I could read some but didn’t know nothin’ ’bout numbers.”
She brought her hand up to her mouth as if she could stop the words. “That’s the God’s own truth; I didn’t know no better.”
“He cheated you.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t know no better then.” She pointed a finger at him. “And you wouldn’t know no better if I hadn’t learned you your numbers.”
He looked back down at the table.
“In them days, what he cheated us ’mounted to four, maybe five days of pickin’ in the fields.” She looked down at rough paper-thin skin covered with scars from years of reaching for boll after boll after prickly boll.
“But the cheatin’ ain’t the worst part, Tuway. That ain’t the worst part.” Her hands clasped each other for comfort. “After all them years, the worst part is thinkin’ of me actin’ like some ignorant pickaninny.
“We walked out of there grinnin’ like we was on top of the world, and that white man lookin’ after us like we was God’s own fool.”
She swallowed hard and shook her head.
“It was a month after, we come to find out, standin’ on the sidewalk in Lower Peach Tree, listenin’ to a man talkin’ ’bout pricin’ to his boy. My whole body started to shakin’ right there on the sidewalk. He said, ‘Now the first thing the man gonna try to pull on you is to say a quarter same thing as a twenty-five-cent piece.’ I was afraid I was gonna be sick right there on the street.
“Me and James didn’t say nothin’ all the way home, thinkin’ ’bout all them hours in the field.
“That night, I made me a vow, wasn’t gonna never let that happen again, never. Next time the rollin’ store come through, took my money and bought me a book on figurin’.” She nodded her head in the direction of her bedroom. “Still in there. Same one I done used to teach you.
“That next spring, James took sick.” She looked over to the flickering lantern. “I coulda used that money to bury him decent when he passed.”
Tuway couldn’t think of anything to say. They sat there in silence. He could
hear the early-evening noises coming from outside the cabin and wished he was in the woods someplace far away from here. He couldn’t imagine her not knowing all the answers. He couldn’t fathom someone getting the best of her. She had told him a story about a person he didn’t know.
Mama Tuway slowly reached her hand to pull the lantern back to the center of the table. Light from the top of the lantern reflected onto her face, making her look like someone he was not sure of. Her eyes watched him across the light. “White man’s gonna cheat you. I been knowin’ that all along, but damned if me and mine gonna be so ignorant we can’t look down on him when he goes to doin’ it.”
She slapped her hand on the table. The light of the lantern flickered. “Look here at me, boy.”
His eyes moved to look straight at her, but his hands still rested in his bib overalls; nothing else of his body moved.
“That ain’t gonna happen to you. You too much a part of me. Listen to me, boy.”
He was listening.
“You ain’t gonna let bein’ different cheat you for the rest of your life. That’s why you goin’ to Tuskegee.” She let the tears run down her face. “There’s no worse feelin’ than somebody takin’ you for the fool.”
He had never seen her cry before. In all their years together, she had never cried in front of him. He put his head down so she couldn’t see the tears in his own eyes.
The next week, he took up his new suitcase and walked out of the Bend all the way to the main highway to catch the bus to Tuskegee.
CHAPTER 16
IT became a routine. Every few days, after being in the fields until midafternoon, Uncle Luther and Little Luther would head home and John would be sent to the post office. Uncle Luther seemed to be less and less interested in the cotton fields, or, as time wore on, he was more and more overwhelmed by the task. There had been no rain since John had come to live with them. He could dig down with his hoe as much as a foot and there was no sign of moisture. The cotton plants in these fields were too young to hold their own against the sun.
Out of the Night That Covers Me Page 9