All God's Dangers (45 page)

So he told me there that day in his house, “Well, Nate, I hit it harder than I ever expected. I done somethin I didn't want to do and thought I'd never have to do it”— O, if he didn't bellow; he bellowed!—“I had to mortgage my home place”—Mr. Grinstead done took a hold and got everything in his hands. And sittin there talkin with him, I could see he was miserable, all out of shape. When he returned from California he had to pay up, get a man to pay up all he owed. He thought he was goin to get a chance to go through like he'd always been doin.

And while I was sittin there talkin with him, he took off his shoes, tan shoes, brand new pair of high-top shoes, and he offered to sell em to me. They was just too hard for him, I reckon. So I looked at em and I said, “Mr. Tucker, I got a pair of Sunday shoes to wear at home. I aint able to buy your shoes. I'll just go ahead, as I got shoes, and let them do.”

I didn't buy them shoes; I didn't intend to buy em when he showed em to me. I didn't need no shoes at that time in particular. I had to put money in things that was needed and things I didn't need right at the present I did without. Mr. Tucker just wanted to get shed of them shoes and get all the money he could. Took em right off his feet—that's the last time I remember ever seein him. When he got his business straightened up, he moved Mr. Morris Wiley into his house. Mr. Wiley was a man that worked a little crop.

Well, Mr. Tucker's wife picked him up a little bit and backed him up into a boardin house in Auburn and he hung on there a good while. Next news I heard he was dead.

M
R
. L
EMUEL
T
UCKER
, Mr. Horace Tucker, and Mr. Melville Tucker was brothers. I don't know whether Mr. Lemuel went to his brothers when he needed money or not. But I will say this: people won't
jump back on their close relationships for money, usually; they'll go to somebody else. Even if it'll ruin em, they'll go to somebody else. Don't want to press them relationships as hard as a money loan will press em. Won't nothin press em no harder.

Mr. Sam Tucker was father to them three Tucker boys and was the father to some more children. I helped him one time to move his family to Apafalya. Took my wagon and mules—now, I didn't help him move his house goods, but all his out plunder that I could get to, even fence rails; pulled up his house fence and carried them fence rails into Apafalya. They was good rails, hard wood, old-timey fence rails, all of em was pine rails, and he wouldn't leave em on the place after he moved. And what he done with them fence rails, I don't know, but I hauled em into Apafalya. And he moved on the inside of the city limits. He sold his place out in the country to Mr. Lucius Little, white man. He got kind of old and he was supposed to have plenty of money to take care of his lifetime, and so he talked hisself into movin to town. But he felt very hurt for movin—that's what caused him to kill hisself. He just lost out, made a mistake, and he grieved hisself to death, then he killed hisself.

I went to Apafalya one day after I'd helped move him there. And I was in the bank that mornin, had some small business to look after. And Mr. Smith run the bank, Merchants and Farmers Bank, that's the kind of bank it was. Mr. Sam Tucker walked in and spoke to Mr. Smith, then he spoke to me. Stood around there a little and he commenced a worryin, looked like, talkin bout his place he had, he had had, out in the country. He'd been doin fine until he done wrong and sold it. And it was worryin him—I heard a heap of people talk about it too, white people. He said, “I was livin out in the country where I was doin well, and if I'd a just kept my place—that's the thing I oughta done. Kept my place and got Nate here and moved him there on my place with me. I'd a had somebody that woulda worked if I'd a had a good man like Nate, and I'd just be happy and comfortable. I'd a been a hundred percent better off if I'd a just kept it and moved Nate on the place and let him work it.”

He didn't like town a bit, he found that out. He had done got to where he couldn't make a crop hisself and he figured he was just as well to be in town. He didn't need the money he got for his place—that weren't why he moved. He had money enough to take
care of him and his wife and baby. O good Lord, it carried him down. He was a sick, sick, sick man off his trade. And he tried to buy the place back but the wife of the man that had bought it from him, Lucius Little's wife told him, “You'll never get this place back.” The place was right on the Calusa and Apafalya highway and it was a good house on the property. Mr. Tucker built that house hisself and moved into it—him and his wife and had one little girl. And he told his wife, after they moved to Apafalya and he just lost his mind just about—you know he lost his mind when he killed hisself—and he asked his wife to let him kill the baby, then kill her, and then kill hisself. She wouldn't agree to that noway, so he went on by hisself down to a little feed house he had built there below his house in town. And had a lot of corn feed in there, hulls and meal. Got his pistol out the house one day and went down in that feed house and over to the backside of that feed and shot his brains out.

His wife heard the gunfire and it unnerved her. She stampeded and begin to run around and look and all, and she couldn't see him nowhere. She looked around the house sufficient and her mind told her to go down to that feed house. And when she went down there and went in she found him dead. And he showed signs of where he had crawled over them cotton seed hulls and scattered the feed around.

I had only one man to come to me and try to get me to move on his place; white man, he was a native of Macon County and he tried his best to fool me and bait me up to move off of the Pollard place down there on his plantation at Sinking Creek, close to Tuskegee settlement. And he made three trips to see me to my knownst. Somebody'd recommended me to him. I figured him out when he run and made so many trips—and he wouldn't a had to back me up to nothin but land to work, that's all. I had plenty of good stock and plenty of everything I needed to make a crop. Had my own little blacksmith shop, what it took to sharpen a plow, sharpen a scrape, or anything.

I felt at all times that there was somethin peculiar about him—he was the wrong man for me to mess with. And when he first started to come at me he brought a colored man with him. I never did try to know the colored man, I just paid attention to him and
his talk. And he proclaimed to have some other business up there to see after; what it was he never did announce to me, but he let me know enough he was seein after some other business in that settlement.

And I eventually told some of the colored people about that man comin up there. Met up with a fellow one day that knowed him. Told me, “Good that you didn't pay no attention to that man. He was just after what you had. If you'd a moved down there on his place, left from where you was and moved down there and settled down with what you got, it'd been his'n then. He only wants you if you got good stock, tools. That man is known, no matter what you carry on his place, it's his'n then.”

I said, “I thought he was that kind of man.”

He said, “Yes, he don't care how you got your stuff, he don't care nothin bout that; you move there you leave it there when you leave.”

R
IGHT
at that period of time, Mr. Hoover got to be President, hollerin, “Keep the dollar out the niggers' hands.” These white folks down here sang that like singin birds. “Keep the dollar out the niggers' hands.”

I didn't hear Hoover say it but it was told to me he did and the white people repeated it. I do know that it was tight as the devil under his administration. He just sat down on us. The white folks in this country was goin in that direction anyways—nigger couldn't have any of their money to make a start with, no way to make somethin for hisself unless he started with his own money. The idea—“keep the dollar out the niggers' hands”—these white folks went rock bottom with that. Afraid a nigger might do somethin if he got the money in his own hands, do as he please; might hold on to it if he wanted to hold it, might spend it accordin to his pleasure. The white people was afraid—I'll say this: they was afraid the money would make the nigger act too much like his own man. Nigger has a mind to do what's best for hisself, same as a white man. If he had some money, he just might do it.

I heard a white gentleman walkin the streets of Apafalya and playin with his baby and talkin—one of the Russell boys. Weren't no kin as I knowed of to Mr. Ed Russell, who turned me down on fertilize one year; he was of a different set of Russells. One day I
was walkin on the streets of Apafalya and I heard him laughin and talkin to another white man—he had his little chap with him and he was playin with the chap and braggin on him. He told that other white man—and a crowd of em heard him, I heard him, there on the street—“You ask my child about the President, that little fella will tell you: who do we want to vote for—‘Hooooover, Hooooover, Hooooover—' ” They just made a song of that. I looked at the little child as the white people got him to hollerin on Hoover, Hoover, Hoover, and I said to myself, ‘They must want Mr. Hoover pretty bad for the child to be singin a song such as that.'

They said Mr. Hoover was goin to cause the womenfolks to wear bag and sack dresses; and sacks was guano sacks, made out of good, old, tough, heavy material. He was goin to put them to wearin guano sack dresses and all like that. And they hollered out, them that was singin for Hoover—and that was the key to the whole proposition: “Keep the dollar out the niggers' hands. Keep the dollar out the niggers' hands.”

D
URIN
President Hoover's administration, cotton fell to about five and six cents. My best idea for that, and not only
my
idea: it appeared that people was producin more cotton than was needed and that just knocked the bottom off the price. Any year that cotton went down they claimed they was overstocked with it. And whenever it picked up, they claimed they was gettin more calls and more cotton was needed.

Cotton first fell, to my knowin, back in 1914. Then the war boosted the price up to forty cents and I wiped out my debts. Cotton commenced a slidin right after the war until it leveled off at twelve and a half and fifteen cents. Still I supported my family and had everything a poor man needed to make a livin. I was public workin to help my farmin—hauled lumber for the Graham-Pike Lumber Company in Apafalya. I had good stock, a good two-horse wagon, a rubber tire buggy, automobiles. And I drove a bargain with a white man to take over his payments on a farm, the Pollard farm, where Mr. Lester Watson was half interested. Then he got the whole thing out from under the Federal Land Bank and I had to pay him the balance. Cotton knocked off again and that put a lot of we farmers in a hole.

I come up to my house one day—I was out checkin on my fences—and my wife told me there was a card in the mailbox tellin me to come to the bank in Apafalya and sign papers on my place. I said, “If I go, any way I go, you goin with me.” See, she had book learnin and she could read and write. So I told her, “Well, we'll go to Apafalya this evenin, right after dark.”

She was right down with me. Sometimes she'd say, “Darlin, you know what's best to do. But you can't decide
what
to do until you knows every side of the proposition. And bein that you can't read and write, it's profitable for us all for you to make me your partner.”

I told her, one day, and many a time, “I'm married to you. And I think my best business should be in your hands. If anybody knows the ins and outs of it, you the one to know. But so far as workin in the field, I aint never had a high opinion of that and I intend to always be that way. Your business is at the house, mine's out in the field.”

She was a girl that her mother would put all her business in her hands—her mother couldn't read and write. You could drop any sort of paper in front of Hannah and she could pick it up and read it like a top. She was pretty far advanced in education. She wasn't a graduate but she understood anything and could talk it off, too. She was, in a way of speakin, the
eyes
and I was the mouthpiece.

So, when I went there to sign them papers, I told her, “You goin with me.”

I wanted her to read them papers to me; I knowed they weren't goin to do it. All I had to do was sign, but I wanted to know what I was signin.

Watson had taken over the place from the federal government and it was him I had to sign with. My wife and I jumped in the car and went right on to Apafalya. Got there and walked in—weren't nobody there in the bank but Mr. Grace and Mr. Watson. O good God, the doors flew right open and I broke out; I couldn't help it, I got red hot. I was signin—called it signin papers on that place. I knowed what I was signin before I signed; that's what brought the devil up.

“Hi, hello, Nate.”

“Hello, Nate.”