Let the Circle Be Unbroken (24 page)

“Well, I must say, that’s right ambitious,” he decided, and when Mr. Crawford turned his full attention back to his cigarette, he said, “Sam, these here young fellas come to see you ’bout a job.”

Mr. Crawford glanced over, licked the cigarette paper, and gently sealed it to the roll, locking in the tobacco. “How old you be?”

“Fourteen. Both of us,” answered Stacey, indicating Little Willie and himself. “We strong and we can do our share.”

Mr. Crawford stuck the finished cigarette between his lips and lit it, his eyes on the flame. “What kinda job you want?”

“Anything you got. We’re willing to do whatever needs doing.”

“This boy Stacey here’s a good worker, too, Sam,” praised Mr. Harrison with a gentle slap to Stacey’s shoulder. “Known him and his daddy both since they was born. Known his granddaddy too. All of ’em good, dependable men and fine workers.”

Mr. Crawford looked across the field to the line of men and nodded at them. “You see them men out there?”

We all looked at the line.

“Yes, sir,” said Stacey.

“Your daddy in that line?”

“No, sir.”

“He been in it?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s he do?”

“Work on the railroad.”

Mr. Crawford nodded. “Then y’all got something. Most of them men there got nothing at all. Mr. Harrison says you
a good worker so I believe that to be so, but I can’t go hiring no boy of fourteen when there’s men out there been waiting months, maybe years to make some money. Now can I?”

Stacey looked directly at Mr. Crawford. I thought he was going to agree with him, but instead he said: “We all trying to keep from losing what we got. Me no less than them others.”

Mr. Crawford seemed somewhat surprised by the statement. Glancing at Mr. Harrison, he looked back at Stacey with appreciation. He waved his cigarette hand at him. “I tell you what. This here project’s s’pose to keep going the next five years. You come back when you get to be sixteen, and if I’m still here and the money’s still comin’ in, I’ll hire you. That’s the best I can do— Farley, didn’t I tell you them men was s’pose to be working on the other side?” He turned back to Mr. Harrison. “Look here, Henry, I’d better see to this myself. Don’t nobody ’round here seem to know what they doing.”

Mr. Harrison watched him hurry off, then turned to Stacey, a look of piercing scrutiny in his eyes. “You serious ’bout working, boy?”

“Why . . . yes, sir.”

“Then I got a job, you want it. Whitewashing. ’bout a week’s work, I figure. Pay you five dollars.”

Stacey was silenced by the offer.

“Well, you want it?”

“I’ll—I’ll have to ask Mama.”

“All right. I’m on my way home now. I’ll drop y’all there and you can ask her.”

Mr. Harrison took Little Willie and Maynard as far as the north end of their farm, then continued to our place, where we hurried into the house while he waited in the car. We found Mama in the kitchen battering okra. She looked up
smiling as we came in, but as soon as Stacey blurted out Mr. Harrison’s job offer, her face grew solemn, and dropping a handful of the okra in the hot oil, she said simply, “No.”

“Ma’am?”

“I said no.”

“But Mama—”

“Stacey, your papa’s not leaving us nine months out of the year, breaking his back on that railroad, so that you can go work on some white man’s place. You’ve got land—four hundred acres out there—of your own to work, and if you want to work somewhere, then you work it.”

“But, Mama, we need that money!”

Mr. Harrison’s horn blasted outside and Mama looked around.

“That’s Mr. Harrison,” I explained. “He brung us home.”

Mama frowned, then took off her apron and went outside with us following.

At the car, Mr. Harrison said: “That boy of yours there tell you what I proposed to him?”

Mama nodded. “He did and we appreciate your offer, Mr. Harrison. But with David away, I really need Stacey here.”

There was a look in Mr. Harrison’s eyes that said he recognized in Mama something he understood. “Well, I was afraid of that. May get another boy from my place to do the work needs doing. Or maybe the Wiggins boy. Ain’t gonna worry ’bout it though for the next few days, so you find you can spare Stacey at all, you send him on down.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Harrison, but I don’t think I’ll be changing my mind.”

“Well, you tell your mama I said hello now.”

“I’ll do that.”

Mr. Harrison backed the car into the road and headed
west toward his plantation. Without thinking, I took it upon myself to say, “Well, there go that five dollars.”

Mama turned to look at me. “What’s that?”

I met Mama’s eyes and figured it was better not to repeat it. “Nothin’.”

Her eyes burned with displeasure. “And what were you doing riding home with Mr. Harrison? Haven’t I told you about riding with white folks? I’d better not catch you doing it again. You hear me?”

Christopher-John, Little Man, and I murmured a distinct “Yes, ma’am,” but Stacey turned from her without a word and started across the backyard.

“Stacey,” she said, “did you hear me?”

Stacey turned and glared at her. “I heard. I heard everything and I figure you’re wrong ’bout that five dollars. We need that money, Mama. Much hard times we been having with the cotton and everything, and then you not teaching and Papa’s leg gettin’ broke, we can’t hardly be talking ’bout not working for the white folks. They the ones got the money, then they the ones we gonna hafta get it from.”

I thought Mama was going to walk up the drive and knock Stacey down for his insolence. She didn’t. Instead she patiently folded her arms and met his accusing gaze. “That may be, but it’ll be quite a few years yet before I have you going out into that white man’s world bowing and scraping.”

“Papa don’t bow and scrape!”

“No. But he has to bend. We all do, and the longer I can keep you from having to, the better I’ll feel. The land, Stacey, that’s more important than Mr. Harrison’s or any other white man’s five dollars.”

“Well, what you think I want the money for? That five dollars of Mr. Harrison’s could’ve gone toward the land tax. Plenty boys my age work outside their place—”

“Well, plenty of boys don’t have land of their own . . . you do.”

Stacey shook his head, as if Mama could not possibly understand how it was with him. “I ain’t no baby no more, Mama, and you gotta stop treating me like one. We need the money and I figures to get me a job—”

“Oh, no,” Mama said as Big Ma crossed the backyard from the garden. “Not as long as I have anything to say about it.”

“Then maybe you won’t.”

Shocked, Christopher-John, Little Man, and I stared in disbelief at Stacey. None of us had ever talked to Mama that way. Looking as though he were as shocked as the rest of us, Stacey glanced our way, then dashed across the yard toward the garden. Mama called after him, but he didn’t stop.

“Boy, don’t you hear your mama callin’ you?” Big Ma demanded as he went past her. But he did not heed her either. “I hear my ears right? That boy sass you?” Big Ma demanded of Mama. “Well, he done got too big for his britches ’round here. Needs a good whippin’, that’s what he needs.”

Mama stared after Stacey in silence. Christopher-John, Little Man, and I kept our eyes on her, wondering what she would do next. “No,” she finally said and slowly walked up the stepping stones to the side door. “It’s not a whipping he needs. . . .” She took one last glance at Stacey’s retreating figure. “It’s David,” she said, and went into the house.

Stacey was changing. In the last year he had grown more than a foot, making him taller than Mama and nearly as tall as Papa. In addition to his new height, his voice had deepened. One morning several months ago he had awakened speaking in somebody else’s baritone. I told him to clear his throat, but he insisted that nothing was wrong with his throat and informed me that all boys’ voices changed. Although I had been aware of Clarence’s and Moe’s voices cracking up and down the vocal scale, Stacey had undergone none of that. When I asked him why he hadn’t, he answered that he was just lucky, he guessed. I suppose he guessed he was lucky as well to have what he called his “mustache,” a simple fuzz
line which he cultivated with delicate daily care and about which, upon Mama’s advice, I wisely kept quiet.

Had the change in Stacey been only physical, I think I could have handled it better, but unfortunately the change had affected other areas as well. Now fourteen, he was a very private person and much preferred to be off by himself somewhere or with Little Willie, Clarence, or Moe rather than with Christopher-John, Little Man, and me, and I frankly resented it. I had always accepted Stacey’s need to have friends his own age, just as the rest of us did, but always before Christopher-John, Little Man, and I had been accepted, no matter how grudgingly, in whatever he was doing, and he had to some extent confided in us. Now too often we were hearing that we were too young to listen to something, or that something or other did not concern us, and the confidences became fewer and farther between.

Sometimes in an attempt to keep things as they had been, I followed Stacey when he went off alone or with one of his friends. Most times he tried to send me back; other times he simply ignored me. I hadn’t yet decided which bothered me most. Once when Moe came over and he and Stacey crossed the road to the forest, I sat for some time debating whether or not to follow. Finally deciding that I had just as much right to be in the forest as they did, I wound my way among the trees to the clearing, where I found them sitting on the bank of the pond, their backs to me. Neither noticed me as I approached, and not feeling like arguing with Stacey on this particular day I settled down some feet away without a word to them. With my hands cupping my head and my eyes on the circle of sunlight sifting softly through the magic of forest green above, I lay comfortably upon a cushiony mattress of pine needles enjoying the stillness of the forest and
paying little attention to Stacey’s and Moe’s conversation; after all, I had not come to eavesdrop. But then Stacey said: “You heard any more ’bout Jacey Peters? I mean ’bout her being with Stuart Walker and Joe Billy?”

My ears perked up. Anything to do with Jacey Peters these days caught my attention.

Moe shook his head. “Nothin’ ’cept for that time at school . . . and, oh yeah, Little Willie did say somethin’ ’bout Clarice and Jacey walking over to Aunt Callie Jackson’s and Stuart and them coming along and offering ’em a ride.”

“But they didn’t get in the car, did they?”

Moe laughed softly. “Little Willie said he didn’t know ’bout Jacey’s folks, but if Clarice had gotten in that car, by the time Mr. Wiggins had’ve gotten through with her she wouldn’t’ve been able to sit for a good week.”

“But you ain’t heard nothin’ else?”

Moe turned curiously toward Stacey and looked at him for a long moment before answering. “Naw, I ain’t heard nothin’ else.” He hesitated, glanced out toward the pond, then back at Stacey. “How come you so interested in Jacey Peters all of a sudden? What? You kinda likin’ her or somethin’?”

Now it was Stacey who was quiet. He threw a pebble into the pond and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean she’s pretty and she’s smart and she’s got a way about her. . . .”

“But you worried ’bout maybe her messin’ ’round with Joe Billy and Stuart?”

Stacey nodded. “She messin’ ’round with white boys, I don’t wanna waste my time with her.”

Again Moe laughed his good-natured laugh. “Stacey, man, you’d probably be wasting your time anyway. That girl’s two years older’n you.”

Stacey laughed too. “You probably right. But . . . I don’t know . . . sometimes I’ve seen her looking at me like . . . like maybe she wouldn’t mind me talking to her.”

“Well, you think that, then go on then. Won’t hurt nothin’. Like you said, she is awful pretty and she’s real nice. Ain’t never heard no bad talk ’bout her, so I wouldn’t worry none ’bout Stuart or Joe Billy.”

“I guess I won’t. I was thinking maybe this Sunday at church I’d—”

“Ah, confound it!” I leapt up from my bed, having realized too late that giant red ants had gotten there before me.

“Cassie, what you doing down here?” Stacey demanded to know, as I danced madly about, swatting at the ants.

“The pond, Cassie,” Moe suggested. “Get in the pond.”

I took his advice and dashed into the water; it rose cool and soothing to my neck.

“You all right?” Moe asked sympathetically.

“Yeah, I guess.”

Stacey, however, showed no concern at all for my discomfort. “Cassie, you follow me down here? Didn’t you ever think maybe me and Moe had something we wanted to talk ’bout in private?”

“Yeah, something private like Jacey Peters,” I retorted, angered by his uncaring attitude.

If looks could kill, I would have been finished right there. But Stacey deigned to say nothing further concerning it, choosing instead to change the subject. “Moe, how’s your cotton coming?”

Moe smiled at me before he answered, showing at least he cared about my misfortune. “It’s looking good,” he said, his voice lifting as it always did whenever he spoke about his cotton. “I think it’s gonna work out for us this time.”

“You know I hope you’re right, Moe. But don’t get your
hopes up too high—you know how things turned out last year and—”

Moe dismissed the reminder with a wave of his hand. “I know . . . But this year it’ll be different. You’ll see.”

Stacey looked as if he wanted to say more, but then seemed to reconsider. “I just hope you’re right, Moe.”

“Stacey! Cassie! Ow, y’all!”

We looked toward the trail leading back to the house and waited for Christopher-John and Little Man to appear. Twice more they yelled before they actually burst into view.

“What’s the matter?” Stacey asked.

“Y’all guess what!” cried Christopher-John.

“Y’all ain’t never gonna guess!” exclaimed Little Man.

“Well, what?” I said.

“It’s Cousin Bud!” Christopher-John blurted out. “He come back.”

Stacey’s face went cold. “He’s here?”

“Yeah, he’s here,” Christopher-John answered. “He jus’ come and y’all ain’t never gonna guess—”