Little Big Man (23 page)

Lavender told me that. He dropped in frequent when I started to improve. I remember the first time I saw him standing alongside the bed as I woke up from the napping with which I put in most of that time, I had the delusion I was back among the Cheyenne. He was
very black of countenance, but the Indians sometimes painted themselves that color: anyhow, he wasn’t white.

So I made a remark in Cheyenne.

“Pardon?” says he, widening his eyes, and then I seen who he was and felt embarrassed.

“Now then,” he says, “you just rest easy. Don’t you worry none about old Lavender. He just come to see how you was.”

He generally referred to himself in that style, as if he was talking about a third person. I guess he had some theory that you wouldn’t suffer him to say “I” or “me.”

I says: “I thought you was an Indian.”

Sometimes one remark will make you a friend, and it generally ain’t planned to do so, for I have found that you can seldom intentionally make up a successful compliment. I don’t mean I was enemies with Lavender before saying that; it was rather that we took each other for granted as kid and servant. I reckon he had come to visit me out of curiosity.

He says: “I snuck up here while everbody but Lucy’s not to home, and Lucy don’t know I did or she’d be riled.”

I had a room all my own on the second floor, with a big soft bed that took me a while to get onto sleeping in without taking down seasick.

“Ain’t you never been here before?”

“I carried up furniture,” Lavender says, “and washed the windows, but never come for socializing. I suppose if it be known I was here now, you might say you ast me.”

“Sure,” I told him, and then you know how a person will feel self-pity when he’s sick: “I reckon you’re the only one who cares whether I live or die. You’re the only one who come.”

“You just don’t recall,” he says. “The Lady was here all the time, and the Reverend made his prayers and I reckon had he not you’d be stone-cold and they’d have dug a hole in the ground and drapped you in and shoveled the earth back on and stomped it down.”

“Well,” I says, “so long as it didn’t happen I wish you wouldn’t go on about it in such detail. Do you figure it was God who saved me when asked by the Reverend?”

Lavender gets a sly look. “That doctor ain’t likely to have done it when he run Lucy off from giving you any of her tonic what is made from roots and suchlike and will cure any ailment. I tell you,
there was a time when everything I et turned to poison and my stomach felt like a fishnet. Lucy give me her tonic and inside a week I could chew up and swally a bone like a dog and never tell the difference from a bowl of mush.”

I said: “Why don’t you set upon the chair there?”

“I wouldn’t mind it a-tall,” says he and does as much, a little stiff at first and then gradually taking his ease. “Say now, that was a funny thing, you taking me for an Indian. I never knowed they was black.”

I just realized I had a mustard plaster on my chest, because it started to itch, and so I was scratching while we talked.

I says: “I saw a Cheyenne dark as you down on the Solomon’s Fork. They called him Mohkstavihi, which is the same name they give to any colored person like yourself.”

“Black Man?”

“No, Black White Man.”

He laughed out loud at that, then stopped short and nodded serious. “I got to burn leaves now,” he says and goes out. I wonder if I had hurt his feelings, but it was the truth, which is supposed to make you free.

However, back he come the following day, when Mrs. Pendrake had gone out shopping again and the Reverend was in his study, and this time Lavender never feared Lucy on account of he got bold enough to ask Pendrake’s permission to see me, which was granted.

He also took the chair without being asked, which was O.K. by me, for owing to my upbringing I never had no views on how fresh you should let a darky get, though that was a worrisome thing to plenty of whites in Missouri.

It turned out that Lavender was fascinated by Indians. I have said Mrs. P. listened that first day to my experiences, but that was the end of it, so I suppose she did then just to be mannerly. And anybody else I run into would have rather died than asked me about that subject, I reckon.

But Lavender couldn’t get enough of it. I would have thought he was going to write a book had he not been illiterate.

After a time he says: “That dark Indian you told me about seeing on the Solomon River, I been thinking on him, and I figure he might be kin.” Lavender was a smart fellow; he couldn’t read nor write and never had a day of schooling, but he knowed a great deal of
things. He started talking now about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, who we hadn’t yet got around to in the school, for their names was new to me.

“Why,” he says, “them white men went up the river until it got so skinny they could stand with one foot on the right bank and one on the left, and then found the tiny hole it trickled out of, and could have stuck a finger in it and stopped it off, and you wouldn’t have had no more Missouri River but just a big ditch of mud two thousand miles long, dryin’ and crackin’ in the sun.”

I didn’t believe him, but later I heard it was true—I mean about Lewis and Clark being real people; whether they could have stopped off the Missouri with one finger was another thing.

“Captain Lewis and Captain Clark took along a colored man named York, and the Indians had never seen a colored man before and thought York was painted black, so would spit on their hands and try to rub York’s color off, and when they couldn’t, they’d tell all the other redskins for miles around and they would all come and try to rub the paint off him too.

“York was the most interesting thing the Indians found about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark. And you know what he done, for he was right humorous, he told them Indians he had started life as a wild animal and Captain Clark caught him in a snare and tamed him into a man. Then he roared and showed his teeth and the Indians would run away. But they took a great liking to York, give him presents and had him lay with their women so as to get some black babies.”

Lavender raised his eyebrows. He said: “Now it is likely if you was to go out there today you would run into some of his offspring, which it looks to me like you done. York was a first cousin to my granddaddy. I believe he was the most famous person in my family.”

“It could be,” says I.

“The more I think about it, the surer I am,” Lavender says, and then he leans over close to me, keeping his voice down: “I don’t mind telling you I’m fixing to go out there myself.… Now you go and mention that to Lucy and I’ll be in trouble.”

“You ain’t taking her along?”

“That’s my reason for leaving,” he whispers, while looking fearfully towards the doorway. “You let a woman catch you and you’ll have reason to be sorry for it every minute of the day. Now the
Reverend bought me from my old master and he freed me according to law. I have heerd him say: ‘No man must own another.’ Then he makes me marry Lucy, for I expect he believe it’s all right for a woman to own a man. The way I look at it, I had one benefit from law and one defect, so I am even now and before I get to losing I want to go out where they don’t have any laws a-tall and are purely savage.”

“Maybe we should go together,” I said. Until that minute I never had thought of running away from the Pendrakes, for they had treated me well, but I had been in civilization for a couple of months now and still couldn’t see no sense to it whenever Mrs. P. wasn’t around. Now I was sick in this shameful way: you hadn’t ought to be made ill by the rain, which is a natural thing. What it meant was that I wasn’t living right. About the only time I felt proper in town is when I throwed that kid Luke English to the ground and went for my knife. And I believed my blood was getting watery from the lack of raw buffalo liver. The only thing I learned so far that seemed to take real root was lustful yearnings, and the Reverend told me they was wrong.

“If you can wait till I am better—” I began.

But Lavender frowned and said: “I ain’t going to listen to that talk. The difference between me and you is I am colored and you is a boy. Now nobody has no call to stop a colored man who ain’t a slave from running off, but if he takes a boy with him, he got trouble with the law again.”

“Listen,” says I, “once we get beyond Fort Leavenworth, I’ll be taking
you.”

That hurt his pride and he mumbled some with his eyes down, and he allows: “Well, I’m going tonight, anyway. I would wait if I could, but I cain’t.”

“What difference would another few days make?” For I thought to be up within that time.

“Ever hour is a living agony,” says Lavender. “It is a monstrosity of nature for man to be ruled by woman.”

I figured he got them words from something Pendrake said, so I asked if Lucy give him so much trouble, why didn’t he get advice on it from the Reverend?

“Look here,” Lavender tells me, “I ain’t going to say nothing against your Daddy.”

“He is my Pa,” says I, “only in that law you was talking about,
and it is a wondrous thing how a man can get himself new relatives by signing a piece of paper.” It made a real mark on Lavender that I never held a high opinion of law, either, and like himself was a victim of it, though not in his discomfort.

He sort of shrugs with his mouth and says in a low voice: “He ain’t going to get none in the usual way.”

My back started to ache from a twitch of muscle, and I shifted my position in bed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” But I knowed well enough, and my back felt worse at the new angle.

Lavender winced and drew back. “I don’t want to get me in trouble.”

“I thought you was going to run off tonight.”

He opened his eyes. “That’s right,” he says and grins in relief. “That’s right, I sure am.”

“You reach me over that paper and pencil on the desk, I’ll draw you a map of where to find the Cheyenne.” I told him quite a number of useful items on how to get along with the Indians, concluding with: “Now you can be friendly but don’t ever crawl on your belly before a Cheyenne no matter what he does, on account of he’ll do it worse then. I mention that because they have lately had a lot of trouble with whites and might carry a prejudice.”

“Against white men?”

“Of which you are a black-colored one,” I says. “I’m talking of what they believe, which is the truth when you live among them, like law is around here.”

I drawed that map, resting the paper against a book. Lavender couldn’t read, but he ought to be able to follow the lines of rivers.

“If you was going to wait a while, I’d teach you some of the sign talk and maybe Cheyenne as well,” I said.

“No,” he told me, “I cain’t tarry. But I thank you kindly.”

“Hold on,” I says as he starts to rise from the chair. “You never finished what you begun before about the Reverend.”

Lavender went out and looked up and down the hall, then he come back alongside my bed.

“He don’t lay with his Lady,” says he. “I expect on account of he is a preacher, but them other preachers in town has children, so it must not be against the law.”

“You mean never?” I asks. “For I’ve knowed Indians who
wouldn’t do it for a time because of a dream they had or before a war.”

“Never,” says Lavender. “Lucy see that in the yolk of an egg. She got the gift of a witch. That’s the reason I’m leaving. Every time I go with another woman, Lucy see it in an egg.”

Lavender didn’t run off that night. He come in to see me again the next day and never even apologized for not carrying out his plan. Instead he talked as if he meant the
next
night, and the same happened the next, and so on. People who
talk
instead of
do
give me a pain in the arse. I reckon Lavender just wanted somebody to complain to, and that’s all right, but I wish he would of admitted it. On the other hand, I guess you ought to have a different standard for judging a man who had been kept as slave until the age of twenty-two. It takes him a while to know what’s possible, and maybe he should be given credit for just having the idea of real freedom.

Anyways, I oughtn’t to protest his staying, for he was the only person in that town I could talk to with ease. That boy I whipped, Luke English, come around to visit while I was sick. He still hated my guts and figured he had been tricked rather than beaten outright—whites always believed that when licked by Indians—but his Pa wanted to suck up to the Pendrakes, so sent him over with a cake his Ma had made. Luke stopped somewhere on the way and tongued off all the icing; which didn’t matter none to me, though, because I was still off my feed and couldn’t have ate a cannonball like that when well.

As soon as Mrs. Pendrake, who had let him in, went downstairs, Luke started talking indecent. Him and the Reverend could have gone around with a tent show, holding debates on the topic, for they represented the long and short of it.

“Say,” Luke remarked, studying round my room with his mean eyes, “you got quite a wigwam here. Did you ever sneak a girl in?”

“Did you?” I asked him in scorn.

“I don’t have it so private. I got to bunk in with three brothers. My old man and old lady went at it so hard they have filled the house. I also got four sisters. The oldest is just eighteen. Some feller climbs in her bed every night and has his way with her. Pa don’t know what to do about it.”

I was taken in and dumb enough to ask: “Why don’t he shoot him?”

“Oh,” says Luke, cackling, “it’s her husband.”

He sits down on the foot of my bed. “What’s it like with an Indin squaw? I hear they got quite a strong smell. I hear you want one, you throw a bean across the fire and the one it lands near has to go with you even if she’s married to the chief. I never had an Indin woman. The ones I seen have been mighty ugly. I’d druther find me a fat sheep if I couldn’t get nothing else.

“Course I do all right as it is. The other day I come into the room while the darky girl was cleaning. Nobody else was upstairs at the time, though my Ma and sisters was down in the kitchen. So I was feeling like a piece, and I just throwed that black girl down and put it to her.…”