Nightjohn

This is a story about Nightjohn. I guess in some ways it is a story about me just as much because I am in it and I know what happened and some of it happened to me but it still seems to be most about him.

Nightjohn.

There’s some to say I brought him with witchin’, brought Nightjohn because he came to be talking to me alone but it ain’t so. I knew he was coming but it wasn’t witchin’, just listening.

It happened. How it came to be was that Nightjohn he came and it wasn’t me, wasn’t nobody one or the other brought him except maybe it was that God did it, made Nightjohn to come.

God and maybe old Clel Waller. He wants that we should call him “master,” and they’s some do when he can hear but we call him dog droppings and pig slop and worse things yet when he ain’t listening nor close. He ain’t no master of nobody except that he’s got dogs and a whip and a gun and so can cause hurt to be on some, bad hurt, but he ain’t no master for all of that. We just call him that when we have to. Keeps him from whipping on us.

I’m Sarny and they be thinking I’m dumb and maybe up to witchin’ and got a stuck tongue because when I birthed they say I come out wrong, come out all backwards and twixt-and-twinst. But it
ain’t so that I’m dumb. I’m just quiet and they be thinking because I don’t make noise and go to twattering all the time that I be dumb. But I ain’t. I just be so quiet and listen all the time that I learn things.

I’m Sarny and the other part of my name be the same as old Waller who wants to be master but is nothing. Nothing. I don’t count the back part of my name no more than I count old Waller himself. No more than I count spit.

My mammy she told me that my birthing mammy was sold when I was four years old because she was a good breeder and Waller he needed the money. My mammy said that my birthing mammy brought enough for four field hands and that she cried when the man bought her. My mammy say that my birthing mammy stood in the back of a wagon and watched back and
waved and my mammy held me up so I could see the waving and hear her crying. But I don’t remember that.

All I know for a mammy is the one that raised me, old Delie, and she be the one who raises all the young. Breeders don’t get to keep their own babies because they be spending all their time raising babies and not working. So when they’re born babies go to the wet nurse and she feeds them and then old Delie gets them and they don’t live with their birthing mammies again even if they aren’t sold off.

It isn’t for certain how old I am except for the Micks. Mammy keeps a stick for each one of us and in the summer she cuts a notch on the stick for each of the girls so as to know when it will come time for the troubles and then the breeding. Waller puts great store in the sticks and watches them like a old hawk watching the chicken pens.

By the stick I am going into the same year as all the fingers on both hands, fold them down, then hold up the thumbs. Delie says it be twelve but I don’t know numbers to count so that doesn’t mean so much to me. I don’t yet have the trouble so I am still left to be as a child. We work around the quarters and clean the yard and gather eggs and help mammy with the young ones. It’s work, but it ain’t dawn to dark hard work like the field work and it leaves me a bit of time to listen and see things. Mammy she tells me some things to learn and I hear some others from the field hands who come back at dark and now and again I have to work in the flower beds below the big window on the white house.

The house women are fond of leaving the window open and talking all their business right there. So when I’m in the flower bed below the window I hear
more things to learn. When the day is coming on dark and we are all finished eating out of the trough in the front of the quarters I get onto the pallet in the back of the long log house with Delie and the babies and I lays there and thinks.

I thinks of all the things I have learned that day and then I tries to add them to the things I learned the day before and then the day before that. I’ve been doing that as long as I can remember, since I was almost just walking, and I remember all the parts of my life. If there is time of an evening and I haven’t been worked to the bone I can just lay there in the dark and think on all my time and remember it. Except for my birthing mammy—I can’t think on her at all except to wonder and wonder about her. Did she have dark skin or light? How was her voice, how did it sound? But you can’t remember what
isn’t there and no amount of thinking on it will make it come into my brain.

It was in the flower bed that I first heard about Nightjohn. Not by name, but by happening.

One morning I was below the window working in the roses. Some leaves had fallen because of the little green bugs that eat the roses and I had to chew tobacco leaves and spit on the plants to kill the bugs. I didn’t much like to chew on tobacco leaves, though some of the men favored it, and it made me sick enough to near heave my guts. I had to stop and while I was stopped, just under the window down in the thick leaves and the soft dirt, I hears it.

“I swear—if Clel doesn’t stop buying hands we won’t have any money left for dresses.” It was the missus talking to her sister. Her sister be an older woman never found a man, dried up and mean and she hates us. The missus is named Margaret and her sister named Alaine or something close to that. Course we never call them by their names. Never talk to them at all. And when we talk about them in the quarters and ain’t nobody listening but quarters’ people we call them same as the master. Call them dog droppings or horse crap.

“He went out and bought another hand,” the missus said. “Over a thousand dollars. Honestly, he must think we’re made of money.”

I didn’t know counting but I knew a little of money. Once I found a penny in the dirt by the quarters and I went to mammy and held it out.

“Hide that,” she told me. “That’s
money. Somebody see that and they’ll come along and take it from you.”

So I figured money was something to have and keep and I kept the penny, hid in the dirt at the end of the quarters and I still have it. Sometimes I take it out when there ain’t anybody around and rub it on my shirtdress until it shines and shines.

And I knew that there was bigger money than a penny but I didn’t know how that all worked, that bigger money, because it wasn’t something I learned. So when the missus she said about a new hand costing a thousand dollars all I knew was that it was more than a penny. More than many pennies. Maybe more than all the pennies in the world because they be rich, the people in the white house.

Richer than God, mammy said once, but she was just mad and didn’t mean it. She’d been praying and got caught at
it. People in the quarters weren’t supposed to pray nor know nothing about God. Mammy she prayed all the time, in her head. Usually she only prayed out loud late at night when there wasn’t anybody to hear her. Sometimes she brought in the big cast iron kettle used for making morning food to pour in the trough for us to eat.

Mammy would put the kettle in the corner of the quarters, way back in the dark corner, and put her head inside the kettle so’s the sound wouldn’t carry and she’d pray in a whisper. She swore they could hear like cats up to the big house and the only way to keep safe was to pray in the kettle.

I one time put my head in the kettle with her.

“Lord Jesus,” she said, talking to the bottom of the kettle. “Lord Jesus, you come be making us free. Free someday. In your name, amen.”

I was small then and didn’t know about being free, or even how to think about being free, or even what being free meant. So I asked her what free meant.

“Nothing to talk about now,” she said. “You’ll know when you get older but now you just be quiet and never, never say you heard me praying about being free.”

Which I never did, even after I learned what freedom is and started praying for it my ownself. Even then.

The people in the white house aren’t richer than God, I know that.

But they be rich, and they be spending a lot of money and they brought in the new hand for a thousand dollars.

And that be Nightjohn.

Old Waller brought him in bad.

Sometimes they come in not so bad. Spec’lators bring them to sell sometimes all in a wagon, sell them from the wagon and Waller he buys them one or two or whatever, right from the wagon.

Sometimes Waller he goes for to buy them at some other place and brings them home in the wagon, sitting in the back. Old Waller on the seat with a pistol in his belt, sitting like he thinks he’s big. Other places, near here, other
places have what they call overseers to use the whip and to use the gun and go to get them. But not here. Waller he loves to carry the whip and carry the gun and so he rides in the wagon his ownself and makes on to be big. Sitting there like he don’t know we hate him.