Nightjohn (2 page)

But he can bring them in good or he can bring them in bad and with Nightjohn he brought him in bad.

Not in the wagon. He was walking, all alone in front of the horse. Waller riding the big brown horse in back. Had a rope down and over to a shackle on Nightjohn’s neck. Rope tied to the saddle. So when the horse stopped, Nightjohn he stopped, jerked on his neck.

Waller he brought Nightjohn into the main yard near the quarters out in the open, yelling and swearing at him. Yanking on the rope. Nightjohn he didn’t have any clothes on, stood naked
in the sun. I was by the quarters, carrying water to wash the eating trough before it was time for the evening feeding and I saw them.

Standing in the sun with the rope going from his neck up to the saddle, tired and sweating because Waller ran him. Dust all over him. Flies around his shoulders.

His back was all over scars from old whippings. The skin across his shoulders and down was raised in ripples, thick as my hand, up and down his back and onto his rear end and down his legs some.

I wondered why he was bought with all the marks. When they be marked that way people don’t buy them because it means they hard to work, hard to get to work.

But he did. Waller he brought Nightjohn home and ran him naked till he sweated and the biting flies took at
him and I was there and saw him come in.

I’m brown. Same as dark sassafras tea. But I had seen black people, true black. And Nightjohn was that way. Beautiful. So black he was like the marble stone by the front of the white house; so black it seemed I could see inside, down into him. See almost through him somehow.

In a little, Waller he untied the rope. Then he cracked the whip once or twice like he be a big man and drives Nightjohn past the quarters and out to the field to work. Didn’t matter that he’d been run or might be thirsty. He didn’t stop at the pump but ran him right on through and out to the fields, naked as he was born, to get to hoeing.

He come in bad and it wasn’t until late that night, after dark in the quarters, that I learned his name.

Mammy she made canvas pants for
the new men when they came. Sewed them from the roll of tarp-cloth we used for all our clothes. She gave a pair to Nightjohn when they came in from the field but he didn’t have time to say nothing because it was time for the evening food.

Two times a day at the wooden trough—that’s how we eat. Mornings they pour buttermilk down the trough and we dip cornbread in it and sometimes pieces of pork fat. We take turns on a calabash gourd for a dipper to get all the milk out except the little ones don’t always get much of a turn and have to lick the bottom of the trough when it’s done. For midday meal the field hands—men and women both, ’less a woman is a breeder in her last month, then she can work the yard—each carry a piece of cornbread and pork fat or meat with them. When the sun is high overhead they stop long enough to stand and eat
the bread and fat. They don’t get to sit or rest. Even do they have to do their business they dig a hole with their hoe and do it standing and cover it with dirt and get back to work.

Don’t they do this, don’t they do it right, don’t they keep standing and work even to eat and do their business, don’t they do it all just exactly right the whip comes down on them. Old Waller he don’t have overseers but they’s two men he calls drivers. They have whips and clubs and use them.

Then at night, when it’s just dark they come in from the fields. During the day mammy and the breeders that can still walk and the small ones that can’t keep up to work in the fields yet make food.

We cook in the big pot mammy used for praying. We cook pork fat and vegetables from the garden and make skillet cornbread. When the field people come
in at night we pour from the pot in the trough and everybody passes the gourd and eats with their hands and dips cornbread into the juice till it’s gone. Then the young ones get to lick the trough and we go into the quarters for the night.

There ain’t no light allowed in the quarters. Time was, mammy said, when she had a small bowl and made a lamp with a piece of cotton and melted pork fat but up to the white house they saw the light and made her put it out. Kept the workers awake, they said.

Course we be awake anyway, if we want to. Just be awake in the dark. Light comes through the open door and there are four small windows down the back wall. If there’s a moon there be good light, light enough to see faces and talk and even if there isn’t a moon enough comes from the stars and the
lights from the white house to let us see a little.

Those to work in the field are always tired. Always caved in with work. And there ain’t never enough to eat, so they be hungry, too. They usually go to sleep as soon as they hit the corn-shuck pallets on the floor.

But the first night when the new man was there you could tell it was going to be different. He didn’t even get on the floor but went right over to the corner where mammy put the pot to pray sometimes and sat there. The new canvas pants were so stiff I could hear them crackle and bend when he sat back against the wall. I was on the side of mammy’s shuck mattress along with about half a dozen young ones who were all kicking and scratching so sleep wasn’t coming and I hear:

“Who’s got tobacco? I need some tobacco.”

It was a whisper, but loud, cutting from the corner where the new man sat. I had me some tobacco. It was just shredded bottom leaf that I’d been chewing to spit on the roses but I’d kept some back in a wrapped piece of sacking inside my shirtdress, tied round my waist on a piece of string. I didn’t say a word. You come on things, things to keep, and you keep them to trade for other things. Things you need. Like pork fat. Or pennies.

He chuckled, low and rippling. Sounded like a low wind through willows, that small laugh, or maybe water moving over round rocks. Deep and soft.

“I’ll trade,” he whispered. “I’ll trade something for a lip of tobacco.”

I thought, What you got to trade? You come in naked as the day you was born, come in bad with whip marks all up and down your back, not even a set of
clothes or canvas pants and you’re ready to go to trading? I didn’t say it, but I thought it. And he like to read my thoughts.

“What I got to trade, what I got to trade for a lip of tobacco is letters. I knows letters. I’ll trade
A, B
, and
C
for a lip of chew.” He laughed again.

And there I was, with the tobacco in my dress and he said that and I didn’t know what letters was, nor what they meant, but I thought it might be something I wanted to know. To learn.

So mammy she was sleeping, her breath moving in and out, and I wiggled out of the pile of young ones and moved to the dark corner and set my ownself next to him. “What’s a letter?”

He smiled. “You sound like you’ve got tobacco.”

“Not until I know what a letter is.…”

“Why, it’s reading. You learn the letters
first and then when you know them you string them together into words. I’ll trade you three letters for a lipful.”

I knew about reading. It was something that the people in the white house did from paper. They could read words on paper. But we weren’t allowed to be reading. We weren’t allowed to understand or read nothing but once I saw some funny lines on the side of a feed sack. It said:

I wrote them down in the dirt with a stick and mammy gave me a smack on the back of the head that like to drove me into the ground.

“Don’t you take to that, take to writing,” she said.

“I wasn’t doing it. I was just copying something I saw on a feed sack.”

“Don’t. They catch you doing that and they’ll think you’re learning to
read. You learn to read and they’ll whip you till your skin hangs like torn rags. Or cut your thumb off. Stay away from writing and reading.”

So I did. But I remembered how it had looked, the drawings on the sack and in the dirt, and it still puzzled me. I dug in my dress and found the tobacco but held it.

“You saying you can read?”

He nodded.

“I give you something to read, you can read it? Just like that?”

“I can.”

There was some yellow light from the windows of the big house and it came through the doorway and made a light patch on the dirt floor.

“Come on.”

I led him to the light patch and squatted. I used my finger to scratch what I remembered in the dirt. The floor
was hard packed and I had to rub hard to make it show right.

“There.”

He squatted and squinted.

“Why, those ain’t letters. Those are numbers.”

“Numbers?”

He nodded. “Sure is. Says one hundred. Then there’s those three letters on the end. They don’t work for me as a word. Just
L B S
—don’t say a word. It must mean something to somebody.”

“Can you teach me that?”

“To read?”

“To read what I just put there in the dirt—can you teach me?”

He rubbed his chin. “Well, mought be if I had some tobacco.…”

I dug the sack out of my shirtdress and gave him a pinch. He put it in the side of his mouth.

“Way it works,” he said, “is you got to learn all the letters and numbers before
you can learn to read. You got to learn the alphabet.”

“Alphabet?”

He nodded. “There be lots of letters, and each one means something different. You got to learn each one.”

“Those three you said back in the dark corner? Can you teach me those?”

“I sure can.” He used the edge of his hand to rub out what I had written in the dirt. Then he made a drawing with his thumb.

“Tonight we just do
A
.” He sat back on his heels and pointed. “There it be.”

I looked at it, wondered how it stood. “Where’s the bottom to it?”

“There. It stands on two feet, just like you.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means
A
—just like I said. It’s the first letter in the alphabet. And when
you see it you make a sound like this:
ayyy
, or
ahhhh
.”

“That’s reading? To make that sound?”

He nodded. “When you see that letter on paper or a sack or in the dirt you make one of those sounds. That’s reading.”

“Well that ain’t hard at all.”

He laughed. That same low roll. Made me think of thunder long ways off, moving in a summer sky. “There’s more to it. Other letters. But that’s it.”

“Why they be cutting our thumbs off if we learn to read—if that’s all it is?”

“ ’Cause to know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it’s bad for them. They thinks we want what they got.”

I thought of what they had. Fine clothes and food. I heard one of the
house workers say they ate off plates and had forks and spoons and knives and wiped their mouths like they wiped their butts. “That’s true—I want it.”

“That’s why they don’t want us reading.” He sighed. “I got to rest now. They run me ten miles in a day and worked me into the ground. I need some sleep.”

He moved back to the corner and settled down and I curled up to mammy in amongst the young ones again.

A
, I thought.
Ayyy, ahhhh
. There it is. I be reading.

“Hey there in the corner,” I whispered.

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

“I be John.”

“I be Sarny.”

“Go to sleep, Sarny.”

But I didn’t. I snuggled into mammy
and pulled a couple of the young ones in for heat and kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t sleep and thought:

Come a hard time then.

Come a awful, hard time.

There be a girl before then named Alice. She slept in the other end of the quarters and as soon as she got big she went to work in the fields picking and hoeing. But she was addled in the head, off dreaming sometimes, and mammy said one day that they would sell her. But her body was all right and they in the white house decided she be a good breeder so they set her for that.

She didn’t take well to it and fought and they tied her to make it happen, in the breeding shed back of the quarters but it went bad on her head and her thinking. When it was done she was worse than before.

She wandered in the yard and sometimes even went up to the white house. Except for the house servants and gardening we weren’t allowed to the white house and when the master one day caught Alice he took her to the wall of the spring house.

The spring house was where we got drinking water. It was made of stone and with heavy walls. They had rings of iron to be made in the walls many years past, big rings of iron with chains and shackles and they put Alice there and tore her clothes off.

Then the master he whipped her his ownself with a rawhide whip cut from an old gin belt used on the cotton gin.
Sometimes he doesn’t whip and makes a field hand do it and stands with his pistol in his belt and smiles.

But sometimes he likes to take the whip and this time he whipped her until her back was all ripped and bleeding. We had to watch. Every time there was somebody to be on the wall of the spring house and be whipped or other punishments we all had to watch.

When it was done and she had screamed until she sounded like pigs being cut he made mammy to go to the salt house and get salt and rub it in the cuts to make more pain.

I never heard a sound like that. I’d seen men whipped but never that kind of sound, cutting like that, high and higher until it whistled in my ears.

Then he left her to hang there until the next day. The flies they came and mammy went out and covered her back with a cloth and kept some of them off
so they wouldn’t make maggots in the cuts.

Next morning they took her down and they was some maggot eggs but not so bad. I helped mammy clean Alice. We took her in the quarters and mammy she rubbed grease on Alice’s back and I sat and held her hands because she kept trying to reach around and push mammy’s hand away.

All the time she don’t say anything. Not a thing. Not even the silly things she used to say and when we were done she lay on the floor in the corner like she was broken. Broken inside.