The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (17 page)

But I knowed then I would never catch Albert Cluveau at that house. Him or one of them children would see me long before I ever got there. I would have to catch him somewhere else.

Not to kill Albert Cluveau. That wasn’t it. What would I look like killing Albert Cluveau? Let God kill him; let the devil take him. I just wanted to speak to him. But he did everything to stay out of my way. He kept one of them children looking out for me at his house. If I was fishing or getting water out the river, he wouldn’t even pass on the main road, he would go use the back road. If he knowed it was the time of day I like to sit on my gallery, he would go down the river bank to pass my house. Sometimes I would see him laying down far as he could on that mule to keep me from seeing him. I knowed if I had run out of the yard or if I had jumped on Pigeon he would ’a’ been too far for me to catch him. So I just waited. I bid my time.

One day the devil fooled Albert Cluveau. Guy Collier was fishing in front of my house. Me and Aunt Guy Collier was about the same size and color and he thought it was me down there. So he turned around and headed for the back road. I was back there on Pigeon, on my way to see Dune White at Grosse Tete. The crop was high and we didn’t see each other till we made the bend and Pigeon almost butt George in the head. Now Albert Cluveau wanted to turn and run. But I had already seen him, and he had no place to go. So he turned his head. I let him turn his head good, but I told him what I had been waiting to tell him for a long time. “Mr. Albert Cluveau, when the Chariot of Hell come rattling for you, the people will hear you screaming all over this parish. Now, you just ride on.”

The people wanted to say I went to a hoo-doo for Albert Cluveau. But I didn’t go to no hoo-doo, because I don’t believe in no hoo-doo. I went to just one
hoo-doo in my life—that was for Joe Pittman and that horse—but even then I didn’t believe in her the way you suppose to. I went to her because nobody else would listen to me. But after I had gone I still didn’t take her advice. Anyhow, the word got back to Albert Cluveau that I had gone to a hoo-doo, and, he, so simple-minded, he started to believe it.

A year or so later he came down sick and thought he was go’n die, and now he jumped in bed with his two daughters, Adeline and Christine. His wife had been dead and him and his sons had done so much dirt together he was scared to sleep in the same room with them. Adeline and Christine begged and begged Albert Cluveau to get out their bed. It wasn’t nice. What would people think. Albert Cluveau said he didn’t care what people thought, he heard the Chariot of Hell in that other room with his sons. Adeline told him there wasn’t no such thing. Albert Cluveau said he knowed better, he heard it. He dared them to get out the bed and sleep on the floor; they had to sleep on both sides of him and protect him from the Chariot of Hell.

By and by he started hearing the Chariot of Hell even in this room with the girls. But he heard it in just one ear, the ear that was pointed toward Adeline. So he reckoned Adeline hated him. She had always been ashamed of him, so now she must hate him, too. Besides that he was sure she was messing round with men when he wasn’t at the house. And he didn’t want his daughters to be rotten like him and his sons. He wanted them to stay pure. That’s why he always made them go to church—to keep them pure. But either Adeline wasn’t pure or she hated him. Cluveau: “Adeline, you hate your pap?” Adeline: “No, Papa.” Cluveau: “Adeline, you pure?” Adeline: “I swear by the Holy Mother I’m pure, Papa.” Albert Cluveau would turn over, but still the Chariot of Hell would come from Adeline’s side of the bed. Cluveau: “Adeline, if you so pure; Adeline, if you don’t have no hate in your heart for your papa who never do you no wrong; Adeline,
how come that Chariot of Hell he just run over there, huh?” Adeline told him, “Papa, there ain’t no Chariot of Hell.” Cluveau told her she was a damn liar and he jumped out of the bed and started beating her with the strap. The boys had to come round there and pull him off. After a while he would get back in bed, but the chariot would start all over. Poor Adeline would lay on her side of the bed crying in the sheet.

This went on for days, for weeks. Then one day Adeline came to my house. She would do anything if I took the hoo-doo off her papa. I told Adeline I had no more hoo-doo on Albert Cluveau than I had on my own self. It was just his sinning ways catching up with him. Adeline pulled her dress down over her shoulders and showed me the welt marks where Albert Cluveau had beat her. She told me to please help a little Cajun gal who had done nobody no harm in all her life. I told her I couldn’t do a thing because I had no hoo-doo on Cluveau. I asked her if she wanted some coffee and tea cakes. She said yes. She was a big fine gal, big pretty legs. She was already old enough to be married, but they kept her there to cook for them. I gived her some coffee and tea cakes and we sat right there on my gallery.

“It’s not me,” she said. “I’m not bad. I’m a true virgin, I believe in my Catholic faith. But Christine—ah, she’s no virgin. No virgin her. She went bad at ’leven. But she is the baby and they like her. None care for poor Adeline. And the chariot, even the chariot, can find no place to run but on my side. Every night he run, every night Papa jump out of the bed and whip me. I want to leave, but where can poor Adeline go? I change sides with Christine. I say, ‘Christine, dearie, sleep here. Let your poor sister Adeline get one night peace.’ Christine’s got a pure soul, poor dear. She says, ‘All right, my dear.’ We change sides—but do that stop the chariot? Christine went bad at ’leven, but that chariot runs right where I sleep. That hoo-doo is against me more than it is against my papa. You must take it off, Jane.”

“I ain’t got no hoo-doo on your papa,” I told her. “I told him when the Chariot of Hell come for him we will hear him all over this parish. That we will. That I will, less the Lord take me first. Other men who did the dirt your papa done have screamed at that last moment. He will scream, too. Yes, Adeline, he will scream. But that has nothing to do with hoo-doo. It’s hell beckoning.”

“He’s poor and foolish, Jane.”

“He shouldn’t’a’ killed my boy.”

“Do you hate me, Jane?”

“I don’t hate you,” I said. “I don’t even hate him. But he will pay.”

“I’m the one paying,” she said. “I’m the one suffering.”

“You don’t know what suffering is, Adeline,” I told her.

“I showed you the marks on my back,” she said.

“I wish I could show you the ones on my heart,” I told her.

“Poor Jane,” she said.

Cluveau didn’t come to die for ten more years. Died just before the high water there of ’12. Christine had been gone. Had fooled around with every man on that river—black and white. Had gotten more buckets of figs, pecans, muscadines from them black boys on that river than you’d care to name. The one day she got on a wagon with a drummer from St. Francisville. The drummer used to sell pots and pans and sharpen knives and scissors. Him and Christine left here one Sunday evening. But poor Adeline was still at the house. Albert Cluveau wasn’t sleeping in the same bed with her now, she told him when Christine ran off with the drummer he had to go back round the other side. If he didn’t, she was go’n run off too. He went back round the other side and she stayed there to look after him. Just the two of them there now. The boys had run off just like Christine did.

The weekend Albert Cluveau died, poor Adeline lived in a madhouse. People could hear Cluveau screaming
half a mile. He died on a Sunday. Jules Patin passed by my house and told me Cluveau was at the point of death. I asked him how he knowed. He said he had heard him screaming and when he asked a Cajun what was the matter the Cajun told him Cluveau was at the point of death. I had always thought I wanted to hear Cluveau scream. I had told myself that ever since he killed Ned. But that had happened so long ago, and now I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Cluveau—’specially Adeline there. But everybody else heard him screaming. People went by that house all time of day and night just to hear him scream. The doctor came, the doctor went, and still he screamed. Adeline sat on the side of the bed wiping his face with a damp towel, but Cluveau screamed. Just before he came to die he pushed Adeline away and got out of bed. Nobody thought he had that kind of strength left. He had his hands up the way you hold a gun. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him.” He made two steps and fell. He covered his head and screamed and screamed for Adeline to stop the horses. She knelt down on the floor side him. And he died there in her arms.

I knowed Aunt Hattie Jordan a long time before I came to Samson. She was the cook here then. Had been cooking for the Samsons even before the war between Secesh and North. When she got old—I’m sure she was already in her seventies when I met her—they gived her a horse and buggy to travel round in. Once or twice a week she passed by my house when I was living on the river. When Albert Cluveau died I told her I was ready to move off the river. She asked me why didn’t I come to Samson. I told her that wasn’t too much of a move, seven or eight miles. I told her I wanted to go farther than that, so I wouldn’t be reminded of these memories. She told me even if I moved a hundred miles I would still be near memories, because memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind. And she told me she knowed, too, that I wanted to be close to Ned’s grave so I could always put flowers there. After thinking about it I told her she was right—and that’s how I came to Samson. I came here one night and asked Paul Samson for the house. Paul Samson was the daddy of Robert Samson who’s running the place now. “You kinda spare, ain’t you?” he said. “How do I know you can carry your load?” I told him I had been doing it for more than fifty years now. “And you can be a little tired,” he said. “I think
I’ll be around fifty more,” I said. “You can have that room side Unc Gilly and Aunt Sara,” he said. “But you go’n have to get here by yourself.” “I’ll get here,” I said.

I borrowed a wagon from off the river and moved here by myself. It took me two trips, but I did it all by myself. It was spring, because the people was plowing and hoeing in the field. Buzz Johnson was the water boy; Diamond was his mule. Used to carry the water in a great big barrel with a hyphen stuck at one end. One day he lost the hyphen and wasted all the water, and the people in the field almost wanted to kill him coming back there with nothing in that barrel. He made three trips to the field every day. He came in the morning round nine-thirty, he came at dinner time, and he came again in the evening. On the twelve o’clock run, the middle run, he brought your dinner buckets. Most of the people had the little dime buckets, and Buzz Johnson looked like a junk man coming back there with them shiny little buckets all over the cart. When he was running late he would have Diamond loping, and you could hear them dime buckets hitting against that water cart from way cross the field. Thirty or forty dime buckets on that cart. Had so many of them he had to put some of them in a crocker sack and hang the sack on Diamond’s back. The people used to mark their buckets with little pieces of cloth—red, yellow, blue. Some put their ’nitials on the top. Toby Lewis put a hog ring on the handle of his bucket. From then on they called him Hog Ring Toby. They was calling Toby Lewis that when I came here: Hog Ring Toby. But he was the best man you had working out there. Could cut and load more cane than any other man ever lived on this place. Every year somebody was crazy enough to challenge him, and every year Toby broke him down. Hawk Brown wanted to cut cane with him; Toby nearly killed Hawk. Joe Simon wanted to load cane with him; when Toby got through with Joe Simon he could hardly pick up enough cane to chew. Now he had to work ’long side the women. In the
spring instead of him getting a plow, now he had to get a hoe.

The worse thing happened in the field while I was out there was that thing with Black Harriet. Her name was Harriet Black, but she was so black (she was one of them Singalee people) and the people called her Black Harriet. She didn’t have all her faculties, but still she was queen of the field. She was tall, straight, tough, and blue-black. Could pick more cotton, chop more cotton than anybody out there. Cut more cane than anybody out there, man or women, except for Toby Lewis. She was queen long before I came here and she probably would have been queen long after if Katie Nelson hadn’t showed up. Katie Nelson was a little tight-butt woman from Bayonne. No kin at all to the Nelsons on the St. Charles River. They wouldn’t own her. What sent Katie to Samson with that little red nigger she called a husband, only God knows. He looked about much a husband as one of them fence posts. Soon as she got in the field she started running off at the mouth. “I’m go’n beat her. Queen, huh? Well, she ain’t go’n be no queen for long. You wait, I’m go’n queen her.”