The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (26 page)

“No, sir,” the girl said. “When I started by him, he grabbed me and swung me back ’cross the room. I struck my back against the wall and fell. I was almost out, and I saw him standing there over me. He looked scared. Then he turned and ran out the house. I heard Clamp calling me, and I tried to answer him, but I couldn’t. Next thing I knowed, Ida was helping me to bed. But, no, sir, he didn’t do that. Robert was too decent for that.”

“Then what he had to go and do a fool thing like that for?” Guidry said.

Ida said it was quiet in there a moment, then she heard Jules Raynard telling the girl not to ever say a word about this ever again. And they wanted her to get away from here tonight. He asked her if she had any money. She said she had some. He told her he wanted her to leave for New Orleans tonight, and he wanted her to leave New Orleans soon as she could. He told her not to tell nobody where she was going, not even him. Then he called Ida back ’round the other side. He told Ida to go find somebody with a car and tell him—he didn’t care who—to take this girl to New Orleans, and take her there now.

Jules Raynard and Sam Guidry came back to the house and talked to Robert and Miss Amma Dean. I didn’t hear what they had to say, but the next day the newspapers said they had no idea why young Robert Samson of Samson, Luzana had taken his own life. The newspapers said everybody thought he was so happy, knowing in a few weeks that he was go’n be the husband of the beautiful and cultured Judy Major of Bayonne, Luzana. Sheriff Sam Guidry was investsagating the matter, the newspapers said.

The coroner came and took Tee Bob away while I was still at the house. Then Jules Raynard brought me on home. When he stopped before my gate I started to get out the car, but I looked at him again.

“You a good man, Mr. Raynard,” I told him.

“Because I didn’t let them kill her?” he said, over his shoulder.

“Yes, sir.”

“We caused one death already this evening,” he said. I sat in the back seat looking at him; he was looking out at the rain. “Jimmy was right,” he said. “We all killed him. We tried to make him follow a set of rules our people gived us long ago. But these rules just ain’t old enough, Jane.”

“I don’t understand you, Mr. Raynard,” I said.

“Somewhere in the past, Jane,” he said. “Way, way back, men like Robert could love women like Mary Agnes. But somewhere along the way somebody wrote a new set of rules condemning all that. I had to live by them, Robert at that house now had to live by them, and Clarence Caya had to live by them. Clarence Caya told Jimmy to live by them, and Jimmy obeyed. But Tee Bob couldn’t obey. That’s why we got rid of him. All us. Me, you, the girl—all us.”

“Wait,” I said. “Me?”

He looked back over his shoulder.

“You, Jane,” he said.

“All right, lets say I’m in there,” I said. “Where I fit in, I don’t know, but let’s say I’m in there. But the girl: you mean she was leading him on all this time, then at the end she backed down?”

“It wasn’t nothing like that,” he said. “She led him on for just a second. And maybe not that long. And even then she didn’t have control over herself.”

“Who told you this?”

“Nobody,” he said. “If she had said it, Guidry would ’a’ put her in jail for the rest of her life. If Tee Bob had put it in that letter, Robert wouldn’t ’a’ waited for Guidry to put her in jail; he would
’a’ broke her neck with his bare hands. Nobody told me—but it happened. Sure as I’m sitting here, it happened.

“When he came to the house, he poured his soul out to her. He wanted to put her in that car, take her away from here, and never see none of us again. She was the only thing that meant a thing in this world to him. But instead of her falling in his arms, she told him the same thing Jimmy Caya had told him earlier. She was a nigger, he was white, and they couldn’t have nothing together. He couldn’t understand that, he thought love was much stronger than that one drop of African blood. But she knowed better. She knowed the rules. She was just a few years older than him in age, but hundreds of years wiser.

“But no matter what she said, he kept telling her love was everything. She gived up trying to talk to him; she got her suitcase and started for the door. That’s when he grabbed her and swung her back. The weight of the suitcase slammed her ’gainst the wall. Now he was standing over her. To carry her to that car? To choke her? To rape her?—I don’t know. But he was standing close enough to see something in her face. (No, he didn’t say it, because Robert would ’a’ come down here and killed her if he had. And if she had said it, Guidry would ’a’ slammed her in jail for the rest of her life.) While he was standing there over her she invited him down there on the floor. Because—”

“But ain’t this specalatin?” I said.

“It would be specalatin if two white people was sitting here talking,” Jules Raynard said, looking round. But he couldn’t look round too far; his weight didn’t allow that.

“But it’s us?” I said.

“And that makes it gospel truth,” he said.

“Then what happened?” I said, sitting back there in the back seat.

“In the flash when her head and back hit the wall,
something happened to her,” he said. “The past and the present got all mixed up. That stiff proudness left. Making up for the past left. She
was
the past now. She was grandma now, and he was that Creole gentleman. She was Verda now, and he was Robert. It showed in her face. It showed in the way she laid down there on the floor. Helpless; waiting. She knowed how she looked to him, but she couldn’t do nothing about it. But when he saw it he ran away from there. Because now he thought maybe the white man was God—like Jimmy Caya had said. Maybe the white man did have power that he, himself, didn’t know before now. He ran and ran, stumbling and falling: like a hurt animal. Then he was home. Home. Home. Home. Now he tried to forget what he had seen on the floor back there. But nothing in that library was go’n let him forget. Too many books on slavery in that room; too many books on history in there. The sound of his grandfather talking to his daddy and his uncle come out every wall; the sound of all of them talking to him come from everywhere at once. Then there was Jimmy Caya’s voice still fresh in his ear.

“He saw grandpa’s letter opener. He picked it up. He laid it back down—but close enough to reach any time he needed it. He got paper and started writing. He wanted to run away from here. That was his first thought—get away from here. ’Mama, I don’t know what to do. I must go somewhere where I can find peace. Then maybe later.’

“Then he heard Robert beating on the door and hollering at him. ‘When you come to me, Mama, I won’t be here. Forgive me. I love you.’ ”

Jules Raynard pulled out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his face and neck.

“But seeing her on the floor like that just hurried it up,” he said.

“He was bound to kill himself anyhow?”

“One day. He had to. For our sins.”

“Poor Tee Bob.”

“No. Poor us,” Jules Raynard said.

I opened the car door and got out.

“Good night, Mr. Raynard,” I said.

“Good night, Jane.”

People’s always looking for somebody to come lead them. Go to the Old Testament; go to the New. They did it in slavery; after the war they did it; they did it in the hard times that people want call Reconstruction; they did it in the Depression—another hard times; and they doing it now. They have always done it—and the Lord has always obliged in some way or another.

Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he’s the One. No, they don’t say it out loud like I’m saying it to you now. Maybe they don’t say it at all; maybe they just feel it—but feel it they do. “You the One?” I’m sure Lena asked Jimmy that when she first held him in her arms. “You the One, Jimmy? You the One?”

He was born a little bit farther down the quarters. Shirley Aaron was his mama’s name—but I don’t need to tell you who his daddy was. That don’t matter—and, yes, it do. Because if his daddy had been there the cross wouldn’t ’a’ been nearly so heavy. Oh, heavy it would ’a’ been—it had to be—because we needed him to carry part our cross; but the daddy, if he had been there, would ’a’ been able to give him some help. But he didn’t have a daddy to help him. The daddy had done what they told him a hundred years before to do, and he had forgot it just like a hundred years ago they had told him to forget. So it don’t matter who his
daddy was, because you got some out there right now who will tell you his daddy was somebody else. Oh, sure, they all know who he was, but still they’ll argue and say he was somebody else.

Lena Washington was his aunt, his great aunt, his mama’s daddy sister; and it was Lena who sent Sappho up the quarters to get me because it wasn’t time to go get Selina from Morgan. It was in the winter—grinding—and it was me, Jane Pittman, who helped him into this world. When I took him ’round the other side and handed him to Lena she was sitting at the fire crying. That’s why I’m sure she asked him if he was the One. No daddy, and soon will be no mama, because mama was go’n leave for the city to work like all the other young people was doing—I’m sure Lena asked him if he was the One.

Lena was the first one to ask him if he was the One, then we all started wondering if he was the One. That was long long before he had any idea what we wanted out of him. Because, you see, we started wondering about him when he was five or six. I ought to say everybody except Lena. Lena started wondering about him soon as she saw him that first morning. I probably would ’a’ done so myself, but I didn’t have time then, I was too busy looking after his mon on that bed. But I did later. We all did later. When he was five or six we all did. Why did we pick him? Well, why do you pick anybody? We picked him because we needed somebody. We could ’a’ picked one of Strut Hawkins’s boys or one of Joe Simon’s boys. We could ’a’ picked one of Aunt Lou Bolin’s boys—but we picked him. It was back there in the thirties. Joe had just tanned S’mellin’. We all knowed Joe was from Alabama, and we said if Alabama could give One that good, Samson, Luzana could do the same. Oh, no, no, no, we didn’t say it exactly like that. We felt it more. In here, in there. People never say things like that. They feel it in the heart.

In the forties, during the war, we started watching him. I had moved down the quarters. I wanted to
move out of the house soon after Tee Bob killed himself, but Robert kept me up there to be with Miss Amma Dean. I stayed five years more and I told them I wanted to get out. Robert told me I got out when he said I got out. I told him at my age I did what I wanted to do. Miss Amma Dean told me she wanted me up there because I needed looking after much more than she did, but, she said, if I wanted to go, go. I told them I wanted to go, I wanted to move down in the quarters. They said why move in the quarters when I already had a nice little house at the front. “Don’t you have a hyphen?” they said. I said, “Yes ma’am.” “Don’t you have lectwicity?” they said. I said, “Yes, sir.” “Then what you want go down there for?” they said. “There ain’t no hyphen down there and no lectwicity. Not even a pump in every yard. Just that well side the road. You got anything against good light and drinking good water?” “Nothing at all,” I said. “But the house I’m staying in now been the cook’s house even since I been here and probably long as Samson been here. Since I’m not y’all cook no more I don’t feel I have the right to be there.” “Maybe you don’t know it,” Robert said, “but you ain’t been doing too much cooking ’round here in about ten, ’leven years. But you been doing your share of eating.” “I hope I have not deprived you of a meal, Mr. Robert,” I said. “My hand is quicker than your eyes,” he said. “That’s why I want to go down the quarters and raise a garden and some chickens,” I said. “I hate to see a grown man snatching food off his own table.” “Go if you want go,” Miss Amma Dean said. “How you plan to get down the quarters, and where will you stay? Is the house clean? How far you go’n have to haul water? The Lord knows I see no point in you leaving.” “I must leave,” I said. “Mr. Robert, is it all right with you if I moved in that house side Mary?” “You asking me?” he said. “I didn’t know I still running Samson. I thought you was. I thought it was up to you to tell me when you wanted to move and where. And it was my duty to go down there and clean up the place for you.
To run a special pipe down there so you can have hyphen water. To run a special line of lectwicity down there so you wouldn’t have to run out to the store for coal oil every day. I thought that was my duty at Samson. Is I done missed out on a duty? Oh, yes, I think I have missed one. I’m suppose to cut all them blood weeds down and run all them blue runner over in Hawk yard so they won’t come upon your gallery at night and keep you company. If it ain’t slipped my mind, you scared of snakes—or have you changed since about yesterday this time?” “Go if you want go,” Miss Amma Dean said, “Find Bea and Mae and tell them clean up that place for you. I’ll get Etienne to take them things down the quarters.”