The Warmth of Other Suns (9 page)

One day, Sambo went to John’s house and told Big George he was going rabbit hunting and needed some shells. Big George went and got the shells for Sambo. A few minutes later, he heard a shot from the woods.

“I guess Sambo done got him a rabbit,” Big George said.

Sambo had just killed Big George’s little sister.

These became some of Lil George’s earliest memories. Each year, he saw his grandfather return from the planter’s house after another dispiriting settlement and recount to the family what had transpired.

At the end of every harvest, the planter would call John Starling up to the big house. John would knock on the back door, the only door colored people were permitted to enter, according to southern protocol. He and the planter met in the planter’s kitchen.

“Come on in, John,” the planter said. “Come here, boy. Come here. Have a seat. Sit down here.”

The planter pulled out his books. “Well, John,” the planter began. “Boy, we had a good year, John.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Reshard. I’m sure glad to hear that.”

“We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.”

The grandfather had nothing to show for a year’s hard toiling in the field.

“This is all he ends up, ‘We broke even,’ ” George would say years later. “He has no money, no nothing for his family. And now he’s ready to start a new year in the master’s debt. He’ll start all over again. Next year, they went through the same thing—‘We broke even.’ ”

The following year, the grandfather went to the big house and got the same news from Reshard.

“Well, by God, John, we did it again. We had another good year. We broke even. I don’t owe you nothin, and you don’t owe me nothin.”

George’s grandfather got up from the table. “Mr. Reshard, I’m sho’ glad to hear that. ’Cause now I can go and take that bale of cotton I hid behind the barn and take it into town and get some money to buy my kids some clothes and some shoes.”

The planter jumped up. “Ah, hell, John. Now you see what, now I got to go all over these books again.”

“And when he go over these books again,” George said long afterward, “he’ll find out where he owed that bale. He gonna take that bale of cotton away from him, too.”

John had no choice but to tell Reshard about that extra bale of cotton. In the sharecropping system, it was the planter who took the crops to market or the cotton to the gin. The sharecropper had to take the planter’s word that the planter was crediting the sharecropper with what he was due. By the time the planter subtracted the “furnish”—that is, the seed, the fertilizer, the clothes and food—from what the sharecropper had earned from his share of the harvest, there was usually nothing coming to the sharecropper at settlement. There would have been no way for George’s grandfather to sell that one extra bale without the planter knowing it in that constricted world of theirs. In some parts of the South, a black tenant farmer could be whipped or killed for trying to sell crops on his own without the planter’s permission.
⁵⁰

Even though John wouldn’t be able to keep the extra bale, Reshard was considered “a good share, a good boss, a good master,” in George’s words, “ ’cause he let us break even.”

Most other sharecroppers ended deeper in debt than before. “They could never leave as long as they owed the master,” George said. “That made the planter as much master as any master during slavery, because the sharecropper was bound to him, belonged to him, almost like a slave.”

The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, studying the sharecropping system back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money.
⁵¹
“The Negro farm hand,” a colored minister wrote in a letter to the
Montgomery Advertiser
in Alabama, “gets for his compensation hardly more than the mule he plows, that is, his board and shelter.
⁵²
Some mules fare better than Negroes.”

There was nothing to keep a planter from cheating his sharecropper. “One reason for preferring Negro to white labor on plantations,” Powdermaker, a white northerner, observed, “is the inability of the Negro to make or enforce demands for a just statement or any statement at all.
⁵³
He may hope for protection, justice, honesty from his landlord, but he cannot demand them. There is no force to back up a demand, neither the law, the vote nor public opinion.…  Even the most fair and most just of the Whites are prone to accept the dishonest landlord as part of the system.”

That did not keep some sharecroppers from trying to get what they were due after a hard year’s labor. During the lull before harvest time, one of George’s uncles, Budross, went to the little schoolhouse down in the field and learned to read and count. When it came time to settle up over the tobacco George’s grandmother Lena had raised, the uncle stood by while the planter went over the books with her. When they got through, George’s uncle spoke up.

“Ma, Mr. Reshard cheatin’ you. He ain’t addin’ them figures right.”

The planter jumped up. “Now you see there, Lena, I told you not to send that boy to school! Now he done learn how to count and now done jumped up and called my wife a lie, ’cause my wife figured up these books.”

The planter’s men came and pistol-whipped the uncle right then and there.

The family had to get him out that night. “To call a white woman a lie,” George said, “they came looking for him that night. They came, fifteen or twenty of them on horseback, wagon.”

George’s grandparents knew to expect it. “We got to get you away from here ’cause you done call Mr. Reshard a lie. And you know they ain’t gon’ like that.”

George was too young to understand what was happening but heard the grown people talk about it in whispers. It was the middle of the 1920s, and George never knew exactly where the uncle went. The particulars were never spoken.

“They hid him out” was all George would say. “He left from out of there.”

Lil George and his parents didn’t stay in Alachua much longer after that. They fled to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Mexico, where they would no longer be under a field boss or overseer. They could work in the big high-rise hotels going up, and with all the tourists from up north and the building boom in the beach towns on the coast, they could be free of the farm and find plenty of work.

They were living in a row house off Fifth Avenue in the colored district. The father found work in construction, and things were good. But by the late 1920s, when the Great Depression descended on the country, things weren’t so good. Big George took to drinking and would lie in wait on the porch for Lil George’s mother to get back from church on Sunday. Once, instead of coming straight back, she stopped a few doors down to chat with a neighbor. Big George saw her dawdling, and that set him off.

“You making plans to meet some other man,” Big George said.

He jumped on her and started hitting her. Lil George and his half brother, William, were sitting on the porch and could see it.

It wasn’t the first time. Lil George cried over it. He was torn between the two of them. Sometimes William, who had a different father and was two years older than Lil George, would throw rocks at Big George to make him stop. Lil George hated it when William did that. He adored his parents. This time, Lil George got mad. The two boys went and got a brick from under a wash pot in the kitchen and hit Big George with it. Then they ran down the street to get away. Big George was hurt more by the pain he had caused his son than by the brick itself and went calling after his namesake.
Son, come back, here. I’m not gonna bother you
.

The marriage gave out after that, and the family split up. The mother kept William on the Gulf Coast with her. And Big George headed east to the town of Eustis, where he said he would send for Lil George after he got established. For the time being, Lil George was sent to live with his mother’s mother in Ocala, a town in the scrublands midway between Alachua and Eustis.

The grandmother was a root doctor named Annie Taylor who was a big-boned woman as tall as a man. She lived on a corner lot and grew pole beans alongside the fence. She was already raising one daughter’s two boys, and here came another one from another daughter, Napolean, now that she had quit her husband.

Annie set George to work right away. She took him and his cousins out to the woods and showed them which twigs and roots to dig up: sassafras, sulfur, and goldenrod. They would tramp behind her through the scrub and wire grass back to the house—George and his cousins James and Joseph, whom they called Brother. She would stir the roots into foul-smelling potions that people bought to thin their blood, cut a fever, shush a hacking cough. She knew all the roots and could identify them, and she knew what they were good for.

The boys were her nearest patients, and every season brought a new torture. Sulfur and cream of tartar at the first sign of spring to thin the blood for the summer. Castor oil to clean your system out in the winter. Balls of asafetida hung around the neck to ward off flu and tuberculosis, the asafetida resin rolled up like flour dough and smelling only slightly worse than cow dung. She put the asafetida paste into little sacks and made necklaces for the boys to wear (which they took off and put in their pockets as soon as they got from around her). In between, she plied them with goldenrod for fever, asafetida with whiskey for a bad cold, and any number of bitter-tasting concoctions that made the boys hate to get sick.

If she detected a cold in the chest, she unscrewed the top of the kerosene lamp, tipped it over a spoonful of sugar, and let four or five drops of kerosene saturate the sugar. Then she stuck the spoon into their tight faces for them to swallow. There was no point in trying to run and hide. “You better not be talking about no run-and-hide,” George said years later. “She didn’t play that. ‘Now you gonna get a whippin’ on top of it.’ ”

The three little boys were left in Annie Taylor’s care because there was a great churning among the young people of working age like her daughters. Her oldest girl, George’s mother, was off on the Gulf Coast. And her two youngest girls, Annie (whom they called Baby) and Lavata (who actually was the baby but whom they called Date), were up in New York. Baby couldn’t keep little James and Brother in New York with her, so she left them with her mother to raise, like a lot of migrants did when they went up north.

Young people like them weren’t tied to a place like their slave grandparents had been forced to, and they weren’t content to move from plantation to plantation like their parents. Ever since World War I had broken out and all those jobs had opened up in the North, there had been an agitation for something better, some fast, new kind of life where they could almost imagine themselves equal to the white people. And so they had gone off to wherever the money seemed to be raining down—to the Gulf Coast rising up in a construction boom or the orange groves at picking season or the turpentine camps if they couldn’t manage anything else; or, if they had nerve in the early days of the Migration, they’d hop a train to the edge of the world, straight up the coast, past Georgia and both Carolinas and straight through Virginia and up to New York, where people said you could get rich just mopping floors.