Whiter Than Snow Page 5

  But the teacher had laughed when they warned him, replying there were worse things than the taunts of rednecks. He’d said the word out loud, and the black people had cringed, warning him to watch his tongue, because a white man might overhear him. A black man could be castrated for less.

  The teacher hadn’t changed his ways, and finally, when the two boys said the school’s Latin motto that day in the dark store that smelled of oiled floorboards and rotted wood, molasses and soft moldy bread, repeated the words, saying loudly that they were in Latin, the storekeeper said he’d had enough. He went to the saloon and rounded up the three farmers, drunk as they were, and the sheriff, who was a bully, and the mill owner, who’d said often enough that he was tired himself of the way black workers thought they should get as much for a day’s work as a white man.

  The men went to the school and grabbed the teacher, who must have thought he was in for a flogging, because he yelled to the children not to be afraid. And the men did indeed whip the teacher, whipped him until the blood ran down his legs. But then they got out the noose, and at last the teacher seemed to understand that he would be hanged. He reared and pitched and looked mortal afraid, and his eyes bugged out like the white people in blackface at the minstrel shows.

  The men strung him up. It wasn’t an execution where the condemned man had a final word, but just a sloppy lynching where the teacher mumbled the words of the Lord’s Prayer before he flopped around at the end of the rope like a catfish out of water. It took a while before he stopped moving, because the fall didn’t break his neck, and he’d had to strangle himself to death. Then the body turned round and round because of a twist in the rope. Joe put his hand in front of his mouth, hoping he wouldn’t throw up. He looked down and saw that Little Willie had wet his pants. A girl was sniveling, another shaking so hard that Joe thought she might tip over. He could smell the fear among the children.

  When the teacher at last was still, his head over to one side, the men, silent now, the bravado gone, got on their horses. “Now, don’t you little negras never forget this,” one of them said to the children. As if we ever would, Joe thought.

  The students were afraid to cut down the teacher, afraid to touch him, and they ran home and told their parents what had happened, although they didn’t tell the names of the lynch mob. And when dark came, the fathers took down the dead man and buried him deep in the woods. They knew better than to mark the grave. They searched the teacher’s room and found an address, and a woman who could write penned a note to his family: “Your son don get cilled, and we bureed him. Hes a good man. We sory.” She took the letter to the post office and purchased a stamp. But the postmaster must have wondered why a colored woman was sending a letter to Boston, because he opened it, read it, then threw it away. The mothers said weren’t they lucky that the schoolhouse hadn’t been burned down.

  The school board didn’t shut down the Negro school, as many expected. Instead, the school board found another teacher, a local girl who hadn’t gone further than the third grade and who understood what was expected of her. She resumed classes in the tobacco barn, a drafty building with no stove and cracks between the boards big enough to let a cat through. But Joe never went back, because there was nothing the young girl could teach him.

  What Joe learned that terrible day the teacher was murdered was not hatred as much as sadness and a knowing of the world, and, of course, that was exactly what the white men had intended. Joe was a smart boy, and when he first met the teacher, he’d decided he wanted to learn everything he could so that he, too, could be a Negro who stood tall with white men. He was embarrassed at the way his father, Riley Cobb, bowed to the whites, docile, obedient, laughing when they made fun of him, never protesting when he was shortchanged at the mercantile. Joe could count, and once he’d spoken up when the change came back two pennies short. His father had smacked him and said, “Shut your mouth, you little fool.”

  “But Pappy—” the boy said after they left.

  “Don’t you never tell a white man he’s wrong, boy, if you want to live. That’s the way of it.”

  School had been different. The teacher told them they were as good as anybody, and that they could own stores and farms just like white men. All they needed was an education. So Joe sat up straight and listened.

  The lynching was the end of Joe’s boyhood. He no longer walked along the dusty roads, barefoot as a duck, with his fishing pole over his shoulder. Nor did he play baseball with a broomstick and the ball his mother had made from rags. With no school to attend, Joe was sent to the fields to help his father, who was a share-tenant on Hogpen Lane. “He’s old enough to work,” said the landowner, who claimed part of the crop Riley made and wanted all the field hands his black families could produce. So now the boy rose before daylight and worked until dark.

  It was not an altogether unhappy time. Joe loved the smell of the earth, freshly turned, and the touch of the dew on his feet. There was pleasure in seeing the tips of the corn poke up from the earth and the white cotton peek from the boll. Riley sang songs from slavery days that had been passed down to him from his own father, and as there were no white men to oversee them, the father straightened his shoulders and lifted his head as he stood in the shade of a tree, explaining the workings of nature to the boy. Sometimes, when the sun beat down hot enough to melt a person’s eyeballs, his father waved Joe off, telling him to put down his hoe and take off his overalls and swim in the pond. Riley Cobb was a kind man who alternated between beating blackness into his son to teach him how to survive and wanting the boy to have a little time of joy before he understood what a burden it was to be a black man at the turn of the century, some thirty years after emancipation.

  Following the harvest, when the cold weather came and there was no work in the fields, the family—there were also a mother and four younger children—sat in front of a fire in the former slave cabin where they lived and listened to the grandpappy, an old, twisted, muscled man, tell about the bitterness of slavery days. “They’d treat you like you was no more than mules,” he said. “They’d whip you, break your jawbone, and they’d’ve cut off your head for a soup bowl, only you was worth money to ’em. You think you have it poorly, Joe, but you don’t know what hard times is.” He’d sink into his memories, then say, “Freedom cried out to us. We thought if we was just free…” And then he’d shake his head and add, “I wish I had went before I had so much to grieve over.”

  “We thought if we just had education,” Joe’s mother would say, letting the thought drop. Then she would add, “Well, trust in God and hoe your row, and better times will come.”

  Joe liked it better when his grandpappy told him stories about Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox and would laugh and say, “White man’s took everything else away from us, but we keeps our humor.” The stories were about how the weaker animals always got the better of the stronger ones. Joe knew without having to be told that the weaker animals were the colored people, and he gloried in their cunning and trickery. As he weeded under the hot sun, the sweat pouring off his back, he pretended he was Br’er Rabbit, getting a white boy to wield the hoe in his place. And when he watched his mother plod off to work, a laundry basket in her arms, he thought of what it would be like if the old white lady washed their clothes.

  But at the same time that he dreamed of revenge for the schoolteacher’s death and the daily acts of humiliation that he and other colored people faced, Joe learned to survive, and that meant acting the way the white people expected him to—good-natured, stupid, lazy. He let the white men make fun of him just as his father did, seething inside but not showing it. Only rarely did he flare up, and then it was in such a way that the white man did not fully understand that he had been bested. When the man who owned the land Joe and his father worked complained about the responsibilities of being a landowner and remarked, “You have an easier time of it than I do,” Joe replied, “Yessir, and so do your hogs.”

  Joe turned into a handsome young man,
certainly by white standards—broad-shouldered, well muscled, light-skinned, with a straight nose and hair that curled instead of kinked. That was not altogether a blessing, because white women glanced at him with approval, which infuriated their men. Joe knew he should never be alone with a white woman, never look her in the eye when he passed one on the street, never brush against her, or he’d fare no better than the schoolteacher. So he shuffled off the sidewalk into the street if he saw one coming. And if she called to him, “Boy, do you want to earn a nickel to chop my wood?” he’d look foolish and shake his head, and she would make a remark on the shiftlessness of colored people.

  Not all white folks were like that, Joe learned. Some were kind, and a few even respected the Negroes. The white minister at the Friendship Church buried Negroes at the colored cemetery, asking God to make their lives easier in heaven. One of the teachers at the white school helped the colored teacher plan lessons. And several white women in town put together food baskets, which they took to the shacks where colored people were stove up. Sometimes they brought medicine, too, and sat awhile with the sick person to let the family rest. And they weren’t uppity about it, but were kind instead. “You mustn’t believe we’re all like the sheriff and the mayor, Joe,” one of them told him. Joe knew that, but the trick was you didn’t know which ones you could trust, so you didn’t trust any of them.

  When he was sixteen, Joe was arrested for fighting a white boy, and he was sentenced to prison. The fight wasn’t his fault. Joe had been carrying the laundry basket for his mother when the white boy ordered him to put it down. Joe did as he was told, hoping that would be the end of it. But the boy upended the basket, kicking the clothes into the dirt and stomping on them.

  Joe’s mother begged the white boy to stop, for she would have to wash the clothes again, and her fingers were so crippled from rheumatism that she could barely rub the cloth on the scrub board. Joe tried to stop the boy by pushing him away, but the fellow turned and slugged Joe, hit him twice—left, right—causing a hurting in Joe’s stomach. Joe let the anger that had built up in his young life take over then, and he kicked the boy. Joe might have gone to prison for five years, maybe ten, because white people would not abide a black boy who hurt a white one. But as it turned out, Joe’s mother’s employer was the wife of the mill owner, who had just fired the boy for stealing. So Joe was sentenced to only two years in prison. Of course, the white boy was not punished. It was Negro law.

  Instead of going to prison, however, Joe and half a dozen other convicts were “sold” to a turpentine operator, the rights to their labor traded by prison officials for a few dollars. They were shipped off to a camp deep in the piney woods. Because he was sizable, Joe was assigned a job as a woodcutter, and he was worked like a mule, because what did the operator care if one black convict was broken? It wasn’t like slavery days, when a black man had some worth. If Joe was worked to death, he’d be easy enough to replace.

  The men were roused before sunup and taken to the field in chains, where they worked until it was too dark for the guards to see to shoot them. Slackers were beaten. Joe was cautious, not only at work but in the camp, a dark and dangerous place where the prisoners mixed with the regular turpentine workers. The first month he was there, Joe glanced at a black woman who was swaying near a fire, a sweet singer whose voice was smooth and silky and ripped through his heart, making him so lonely, he wanted to hug himself like a baby. He took a step toward the fire and found a knife at his throat. “You look at my woman again, and you don’t know what you will come to before you die,” said a voice that was low and ragged in his ear.

  Joe put out his hands and said, “Easy,” and the man drew back the knife, but not before he scratched it across Joe’s throat, drawing a line of blood as fine as a thread. “I just got here. I mean no trouble,” Joe told him.

  “Stay away from the women,” the man warned. Joe recognized him as one of the regular turpentine workers. “There’s girls enough from the juke house for you.”

  “I got no money. I came from the prison.”

  The man relaxed a little. “Then you got to stay out of trouble.” He stepped back and looked at Joe. “You work hard, and you keep away from Sykes over there, and when you can’t, you mind your back. He is treacherous.” He pointed with his knife at a fat white man with eyes like a pig. “He’d rather whip a man to death than eat breakfast. And if you run away, you better hope you make it, ’cause you won’t be worth nothing if they bring you back.”

  Joe thanked the man and went to sit with the other new turpentiners who had come from the prison. One of them was Little Willie, who had stood next to Joe when the schoolteacher was lynched. Little Willie, a runt of a man, had been sentenced to five years of hard labor for killing a dog that was the property of a wealthy farmer. The farmer sicked the dog on Little Willie every time he passed. “And one day, I fixed up not to take it again, and I kicked that dog till I broke his neck,” Little Willie told Joe.

  As the two men sat near the fire, shivering, because it was cold in the woods and neither had a coat or a blanket, Little Willie said he’d rather die than spend his sentence in the turpentine camp.

  “You’ve got to bear it,” Joe told him.

  “I can’t suck sorrow for five years. Maybe I’ll run away.”

  Joe shook his head. “Where’d you go? They’ve got dogs to track you down. You’ll never make it, never under God’s kingdom.”

  “I’ll just go where they can’t ever find me.”

  Joe looked out for Little Willie, because the small man was treated mean, but there wasn’t much Joe could do. Oh, he might threaten another black turpentiner for bothering Little Willie, but he couldn’t do anything when the bully was a white man. One guard dropped an ax on Little Willie’s foot and nearly cut off his toes. Another knocked his tin plate of food to the ground. His shoes were stolen. He was whipped for not working hard enough. Little Willie turned morose, and there was a gleam of madness in his eyes, so Joe wasn’t surprised when one morning the man wasn’t there.

  Guards went after him with dogs, and in less than a day, he was brought back, beaten and trussed up like a pig, thrown onto the ground as a lesson to the other prisoners. The white men joyed in the prisoners’ fear.

  After the others turned away from Little Willie, Joe crept up to him and held him while he sipped a cup of water. “There wasn’t anyplace to go,” the man said through broken teeth.

  The next day when the turpentiners returned from work, Little Willie was gone, and one of the men who had been there a long time told Joe that most likely Little Willie had been thrown into a swamp to drown, if he wasn’t dead already. “You dare not talk about it,” he said.

  Those two years in the turpentine camp were a plague of misery for Joe, but he lived through them, which was something to be grateful for, since many of the prisoners didn’t make it. They were killed in fights with the other turpentiners, knifed by the women, beaten to death by the guards, or died from the poor food and brutal working conditions. Joe had a deep scar across his cheek, where a guard had cut him after Joe refused to kneel down for a whipping. “I only get on my knees to pray,” he’d said, and the guard went after him with both the knife and a whip. The black man learned meekness from that encounter, and during the rest of his stay at the camp, he was whipped no more than the other prisoners.

  When he was released, Joe returned to his parents’ farm, a wiser young man now, but one devoid of hope for his future. He figured he wasn’t going to have anything, so nothing could hurt him. But Joe was wrong. He knew it when he met Orange, a good-sized gal of seventeen with smooth skin and fancy hair—red hair. Joe knew the first time he saw her at the church that he had to have her and that in the end he’d be hurt in some way.

  Orange was a quiet woman, serious, with a fierce desire to learn, and she reawakened that same yearning in Joe. Teaching him appealed to her, and when Joe called on Orange, the two sat outside on a log with a ragged primer she’d picked up somewh
ere, and she helped him with the words. She opened an arithmetic book, and discovered that Joe could figure. Maybe that was why he was good with mechanical things. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix, and Orange encouraged him to get a job working with the blacksmith. But Joe wouldn’t do it. He wanted to be as far away as possible from white people.

  When he was in his early twenties, Joe married Orange, and they set to housekeeping in an old slave cabin on the farm on Hogpen Lane that Joe worked with his father. It was a one-room shack fit up with a door and a single glassless window with a heavy wooden shutter to keep out the cold and rain, but they treasured it up, and for the first time since he was eight years old, Joe knew real happiness. At night, as they looked out a hole in the roof at the stars, Joe satisfied himself with his wife’s smoky body, and in the first year of their marriage, Orange gave birth to a little girl. They named her Jane. She was a sweet child, obedient, and pretty, which caused a confusion in Joe’s breast. He was proud of his daughter’s fine looks, but he knew they would be a burden to her when she was older and white boys came sniffing around. He would not borrow trouble, however, not in the early years of his child’s life. So he gloried in the little girl. And when Orange became pregnant again when Jane was five, Joe looked at his wife’s protruding belly with gladness.

  Orange had given birth the first time with so little trouble that Joe did not worry. Her labor had lasted only an hour or two, barely enough time for him to fetch his mother, who had grannied many of the birthings in the neighborhood. So when Orange went into labor with their second child late one afternoon, Joe sent Jane across the fields to fetch Ada, instead of going himself. He feared the baby might come before his mother arrived and he’d be needed.

  Orange was still in labor when Jane returned with her grandmother, Ada, Joe’s father coming behind them. Ada went into the house while Joe sat in the shade with his father, thinking he ought to have a nice bottle of whiskey to celebrate after the baby was born. It would be good to share the bottle with the men who’d stop by, and to brag a little about the fine baby boy he’d produced—for it would be a son this time. Or so he hoped, because he didn’t believe he could love another little girl as fiercely as he did Jane. The two men sat on a bench that Joe had fashioned from a log and talked about crops and weather, stopping when they heard Orange’s cries. Joe wrung his hands at each moan, the sweat dripping down his face. “Don’t worry,” his father told him. That was the way it was with women in childbirth, paying for Eve’s sin, as they must. Every so often, Joe went to the door and looked in at his wife writhing on the bed, but then his mother would wave him away.