All God's Dangers (86 page)

He had a wife. I didn't know nothin but this about her—Josie in there knows her well; she have waited on her in her lifetime. He married old man Tom Sherman's daughter; lived with her daddy out yonder close to Apafalya before he married her. And Watson was born and raised right over at a place between Calusa and Apafalya called Ore City. He was a farm-raised man and he moved into town and commenced a pilin up riches off of the farmin class of people.

I heard a illustration against Mr. Watson one day—one of the Bailey family, white people, live over here across Sitimachas Creek, told me, if he was to go to Apafalya to get him a heel-bolt and didn't nobody have one but Lester Watson, he'd catch the train and go on to Montgomery, get him a heel-bolt. Well, was that good logic or bad logic? That white man could talk that mess but I couldn't without bein called in question and cussed out; and if I'd get out of it by bein just cussed out, I was a lucky bird.

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white men in the community have come to me since I been out of prison and told me they didn't have nothin to do with that mob crowd that hunted my people them nights and days past. One of em was a fellow by the name of Titus Gilmore; he lives right up there now on the Apafalya-Beaufort highway. We got to
talkin bout it once, edgin the subject; never talked no deep talk about it. He told me, “Nate, I weren't in that business. I didn't have nothin to do with it.”

I believed him. Titus Gilmore was a man that his daddy-in-law failed and refused to carry him—his daddy-in-law, his wife's daddy—Titus Gilmore had a sick baby and he thought it might die and his daddy-in-law, fellow by the name of Hale Whitney, wouldn't carry him to Apafalya. And Titus Gilmore lived close to me at that time—I was livin on the Pollard place less'n half a mile from the place he was livin on. Poor white man, he told me, “Nate none of em won't carry me. I'd like to get you to carry me to Apafalya so I can call up my brother Robert in Tuskegee, let him know bout my baby bein sick and all.”

I just got my car out, took him on, carried him to Apafalya one night. That was the year of '32. I insisted at him to let me stop at Dr. Andrews before he went to call his brother and he agreed. Dr. Andrews was livin way out of the heart of town, on the skirts, up on the Tuskegee road. Titus Gilmore begged him to come out there and see about his baby but he couldn't come. Well, he come back to the car then and asked me would I carry him up to town to the central office. I told him, “Yeah, I'll carry you anywhere you want to go.”

We left Dr. Andrews' home and drove up to town to the central office and he called up his brother Robert, and when he got through with his talk he come back out to the car and me and him come on home. And his brother Robert got a doctor there in Tuskegee and come up that night—if he didn't he come the next mornin. He told me later his baby done well after that. I told him, that night, straight, when we got to his house, “Well, Mr. Gilmore, if your baby don't do well and you need my assistance, call on me, I'll go with you. I'll go with you.”

He said, “All right, Nate, I'll come to you if I have to.”

Well, that man, I know he thought well of me for that act. And he seed me—first time he seed me after I got out of prison, we was in a storehouse in Beanville and he seed me and walked up and shaked hands with me right in a crowd. Didn't care who seed him do it—that baby of his was a grown chap at that time. And he told me, “I weren't in that crowd, Nate. I hated it but there weren't nothin I could do about it but stay out of it.”

I carried a bale of cotton to the gin one fall—I hadn't seen Mr. Horace Tucker in several years; that was the first time I seed him since I come out of prison. He was waitin his turn and talkin with some white men—he just left that crowd, walked over and shaked hands with me, glad to see me, acted like, and he stood and talked with me until his time come to gin. Every once in awhile them white men that he left when he come to me would look around, but none of em never did seem to act badly about it at all.

Mr. Estes Tucker, Mr. Horace Tucker's son, carried me on his milk truck one day; he had a dairy and he sold milk and he carried me with him, showin me all of his fixins. He done growed up and as he got older he got to be a heavy-built white man, and I didn't know him by his built and all. And he was a skinny boy growin up—I knowed all them Tucker boys from mighty nigh babies. He told me before I got off his truck, “Well, Nate, come see me, come see me. I don't know where you livin, but don't stay over there and suffer. You been a friend to me when I was a boy, and you was a friend to my daddy, and a friend to his daddy—you've come through this world with all of us; it runs deep, runs deep.” Then he made me welcome to anything he had. “Nate,” he said, “you got stock, I know, but if you need the use of mine, come and get em, come and get em.”

I was workin white oak one day when a young white man come to see me. A colored fellow come there with him by the name of Wade Hennessey. They come together drivin a small pickup truck. And this young white man called me Mr. Shaw—that stirred me up. He said, “Mr. Shaw, you know me—” I didn't know him—“You know me, you knowed Toby Culpepper, didn't you?”

I told him, “Yes, I knowed Mr. Culpepper—” white man had a small plantation joinin the Stark place at Two Forks.

He said, “That's my daddy; I'm his baby. I weren't nothin but a young child when you went to prison, but I was big enough to know you. See, I was the baby boy. My daddy is dead now—” I don't know when he died, the boy didn't tell me that. And he brought up all that had happened to me. I sat and listened at what he said. And he was just as familiar as he could act. Before he left my place—
stayed there talkin a long time—he come up close in the subject, said, “Mr. Shaw, you done right to stand up like you done.”

He knowed—I knowed—white folks was just used to takin everything the colored folks had; didn't matter if they owed em or not, just take it, used to takin it. Had to be stopped, had to be stopped—

The Culpepper boy said that three or four different times: “You done right, Mr. Shaw, you done right.”

I looked at him and I said, “White man, do you really think I done right?”

“Yes, you done right!”

Just stuck to it and he stayed there ever so long—and when he left he said, “Don't tell nobody that I come to see you.”

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since I done made my sentence and been back home, I heard who a heap of em was in that mob crowd and who they wasn't. None of my neighbors wasn't in it—but it was other folks I knowed.

God says revenge is His—it's under the ledger of the Bible. Every man that I heard talk against me and all the rest of the niggers at that time, every one of em to my knowin is dead and gone. They died like sheep with the rock. The old judge that sentenced me, he didn't live to see me make my sentence. Tom Heflin, man that prosecuted me, he didn't live—my Lord, that opened my eyes; God removed em from this earth. The jury, a heap of them gone. The high sheriff Kurt Beall, he was desperately against me—shot to death by his own color. And them sheriffs that come at me that mornin—Lew Badger's dead, Virgil Logan's dead, Ward's dead, Platt, the man that shot me, he's dead. There's the crowd that come to see me when I was in jail, aint but one of them livin to my knowin, CD Grace, the banker. He come out to see my wife while I was in the penitentiary and he asked her about me and how she was gettin along and before he left there he reached in his pocket and pulled out a quarter and told her to give it to me when she come to see me—twenty-five cents' worth of sympathy. And the rest of that bunch—Curtis is dead, Flint's dead, Watson's dead. God moved em. People ought to live right. They ought to live to inherit the kingdom of heaven after they gone from this world, but they don't give a damn.

There is people that don't count God no more than a dog. Somebody,
I forget who it was, didn't want God to create man. Said if He created man, man would sin. But God rules: He thought so much of man He made him in His own image and likeness. The Bible don't say nothin bout the colored man and the white man, just says man. With God, man aint but a man. But with the people here, some men is ruled out, blowed off the map, discarded.

Warren Jenks died while I was livin on his place. Old age carried him away—he was well up in his nineties. And he done got to where he'd just sit up on the veranda over there at his old home place and smoke cigars, sit and look out on the road. He had owned, years ago when his children was comin along, cars and trucks, cars particular. And he had him a Ford truck at the time he died and he'd make mistakes in drivin it, but bein his age people had sympathy for him, didn't nobody run over him; but he'd get his truck in places sometimes he couldn't get out. Backin into ditches and turnin off into the swamps when the road went straight or sometimes he'd go straight when the road turned. It taken other people to get him out of such situations. Then he died.

I'd lived on the Jenks place bout ten years when Mary Beth told me and her mother: if we could find a place we could buy, she'd buy it for us. And that's why I'm here.

White man by the name of Stu Wilcox owned this house. Vernon carried me over to see him one Sunday. Lived out on the low line connectin Beanville and the Beaufort highway on what used to be called the Coalhouse road. Got there and I asked him definitely would he sell this place—I'd heard he wanted to sell it. He said, “Yes, I'll sell it.”

I said, “What do you want for the lot?”

He said, “I want twenty-five hundred dollars.”

Half-acre lot and one buildin on it. He'd bought the place a few years before when the colored man that lived here come up disabled to do anything. And when he bought it he had some inside works put in it and runned a café business here for the colored. And when I bought it I turned it back into a dwellin house.

You got a tight section of colored people right through here for a good ways; the colored people—by the land bein owned by the
colored people, they wouldn't sell none to nobody less'n it was a colored. And when this house fell into the hands of a white man—here's the first thing: that house when it was first built, and the fellow it was built for give down, why, it fell back in the carpenter's hands, the man who had it built. Then Mr. Wilcox had a chance to get a hold of it, and he did. He turned around and sold it to a colored fellow and that poor colored fellow had bad luck; he fooled around and got drowned up here in these backwaters. Well, when he left this world his mother come down from Boston, Massachusetts—called her Ruby. Ruby come out of Boston to the death of her son; daddy'd been dead for years. And it was told that she wanted to take over the payments on this place, bein it's her child had money in it. But Wilcox wouldn't let her take it up and the place fell back in his hands. And he kept whatever money the boy had put toward buyin the place before he died. I eventually heard that Wilcox wanted to sell the place again and I taken a interest in buyin it. Ruby had been here and gone about it and she was out of the picture, and Mr. Wilcox had done turned the house into a café. Had people livin in there too, in the bedroom part, that runned the café for him. They moved out of there for me to move in it and we all moved on the same day, on a Sunday, they movin out and me movin in. And they moved right in the house I was movin out of, the colored people that runned the café. As fast as I could move out of Jenks' house and move in here, they was movin out of here and movin in there—just swappin houses. Leslie Meade and his wife—I was goin up a little bit by movin in here and they was goin down; couldn't do no better at the present than move into Jenks' old house.

I went and notified Josie's daughter about the deal. She come right on as quick as she could get here. But I tided it, I tided it. I sold my mule and I sold my cows and everything else I could get my hands on I didn't need: sold my plow stocks, all but one of em; got rid of my little blacksmith shop and most of the other tools of my life.

My cows brought me two hundred and seventy dollars. Both of em was dandy good cows, big bags like good dairy cows. But that first cow had lost part of her bag—if I must say it, that cow lost her bag herself. I sold her yearlin, bull yearlin, and when I sold him out of her sight, she just held that milk tight against her, kept it in her bag, wouldn't let it down, because the calf weren't suckin.
Some milk cows is like that: if you get rid of their suckin calf they goin to snatch up their milk and hold it there. Revengin herself on you, but it's the wrong way for her to do. She suffered many a hard pain in her bag, no tellin—but that's a dumb brute, she didn't know what she was doin when she did her hellish trick. And that other cow, at that time, she had a heifer calf and I sold the calf for eighty-five dollars. So, eighty dollars for that bull yearlin and eighty-five dollars for that heifer—that gived me a piece of change. Then I jumped up and sold that first calf's mother, as she'd messed up and wouldn't let her milk down. I'd go to milk her, mornin and night, every time looked like her bag had as much milk in it after I milked her as before. She was a cow of that type and I couldn't do nothin with her so I wheeled in and sold her to one of the Bailey gentlemen for a hundred cash dollars. I was aimin to keep her and see if I couldn't raise calves from her, if she could get up enough milk just to raise calves; but I soon discovered she weren't goin to do it. I told him, “She's in bad shape, she's lost part of her bag, Mr. Bailey, you can see that; she aint givin no milk out of it and the bag stays filled all the time.”