Gloryland (7 page)

He was lighting up the woods now, casting shadows, moving back and forth, slowly swinging from that oak. The branch was burning hot, and then the branches above him caught fire and the whole tree began to burn, but the branch never let go. I could smell the wood burning and I could smell him, both were in my eyes and my lungs, and smoke was going up into the black sky, moving between the stars till it blacked out the stars and the only light was from the burning tree. It lit up everything I could see and not see, it hurt my eyes to see such a blaze. Everything was visible except the Klan men. They were gone into the dark, and the light couldn’t find them.

For a long time, hours maybe, I just stayed where I was, in the coldest shadow I’ve ever felt. Though there was plenty of heat not too far away, I stayed away from it, curling up round myself like there was a little bit of heat somewhere deep inside me, as if I could curl round my own heart, but it gave me no comfort.

The wind began to blow and the trees started talking. I knew whatever they were saying had nothing to do with what had happened, nothing to do with the life that was taken. And I thought about God and wondered where he was that night, cause it was still Sunday. George Washington had probably talked to God in church that morning. Then I looked at him, yeah, I raised my head and looked at what they’d done to him.

Could this have been the answer to his prayers?

S
ome months later came a day when I was just too tired to care about what might happen if I began to think of myself as a man. I wasn’t a boy anymore, but white people still called me
boy
or
nigger
, and I thought they should know that I was a man, just like Mr. Washington. He was a man, a good man, and that’s why they killed him. I could never forget what I’d seen in the woods, Lord knows, I couldn’t even talk about it.

Talk? I wanted to scream, but there was a rope round my neck too. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. That rope made me a nigger. Fear made me a boy, and I didn’t want to be a boy or a nigger anymore.

Daddy was a man, a strong man. He wouldn’t hide that, so he was bound to have a run-in with Sheriff Reynolds. Yeah, Daddy was still walking round and all, but after that he held his head lower than he used to, let his shoulders slump a bit, so you might’ve thought that fire was out, but you’d be wrong. He wasn’t dead, like I’d been thinking. He just walked like the dead so he’d be left alone, but if you walk like the dead and can fool someone like the sheriff, it may be just a matter of time before you fool yourself.

Mr. Washington had chosen to walk with his head up, which meant he wasn’t a nigger. The Ku Klux don’t usually kill niggers. George Washington was a man. That’s why he was killed.

For a long time I figured I had just two choices. I could walk the rest of my life with my head down and be sick on the inside. Or I could walk with my head up and be fine on the inside. Course that
would attract the notice of the Ku Klux or some kind of attention I didn’t want, and I’d be dead soon. But there was a third choice.

Daddy wasn’t a nigger either. That’s why he stood up to Sheriff Reynolds. He eventually backed down on account of me, on account of Mama, on account of something that was more important than himself, his family. That was the third choice. It’s not a question of standing or running, but how long you going to stand or how long you going to run? You got to understand that there’s always a third choice even if you can’t see it or feel it. Like Daddy. He was busted up inside, and I’ve seen him busted up on the outside too. That’s called sharecropping. Even after winning an argument with a mule, you eventually heal. Daddy would be all right. That’s how he got to be strong and old.

But I wasn’t there yet, didn’t understand. I’d had enough of keeping my head down, and I thought I’d figured out a way to take a stand on something yet live to tell about it. I figured all I had to do was remember to smile with my head up, remember my manners. So I got up one morning when the sky was red with day, put my clothes on, got a fire going in the woodstove, and crept out of the cabin with an idea fixed in my head about walking on a sidewalk.

There was this wooden sidewalk in Spartanburg, running right through town along either side of the main street. The sidewalk lay under the shade trees where white folks walked after church on Sundays. Colored men built it and tended it, but colored folks had to walk in the dirt of the street, and that never made any sense to me. Why build something you could never use?

The path into town from our cabin was kinda overgrown, but you could find it if you knew it was there. I walked without really seeing it, my hands in my pockets trying to keep them warm, and my head held high. Figured I should get some practice before I got to town. I was terrified, but one thing I’d learned from horses and mules was to never let them sense your fear. There had to be no doubt who was in charge and who wasn’t.

I had recently turned eighteen, and Daddy had given me a Sunday
free of chores as a gift. That was about all we could afford. Since that night in the woods I’d been thinking about what had happened to Mr. Washington and to Daddy and to Grandma Sara in the war against the Seminoles, thinking about all the things in this world I could never change and what I maybe could change. And that’s when it come to me to go walk on that sidewalk in town. I remembered watching a group of colored men fixing part of that sidewalk, and when I was younger, I thought it was strange they would do that. Now I felt anger over my fear.

Every abuse I’d ever suffered or seen, every curse, every sour look, every mean gesture or pointed finger or raised eyebrow or jutted chin, every joke that wasn’t funny, even the compliments that sat in your gut like a stone, all those were some of the many sick ways of hearing and feeling the word
no
. I started to think that no matter what rule I followed, no matter how many times I smiled or lowered my eyes, I would always be guilty of doing the wrong thing. So I might as well try doing something right, even if it killed me. If I died, I’d at least know what it felt like to be a man, and if I lived I could always remember that I’d once been a man, and all I had to do to get there was go for a walk.

The morning was quiet and getting brighter all the time. Shadows under the elms made the ground look as if it were gone, like I was walking on nothing. It was all right for me to spend my life walking on this nothing, but not on that sidewalk in town.

Pretty soon I could feel the ground getting harder and hear town getting closer. Someone’s dog was barking, a door slammed, and somewheres off, a rooster was letting everyone know that I was coming. It’s strange how when you’re going somewhere you really shouldn’t be going, you get there mighty quick. Part of me wished I hadn’t got there so fast. But something made me keep walking, keep my feet moving toward that sidewalk up ahead, but I was so afraid that I dropped my head now, and watched my dirty shoes go forward on their own, pulling me along.

People were already walking there cause church had just let out. I
could feel the stares, which were empty like the black shadows under elm trees, but colder. I caught the scents of manure and hay from a livery stable to my right, but I didn’t look at it. I knew it was there, like the beauty shop on my left that colored women couldn’t use.

I kept walking and I knew when I was beside the butcher shop that wouldn’t take credit from colored people, no, I didn’t need to smell blood to know where death kept a business, or maybe it was the funeral parlor up ahead that only served whites, though Mama once told me we’re all the same color to worms. I stared at that shop wondering who would make my coffin on the day I died, and maybe this was the day. I kept looking even after I passed, so I didn’t notice I’d turned slightly toward the sidewalk till my right foot bumped up against something hard.

I lifted that foot and put it down squarely on the sidewalk. I leaned forward, pushed off, and brought my left foot up right next to it. Then I was standing on the sidewalk where no colored person was supposed to stand. It was just a few inches off the ground but the sky seemed closer and bluer. I felt if I reached up with my hands, they would turn blue cause the sky was so close. I felt giddy, but I didn’t know if it was fear or being up so high. It was just a few inches, the distance between where I’d been and where I was, but it could have been a mountain.

I didn’t move right away. Looking down, I could see each sunlit pine plank and how they fit together like they’d always been lined up side by side, like the sidewalk came whole from a mill and colored men had nothing to do with it at all. The sweat of the men who had built it was soaked into the ground under those boards, where eyes couldn’t see. There must’ve been pools of blackness down there, but only insects could taste the salt.

I looked up and saw Spartanburg like it had just come out of the air. The fear hit me again and made my head too heavy to keep up. The trees whispered as I began to walk, head bowed. In front of me and behind me were white people, but they were just bright pieces moving in a fog of perfume, branches, shadows, and light. I
could smell them and hear them moving all around me. Eyes were going through me cause I wasn’t there, I was a shadow under the magnolias.

I could feel my breath pick up as my feet went up, down, up, down. I was walking on whiteness all broken up under the shade, the trees breaking up the sun and casting it down to silence. I was looking at feet, lots of feet moving toward me or away from me, and a few shoes not moving cause their owners were sitting on benches off to the side, pairs of them just sitting there, nice shoes pointed at me as I walked by. Black trousers, white dresses, scuffing of boots along the sidewalk, tap and scrape of a cane, knees bending, creases on pant legs, dust staining cotton dresses long enough to sweep any darkness off the sidewalk, white enough to bleach any stain out of it.

“Who’s that boy?” I heard someone ask behind me.

I didn’t turn around, just kept walking. But I looked up quickly then and smiled at the person walking toward me, about to brush past me. He didn’t smile back but looked at me the way you look at a stray dog.

“Crazy nigger,” someone else said, “probably drunk.”

This voice was older, grayer. If I didn’t act like I noticed, maybe it would be all right. Just keep walking. If I could tell someone was coming right at me, I moved out of the way. Sometimes I couldn’t tell till it was too late and I got shoved aside, violently one time, but I kept going, hands tight as stones in my pockets, sweat slipping down my back like a cold river.

And then something happened in me, and my head, which had been pulled down for so long, was no longer stone, no longer iron. It became so light it began to pull on the rest of me, until my whole self was straight like I’d never bent over before, or ever used my knees to reach down. With my head up, I looked straight ahead and side to side, at everything there was to be seen.

The fear didn’t matter anymore. I felt a strength in my blood, and every part of me drank it in like a plant that had gone months without water and suddenly received rain. Something in my body
was remembering the reason for blood, the river that joins the living to the dead. All the ancestors in my blood had given me the strength to raise my head and make me smile. It was they who put laughter on my lips, told me to mind my manners and walk like it was the most natural thing on earth.

I remembered to smile, tip my hat, mind my manners as the white folks passed me by. But I couldn’t help noticing all the cracks in the wooden planks. Pretty soon, I thought, some colored man will have to fix all those cracks. He’ll seal up each one, trapping his own blackness inside with the rot, and when he’s done, he won’t be allowed back to feel his own work under his feet. Can’t use what you make, can’t touch what you hold.