Had I a Hundred Mouths (2 page)

When the black baby was borned in the cave and I helped Louetta with it, black, and said Oh my God Louetta black, it's black, I took it to the Orphanage up at Longview. But they would not take it, black. All day I was wandering with the little black baby boy, through the woods and hiding in the deep groves, wondering what to do. It was a warm little thing with big white eyes and I hated to give it up cause I felt that it was part mine, you understand. Towards dark I took the baby to Aunt Kansas Tate, our washerwoman way back in the woods in Niggertown, and begged her to take it, and she looked, black, at me, the way they do when they're stern like that, a kind of look of God, and I knew she thought the baby was mine. Who is its Mama? asked Kansas Tate. And I told her that I found the baby in the woods. Must be God's child, she said. And then she held the warm child and I saw her love, and she took the baby boy. She named him Leander…

Louetta and I watched the boy grow. When Kansas Tate came to our place to wash and iron, the little boy Leander played near the washpot, under the Chinaberry tree. And I saw Louetta watching him from the window. Leander was different, twas in his eyes. After all, he was borned in a cave of tree roots that the tornado from Oklahoma had made in 1918, tore up half of the county. He was as light-complected as a light Mescan boy, and real different. Something of Louetta was on him, and sometimes I'd catch her standing at the back door peeking and staring out at the little boy playing in the woodpile. Leander grew on. A look of Louetta was strong over him. But I never saw her talk to him. Sometimes I'd play with Leander, and as he grew up I taught him marbles and we'd shoot em; and I showed a lot of things a father would have shown him—how to aim and shoot a beebee gun, how to whittle a slingshot; and we hunted rabbit once, back of the old road. Until the Klu Klux boys caught us and warned me not to do it again. This hurt me before the boy, because what could I say to the boy, that we couldn't be friends or that we would have to hide to be friends. And so we slipped out to the cave in the sawmill woods where nobody ever came and we hid in the cave and played jack-knife and I told him stories and answered some of the questions that he was beginning to ask. And Leander grew. Louetta and I had made love oh I guess a million times by that time. We'd never got enough since the first time. We did it back in the woodshed at night and sometimes in the barn in pure daylight. But the hiding was terrible and our feeling of sin was terrible. How could we stop? I guess nobody in the world has ever stopped something like that, once it's started. But Louetta said she felt doom, said something terrible was going to happen to us, and I worried for fear she would do something to herself, sometimes she was ahurting so. But then we'd want each other again and no suffering God made, I hate to say it, could keep us from that wanting. One day you boys might know that, hope to God you won't, but one day you might, and guess you will; because nobody's perfect and we all got flesh on us.

When Leander was twelve Louetta came one day to where he was, working and helping out on the place, and gave him a red ring for his twelfth birthday that he put on his finger. He loved that ring and kept it there. I don't know why but I felt Leander was part my boy, that I'd helped make him, I'd held him first of anybody in the world and carried him when he was just borned, so he was that much mine. But the boy had two fathers, one run away, black, and one keeping a secret, white. I loved Leander. The town was afraid of him, though, because he was so light-complected and carried something unusual over him, not like any others. Sometimes I would see Leander watching Louetta when she was in the yard and I saw him gazing at her with such a look, almost as if he knew.

And now I'm going to tell you something. One night Louetta was sitting in the hot dark on the gallery; a darkest night, black as ink, was over us, the way it is back here when the moon's away, black as ink. The rest of us had gone up the road to see about old Uncle Ned that was sick. And Louetta saw a shape coming in the dark and she could not see who it was; and before she could call out anybody's name the figure was on her and tore at her and she could see that it was black and she begged and she fought. This's what she told me, because when I came home I found Louetta torn and wild and I smelled the smell again and saw that she'd been taken again. And I said was it the red nigger come back and she said black black. I run in the dark to get my shotgun that I kept in the hall in the corner, but then I heard a terrible sound, one I'll never forget, one of broken well-water, the groan of the deep porch well, and Louetta had thrown herself in the well. And right then the others came back, Mama and you boy's mothers, Holly and Eva, and I run for the boys to come and help bring up the body of Louetta from the well. When I held the cold body of Louetta how could I show all the feelings I felt before the others, just for a cousin? I tried not to pull that frozen body to my flesh like I had done so many times, my secret to my own damnation, and then I saw that Louetta's blue hand was clutched as though it held something it would never give up; and when nobody saw me, I broke open Louetta's hand and there, what she clutched and held on to, to her very death, in all her feelings of shamefulness and her, I'll bet you, tenderness, and would not even now give up until I broke the very bones of her hand, was the red ring of Leander. Fighting his wild hands, Louetta must have clawed it off Leander's finger. My howling was so loud that they ran to see if a snake had bit me or a blue hornet stung me, and before they knew it or anybody ever saw, I swallowed the red ring. It burned down my gullet like a coal of fire. I didn't know how I was going to live with my feelings. I wanted to jump into the well, but I couldn't show my hurting; and I couldn't show my shamefulness for all these secrets; and I couldn't show my despisement of Leander for killing my own secret Louetta—too many feelings for one person ever to stand and I don't know how I did it. But so much was happening. The boys wanted to run to Niggertown and round up the man, and I don't know what kept them from it, God himself did, I guess, if He could be in such an infernal place; because we all begged them to wait until Louetta was buried and they agreed if we would bury her the next day. The whole town was roiling and bonfires were burning all night and the boys put on their sheets and burnt a cross on the hill; was like the end of the world. All the pore niggers in Niggertown hid in their houses.

At the funeral suddenly come from out of nowhere Leander and Kansas Tate and stood by me. Leander was dirty and wild and looked like he had been hiding in the thicket all night long and Kansas Tate was in her black strongness and with a face that dared everybody. And suddenly Leander broke from us and ran and fell in the dirt of the open grave of Louetta and wailed and wailed, and oh the sight of that boy in the dirt of his mother's grave made me cry like a baby. People thought it was all for Louetta, but some was for Leander. Leander's hurting was terrible to see. They couldn't get him off the grave, he clung in the dirt, but the pallbearers in their white hoods seized him and dragged him away. Kansas Tate cried out that the Lord would strike them dead for blaming an innocent Negro boy and making him pay for somebody else's evil deed and they had to hold her in her wildness and daring of everybody. But the Klu Kluxes shouted burn him, make him pay for the one that raped and killed a white woman, a nigger in the hand is worth five in the bushes; and Clarence McKay, an old friend of Kansases but a leader of the Klu Klux, said Kansas I can't stop them, they'll have to have them a scapegoat. And Kansas Tate cried out, scapegoat? scapegoat? Leander's not a scapegoat! He's a Christian boy that loved Miss Louetta. But they dragged Leander on off into the woods. Back in the woods, no matter what I knew about it or what I felt, I couldn't lay a hand on Leander. The red ring laid in my gut and cut it like a claw. Most of the Klu Kluxes sympathized with my hurting for my cousin Louetta, but when they tore off his clothes from his brown young man's body they had to hold me to keep me from running to stop them and protect Leander; but then I rushed with them when they cut him clean as a woman and hung his young manhood on a tree branch. And I stood there crazy with the red ring of Leander and Louetta in me and saw them tar and feather Leander's brown young body, now neither man nor woman, and I vomited on my knees in the night. And there on the ground in the flare of the Klu Klux torches I saw the gleaming of the red ring, my damnation to curse me. I wanted to stomp it into my own vomit and crush it into the ground, but I took it and put it in my pocket.

And then they brought Leander into town and run him howling down Main Street on that funeral night and then they let him go, hollering to him to get out of town. That night Kansas Tate in her misery fell in a stroke and died, and I run far into the woods and drank my whiskey in the dark of the deep woods and laid like a log in the leaves. And then I crawled and hid in the dark of the cave.

The uncle took a long swallow of whiskey. And then he said, very low, I've never told a soul this story until now. Had I a hundred mouths I could not have told the story; it was too much of a story to tell. I've kept the tale of Leander and Louetta a secret all these years and have drank a ton of whiskey on it. And now I've told it to you boys, my brother's son and my sister's son, one just becoming a man and the other still adozing in his little boyhood. And the uncle reached again under the bed and brought up the bottle to his mouth. The golden fumes of whiskey spread over the nephews, and the carnality of that moment, the despairs of the flesh and the sorrows of the story of Leander brought life down upon the older nephew so heavily that it seemed unbearable; and he wondered how he would ever bear his feelings that his heart and his body were just beginning to give to him. He understood then his uncle's feelings and the ton of whiskey used to deaden them, but he vowed he would never deaden life, that he would feel his feelings full and that he would not fall under their burden as his uncle had, in hiding and numbness. He would feel and he would tell, even as his uncle had, finally, this afternoon.

But the uncle had more to tell. His voice went on, graver than the nephew had ever heard it. That day as I laid in the cave and wanting to die, I heard a sound, and it was Leander rolling on the ground in the leaves and grunting like an animal dying. He'd torn his flesh from the bone trying to get off the tar that had clung to him like another skin. He had skinned himself. And then I laid and watched him go to the river where his unbeknownst mother had washed herself of what had made him, and there I had washed myself, too. And there by the river I saw Leander, rising up out of the river, a scary figure, and I saw him tear at himself and I heard his wailings of pain. I'll drown him, I said to myself. But I heard myself call, Leander! Leander! I called. When he saw me, who I was, he howled at me like Satan the devil, white eyes flashing, and came out of the water, steaming and red like a young Satan, and spit at me like a fiend. I saw his burnt face and I saw his clawed bleeding body and I saw him limp from a foot that had been bad hurt. Leander! I cried. I ought to kill you for what you done. But I can't help it I am your friend and I ask you to remember all our life together; sometime I'll tell you how I held you when you was just a little baby. I will help to heal you if you will let me. And then I held out the red ring and Leander fell passed out and I picked him up from the water like a raw piece of meat and took him to the cave and tied him to a root. Poor lonesome lost nigger boy, there's not any more can be done to you for what you did and I can't kill you, like somebody'd tell me to.

I kept Leander hid back in the cave, tied to the tree root, and nursed him, every day I'd come and feed and doctor and nurse him, right there in the deep cave of trees where he was borned and where he was made on the night I heard his maker crying out, sixteen years ago. He never asked one question never said one word. I set and drank my whiskey. In the secret woods, in the cave, Leander was healing from the Klu Klux. He never told his feelings, never said a word. He hid his hate, and what love could he have? The foxes and the deer came to the cave and put their noses to his face, and the birds knew Leander. Summer and winter and spring Leander saw come over the woods; and Leander was seventeen. Every night I'd come and walk him out of the cave and in the light of the moon, I saw the terrible scars and patches of white on him. His beauty was ruined and all over his face was white scars and his torn mouth was healed crooked and his lips looked like they were burnt away. The healed skin on his face and on his arms and all over his body had turned white. In the moonlight I saw that Leander was striped and spotted like an animal. He limped because of his hurt leg some way, but he would never let me see what was the matter with it. His big eyes glared pure white, his hair was all coming back wild and long like a white man's and twas of a reddish color like his bedeviled father's. Who was this boy? Who could live like that, who would want to, you answer me that. And he never showed his feelings; no matter how many times I asked the question why would you do something like that, he would look at me with that terrible look as if he was asking, do what? When I finally held him up against the wall of the cave and said tell me, tell me why you would do something like that, and I almost told him about the red nigger his father and that he had done it to his own mother, but I couldn't, I couldn't do that, I guess I just loved Leander too much to kill his heart like that, if he had any of it left, and if any of his heart was left he was probably saving it for his mother and his father if ever he would find them. Anyway, when he didn't say a word I finally realized that he couldn't, that his voice must have been burnt out of his throat. Because when I finally held him by the throat he groaned a sound of ah-ah-ah and his breath smelled of old smoke of the Klu Klux Klan. Leander was burnt inside too. Poor lost nigger boy. So I just came and sat in the cave with him and drank my whiskey in the dark, as quiet as he was. This was when I give him back the red ring and he put it on his burnt finger.