Leaving: A Novel (37 page)

When I was first put in the stockade my wife was still kept for a while in the “Big House,” but my little boy, who was only nine years old, was given away to a Negro family across the river in South Carolina, and I never saw or heard of him after that. When I left the camp my wife had had two children by some one of the white bosses, and she was living in a fairly good shape in a little house off to herself.…

Today, I am told, there are six or seven of these private camps in Georgia—that is to say, camps where most of the convicts are leased from the State of Georgia. But there are hundreds and hundreds of farms all over the State where Negroes, and in some cases poor white folks, are held in bondage on the ground that they are working out debts, or where the contracts which they have made hold them in a kind of perpetual bondage, because, under those contracts they may not quit one employer and hire out to another except by and with the knowledge and consent of the former employer.

One of the usual ways to secure laborers for a large peonage camp is for the proprietor to send out an agent to the little courts in the towns and villages, and where a man charged with some petty offense has no friends or money the agent will urge him to plead guilty, with the understanding that the agent will pay his fine, and in that way save him from the disgrace of being sent to jail or the chain-gang! For this high favor the man must sign beforehand a paper signifying his willingness to go to the farm and work out the amount of the fine imposed. When he reaches the farm he has to be fed and clothed, to be sure, and these things are charged up to his account. By the time he has worked out his first debt another is hanging over his head, and so on and so on, by a sort of endless chain, for an indefinite period, as in every case the indebtedness is arbitrarily arranged by the employer. In many cases it is very evident that the court officials are in collusion with the proprietors or agents, and that they divide the “graft” among themselves.…

But I didn’t tell you how I got out. I didn’t get out—they put me out. When I had served as a peon for nearly three years—and you remember that they claimed I owed them only $165—when I had served for nearly three years one of the bosses came to me and said that my time was up. He happened to be the one who was said to be living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of overalls, which cost about seventy-five cents, took me in a buggy and carried me across the Broad River into South Carolina, set me down and told me to “git.” I didn’t have a cent of money, and I wasn’t feeling well, but somehow I managed to get a move on me. I begged my way to Columbia. In two or three days I ran across a man looking for laborers to carry to Birmingham, and I joined his gang. I have been here in the Birmingham district since they released me, and I reckon I’ll die either in a coal mine or an iron furnace. It don’t make much difference which. Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a peon camp is hell itself!

CHAPTER 3

MARCH 1965   •   LOVE EASTON 19, ELISE 53

EASTON SLEPT IN
his car by the side of the road and in the morning drove from Selma to South Carolina, seventeen miles past Aiken toward Orangeburg, across the Edisto River, and onto the small white sand roads of Norma. On both sides, pine trees hid the tract houses in the backwoods. Just after a low grass field on the right, he turned in to a driveway by the black cast-iron mailbox. Here there was no number on the mailbox or the house, for all the families and homes were well known to the postman. He drove slowly, the sand and pebbles crackling under his tires. Nothing seemed to have changed in his five-year absence: the
NO TRESPASSING
sign still lay on its side from the time he and Ronald shot the post out from under it with Papa Samuel’s shotgun; the rusted iron horseshoe spike stood by the dogwood tree; even the patterns of shadows seemed familiar as they shifted in the slight breeze over the windshield of his car.

A deer stood in the middle of the road, looked up at him, and slowly walked into the thicket, rubbing its antlers on the low myrtle branches. Then the tunnel of pines gave way to the house and the adjacent cotton field. The field had died long ago, and hollow thistles stood up in the dried grass.

There was no car parked out front, but there never had been. Elise had never owned a car, and Papa Samuel took his tractor when he left. Easton pulled right up to the steps below the porch. It looked older than he’d remembered it; the thin grayed wood had splintered, and the roof had blanched. The front doorknob was still missing.

He turned off the engine. Though he’d come all this way to see it, he had no desire to enter the old house. He got out of the car and stood beside it.

“Mama?” he yelled. There was a slam, which Easton knew to be the breeze opening and shutting the back door. He put his foot up on the first step leading to the porch as Ronald used to do talking to Ruby, and it felt strange to know he was now nearly the same age as Ronald had been then.

“Mama?” he yelled again.

She wouldn’t be home in the middle of a weekday; she’d be in town selling her dresses or tending to the feed shop. He gladly turned away from the house and looked across the field to the trees that hid the river. It was still bright, though the cold evening was coming and in the thicket the darkness could overtake you swiftly. He walked across the field. His head no longer hurt, but he still felt a cloudiness as he walked, like a thought had just escaped him. The field went on for fifty yards and then turned into tall weeds and small saplings. The path to the river was still clearly beaten down, though branches had grown across at shoulder height, or perhaps those branches had always been there and he’d been too short to notice before. As the woods grew thicker, the air became damp, and he could hear the river rushing in the distance like a breeze blowing through leaves. He walked more quickly, swiping branches out of the way with impatience. It had been warm earlier in the week, so the water would be high. The pine needles crunched beneath his feet and hidden animals ran in the side brush. He knew he was close to the river when he passed a piece of barbed-wire fence: two posts stuck in the ground to the side of the path with one rusty wire between them.

The river roared as he reached its side, the swift water splashing against the larger rocks that still peeked above the surface. This was by no means a rapid, but the swollen tide ate away at the dirt banks and revealed the roots of trees dangling at its edges. The other side of the river was a stone’s throw, perhaps thirty feet across, yet the sheer force and volume of water made the distance seem untraversable.

The bridge to town was a quarter mile downstream on an inland path cut by the schoolchildren and laborers from the surrounding farms, but the spot he used to go to with Ronald was upstream, not nearly as far but less well traveled, on the edge of the river, lined by blackberry vines entangled with poison ivy.

Easton walked carefully along the muddy shore until he found the spot, a fallen log covered by moss, just large enough for two, and a large rock, waist-high, perfect for resting fishing rods against to let the lines dangle into the carved inlet. He leaned himself over the rock and looked down into the water, searching for catfish or trout. But nothing below the surface was clear. The water was too wild in the main part of the river, and even the depth of this private alcove churned with soil and sand.

He sat on the damp log and put his feet up on a shelf of the rock—his legs used to stretch straight out across, but now he bent them at the knees as Ronald used to do, sitting forward with his elbows on his thighs. Finally at rest, he let the sound of the river fully engulf him. Ronald said the river was a healing force: the loud, steady sound cleaned out the noise in your own mind. But now the rushing river brought with it memories.

“Why is he so mad at me?” Easton once asked Ronald after the required moments of cleansing had passed.

“He’s just mad. He’s not mad at you. Some people get mad at so many things that happen in their lives that they forget what they’re mad at and just take it out on anyone they can. And Samuel is a person like that.”

“When I’m mad, I know who I’m mad at.”

“And who are you mad at?”

“I’m mad at him.”

“Anyone else?”

“And I’m mad at them Palmer boys. They the ones who done something to me.”

“They’re the ones who did…”

“They’re the ones who did something to me. And my papa. He can’t just beat on me like I was his mule. I ain’t his mule. I ain’t nobody’s mule.”

“You sure you aren’t mad at anyone else?”

“I told you I’m not.”

“Tremendous. I just thought you might be—but as long as you don’t forget who you’re mad at, then you’re all right.”

“He’s stupid if he doesn’t know who he’s mad at.”

Ronald nodded. They fished in silence for a while, and just after letting enough time go by so that Easton knew he’d been heard and respected, Ronald gave him a little more to consider.

“Sometimes it takes longer before things get more complicated. Sometimes you get less sure of yourself with age.”

Easton nodded his head, sitting alone, older now, listening to the river. He was mad at everyone it seemed, and no one in particular. He felt the anger in his belly and his chest. He was mad at himself the most, for all the things he’d done and hadn’t done. How had Ronald been so wise? Or did he just know what everyone knows when they get older but doesn’t do them any good to know: that it all gets more complicated as time passes.

The sun was setting and it was beginning to get cold. There was a snap of twigs and Easton looked up to see his mother staring at him with a smile. Elise hadn’t changed all that much; she looked like Ruby wearing a pair of black plastic-rimmed glasses. Her head was wrapped in a red bandanna, and her body sagged under the weight of her thick wool coat.

“Look at you,” she said. “Look at you. You a man now.” Easton stood but did not go to her, and she did not go to him.

“I’m not a man, Mama. I’m just your little boy grown bigger.”

“You got a nice car. Is dat your own car?”

“I built it.”

Elise shook her head. “I went to de house and saw it and wondered who was out here. But here you is. Your sister say you might be comin, but I didn think so soon. Not before Sunday. I’m so glad to see you. Why didn you call and I could a fixed somethin for you?”

“I didn’t want you going to all that trouble.”

“Well, come on and we’ll have cake. You hungry?”

“Let’s just sit here a minute.”

“In dis cole?”

“Just a minute.”

Easton sat back down on the log. He patted the space next to him. “You come sit here next to me and listen, Mama. I want you to hear this.”

“I’ll jus meet you back at de house when you get done.” She turned away and began to edge back along the path.

“All I’m asking for is one little minute. Can’t you give me one minute after all this time? And I come all this way. Shit.”

She stopped and looked at him. He turned away.

“I guess I could stay if it mean dat much to you,” she said.

She moved cautiously, turning her large body sideways between the vines and the river. She brushed off the log next to him and sat. He didn’t move to touch her or even look at her.

“Just listen,” he said. The water rippled over rocks and around snags into small falls. But the rush of the river did not feel calming to him anymore. He felt her impatience, and the roar of the water only seemed to push them further apart.

“What you want me to hear?” she asked after a few moments.

“Just listen. Listen to the water.”

“What about it?”

“Mama, you’re not giving it a chance. The water’s supposed to take all your thoughts away, all your worries.”

“I don’t have no worries, chile. You have worries, June Bug?”

“No, Mama.” He shook his head. “No. I just meant it’s peaceful here.”

“Well, it’s peaceful
and
warm back at de house. We can get de stove burnin. I worked hard all day and I need to res my feet. You come along when you feel de need.” She got up and brushed off the bottom of her coat.

She walked up the path, but Love didn’t watch her. He sat for a minute more, staring at the river until he could no longer hear her push aside the branches, until he saw that she really wasn’t going to wait for him.

*   *   *

THERE WERE NO
piles of clothing on the dining table, no pieces of broken thread by the sewing machine, and no needles stuck in a bar of soap like there used to be. Elise had a job as a textile worker. “Now I just makes de fabric and imagines de clothes,” she told Easton.

That night he told her about his life in Oakland, and she fell asleep right after supper. He went with her to the mill the next day and got hired on for temporary work so he could make enough money to get back to California. The work was tiring, and again they talked little at night before falling asleep.

At five
A.M.
the next morning, before work, Easton stood in the kitchen by the wood-burning stove, rubbing his hands together while his mother patted down rice cakes to take for lunch. Then they ate breakfast in silence, as they had for the last two mornings. They were heading into a ten-hour day of clattering machinery, so deafening that it stayed in their heads long into the night and entered their dreams as waterfalls and trains rushing down tracks, so in that way it was nice to have the silence. Yet it was uncomfortable, as if they were pulling on each other with invisible threads. Every once in a while Easton looked at Elise as if he expected her to say something, ask him something about his life, though he’d already told her everything he could think of that first night.

After breakfast, they left the house and crossed the field toward the shortcut to town by the river. Easton didn’t want to drive and use up any of the gas. He thought about his finances as he swiped away branches. At a dollar-fifteen an hour, he’d earn enough money for the trip in a few more days.

He turned around and noticed that he’d lost sight of his mother. She walked more slowly than he but at a steady pace, with a more forceful consistency, her eyes lowered and her feet moving in equally spaced steps, landing on whatever flower or vine happened beneath them. He waited for her to catch up, and without looking at him, she continued past, as if her feet couldn’t stop once in motion.