Nightjohn (3 page)

Mammy made her some root tea that smelled of bark but Alice wouldn’t drink it. She just lay there all that night and the next three, four days. During that time John came and I talked to him about
A
, traded tobacco with him. For two nights he didn’t do no work on the trade and went to sleep right after the
trough because the master worked him so hard. On the third night after I traded for
A
—sometime that same night Alice ran.

My life is short, but some live long and the one thing we know, short or long—it’s wrong to run. Not wrong because it’s wrong. But wrong because nobody ever gets away.

I’ve seen two to try it. Both men. One was an old man named Jim who just couldn’t take no more and one night he up and cut.

They set after him the next morning with dogs. Only the master, he don’t only go his ownself but took five or six field hands with him to see so they can carry what they see back to tell us.

The dogs be mean. He feeds them things to make them mean. Blood things. Sometimes he’ll take them to the fields and should a man or woman work a little behind the others, or behind the
best man, who is whipped to speed—why, he sets the dogs on the slow one. And he don’t pull them off right away, neither. Lets them go until they taste blood and want more of it.

They’s mean, the dogs. They’s big and red with tight hair and heads like hogs and mean as Waller his ownself. He keeps them in a stone pen by the side of the horse barn and they slobber and chew at the gate each time we walk by. Dirt mean.

Jim, he ran at night too but it didn’t help. The field hands told us later. He cut and ran down to the river, ran in the water for a goodly distance, then on the top of a fence rail for as long as the fence ran and then dropped to the ground and just moved.

The dogs followed him all the way. The hands said that one dog even got up and ran on the top rail of the fence.
Only took half a day and they caught Jim.

The last bit, when he heard the dogs singing him, baying on him, Jim climbed a tree. Problem was, the tree wasn’t higher than he could reach, nearly, and as high as he got, the bottom of him hung down where the dogs could reach him.

The master set the dogs on him and they tore and ripped what they could reach until there wasn’t any meat on Jim’s legs or bottom. The dogs ripped it all off, to hang in shreds. The field hands say he still didn’t let go, nor never did. Even when he was dead his hands didn’t let go and the master made the field hands leave him there. They’s some wanted to take Jim down and bury him but he made them to leave him that way, hanging by his hands in the tree, for the birds to eat.

Second man was young. Name of
Pawley. He wasn’t a big enough hand to be allowed to be a breeder in the quarters and so he went to looking. He snucked away and met a girl at a plantation down the road a piece and they sat in the moonlight with each other some nights. Pawley he made it back before wake-up time every night but one, the last one. He fell asleep in his girl’s arms, fell asleep in the moonlight.

So they from the white house set out with the dogs and Pawley he didn’t run, or try to get away. He was on his way home but they let the dogs to have him anyway, tear him up to bleed but not kill him. Then the master he tied him down and cut him like he did the cattle so he wouldn’t run to girls no more, but the cut went wrong and Pawley he laid all night and bled to death without ever making a sound in the corner of the quarters.

So don’t nobody run. Besides, I don’t
think there’s a place to run to. I heard talk once of some land, some land north but it’s far away and it was only talk. Not something to know. Just something to hear. Like birds singing, the talk of the land north, or the wind in the trees.

But Alice cut and run that night.

She didn’t get far. Down to the river and then sideways some. Her back was still ripped and sore and she must have moved slow. She might have kept moving all night but hadn’t gone more than to the other end of the cotton fields—an easy small walk. Then she pulled herself under some brambles and was there when they found her.

He let the dogs to have her.

Didn’t matter what she’d gone through, or that her thinking wasn’t working right. The field hands with him told us he smiled his big white smile like the big white house, pale maggot white like his skin smile and let the
dogs to have her. She didn’t fight them or try to get away and they just tore at her. Tore at her until her whole front was torn and gone and she was bleeding from the chest.

She didn’t die.

Alice be too tough for her ownself good. She didn’t die and he made the hands to carry her back and put her in the quarters. Mammy sewed up what she could with canvas thread and greased and patched and she lived.

She be like Pawley. She didn’t make sounds even while mammy was pulling at the torn flaps of skin and sewing them on her chest. Not a sound. Just stared and stared at the wall.

That night John called to me as he came past where I was trying to sleep.

“Tobacco girl—time for another letter.”

I had been all day helping mammy and was tired and sad for Alice, how
she be at the other end of the quarters, but I went just the same. I still had two letters coming for that first pinch of tobacco.

He was sitting on his heels in the open doorway.

I squatted next to him. “What’s the next one?”

He used a stick with a sharpened end on it and wiggled in the dirt two half circles:

“
Bee
,” he said. “It be B.”

“That sounds crazy.…”

“That’s how you say the letter.
B
. It’s for
behh
or
be
or
buh
or
boo
. That’s how a
B
looks and how you make the sound.”

I made it sound in my mouth, whispering. “So where’s the bottom to it?”

“I swear—you always want to know the bottom to things. Here, here it is. It
sits on itself this way, facing so the two round places push to the front.”

Suddenly he’s gone. One second he’s there, the next he’s slammed sideways and gone.

“What in the
hell
are you doing to her?”

Mammy was standing there, big and black and tall in the moonlight. “What you doing to this girl?”

She had come from the side and fetched John such a blow on his head that it knocked him back into the wall and on his back.

He come up quick and didn’t cower none.

“Nothing. Not like you think. I’m teaching her to read.”

“That’s what I mean,” mammy said. “What in the
hell
are you doing? Don’t you know what they do to her if they find her trying to read? We already got
one girl tore to pieces by the whip and the dogs. We don’t need two.”

I’d been quiet all this time, watching. Didn’t seem so bad, what he was doing. Teaching me a few letters to know. Maybe a word or two. So I said it. “Doesn’t seem so bad—”

“
Bad?
” Then she hissed like a snake. “Child, they’ll cut your thumbs off if you learn to read. They’ll whip you until your back looks knitted—until it looks like his back.” She pointed to John, big old finger. “Is that how you got whipped?”

He shook his head. “I ran.”

“And got caught.”

“Not the first time.”

She waited. I waited.

“First time I ran I got clean away. I went north, all the way. I was free.”

I’d never heard such a thing. We couldn’t even talk about being free. And here was a man said he had been
free by running north. I thought, How can that be?

“You ran and got away?” mammy asked.

“I did.”

“You ran until you were clean away?”

“I did.”

“And you came
back
?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

He sighed and it sounded like his voice, like his laugh. Low and way off thunder. It made me think he was going to promise something, the way thunder promises rain. “For this.”

“What you mean—this?”

“To teach reading.”

It’s never quiet in the quarters. During the day the young ones run and scrabble and fight or cry and they’s always a gaggle of them. At night everybody be sleeping. But not quiet. Alice, she’s quiet. But they’s some of them to
cry. New workers who are just old enough to be working in the fields cry sometimes in their sleep. They hurt and their hands bleed and pain them from new blisters that break and break again. Old workers cry because they’re old and getting to the end and have old pain. Same pain, young and old. Some snore. Others just breathe loud.

It’s a long building and dark except for the light coming in the door and the small windows, but it’s never quiet. Not even at night.

Now it seemed quiet. Mammy she looked down at John. Didn’t say nothing for a long time. Just looked.

I had to think to hear the breathing, night sounds.

Finally mammy talks. Her voice is soft. “You came back to teach reading?”

John nodded. “That’s half of it.”

“What’s the other half?”

“Writing.” He smiled. “Course, I
wasn’t going to get caught. I had in mind moving, moving around. Teaching a little here, a little there. Going to do hidey-schools. But I got slow and they got fast and some crackers caught me in the woods. They were hunting bear, but the dogs came on me instead and I took to a tree and they got me.”

Another long quiet. Way off, down by the river, I heard the sound of a nightbird. Singing for day. Soon the sun would come.

“Why does it matter?” Mammy leaned against the wall. She had one hand on the logs, one on her cheek. Tired. “Why do that to these young ones? To Sarny here. If they learn to read—”

“And write.”

“And write, it’s just grief for them. Longtime grief. They find what they don’t have, can’t have. It ain’t good to
know that. It eats at you then—to know it and not have it.”

“They have to be able to write,” John said. Voice pushing. He stood and reached out one hand with long fingers and touched mammy on the forehead. It was almost like he be kissing her with his fingers. Soft. Touch like black cotton in the dark. “They have to read and write. We all have to read and write so we can write about this—what they doing to us. It has to be written.”

Mammy she turned and went back to her mat on the floor. Moving quiet, not looking back. She settled next to the young ones and John he turned to me and he say:

“Next is
C
.”

Come more hard times.

A week goes by, then another week. It’s the time of year for planting and the field hands have to work until they drop. Waller whips them past that and they get so tired they don’t know up from down.

But John works with me. Not each night, because he’s too tired. Some of them to work in the fields can’t even walk back. Have to be carried by others. But some nights he works with me.

I learn a whole family of letters. All the fingers on one hand, two on the other.
A, B, C, D, E, F
, and
G
. He makes me to write them in the dirt and shows me how to take more than one of them and make a word, how the word is to be looking and how the word is to be sounding.

“Make it slow, make the sound each time. First the letter, then the sound, then make it to meet the sound from the next letter. Write
B
, say it, then
A
and say it, then
G. Bag
.”

And I make the word. First word.

Bag
.

I make the word. I couldn’t believe it. I came to make the word. Don’t matter what the word is, what it means. Just to make the word. The first word.

That’s what caused the trouble. Me and that first word.

I was so excited to be making a word I went everywhere and made the word. I
took a stick and rubbed a point on it against a stone and round in back of the quarters I made the word in the dirt.

Wrote
BAG
. Then said it.
“Bag.”

I rubbed it out with my heel and wrote it in a new place.
BAG
. Wrote it all over.
BAG. BAG. BAG
. Each time I rubbed it out and moved to a new place and I was just looking at it, last time I wrote it, wondering if I could use other letters to make other words, thinking how to make another word when I hear the bull voice of Waller.

“What are you doing?”

A big hand grabbed the back of my shirtdress and dragged me up off my feet so I be hanging there.

“Tell me what you’re doing.” He was ugly. Pale white maggot ugly and I could smell his ugliness on him—white ugly. Stink of bad sweat and whiskey and smoke and fat food. I didn’t say nothing.

He shook me like a dog shaking a rat. I felt my eyes go to wobbling and I just about messed. I still didn’t say a word.

“What are you scribbling in the dirt?”

I thought, I’ll lie. “Nothing. Something I saw on a old feed sack. I didn’t know it was wrong to make it in the dirt.”

“It looks like writing to me.” Holds me up. Closer. Stink of his breath in my face. White stink. Pig stink.

“Don’t know nothing about writing.”

He hit me then. Be holding me with both hands, one on each shoulder so I’m facing him, and he quick drops one hand and hits me with his fist alongside the head as I fall.

I saw lights. Exploding colors.

“Don’t lie to me. You tell me the truth of it and I’ll let you off. Where did you learn to write?”

“Don’t know nothing about writing,” I said again. I had dropped all the way down and I was sitting in the dirt looking up at him but it put me in a bad place. Near his feet. Big boots. Black boots but wrong kind of black. Bad black, not good black like John. Mammy. Me. My mind rolled around like a sick dog.

He kicked me in the stomach.

“God damn you—don’t you lie to me. I’ll tie you to the spring house and get the truth out of you.”

“Don’t know nothing about writing.…”

He kicked again but he missed. First time I had grabbed my stomach, rolled away, and on the second kick I crawled-ran to get away. Ran to the only place I knew. Ran to the quarters. Ran to mammy.

She be in the corner changing the grease and rag on Alice’s back and I
ran to her dress and hid my head in the folds.