The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (12 page)

Joe came back and told me and the girls to get ready. The two girls was called Ella and Clara. Ella the oldest one, and Clara the youngest one and looked just like Joe. After we had got everything we was go’n take with us, Joe led us back in the swamps. Ella and Clara got on the horse with the bundle, and me and Joe walked in front. I asked Joe how come he got the money so easy. He said it wasn’t easy; some colored men he had met had to speak up for him. Then he had to prove to Mr. Clyde how good he was. Clyde picked one of the wildest horses he had. He broke the horse, true, but he was so stoved up he had to lay up awhile before he could start back home.

It took us about ten days to reach Clyde’s place. We traveled the swamps all the time for fear the secret groups might see us and attack us for leaving Colonel Dye’s place. We ran out of food four days out, and from then on we ate what we could find. Corn, potatoes. If Joe was lucky he might kill a possum, or if we came up to a bayou we might catch a fish or two. We ate anything we could get. We met people, black and white, but they saw us on the move and wouldn’t have nothing to do with us.

We came up to Clyde’s place about five one evening. Clyde and his men had been killings hogs, and when we came up, the men was standing in the yard talking. Clyde told Joe to take us to the back and tell the women in the kitchen to give us a good feeding. I could smell that good hog meat from way cross the yard. The women was making hoghead cheese and blood pudding. They handed us a big pan of food and we found a clean spot on the ground to sit down. When we got through, almost too full to move, we went back round the house. Mr. Clyde told Joe he wouldn’t need him till Monday, so Joe could take us on home. The cabin wasn’t much bigger than the one we had left, but we had made a new start and everything looked right smart better. After the children
went to bed me and Joe sat at the firehalf talking. We was so proud we had moved, so happy for the good meal we got soon as we got here, every time we looked at each other we had to grin. Feet sore, back still hurting, but grinning there like two children courting for the first time. We tried to keep from looking at each other. I looked at the firehalf, Joe looked at the door; then I looked at the door, Joe looked at the firehalf. When we couldn’t find nowhere else to look we looked at each other and grinned. No touching, no patting each other on the knee, just grinning.

We got there on a Friday. Next day, Saturday, I heard that I was supposed to work in the big house. I hadn’t worked in a house since I was a slave, but I work where they put me. What I couldn’t figure out, why I got the job soon as I got there? How come some other woman didn’t have it? Some people like house work. Make them feel more important. House niggers always thought they was better than field niggers. I asked Joe if he knowed why they had gived me the job. He said he didn’t know, either.

’Fore day Monday morning when they called Joe for work I got up, too. After he ate and left, I went over to the house. It was pitch black, but I didn’t know what they wanted me for, so I went on anyhow. At that time some of the kitchens used to set away from the house. I didn’t know where I was go’n be working, so I went back to the kitchen and sat down on a barrel I saw in front of the door.

I sat there and sat there. I sat there over an hour. Just as the sun was coming up I saw a woman, a great big, brown-shin woman walking across the yard toward me. It had been a heavy dew the night before,
and her legs and feet was shining wet. She came up to the kitchen and looked at me sitting there.

“Well?” she said.

“My name’s Jane Pittman,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you that,” she said. “What you want?”

“I’m working here,” I said.

“No, you ain’t,” she said. “I don’t need nobody spying on me.”

“Spying?” I said.

“Get out my way ’fore I lam’ you up side the head,” she said.

She didn’t give me time to move. She pushed me side the head and I fell on the ground. I brushed off my clothes and went in the kitchen where she was. She was lighting a fire in the firehalf. When she got through she looked at me standing there.

“You don’t hear good, do you?” she said.

I was go’n tell her I didn’t want be there in the first place. I rather be out in the field, but she grabbed me and pitched me back outside. I fell flat on my face, my hands covered with chicken and guinea stuff. I wiped my hands in the grass and went back in the kitchen. Molly was singing. She didn’t even stop. She just grabbed me, still singing, and slammed me back out there. While I was sailing in the air I was hoping I hit a clean spot. That was like hoping I didn’t hit the ground.

I wiped off my hands and clothes and went back in. Molly just stood there looking at me now. When she went back to the firehalf I got the broom and started sweeping. She jecked the broom out my hand and throwed it back in the corner. I kept out of her way after that, but I watched everything she did. After she got through cooking, she took the food to the house. I waited and waited for her to come back. When she didn’t, I went over to the house too. The white people was sitting at the table eating. One white lady was just coming in the dining room. She was Mr. Clyde’s daughter, Miss Clare.

“You must be Jane,” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

“You’ll take care the children, Jane.”

“I don’t need nobody taking care them children,” Molly said. “I can cook and take care them children.”

Miss Clare didn’t answer Molly. She looked at the side of my face and my forrid.

“You hurt anywhere else?” she asked me.

I touched my forrid, and I had a knot up there the size of a marble.

Miss Clare looked at the side of my face again. She was too much of a lady to tell me I had some guinea stuff there. I could see her mouth working like she wanted to say something, then she pressed her lips tight. Then her nose worked a little bit like she was smelling something. All this time she was looking straight in my eye. She wanted me to guess what she didn’t want tell me.

One of the children at the table looked at me and pointed his finger. “Caw-caw,” he said. Then everybody else at the table looked at me, and all of them bust out laughing. I touched the spot they was looking at, and it was there, all right.

Molly didn’t want nobody else working in that house with her, scared the person would take her place. She had been with the Clyde family ever since she was a young lady. She had been the cook, she had been the nurse. But now she was in her sixties, and they thought she was getting old and needed help. Molly didn’t think she needed help. She was scared if she got help the next thing the other person would be taking over. She had had it pretty easy all her life, and she wasn’t go’n let nobody take it from her. The people tried to show Molly they didn’t want nobody else to take her place. “We love you, that’s why we want people here to help you,” they told her. But Molly didn’t see it that way. And she made everybody who came there to work pay for it. She would spill hot ashes on the floor and swear
you
was trying to burn the house
down. If she heard one of the children crying she would swear you had done him something wrong. If you had to make a fire in the firehalf or you had to make up a bed she would find something wrong with it every time. She did everything to get rid of you; then after she had got you out she couldn’t take care the work by herself.

Molly tried to get rid of me just like she had got rid of all the others. She had told lies on them till the white people had to let them go. When the white people found out she was telling lies and refused to fire the servants Molly vexed them and vexed them till they quit themself. When that didn’t work on me she went to the white people crying. She was quitting because they didn’t love her no more. She said she had wet nurse Miss Clare and now Miss Clare was the main one trying to put her out in the cold. They told Molly that wasn’t true, they wanted her there, they wanted her there the rest of her life. Molly said they didn’t want her, they wanted me.

One day she told them she was leaving. They told her she couldn’t leave, she been with them most of her life. She said me or her, one of us had to go. Miss Clare said I wasn’t going, but she didn’t want Molly to go either. She told me herself that she loved Molly much as she loved anybody and she wanted Molly to spend the rest of her life there with them. Molly said me or her, one had to go. I told them let me go in the field. No, they said.

Molly went to Deritter and got a job looking after an old lady there. I think for the first six months after Molly left, Miss Clare cried for Molly every day. She would go to Deritter every week to see Molly. If she didn’t go to Molly, Molly came there to see her. They would sit in that front room and talk for hours. Molly would spend the night and go back the next day. I went to Miss Clare and told her I was quitting. She told me if I did, she just had to get somebody else. I told her I didn’t care what she did, I was quitting. I
went home and told Joe I had quit. Joe told me if I didn’t get back up to that house he was go’n take a stick and run me back up there.

Molly died four or five years after that. The doctor said she died from old age, but Molly died from a broken heart. They brought her back to the place and buried her in the family plot. One of the things I’ll always regret, me and Molly never got to be friends. Maybe in the Beyond we will meet again and I’ll have a chance to tell her I never meant any harm. I think up there she will understand much better than she did down here.

I stayed there about ten years. All that time I worked in the house and Joe broke the horses. They used to get the horses out of Texas. We wasn’t too far off the Luzana-Texas borderline, and they used to get the horses out of Texas and bring them home to break them, then sell them to a boat that went down the Sabine River. Joe was called Chief Breaker. Everybody called him Chief—Chief Pittman. He broke horses nobody else could ride. People used to come from all over just to see him. Bet on him like you bet on rodeo riders. Clyde made as much on his rodeo as he made selling the horses down the river.

I dreaded the days they went to Texas to get horses. Scared somebody was coming back and telling me Joe was dead. Scared they might bring him in the house all broken up. I had seen it happen. A young boy had been throwed against a fence. Laid in bed a week, suffering, screaming, before he died. Every time Joe went out now I thought about that boy. But when I told him how I felt, all he said was: “What else can I do? I got to make a living doing something. Maybe the Lord put me here to break horses.”

“And maybe He didn’t,” I said. “Well, till He come down here and tell me different, I reckoned I’ll just go on breaking them,” Joe said.

Together we was making a dollar a day. We didn’t have to pay rent or buy food, so we could save most of what we made. After we had been there two, three years we had already paid back the hundred and fifty dollars Joe had borrowed. Couple more years, I thought we had enough and we ought to go out and find a little place of our own. Joe said it wasn’t that easy. He was too valuable to just pack up and quit like that. And what would he do? Farm? He didn’t want do no more farming. No, he wanted to ride horses. He was good at it and he liked it.

When I saw he wasn’t go’n leave I started having dreams about his death. I saw him dead in every way you can think possible. Throwed on a fence, throwed against a tree, dragged through the swamps. Every way possible a cowboy could die, I dreamed it of Joe. Then one dream started coming back over and over, the one where he was throwed against the fence. When I told it to him, he said: “Now, little mama, man come here to die, didn’t he? That’s the contract he signed when he was born—‘I hereby degree that one of these days I’m go’n lay down these old bones.’ Now, all he can do while he’s here is do something and do that thing good. The best thing I can do in this world is ride horses. Maybe I can be a better farmer, but the way things is a colored man just can’t get out there and start farming any time he want. He’s go’n have to take orders from some white man. Breaking horses, I don’t take orders from a soul on earth. That’s why they calls me Chief. Maybe one day one of them’ll come along and get me. Maybe I’ll get too old and just have to step down. Maybe some little young buck’ll come along and take over Chief from me and I won’t have to ride the terrible ones no more. But till that day get here I got to keep going. That’s what life’s about, doing it good as you can. When the time come for
them to lay you down in that long black hole, they can say one thing: ’He did it good as he could.’ That’s the best thing you can say for a man. Horse breaker or yard sweeper, let them say the poor boy did it good as he could.”

Every time he left the house I thought that was the last time I was go’n see him alive. Then a month or two later they would show up with another drove. These was the good times, when the men came riding back. Everybody was happy, the white and the black. The men would put the horses in the corral a few days; then after the men had rested up, after the word was out they had new horses on the place, then they would go out to break them. The corral was between the house and the quarters, and I could see them riding the horses from the yard or from one of the windows at the house.

Seven or eight years after we had been living there it happened. It was cold that day when they came in with the horses. It was February, a Monday, almost freezing. Any time the men came back, ’specially with a good drove, they had a feast in the kitchen at the big house. Me and Joe went to the feast late that day. When we came up even with the corral, a black stallion ran long the fence whinnying and bobbing his head. I got so weak I almost fell. This was the same horse I had been seeing in my dreams. But when I told it to Joe, all he did was laugh.

Everybody was already in the kitchen when we got there. Joe sat down at the table and I served him. The women didn’t sit at the table with the men on that day, they served their men. Clyde came back to the kitchen and had a drink, but he didn’t sit down at the table. While he was back there Joe told him what I had said about the horse, and everybody bust out laughing.