The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (16 page)

But I used to see Ned all the time. He used to live just across the road from where he is buried now. He is buried side the place where he was building his school. The people finished the school after his death, but it was destroyed during the second high water. That was back in ’27 when we had a very bad high water. We had one in ’12, but the one in ’27 was much worse. Ned used to live on the field side of the road; his school was on the river bank side of the road. Another house is built in the place where his house stood, but we kept the place where his school was and where he is buried. It will never be sold. We collect from people
to pay the taxes and keep up the land, but it is ours. It is for the children of this parish and this State. Black and white, we don’t care. We want them to know a black man died many many years ago for them. He died at the end of the other century and the beginning of this century. He shed his precious blood for them. I remember my old mistress, when she saw the young Secesh soldiers, saying: “The precious blood of the South, the precious blood of the South.” Well, there on that river bank is the precious dust of this South. And he is there for all to see. We have a marker there for people to stop by and see if they want to. No, it is not a tall and showy thing. It’s nothing but a flat piece of concrete, but it’s there for all to see if they just get out the car and look.

I used to go by all the time when he was alive. He had already cleaned up that acre of land, and now he was laying down the foundation for the school. The children used to help him in the evenings and on the weekends when they didn’t have to work. Sometimes I used to stop by and instead of finding them working I would see them out in the river swimming. I was so scared for Ned’s life, I was scared the white people might pay some of them bigger children to drown him. He would always come out the water when he saw me sitting there on Pigeon. “You call that building a school?” I would say. “Me, I call that playing.” “I have to teach everything,” he said. “Swimming is good to learn.” Looking at Ned now, you could see how big he was, how powerfully he was built in the chest and shoulders. If he was standing close to me I would put my hand on his shoulder.

“You worry too much, Mama,” he would say.

“Do I, Ned?” I would say. Because both of us knowed that day was coming. When and where we didn’t know.

Two nights before he was killed I had a dream where a bunch of Cajuns had lynched him in the swamps. The next morning I got on Pigeon and went up to his house. When I told him about my dream he
brushed it aside like it was nothing. While I was up there he told me he was going to Bayonne to get some lumber for his school. He was taking two boys with him and he was go’n spend the night in Bayonne with a friend. He told me to stop worrying; this was making Vivian worry, too. She was already getting nervous, he said. I stayed up there till he left that evening, then I got on Pigeon and went on back home. The next evening when he was on his way home with the second load, Albert Cluveau shot him down. Alcee Price and Bam Franklin, the two boys he took with him, told us how it happened. They had spent the night in Bayonne with Ned’s friend talking about the school. Nobody went to bed before midnight even when everybody had to get up early the next morning and go to work. They got up around five because they wanted to pick up the lumber and get it back here before the weather got too hot. They got back to the school around eight-thirty. That evening when it got cool again they went back to Bayonne for the second load. After they had loaded up it was around five. They didn’t have far to go, three, four miles, but they had to travel slow because of the road. The road was dirt and full of ruts and the lumber was heavy. Bam said every half mile they had to stop to give the mules a rest. They always stopped in the open. At that time you had cane fields and houses on one side of the road; trees on the river bank side. They always stopped near a house or a yard. After resting the mules a few minutes they would start out again. Bam said they had just driven off after the second or third stop when they looked up and saw Albert Cluveau. He was on his mule at the end of a cane row with the gun already sighted at Ned. He told Ned to get down. Ned stopped the wagon, but nobody moved.

“What do you want?” Ned asked him.

“Get down,” Cluveau said.

“You don’t scare me, Cluveau,” Ned said.

“Get down now,” Cluveau said.

Ned handed Bam the lines. Bam pushed them back.

“Let me go,” Bam said. “I don’t care about me.”

“But I care about you, Bam,” Ned told him. “That’s what I’ve been teaching all the time—I care about you. When will you ever hear me, Bam?”

“I won’t let you die,” Bam said. “He ain’t got nothing but a double barrel there; he’ll need both of them to bring me down.”

“Stay here,” Ned said. “Take the lumber home. Finish the school. Talk to my wife. Talk to Mama.”

“No,” Bam said.

“I order you to do that,” Ned said. “You must listen to me sometime, Bam.”

Bam and Alcee both said Ned looked at them a second, then he looked all round him, even glancing at the sky, like he wanted to see everything for a moment. Then he jumped from the wagon and started running toward Cluveau. Cluveau hollered for him to stop and get down on his knees, but he kept running on Cluveau with nothing but his fist. Cluveau shot him in the leg—the white people had told Cluveau to make Ned crawl before killing him. When Cluveau shot him, he fell to one knee, then got back up. Cluveau shot again. This time he tored off half his chest.

Albert Cluveau swung the mule around and rode away. Bam and Alcee didn’t go after Cluveau, they picked up Ned and laid him on top the lumber. The lumber was red when they got home. Blood dropped through the lumber on the ground. A trail of blood all the way from where Ned was shot clear up to his house. Even the rain couldn’t wash the blood away. For years and years, even after they had graveled the road, you could still see little black spots where the blood had dripped.

When the people heard the news they started crying. The ones living side the road followed the wagon to the house. When the others came in from the field and heard what had happened they knelt down right there and cried. They didn’t want go near him when he was living, but when they heard he was dead they cried like children. They ran up to the wagon when it stopped at the gate. They wanted to touch his body, they wanted to help take it inside. The road was full, people coming from everywhere. They wanted to touch his body. When they couldn’t touch his body they took lumber from the wagon. They wanted a piece of lumber with his blood on it.

I knowed he was dead before Frank Nelson’s boy came there and told me. I was laying down on my bed when I heard this sweeping noise passing through the house. “Now what?” I said. I sat up and looked, and it wasn’t sweeping at all, it was a light on the floor. Like a flashlight, but not shaking like a flashlight would shake, moving smooth, going from the front to the back. “They done killed him,” I said. And I got on Pigeon and started for his house. I met Nelson’s boy coming to tell me. But he could see I already knowed, and he turned around and ran back long side the horse. When I got there they had already took his
body inside and had laid it on the bed. Vivian was sitting in the chair just looking at the body. People all round her crying, but she wasn’t hearing a thing. Just looking at the body. I put my arms round her shoulders and I could feel her trembling. It was hot as it could be, but she was trembling like she had chill. I tried to say something to her, but she didn’t hear me. I doubt if she even knowed I was there—just looking at the body. I told the people to get out. Making all that noise wasn’t doing a bit of good—get out. I kept a couple women in there to help me with Ned and Vivian, but I wanted the rest of them out. After we had put Vivian to bed round the other side, I came back in and told the people let me be by myself with Ned awhile. They didn’t want leave me alone, but I told them I was all right, and they went out. I sat down side Ned and held him close and started talking to him like he was still alive. I can’t recall what I said to him—just little talk; I can’t recall when I fell on him, but I remember people pulling me off the bed and my clothes soaking wet with his blood. The took me to the children’s room and made me lay down. Somebody stayed in the room with me, but I can’t recall who it was.

The sheriff came and examined the body and asked Bam and Alcee some questions. They told him it was Albert Cluveau—like they needed to tell him anything, like he didn’t already know it was Albert Cluveau, like everybody round there didn’t already know it was Albert Cluveau—but he told them he wanted them to come to Bayonne the next day and make a full statement. From what he could see there now everybody was too excited to make sense. The next day Bam and Alcee went to his office. The first thing he asked them, even before they had a chance to say good morning, if they had been to the wake last night. They said yes. He asked them if they had had anything to drink there, coffee or maybe little wine? They said yes, little homemade wine; blackberry. He said, “Uh-hum, now tell me what happened.” They told him the only
thing they could tell him was that Mr. Cluveau shot Professor Douglass when Professor Douglass wouldn’t get on his knees and crawl. He asked them if they was sure it was Mr. Cluveau. They said yes they was sure. He asked them if it was a cane field or a corn field. They had already told him it was a cane field, so they said cane again. He told them with cane so high that time of year (July) how could they see a man? They said Mr. Cluveau came out of the cane on the headland. He said he thought they told him Mr. Cluveau shot Ned
from
the cane field. He said just like they was changing their story from cane field to headland, maybe they would change that story from headland to corn field. And maybe they would change that story from corn field to pecan tree. He said if memory served him right there was a pecan tree close to where Ned was shot. He said was he right or wrong. They said right. He said, “You sure the person didn’t shoot from round the pecan tree?” They said they was sure he didn’t, he shot from the headland of the cane field. He asked them if they had anything to drink the night they stayed in Bayonne. They said they didn’t. He asked them how come. They said they was too young and Professor Douglass would ’a’ frowned on that. He said what they meant they was too young. He said didn’t they just tell him they had drunk exactly one night later at the wake. He said do one night age niggers that fast. Or is it the sight of seeing a dead man that put the gray in their head. Bam and Alcee told him they had the drink because some older men had the bottle. One of the older men said, “Here. Drink. Rejoice when somebody leave this wicked world. Do not weep.” He said, “Rejoice, huh? Do not weep, huh? And maybe y’all did some rejoicing in Bayonne the night before. And maybe y’all was still rejoicing when y’all was coming home yesterday. And with all that rejoicing going on, maybe y’all mistook one man for another.” He said he had heard that had often happened when niggers started rejoicing. Half the time they don’t know what they see. And he said how did
he know the two of them hadn’t gotten together and killed the professor. He said from what he had been hearing around there that professor was getting on a lot of people nerve trying to make them vote and go to school. He said how did he know some of these people hadn’t paid them to shoot that drunk professor to make him leave them alone. He said just to show you it couldn’t have been Mr. Cluveau, he had talked to Mr. Cluveau the night before and Mr. Cluveau had told him with his own mouth, mind you, that he had spent all day yesterday and all night the night before gigging frogs on Grosse Tete Bayou. He said to prove it, old man Cluveau had showed him the mosquito bites—his poor old body was just full of welts. He told them he was sure they didn’t want call a nice old man like old man Cluveau a liar, now, did they? They said they could just tell him what they saw. He said he didn’t ask them that. He said he asked them if they wanted to call a God-fearing man like Mr. Albert Cluveau a liar. They said no. He told them to go on back home and he didn’t want hear that kind of talk out of them no more.

Vivian stayed here till we finished building the school, then she went back to Kansas. She wanted to stay here and do Ned’s work, but we was scared she could get herself killed just like Ned was killed. We made her go and we hired a teacher by the name of Jones. Professor Jones didn’t look nothing like Ned. A little light-skin man about half Ned’s size. Didn’t teach what Ned wanted to teach either. Taught just what them in Bayonne told him to teach—reading and writing and ’rithmetic—and we had to take that or get nothing. He stayed there till the high water destroyed the school in ’27.

I waited till we had put Ned in the ground, then I went out looking for Albert Cluveau. But no matter when I came up to his house, Adeline, the oldest girl, said he had just left. “What you want?” she said. “I want talk to him,” I said. “Daddy just left,” she said. I would turn Pigeon around and go on back home, but that evening or the next day I would go back to his house again. Every time I thought about Ned I would head back to that house. Adeline would be standing on the gallery waiting for me. “I want speak to your daddy.” “Daddy just left.” “Just left again, huh?” “Yes, Jane.” One day I made pretend I was going back home. I went a little piece and came right back. I saw him sitting on that mule back there in the yard. He was just getting ready to get down when he looked up and saw me. He swung that mule around and shot out cross the yard, headed for the swamps. Another time when I went there he didn’t have time to get on the mule. Headed for the swamps and left the mule.

“Where your daddy?” I asked Adeline.

“Gone.”

“Where?”

“Bayonne.”

“What George doing back there in the yard?” I
said. “You know Albert Cluveau ain’t never went to the toilet if he wasn’t on George’s back.”

“He walked this time,” Adeline said.

“I’ll catch him,” I said, and left.