The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (27 page)

It was in the war I moved down the quarters. He was five or six then. Maybe four because he wasn’t in school yet. He didn’t start school till that Richard girl came here and started teaching. That was after Lillian. Lillian was between Mary Agnes and Vivian Richard.

Shirley went to new Orleans soon after she weaned him, and now it was just him and Lena in the house down there. After I moved down the quarters I spent many days over there on Lena’s gallery and at her firehalf. But not just me; looked like all the people met there. Lena had that willow tree in the yard and it kept shade on the gallery on the hottest days. There was always somebody down there talking to her, and Jimmy sitting right there listening to all we had to say. I think that’s how we started watching him. Seeing him sitting there all the time, we started wondering if he was the One. No, we never said nothing to him about it, we never said nothing to each other about it—but we felt it. When we found out he count to a hundred by ones, twos, fives, tens, and we found out he knowed all his ABCs, we used to make him recite for us any time we went down there. “Y’all hear that?” Lena used to say, with that big grin on her face. “No more than six now, and y’all hear that?” It made her feel good and sad. Good because he could do it;
sad because if he was the One he was go’n have to leave sooner or later.

We used to watch him passing by in the road on his way to school. If it was cold and we saw that sweater not buttoned, we would say, “Get that thing buttoned there, Jimmy.” If we saw him trying to break ice in that ditch with the toe of his shoe, we would tell him to cut that out before he caught a death of cold. In summer we used to tell him, “You better stay out them weeds before snake bite you, boy.” If we saw him fighting we chastized him no matter who was wrong. He wasn’t suppose to fight these here in the quarters, he was suppose to stand up for them. You see, we had already made him the One.

When he learned how to read we made him the reader in the quarters. And by the time he was nine he could read good as anybody down here except the schoolteacher. He used to read and write our letters for us, and he used to read the newspapers, too. Miss Amma Dean used to send me the newspapers every evening and I used to get him to read the sports to me. I didn’t care for nothing in the papers side the sports and the funnies. I used to make tea cakes, and I used to give him tea cakes and clabber, and he used to sit right there and read me the funnies. And could go just like Jiggs and Maggie. Go just like Dagwood. “See what devilment they in this time,” I used to say; and he used to sit right there and read it all to me. Then he used to read the sports to me and tell me what Jackie had done. Jackie and the Dodgers was for the colored people; the Yankees was for the white folks. Like in the Depression, Joe Louis was for the colored. When times get really hard, really tough, He always send you somebody. In the Depression it was tough on everybody, but twice as hard on the colored, and He sent us Joe. Joe was to lift the colored people’s heart. Of course S’mellin’ beat him the first time. But that was just to teach us a lesson. To show us Joe was just a man, not a superman. And to show us we could take
just a little bit more hardship than we thought we could take at first. Now the second fight was different. We prayed and prayed, and He heard our prayers, and at the same time He wanted to punish them for thinking they was something super. I heard every lick of that fight on the radio, and what Joe didn’t put on S’mellin’ that night just couldn’t go on a man. You could look a week and you could still see the niggers grinning about that fight. Unc Gilly used to come up to my house and lay down on the floor on his back and kick his heels up in the air to show me how S’mellin’ had fall. Up till Unc Gilly died he was showing people how S’mellin’ fell when Joe hit him.

Now, after the war He sent us Jackie. The colored soldiers coming back from the war said we could fight together we could play ball together. Not till then would they hire Jackie. And when they got him he showed them a trick or two. Home runs, steal bases—eh, Lord. It made my day just to hear what Jackie had done. Miss Amma Dean would send me the papers when they got through with it at the front, and soon as I got it I would send for Jimmy to come read me the sports and the funnies. If the Dodgers had won, if Jackie had done good, my day was made. If they had lost or if Jackie hadn’t hit, I suffered till they played again.

Then I found out Jimmy was telling me lies. He knowed how much I liked Jackie and the Dodgers and on them days I wasn’t feeling too good he would tell me Jackie had stole two bases when Jackie hadn’t stole a one. Would tell me Jackie had got three or four hits when Jackie hadn’t got near the first base. Then on them days when Jackie got a bunch of hits and stole a bunch of bases he would take couple of them back to make up for the others he had gived him earlier. (He wasn’t nothing but a child, and he didn’t know we had already made him the One, bur he was already doing things the One is supposed to do.) Side reading the newspapers, he used to read the Bible for us, too; and he used to read and write our letters. Knowed how to
say just what you wanted to say. All you had to do was get him started and he could write the best two-page letter you ever read. He would write about your garden, about the church, the people, the weather. And he would get it down just like you felt it inside. I used to sit there and look at him sitting on my steps writing and water would come in my eyes. You see, we had already made him the One, and I was already scared something was go’n happen to him or he would be taken from us.

One summer he stayed in New Orleans with his mama, and we got that ugly boy there of Coon to read and write for us. That boy was ugly as a monkey and had ways twice as bad. He had a little ugly brown dog that used to follow him everywhere, and the children here in the quarters used to call that dog Monkey Boy Dog. The dog’s name was Dirt, but the children wouldn’t call him Dirt; called him Monkey Boy Dog.

But that boy was something else. What was in that paper, that’s what he read. He didn’t care how bad you felt. He came to your house to read what was in the paper, he didn’t come there to up lift your spirits. If Jackie stole a base, he read that. If Jackie didn’t steal a base, he read that, too. The people used to tell him that old people like me needed her spirit up-lifted every now and then. “Can’t you make up a little story at times?” they used to tell him. He used to say, “I ain’t no preacher. Let preachers tell them lies.” Oh, he was evil, that boy. Same when it came to writing your letters. Wrote what you told him and nothing else. When you stopped talking, he stopped writing. “I don’t know your business if you don’t know it,” he used to say. “I come here to write your letter, not think myself crazy,” One time I told him: “Can’t you say something about my garden?” He said: “Say what about it? Say it out there? I can say that if you want me to. You want me to say, ‘My garden still here?’ ” “Can’t you say, ‘Beans dry’ or something,” I said. (I always like to fill both sides of the page when I write a
letter, you know.) He said: “If you want people in New Orleans to know your beans dry, I’ll go on and write your beans dry. Don’t make me no never mind.”

It was pretty clear to everybody in the quarters that he wasn’t the One.

Jimmy was born after Tee Bob killed himself, so that mean Robert had already turned the place over to sharecroppers. Tee Bob was to inherit the place, but when he died and they didn’t have another son to give the place to, Robert chopped the place up in small patches and called in the people. First, he called in the Cajuns off the river and gived them what they wanted. Then he called in the colored out the quarters and gived them what was left. Some of them got a good piece of land to work, but most of them got land near the swamps, and it growed nothing but weeds, and sometimes not even that. So the colored people gived up and started moving away. That and the war took most of the young men and women from here. After they left, the old people and the children tried to work the land, but they got even less from it. The Cajuns, on the other hand, was getting more and more all the time. And the more they got, the better plows and tractors they got. And the better the plows and tractors, the more they got. After a while they wanted more land. That’s when Robert started taking acre by acre from the colored and giving it to them. He took and took till there wasn’t enough to support a family, so the people had to give up and leave or give up and work for the Cajuns. If they left a house that was rotten, Robert boarded up the windows and doors awhile, then he had somebody on the place tear it down, and he let the Cajuns plow up the land where the house used to be. That’s why coming down here now you see cane and corn where houses was twelve, fifteen years back. But they’ve had a many babies born here, and many old people have died here, you hear me. Sappho and them right over there; Claudee and them little farther down. Then Grace, then Elvira and them. On this side Lettie and her brood. (Corine
drowned one of Lettie’s children in that well down the quarters way back there in the twenties.) On the other side of Lettie, Just Thomas and Elsie; then Coon and her drove. Hawk Brown, Gerry and their children right over here. Little farther up, Phillip, Unc Octave and Aunt Nane. Strut Hawkins and his bunch. Then go on the other side and start where I used to live. Little farther down Joe Simon and Ida. Harriet. Little farther, Oscar, Rosa, their children. Manuel, his family. Toby, his bunch. Bessie and hers. Aunt ’Phine Jackson and them. Aunt Lou Bolin and her hungry bunch. Billy Red, his mama and daddy. (He went to New Orleans and called himself Red Billé—a Frenchman.) Little farther down, Unc Gilly and Aunt Sara. Timmy and Verda. And many many more I can’t think of right at the moment. But now just a few of us left. Now nothing but fields, fields, and more fields. They don’t have nerve enough to kick the rest of us off, so they just wait for us to move away or die. Well, I got news for them: these old bones is tired, and that’s true, but they ain’t about ready to lay down for good, yet. I done seen a hundred and ten or more years, and I don’t mind seeing a few more. The Master will let me know when He wants His servant Up High. Till then I will have some of them children read me the Bible, read me the papers, and I’ll do all the walking I can. And I will eat vanilla ice cream which I loves and enjoys.

Jimmy saw this place changing, and he saw all the people moving away. He saw the young men going to war, and he saw the young women going to the city. His own mon was in that crowd. He saw the tractors come and tear down the old houses and plow up the land, and he saw us all standing there watching the tractors. He saw all that. Now he heard this: heard us on that gallery talking about slavery, talking about the high water, talking about Long. He heard me talk about Cluveau and Ned. He heard us all talk about Black Harriet and Katie; Tom Joe and Timmy. And when the young men came back to visit the old people
he heard them talking about the war. The japs wasn’t like the white people said they was. They was colored just like us, and they didn’t want kill us, they just wanted to kill the white soldiers. If the colored soldiers was marching in front, the japs would shoot over the colored soldiers head just to get to the white boys. If the colored soldiers was marching in the back, the japs would drop the bombs shorter. It was this that made them integrate that Army and nothing else.

Jimmy heard all this before he was twelve; by the time he was twelve he was definitely the One. We watched him every move he made. We made sure he made just the right ones. If he tried to go afoul—and he did at times—we told him what he had heard and what he had seen. No, no, no, we never told it to him like I’m telling it to you now; we just looked at him hard. But it was in that look. Sometimes that look can tell you more than words ever can.

He tried first there with Strut’s gal, Eva, or she tried it with him, because they was both about that age now, and from what people had been saying she had already tried it with a few others. So now he thought it was his time to try it, or be enticed by it. It was spring, it was the year he was twelve. It was April, it had just rained. Evening—just getting dark. Lena sent him to the store to get a gallon of coal oil. We had lectwicity down here now, but the old people still kept some coal oil for the lamps just in case something happened to the ’lectric wires. And side that they used coal oil to light fire. Lena sent him to the store that evening to get coal oil. Nobody know who said what to who, but next thing—Aunt ’Phine saw it when she came out on the gallery—that coal oil can was hanging on that gate and he was on Strut’s gallery trying to throw Strut’s gal down. Yes, Aunt ’Phine said, that’s the noise she had heard in the house. She said she was sitting in the front room eating supper when she kept hearing this booming noise over there on Strut’s gallery. It kept going,
boom
. Then little bit later,
boom
. Then little bit later,
boom
again. She went out on the gallery to see what was making the noise. It was almost dark, but she could see somebody trying to throw somebody down. Instead of pushing her down like it was clear she wanted him to do—no, he was trying to throw her down. Picking her up and swinging her over his shoulder. But each time he swung her, her feet, her heels, hit the floor before her back did. If he had pushed her down like she wanted him to do Aunt ’Phine wouldn’t ’a’ heard the noise and he wouldn’t ’a’ got whipped, but, no, he wanted to pick her up and slam her down. And each time he tried it, she made sure her heels hit first. (Teasing him.) Aunt ’Phine said before she recognized him, she recognized that coal oil can hanging on Strut’s gate. No, she didn’t recognize the coal oil can, it was too dark: she had talked to Lena earlier that day and Lena had mentioned something about getting a gallon of coal oil from the store soon as Jimmy came home. Now since that person on Strut’s gallery was about Jimmy’s size and age, the age to be thinking about doing what this one here was trying to do, she hollered: “Get away from there, Jimmy.” Instead of him moving, he picked that gal up and slammed her back on her heels again. “Boy, you hear me?” Aunt ’Phine said. He picked her up and slammed her back down. “Wait,” Aunt ’Phine said. She sat her pan of food on the gallery and started out the yard. She said she heard
boom
again, then again
boom
. But by the time she got to Strut’s gate, the coal oil can was gone, and nothing but a black streak was headed up the quarters. Aunt ’Phine came on down to Lena. When Jimmy got back home, Lena sent him out in the yard to get her a good switch. And that was the first time.