The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (9 page)

We didn’t see the house till we made the bend. A big white house with a gallery on the front and the side. To the right of the house you had fruit orchard—oh, maybe two or three acres—maybe more. On the other side, the left side of the house, you had horses and cows in a pasture. Farther down was the quarters.

Listening to Job, I went up to the front door and knocked. A nigger came there and looked down at me. Right off, I could see I had done the wrong thing.

“Job brought y’all here?” he said.

“Who?” I said.

“You see them steps?” he said, pointing behind me. “Go right on back down, march round that house and knock on that back door. That or catch up with Job.”

I went round the back but I didn’t knock. I figured since he already knowed I was there, there was no need to knock. I stood there and stood there and stood there, but he never showed up. But soon as I knocked he opened the door and told me to come in.

“What you want?” he said.

“Mr. Bone live here?” I asked him.

He went up to the front. Little while later a white man came back in the kitchen. He was a big man with a red beard and blue eyes. And he had the biggest pair of hands I had ever seen.

“You too spare,” he said, looking down at me and shaking his head. He looked at Ned standing behind me. “That one over there ain’t weaned yet. I ain’t running no nursery here, I’m running a plantation. Y’all can stay here tonight and I’ll get somebody to take you to town in the morning. I can’t use you.”

“You mean work?” I said.

“That’s what I mean,” he said.

“I might be little and spare, but I can do any work them others can do,” I said.

“I got women in that field eat more for breakfast than you and that boy weigh together,” he said. “First thing y’all die on me and I have to answer to the beero.”

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” I said. “But if we was ready to die we would have been dead long before we got here.”

“You ain’t been out there yet,” he said.

“That’s the only place I been,” I said.

“Yes?” he said.

“Yes sir,” I said. “Me and this little fellow here ain’t been doing nothing but walking and walking and walking ever since we heard of our freedom. Any of them out there can do more walking than that I like to see them.”

“You got to do more than just walk out in that field,” Bone said.

“I done pulled my share before,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

I told him.

“Your walking too,” he said.

I told him.

“All right, I’ll give you a try,” he said. “But you still spare and I won’t pay you more than six a month. Take it or leave it.”

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful again,” I said. “What you paying them other women?”

Bone eyes opened just a little bit wider. Like he was ready to tell me, before he remembered I was nothing but a child, and a little black one at that. But if I was go’n work for him, maybe it was right for me to know.

“Ten,” he said. “But they happen to be women.”

“I’m a woman,” I said.

“Prove it out there,” Bone said. “Not in here. Fifty cents of that coming back to me to school that boy over there—if he wake up long enough. What he carrying them rocks for?”

“Secesh killed his mama. That’s what’s left.”

“Fifty cents to school him,” Bone said.

“If I keep up with the other women, I can get much as they get?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said.

He went in the front and came back with a feather and a sheet of paper. He handed me the feather and laid the sheet of paper on the table.

“Put a cross there,” he said, pointing at the paper. “One time that way, one time that way.”

“I know what a cross is,” I said. “What it’s for?”

Bone was still looking at the paper, but I knowed
he wasn’t reading it, because I was looking up at his eyes and I could see they wasn’t moving. He was probably thinking he ought to take me by the neck and throw me outside. Then his eyes shifted from the paper to me. But he just looked at me like he was still thinking about something else.

“So I’ll know you somewhere in my field even if I can’t find you,” he said. “You’ll know I owe you five dollars and fifty cents.”

“Six dollars, Mr. Bone,” I said. “Then I give you back fifty cents.”

I stuck the point of the feather in my mouth and leaned on the table to make my cross. After I made it it looked so correct I just stood there looking at it a long time. I started to add another little curve or a dot or something, but Bone took the feather and paper from me.

“I said a mark, not a book.”

Bone called that nigger who had let us in the back door and told him to find somebody else to show us to the cabin. All we found in that cabin was two little beds and a firehalf. Beds was two wide boards nailed against the wall like a shelf. Mattress was dry grass sewed in ticking. We had no table, no chairs, no benches—you sat down on your bed or you sat down on the bare ground. After I had been there awhile I got the carpenter to make me a bench. Then I got him to make me a table. That was the only furniture I had for the next ten, twelve years.

We was clearing off the land. The land hadn’t been ’tended since the war, and weeds and shrubs covered everything. The women used axes and hoes, the men did the plowing and hauling. After I had been there about a month, Bone came out there and told me he was paying me ten dollars a month like he was paying the rest of the women because he didn’t want me killing myself. I wasn’t but ’leven or twelve, but I could do much work as any of them. And the ones who beat me had to do a lot of sweating to stay up there.

For a while there looked like everything was go’n be good for us. We had a little school on the place, the first cabin on your left when you came in the quarters. All the small children went to school in the day, the big children and the grown people who had to go in the field went to school at night. The teacher was a young colored man from the North. A good-looking brown-skin man, very good manners. The grown people just like the children all loved him. One day a week we had a special Teacher’s Day. When he went to somebody’s house and took dinner with them. Everybody tried to out-do everybody else. I didn’t have a chair in my house—the bench wasn’t good enough for the teacher to sit on—so I sent Ned out to borrow me a chair. When he got back with the chair I sent him out to borrow a fork and a plate. I got the fork and plate from the woman who worked at the big house, and she told Ned to tell me don’t be surprised if the teacher recognized them. Everybody else on the place had borrowed that same fork and that same plate before. Well, if he recognized them his manners kept him from saying he did. I didn’t eat with him and Ned, I was too ’shame to do so. I pretended I had some work to do, but all the time he was eating I was looking at him to see how he liked the food. After they
got through eating he asked Ned if he wanted to read something for me. He got the book out his pocket—the only book they had at school—and Ned had to stand side him. And while he pointed to the words Ned spoke them out. I stood there listening and smiling. Before then I doubt if I had ever looked at Ned like he was my own. I had always looked at him like he was a little boy that needed me. But listening to him read I knowed if it wasn’t for me Ned wouldn’t be here now. And I felt I hadn’t just kept Ned from getting killed, I felt like I had born him out of my own body. After he went to bed that night, me and the teacher sat by the firehalf talking. He asked me why I didn’t come to school like the rest of the people. I told him when I came out the field at night I was tired, and long as Ned was getting a learning I was satisfied. We talked and talked. He had very good manners and everybody liked him—’specially the ladies. I liked him, too, and I went to school couple times just to be near him. But I told myself I had no business thinking about somebody like that, and after I had gone there maybe three times I didn’t go no more.

Then they had the colored politicians that used to come to the big house to hold meetings with Bone. They would come to the house once, maybe twice a week, stay couple hours and then leave. If they had anything important to tell us they would gather us at the school. This was church, too: school and church the same cabin. Most of the talk was about the Fedjal Gov’ment—’specially the Republican Party. It was the Republicans that had freed us, and it was the Republicans that had the Freedom Beero there to look after us. They wanted us to take interest in what was going on. They wanted us to vote—and vote Republican. The Democrat Party was for slavery, they said, and believe it or not, they said, there was niggers in the Democrat Party, too. You could always spot him, they said, because he had a white mouth and a tail. They told us they was go’n take us to Alexandria one day so
we could see a nigger Democrat at work. The day came, they sent some colored troops to the plantation to bring us in town. The town square was full of people, white people and colored people. It was hot that day. People just standing there sweating and fanning. On the platform the people was giving their speeches. One after another, white and colored. Every now and then somebody would holler and call somebody else a damn liar, then the troops would have to step in to keep them apart. When a nigger Democrat got up on the platform, somebody hollered, “Pull his pants down, let’s see his tail. We done already seen he got a white mouth.” The nigger Democrat said, “I rather be a Democrat with a tail than a Republican that ain’t had no brains.” The people on the Democrat side laughed and clapped. The Democrats talked awhile, then the Republicans got up there and talked. The Democrats wanted the Yankees to get out so we could build on our own. The Republicans wanted the Yankees to stay. The Democrats said we wouldn’t have peace till the Yankees had gone. The Republicans said we didn’t have peace before they came there. The Republicans said every free man ought to have forty acres and a mule. The Democrats said that was strange coming from a Republican when a dirty scalawag had one of the biggest plantations in the parish. The Republicans said Bone had the plantation there to give people work who couldn’t go out and get work on their own.

It was burning up. The square packed. The arguing going on and on and on. Then somebody hauled back and hit somebody—and what he did that for? Looked like everybody was waiting for that one lick. I grabbed Ned and dragged him under the platform. I had to fight my way under there, because everybody who wasn’t fighting on top the platform or round the platform was trying to get under there just like I was.

The fighting went on and on and on. Under the platform was burning up, but nobody moved out.
Then after ’bout an hour, the troops got everybody quieted down again. They took the trouble-makers to jail and brought the rest of us back home.

We heard later it was the secret groups that had caused the trouble. Names like the Ku Klux Klans, the White Brotherhood, the Camellias o’ Luzana—groups like that rode all over the State beating and killing. Would kill any black man who tried to stand up and would kill any white man who tried to help him. Just after the war many colored people tried to go out and start their own little farms. The secret groups would come out there and beat them just because their crops was cleaner than the white man’s crop. Another time they would beat a man because he had some grass in his crop. “What you growing there, Hawk?” they would ask him. “Corn, Master,” Hawk would say. “That look like grass out there to me, Hawk,” they would say. “Well, maybe a little bit, Master.” Hawk would say. “But ’fore day in the morning I surely get it out—if the Lord spare.” “No, you better start right now, Hawk,” they would say. Then they would make you get down on your hands and knees and eat grass till you got sick. If they didn’t get enough fun out of watching you throw up, they would tie you to a fence post or to a tree and beat you. “Tomorrow night we come back again, Hawk,” they would say. “And you better not have no grass out there, you hear?” Or. “Tomorrow night we come back and you better have some grass in that field, hear, Charlie?” They was just after destroying any colored who tried to make it on his own. They didn’t care what excuse they used.