The Ways of White Folks (22 page)
Read The Ways of White Folks Online
Authors: Langston Hughes
And sure enough, all around the Big House in the dark, in a wide far-off circle, men and dog-cries and auto-horns sounded in the night. Nearer they came even as Cora stood at the back door, listening. She closed the door, bolted it, put out the light, and went back to the parlor. “He’ll come in by de front,” she said. “Back from de swamp way. He wont’ let ’em stop him from gettin’ home to me agin, just once. Po’ little boy, he ain’t got no place to go, no how. Po’ boy, what growed up with such pride in his heart. Just like you, Colonel Tom. Spittin’ image o’ you.… Proud!… And got no place to go.”
Nearer and nearer the man-hunt came, the cries and the horns and the dogs. Headlights began to flash in the dark down the road. Off through the trees, Cora heard men screaming. And suddenly
feet running, running, running. Nearer, nearer. She knew it was him. She knew they had seen him, too.
Then there were voices shouting very near the house.
“Don’t shoot, men. We want to get him alive.”
“Close in on him!”
“He must be in them bushes there by the porch.”
“Look!”
And suddenly shots rang out. The door opened. Cora saw flashes of fire spitting into the blackness, and Bert’s tall body in the doorway. He was shooting at the voices outside in the dark. The door closed.
“Hello, Ma,” he said. “One or two of ’em won’t follow me no further.”
Cora locked the door as bullets splintered through the wood, shattered the window panes. Then a great volley of shots struck the house, blinding head-lights focused on the porch. Shouts and cries of, “Nigger! Nigger! Get the nigger!” filled the night.
“I was waitin’ for you, honey,” Cora said. “Quick! Your hidin’ place’s ready for you, upstairs in de attic. I sawed out a place under de floor. Maybe they won’t find you, chile. Hurry, ’fore your father comes.”
“No time to hide, Ma,” Bert panted. “They’re at the door now. They’ll be coming in the back way, n
too. They’ll be coming in the windows. They’ll be coming in everywhere. I got one bullet left, Ma. It’s mine.”
“Yes, son, it’s your’n. Go upstairs in mama’s room and lay down on ma bed and rest. I won’t let ’em come up till you’re gone. God bless you, chile.”
Quickly, they embraced. A moment his head rested on her shoulder.
“I’m awful tired running, Ma. I couldn’t get to the swamp. Seems like they been chasing me for hours. Crawling through the cotton a long time, I got to rest now.”
Cora pushed him toward the stairs. “Go on, son,” she said gently.
At the top, Bert turned and looked back at this little brown woman standing there waiting for the mob. Outside the noise was terrific. Men shouted and screamed, massing for action. All at once they seemed to rush in a great wave for the house. They broke the doors and windows in, and poured into the room—a savage crowd of white men, red and wild-eyed, with guns and knives, sticks and ropes, lanterns and flashlights. They paused at the foot of the stairs where Cora stood looking down at them silently.
“Keep still, men,” one of the leaders said. “He’s armed.… Say where’s that yellow bastard of yours, Cora—upstairs?”
“Yes,” Cora said. “Wait.”
“Wait, hell!” the men cried. “Come on, boys, let’s go!”
A shot rang out upstairs, then Cora knew it was all right.
“Go on,” she said, stepping aside for the mob.
The next morning when people saw a bloody and unrecognizable body hanging in the public square at the Junction, some said with a certain pleasure, “That’s what we do to niggers down here,” not realizing Bert had been taken dead, and that all the fun for the mob had been sort of stale at the end.
But others, aware of what had happened, thought, “It’d be a hell of a lot better lynching a live nigger. Say, ain’t there nobody else mixed up in this here Norwood murder? Where’s that boy’s brother, Willie? Heh?”
So the evening papers carried this item in the late editions:
A large mob late this afternoon wrecked vengeance on the second of two Negro field hands, the murderers of Colonel Thomas Norwood, wealthy planter found dead at Big House Plantation. Bert
Lewis was lynched last night, and his brother, Willie Lewis, today. The sheriff of the county is unable to identify any members of the mob. Colonel Norwood’s funeral has not yet been held. The dead man left no heirs.
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. After graduation from high school, he spent a year in Mexico with his father, then a year studying at Columbia University. His first poem in a nationally known magazine was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which appeared in
Crisis
in 1921. In 1925, he was awarded the First Prize for Poetry of the magazine
Opportunity
, the winning poem being “The Weary Blues,” which gave its title to his first book of poems, published in 1926. As a result of his poetry, Mr. Hughes received a scholarship at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he won his B.A. in 1929. In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Litt. D. by his alma mater; he has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1935), a Rosenwald Fellowship (1940), and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant (1947). From 1926 until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes devoted his time to writing and lecturing. He wrote poetry, short stories, autobiography, song lyrics, essays, humor, and plays. A cross section of his work was published in 1958 as
The Langston Hughes Reader
.
T
HE
P
ANTHER AND THE
L
ASH
The last—and the most explicitly political—book of verse by one of the great poets of our century. Hughes’s last collection of poems, originally published just before his death in 1967, addresses the racial politics of the 1960s. It includes “Prime,” “Motto,” “Dream Deferred,” “Frederick Douglass: 1817-1895,” “Still Here,” “Birmingham Sunday,” “History,” “Slave,” “Warning,” and “Daybreak in Alabama.”
0-679-73659-X/$10.00
S
ELECTED
P
OEMS OF
L
ANGSTON
H
UGHES
The classic collection by the lyric voice of the Harlem Renaissance, whose poetry launched a revolution among black writers in America. Hughes celebrates the experience of men and women who had previously been invisible, in language that merges the spoken with the sung.
0-679-72818-X/$10.00
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