Underground to Canada (4 page)

Julilly wanted to ask more questions, but she held back: she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answers.

“You been lookin' at my bent-up back and beat-up legs,” Liza said bluntly. She seemed to read Julilly's mind.

“Old Sims likes to whip me,” she went on. She looked weary and rested her head on her drawn-up knees. “I tried runnin' away. I got caught. Old Sims whipped me until I thought I was gonna die.”

Julilly felt a coldness creeping over her. It squeezed her throat and made her breathing come in jumps.

“The slaves at Massa Hensen's place feared it here in Mississippi,” she answered her new friend.

Liza suddenly relaxed.

“You know what my Daddy said to me once. He was a preacher where we used to live.

“He said, ‘Liza, the soul is all black or white, 'pending on the man's life and not on his skin.' I figures old Sims got a soul like a rotten turnip.”

Both girls smiled.

A bell rang, startling the listless girls in the cabin to action. They began wandering out of the door. Julilly and Liza followed.

The bright sun was blinding after the shadows of the cabin. Julilly squinted her eyes and then opened them wide. She wondered if she was really seeing the sight before her. Little children, naked and glistening in the sun, were running toward a wooden trough in the yard. A man poured
corn meal mush
into the trough from a dirty pail. The children pushed and shoved on hands and knees—sucking and dipping in the
yellow grain
until there was nothing left.

Julilly stared with disbelief. She began looking for little Willie and the other children who had travelled with her in the wagon. But they weren't there. They hadn't yet learned how to suck their food from a trough like pigs. But Julilly knew that they would soon or they wouldn't eat. She felt sick. Now she understood why the slaves in Virginia dreaded this place called “the deep South.” Liza was right. This plantation was a no-good, rotten place to live.

Liza yanked Julilly into the line of older boys and girls. They gathered around a black washpot where
collard greens
bubbled and steamed, and bits of fat pork pushed to the surface now and then. Each person carried a gourd and dipped it in. Julilly shared Liza's until an old woman came along and handed her one.

There wasn't much talk. There was too much hunger.

Julilly's gourd was empty and there was nothing more to fill her aching stomach but a dipper full of water.

There was no gaiety or bounce in the walk of anyone around Massa Riley's slave yard, Julilly noticed. At Massa Hensen's, on a day off from work, folks collected in little groups to laugh and sing. Here it was like ghosts being pushed around. The slaves were as thin and frail as shadows.

Again Liza yanked Julilly by the arm. This time she pulled her back to the cabin to take off her ragged tow shirt and put on a crocker sack full of holes.

“What's this for?” protested Julilly.

“On Sunday we wash any ol' rags that we wear for the rest of the week.” Liza became sullen again. She could have been taken for a bent old woman if one forgot to look at the smooth, black skin of her face and her young, hurt eyes.

The girls dropped their dirty clothes into one of the washtubs in the slave yard and punched them up and down in the steaming water.

“Here's your ‘battlin' stick,'” Liza said, handing Julilly a hard solid stick. “Now we just put our shirts on this big ol' block of wood and hit and battle the dirt right out of them.”

At last the miserable beaten rags were hung on a
rattan vine
to dry.

THAT NIGHT Julilly crept into the long, shabby cabin that housed the slave girls who had no parents. She lay down beside Liza who shared her heap of rags. There was no talking; everyone slept. Julilly looked into the dark. She was fearful of the morning, when Sims would be back: Liza said the cotton in some of the fields was ready to be picked. She thought about the little children, about Adam, Ben, and Lester; and she wondered where Mammy Sally was sleeping tonight.

“Lord, help us find each other again,” she prayed and went to sleep.

It seemed only a few minutes later to Julilly when a piercing bell clanged through the darkness. Liza pulled her up by her arm and led her out of doors, where a fire was crackling below the black-leafed trees. A line of slaves passed before it. Julilly followed. Each one was given a corn cake and a gourd of water for breakfast. Silently the line continued. This time hands reached out for a pail. Looking inside hers, Julilly saw that it held another corn cake and a cold strip of bacon.

“It's your lunch,” Liza whispered; “don't eat it now.”

The line went on—women, men, and children all mixed up together. Next they all got crocker sacks—low and baggy—to fasten around their necks. Julilly knew that before that day was done she'd fill more than one bag full of white
cotton bolls
.

Julilly had been
picking cotton
for three years now. The overseer at Massa Hensen's always said how good she was—not breaking the branches off the stalks when she pulled off the blossoms. She could use both hands to snatch at the bolls and put them in the swinging sack around her neck without dropping one upon the ground.

The line of slaves seemed endless to Julilly as they strung along the field behind fat Sims. He swayed back and forth on his horse, flipping a
cat-o'-nine-tails whip
into the pink sky. Soon the sun would rise and burn up all the pink and coolness of the dawn.

Julilly followed Liza. She saw that the girl limped and that she bent forward, as though her back was trying to push away the burden of her crocker sack.

“Too many whippin's,” a slave woman behind Julilly said, pointing toward Liza.

The sun still hadn't risen far when the picking started.

A sharp cry at the far end of the cotton row froze Julilly's hands in mid-air. Fat Sims had dismounted his horse and was flaying his whip over the back of an old, white-haired man.

“He likes to beat at old folks and cripples like me,” Liza said in a low voice without lifting her head.

Julilly saw that Liza couldn't reach the high branches with her bent back, so she began pulling the open bolls from the top branches—letting Liza take all those at the bottom. Her new friend gave her a grateful smile.

The sun rose, white and hot, burning at the nakedness of the ragged slaves. The face of Sims glistened with sweat. It dripped down from the wide brim of his hat. None of the slaves wore hats. There was no shade for their heads.

Sims' anger rose with the sun. When the work slowed, he used his whip. Julilly's fear of the man turned to despair, and then to intense dislike. She had never disliked anyone as much as this fat, squint-eyed Sims. She avoided looking at him. When he came near her she worked steadily and tried to overshadow Liza, who crouched beneath her, pulling cotton from the lower branches.

Once Liza said after Sims had safely passed beyond them, “That man thinks a slave is just like a work-horse. If you acts like a work-horse, you gets along just fine. If you don't—it's the cat-o'-nine-tails on your back.”

The work went on—picking, filling the crocker sack—emptying it into baskets—stamping it down. The small lunch and fifteen minute rest seemed no longer than the time it took for a mosquito to bite.

The slaves still picked when
twilight
came, and the red sun had slipped away to cool its fire under the earth. The long walk back to the slave quarters was silent, except for the shuffle of tired feet dragging through the dust.

That night it was as dark as a snake hole in the long, low cabin where Julilly and Liza lay on their heap of rags on the hard dirt floor. There wasn't a wisp of wind and the heat of the day stayed inside like a burning log.

Julilly ached with tiredness and hunger gnawed wildly at her stomach. There had been only turnips and a little side meat served for supper. The other slave girls along the floor slept heavily, but Liza was restless. Her hand reached out in the dark and touched Julilly.

“You is a friend,” the crippled girl whispered; “no one else ever picked the high cotton that my poor ol' back won't stretch to.”

Julilly felt a strong urge to protect this beaten, crippled girl, who had once tried to run away. All alone Liza had run into the swamp—waded into the sticky water and slept with no covering until Sims tracked her down.

Julilly moved closer to her and began whispering to her about life at the Hensen plantation and the sale to fat ol' Sims.

Eventually she repeated her mother's words about Canada and the freedom that country held for every slave. To her surprise Liza had heard about Canada too, and the two girls talked dreamily before drifting into sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE HOT DAYS of cotton picking went on and on at the Riley plantation. Since the day she had first jogged up the elegant road with the swaying moss hanging from the giant oak trees, Julilly had not seen the fine big house or Massa Riley or his Missus. She knew only the long, low sleeping cabin in the “nigger quarters,” and the cotton fields, where the big branches shot out in all directions with blossoming white bolls, popping out like pure white feathers from a thousand swans.

Sims' savage lashings became a part of every day. So far, Julilly hadn't been touched. Her filled basket of cotton at the end of every day always weighed a hundred pounds. She saw that Liza filled hers too. It was a fearful business to tote the baskets of cotton to the
ginhouse
for weighing and have Sims find them short. The old people suffered most. Twenty-five lashes on the back with the cat-o'-nine tails was their punishment if they didn't meet the measure.

Julilly sickened with each blow.

More and more she and Liza talked of Canada. But they watched that no one listened. There were whippings for any kind of talk of running away. Sometimes, however, the other slave girls in their cabin heard them and offered fearful words of caution.

“When I lived in
Tennessee
,” one girl said, “my Massa said that folks in Canada would skin a black man's head, eat up all his children, and wear their hair as a collar on their coats.”

“I hear tell,” another whispered, “it's so cold in that country that the wild geese and ducks have to leave there in the winter. It's not a place for men and women.”

Another girl said, “Nothin' but black-eyed peas can be raised in Canada.”

Julilly tried not to listen. She must keep her mind on just one thought. Mammy Sally said this country was a place where slaves were free and it was a place where they would meet. It lay there waiting beneath the big North Star.

Each night Julilly and Liza searched the shower of stars in the black sky above the slave quarters until they found the brightest one. It stood guard above the row of lesser stars that resembled a drinking gourd.

ONE MORNING there was a sprinkle of rain. Julilly and Liza cooled their feet in a puddle beside the tool house.

“I feel in my bones, Liza,” Julilly almost laughed, “that something's happening around here today that's special. Ol' Sims ain't so mean.”

The sullen pout on Liza's face shifted to a cautious smile. It gave her a girl's look that had been locked away in old-age misery.

“He maybe had an extra bucketful of breakfast,” she chuckled openly.

Julilly warmed to this unexpected humour.

“You don't talk nasty like a snake's hiss,” she giggled quietly. “Something sure is different with this day.”

The walk to the cotton field was eased by cool, grey clouds that covered the sun, and the furrows between the rows of cotton were soft with mud.

But Sims' good humour didn't last. He was soon shouting threats and warnings against a heavy rain. It didn't come. The clouds eased away as silent as big bolls of cotton, and the sun shot out from under them into a blue patch of sky. The wet earth began to steam and the black mosquitoes, dizzy with moisture, whined about Julilly's face. She couldn't swat at them because her hands had to keep up the rhythm of the picking.

Liza, bent down among the lowest branches, swayed as though she might be sick.

“My back is givin' me misery,” she muttered to Julilly without lifting her head.

The sun hadn't reached the top of the sky yet and there was a row of picking before the short rest and miserly bit of lunch. Julilly wondered if she could bear the bugs and steaming sun a minute longer. This kind of wet heat soaked up all the air.

Suddenly there were sly looks along the cotton rows toward the slave quarters, although the slaves didn't stop picking. A strange white man was walking up the road toward Sims. Beside him was tall, thin Massa Riley. Julilly knew him at once from his copper-red beard. His hair of the same colour was covered with a wide-brimmed hat.

If the strange man was a plantation owner, he didn't look or dress like one. He was dressed more like a Sunday preacher with a long-tailed jacket fully buttoned and a white shirt, starched around the collar. His stomach rounded out in front, but his straight shoulders and brisk walk had Massa Riley panting to keep up with him.

Julilly felt no fear. If he were buying slaves, there could be no worse place to go than Riley's. But he was no ordinary man, she was certain of this.

When Sims slacked his whip and strode toward the man, the slaves slowed their picking ever so slightly. The strange man bowed his head. It was large and covered with thick brown hair, neatly combed straight back from his forehead. He had a reddish beard and a moustache, too.

Massa Riley's slow drawl hung heavy in the hot,
listless
air and every word he said could be heard along the cotton rows.

“This is Mr.
Alexander Ross
.” He stretched his words out slowly like strands of taffy. “He's come all the way from Canada to study birds in our beautiful land of the South.”