Whiter Than Snow (5 page)

Dolly had three children. Besides Jack, who was ten and looked mostly like Gus, there were Carrie, nine, a pretty child, thin and lanky, like Ted, and Lucia, only six.

As she stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes and listening for the school bell that fateful day of April 20, Lucy thought once again about Dolly’s sad attempt to win her over by giving her daughter Lucy’s pet name. She thought it something of an irony that her daughter, Rosemary, looked like Dolly, while Dolly’s daughter Lucia was the spit of Lucy.

On his eighth birthday, Joe Cobb saw them lynch the schoolteacher. That was in Alabama, in 1896, more than thirty years after the end of the war that had freed the slaves, and Joe knew then that Negroes would never be free, that the world would always be a brutal place for black people.

The men forced the children to watch. Without warning, they entered the tobacco barn that served as a schoolhouse and grabbed the teacher, blocking the door so the students could not run away. The men marched the children outside, behind the teacher, and the little ones stood silently, twitching, shifting from one foot to the other as the men put the noose around the teacher’s neck. Joe looked away. It didn’t seem fitting to watch, but a man prodded him, and he turned his head back. Still, he did not look directly at the teacher, but made his eyes blur and looked over the condemned man’s head.

“You little
negras
pay attention,” one of the white men said, pronouncing
Negro
in the southern way, with as much loathing as if he had used the other word, the uglier one. The men hadn’t bothered to put white hoods over their heads, so the students were aware of who they were. But it hadn’t been necessary for them to disguise themselves, because the men knew the children would never tell. Their parents wouldn’t ask, and the children wouldn’t say. And who would they tell if they did? One of the six men was the sheriff. Another owned the sawmill that employed several of the students’ fathers, and a third ran the store where the colored families shopped. That one was also the town mayor. The other members of the mob were farmers, mean men who would as soon chop off the foot of a Negro child who failed to step off the sidewalk while they passed as they would squash a toad that got in their way. Lynching a Negro in that small Southern town was sport, and the men wouldn’t be punished even if their names were printed in the newspaper. There was one law for white people and “Negro law” for black ones.

The teacher pleaded, promised he’d leave the small backwoods town and return north and never come back. He asked what he’d done wrong and apologized for it, even though he didn’t understand how seriously he had off ended them. Joe reached out a hand as if to help his teacher, then stopped, for what could one little black boy do? He would likely get a whipping for making that small gesture.

“He teached them
Latin,
” one of the farmers said with disgust.

Then Joe understood what had set off the men. And he understood, too, that he and his friend Little Willie were responsible. They had talked Latin in the store, feeling smug, a little proud of themselves, although it was only three words, and enraging the owner, the mayor. “What you little niggers think you’re doing sassing me?” He brought a broom handle down hard on Joe’s head, and the two boys ran out into the dusty street. But they’d giggled after they got away. Imagine, they told each other, they knew something a white man didn’t.

Joe’s hands began to shake, and he put them into his pockets, feeling the mouth harp he had received just that morning for his birthday. He did not have to be a man grown to understand how much the white people hated the schoolteacher. He understood now, although his mother, Ada, had warned him, told him what the whites said.

The colored people had been delighted when the teacher showed up, a man who had been to college and whose father was a doctor. But the whites hadn’t liked it. “You take your boy out of school, Ada, before he forgets who he is,” said the white woman who employed Joe’s mother to sweep and clean, wash and iron, and cook for a dollar a week. “The Negroes were put on this earth to be of the servant class, and it’s not right, them learning to talk and think like white people. It unfits them. You elevate a darky, and next thing your young bucks’ll think they’re as good as we are, and we can’t have that. It will upset the natural order of things.”

When Joe overheard his mother tell his father of the conversation, he knew she’d said “Yes’m” to the woman and maybe repeated it, “Yes’m.”

“Now, Ada, if you could read and write, you wouldn’t be content to work for me,” the woman had continued. “Then where’d you and me be?”

“Yes’m.”

He’d heard other whites in town put it less delicately. “It’s as foolish to teach a
negra
to read as to learn a monkey to shoot a gun,” a farmer had said, learning against the feed store, looking at the boy and laughing.

“You can’t teach ’em not to be black,” his friend had replied. Even at that age, Joe knew that most whites believed learning was the ruination of a good Negro and that an educated darky was more likely to be discontented and lust after white women.

There’d been incidents in town before the lynching, so the teacher should have known better. Someone had thrown a rock through the schoolhouse window, and the teacher himself had been splattered with mud and told he was to wear overalls like any other black man. Suits were for white men. They had broken the teacher’s spectacles, saying he wouldn’t need them if he kept his eyes to the ground. Then two white boys had grabbed the teacher’s books and tossed them into a hog pen.

The treatment brought a bad feeling to the black people who had been so hopeful when the teacher arrived from the North, full of stories about how Negroes had been kings in the Bible and how the black race had produced men like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, who were superior to most white men. The teacher dressed and spoke like a white man. He walked like one, too, his head high, his step sure, instead of using the shuffling gait of slavery days. The parents warned him to be deferential to whites, to tug at his cap when he passed one and not to look him in the eye. They told him there might be trouble with that Latin motto he gave the school. The students were proud of it, but the older folks, they knew it meant trouble.

But the teacher had laughed when they warned him, replying there were worse things than the taunts of rednecks. He’d said the word out loud, and the black people had cringed, warning him to watch his tongue, because a white man might overhear him. A black man could be castrated for less.

The teacher hadn’t changed his ways, and finally, when the two boys said the school’s Latin motto that day in the dark store that smelled of oiled floorboards and rotted wood, molasses and soft moldy bread, repeated the words, saying loudly that they were in Latin, the storekeeper said he’d had enough. He went to the saloon and rounded up the three farmers, drunk as they were, and the sheriff, who was a bully, and the mill owner, who’d said often enough that he was tired himself of the way black workers thought they should get as much for a day’s work as a white man.

The men went to the school and grabbed the teacher, who must have thought he was in for a flogging, because he yelled to the children not to be afraid. And the men did indeed whip the teacher, whipped him until the blood ran down his legs. But then they got out the noose, and at last the teacher seemed to understand that he would be hanged. He reared and pitched and looked mortal afraid, and his eyes bugged out like the white people in blackface at the minstrel shows.

The men strung him up. It wasn’t an execution where the condemned man had a final word, but just a sloppy lynching where the teacher mumbled the words of the Lord’s Prayer before he flopped around at the end of the rope like a catfish out of water. It took a while before he stopped moving, because the fall didn’t break his neck, and he’d had to strangle himself to death. Then the body turned round and round because of a twist in the rope. Joe put his hand in front of his mouth, hoping he wouldn’t throw up. He looked down and saw that Little Willie had wet his pants. A girl was sniveling, another shaking so hard that Joe thought she might tip over. He could smell the fear among the children.

When the teacher at last was still, his head over to one side, the men, silent now, the bravado gone, got on their horses. “Now, don’t you little
negras
never forget this,” one of them said to the children. As if we ever would, Joe thought.

The students were afraid to cut down the teacher, afraid to touch him, and they ran home and told their parents what had happened, although they didn’t tell the names of the lynch mob. And when dark came, the fathers took down the dead man and buried him deep in the woods. They knew better than to mark the grave. They searched the teacher’s room and found an address, and a woman who could write penned a note to his family: “Your son don get cilled, and we bureed him. Hes a good man. We sory.” She took the letter to the post office and purchased a stamp. But the postmaster must have wondered why a colored woman was sending a letter to Boston, because he opened it, read it, then threw it away. The mothers said weren’t they lucky that the schoolhouse hadn’t been burned down.

The school board didn’t shut down the Negro school, as many expected. Instead, the school board found another teacher, a local girl who hadn’t gone further than the third grade and who understood what was expected of her. She resumed classes in the tobacco barn, a drafty building with no stove and cracks between the boards big enough to let a cat through. But Joe never went back, because there was nothing the young girl could teach him.

What Joe learned that terrible day the teacher was murdered was not hatred as much as sadness and a knowing of the world, and, of course, that was exactly what the white men had intended. Joe was a smart boy, and when he first met the teacher, he’d decided he wanted to learn everything he could so that he, too, could be a Negro who stood tall with white men. He was embarrassed at the way his father, Riley Cobb, bowed to the whites, docile, obedient, laughing when they made fun of him, never protesting when he was shortchanged at the mercantile. Joe could count, and once he’d spoken up when the change came back two pennies short. His father had smacked him and said, “Shut your mouth, you little fool.”

“But Pappy—” the boy said after they left.

“Don’t you never tell a white man he’s wrong, boy, if you want to live. That’s the way of it.”

School had been different. The teacher told them they were as good as anybody, and that they could own stores and farms just like white men. All they needed was an education. So Joe sat up straight and listened.

The lynching was the end of Joe’s boyhood. He no longer walked along the dusty roads, barefoot as a duck, with his fishing pole over his shoulder. Nor did he play baseball with a broomstick and the ball his mother had made from rags. With no school to attend, Joe was sent to the fields to help his father, who was a share-tenant on Hogpen Lane. “He’s old enough to work,” said the landowner, who claimed part of the crop Riley made and wanted all the field hands his black families could produce. So now the boy rose before daylight and worked until dark.

It was not an altogether unhappy time. Joe loved the smell of the earth, freshly turned, and the touch of the dew on his feet. There was pleasure in seeing the tips of the corn poke up from the earth and the white cotton peek from the boll. Riley sang songs from slavery days that had been passed down to him from his own father, and as there were no white men to oversee them, the father straightened his shoulders and lifted his head as he stood in the shade of a tree, explaining the workings of nature to the boy. Sometimes, when the sun beat down hot enough to melt a person’s eyeballs, his father waved Joe off, telling him to put down his hoe and take off his overalls and swim in the pond. Riley Cobb was a kind man who alternated between beating blackness into his son to teach him how to survive and wanting the boy to have a little time of joy before he understood what a burden it was to be a black man at the turn of the century, some thirty years after emancipation.

Following the harvest, when the cold weather came and there was no work in the fields, the family—there were also a mother and four younger children—sat in front of a fire in the former slave cabin where they lived and listened to the grandpappy, an old, twisted, muscled man, tell about the bitterness of slavery days. “They’d treat you like you was no more than mules,” he said. “They’d whip you, break your jawbone, and they’d’ve cut off your head for a soup bowl, only you was worth money to ’em. You think you have it poorly, Joe, but you don’t know what hard times is.” He’d sink into his memories, then say, “Freedom cried out to us. We thought if we was just free…” And then he’d shake his head and add, “I wish I had went before I had so much to grieve over.”

“We thought if we just had education,” Joe’s mother would say, letting the thought drop. Then she would add, “Well, trust in God and hoe your row, and better times will come.”

Joe liked it better when his grandpappy told him stories about Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox and would laugh and say, “White man’s took everything else away from us, but we keeps our humor.” The stories were about how the weaker animals always got the better of the stronger ones. Joe knew without having to be told that the weaker animals were the colored people, and he gloried in their cunning and trickery. As he weeded under the hot sun, the sweat pouring off his back, he pretended he was Br’er Rabbit, getting a white boy to wield the hoe in his place. And when he watched his mother plod off to work, a laundry basket in her arms, he thought of what it would be like if the old white lady washed
their
clothes.

But at the same time that he dreamed of revenge for the schoolteacher’s death and the daily acts of humiliation that he and other colored people faced, Joe learned to survive, and that meant acting the way the white people expected him to—good-natured, stupid, lazy. He let the white men make fun of him just as his father did, seething inside but not showing it. Only rarely did he flare up, and then it was in such a way that the white man did not fully understand that he had been bested. When the man who owned the land Joe and his father worked complained about the responsibilities of being a landowner and remarked, “You have an easier time of it than I do,” Joe replied, “Yessir, and so do your hogs.”

Joe turned into a handsome young man, certainly by white standards—broad-shouldered, well muscled, light-skinned, with a straight nose and hair that curled instead of kinked. That was not altogether a blessing, because white women glanced at him with approval, which infuriated their men. Joe knew he should never be alone with a white woman, never look her in the eye when he passed one on the street, never brush against her, or he’d fare no better than the schoolteacher. So he shuffled off the sidewalk into the street if he saw one coming. And if she called to him, “Boy, do you want to earn a nickel to chop my wood?” he’d look foolish and shake his head, and she would make a remark on the shiftlessness of colored people.