Whiter Than Snow (6 page)

Not all white folks were like that, Joe learned. Some were kind, and a few even respected the Negroes. The white minister at the Friendship Church buried Negroes at the colored cemetery, asking God to make their lives easier in heaven. One of the teachers at the white school helped the colored teacher plan lessons. And several white women in town put together food baskets, which they took to the shacks where colored people were stove up. Sometimes they brought medicine, too, and sat awhile with the sick person to let the family rest. And they weren’t uppity about it, but were kind instead. “You mustn’t believe we’re all like the sheriff and the mayor, Joe,” one of them told him. Joe knew that, but the trick was you didn’t know which ones you could trust, so you didn’t trust any of them.

When he was sixteen, Joe was arrested for fighting a white boy, and he was sentenced to prison. The fight wasn’t his fault. Joe had been carrying the laundry basket for his mother when the white boy ordered him to put it down. Joe did as he was told, hoping that would be the end of it. But the boy upended the basket, kicking the clothes into the dirt and stomping on them.

Joe’s mother begged the white boy to stop, for she would have to wash the clothes again, and her fingers were so crippled from rheumatism that she could barely rub the cloth on the scrub board. Joe tried to stop the boy by pushing him away, but the fellow turned and slugged Joe, hit him twice—left, right—causing a hurting in Joe’s stomach. Joe let the anger that had built up in his young life take over then, and he kicked the boy. Joe might have gone to prison for five years, maybe ten, because white people would not abide a black boy who hurt a white one. But as it turned out, Joe’s mother’s employer was the wife of the mill owner, who had just fired the boy for stealing. So Joe was sentenced to only two years in prison. Of course, the white boy was not punished. It was Negro law.

Instead of going to prison, however, Joe and half a dozen other convicts were “sold” to a turpentine operator, the rights to their labor traded by prison officials for a few dollars. They were shipped off to a camp deep in the piney woods. Because he was sizable, Joe was assigned a job as a woodcutter, and he was worked like a mule, because what did the operator care if one black convict was broken? It wasn’t like slavery days, when a black man had some worth. If Joe was worked to death, he’d be easy enough to replace.

The men were roused before sunup and taken to the field in chains, where they worked until it was too dark for the guards to see to shoot them. Slackers were beaten. Joe was cautious, not only at work but in the camp, a dark and dangerous place where the prisoners mixed with the regular turpentine workers. The first month he was there, Joe glanced at a black woman who was swaying near a fire, a sweet singer whose voice was smooth and silky and ripped through his heart, making him so lonely, he wanted to hug himself like a baby. He took a step toward the fire and found a knife at his throat. “You look at my woman again, and you don’t know what you will come to before you die,” said a voice that was low and ragged in his ear.

Joe put out his hands and said, “Easy,” and the man drew back the knife, but not before he scratched it across Joe’s throat, drawing a line of blood as fine as a thread. “I just got here. I mean no trouble,” Joe told him.

“Stay away from the women,” the man warned. Joe recognized him as one of the regular turpentine workers. “There’s girls enough from the juke house for you.”

“I got no money. I came from the prison.”

The man relaxed a little. “Then you got to stay out of trouble.” He stepped back and looked at Joe. “You work hard, and you keep away from Sykes over there, and when you can’t, you mind your back. He is treacherous.” He pointed with his knife at a fat white man with eyes like a pig. “He’d rather whip a man to death than eat breakfast. And if you run away, you better hope you make it, ’cause you won’t be worth nothing if they bring you back.”

Joe thanked the man and went to sit with the other new turpentiners who had come from the prison. One of them was Little Willie, who had stood next to Joe when the schoolteacher was lynched. Little Willie, a runt of a man, had been sentenced to five years of hard labor for killing a dog that was the property of a wealthy farmer. The farmer sicked the dog on Little Willie every time he passed. “And one day, I fixed up not to take it again, and I kicked that dog till I broke his neck,” Little Willie told Joe.

As the two men sat near the fire, shivering, because it was cold in the woods and neither had a coat or a blanket, Little Willie said he’d rather die than spend his sentence in the turpentine camp.

“You’ve got to bear it,” Joe told him.

“I can’t suck sorrow for five years. Maybe I’ll run away.”

Joe shook his head. “Where’d you go? They’ve got dogs to track you down. You’ll never make it, never under God’s kingdom.”

“I’ll just go where they can’t ever find me.”

Joe looked out for Little Willie, because the small man was treated mean, but there wasn’t much Joe could do. Oh, he might threaten another black turpentiner for bothering Little Willie, but he couldn’t do anything when the bully was a white man. One guard dropped an ax on Little Willie’s foot and nearly cut off his toes. Another knocked his tin plate of food to the ground. His shoes were stolen. He was whipped for not working hard enough. Little Willie turned morose, and there was a gleam of madness in his eyes, so Joe wasn’t surprised when one morning the man wasn’t there.

Guards went after him with dogs, and in less than a day, he was brought back, beaten and trussed up like a pig, thrown onto the ground as a lesson to the other prisoners. The white men joyed in the prisoners’ fear.

After the others turned away from Little Willie, Joe crept up to him and held him while he sipped a cup of water. “There wasn’t anyplace to go,” the man said through broken teeth.

The next day when the turpentiners returned from work, Little Willie was gone, and one of the men who had been there a long time told Joe that most likely Little Willie had been thrown into a swamp to drown, if he wasn’t dead already. “You dare not talk about it,” he said.

Those two years in the turpentine camp were a plague of misery for Joe, but he lived through them, which was something to be grateful for, since many of the prisoners didn’t make it. They were killed in fights with the other turpentiners, knifed by the women, beaten to death by the guards, or died from the poor food and brutal working conditions. Joe had a deep scar across his cheek, where a guard had cut him after Joe refused to kneel down for a whipping. “I only get on my knees to pray,” he’d said, and the guard went after him with both the knife and a whip. The black man learned meekness from that encounter, and during the rest of his stay at the camp, he was whipped no more than the other prisoners.

When he was released, Joe returned to his parents’ farm, a wiser young man now, but one devoid of hope for his future. He figured he wasn’t going to have anything, so nothing could hurt him. But Joe was wrong. He knew it when he met Orange, a good-sized gal of seventeen with smooth skin and fancy hair—red hair. Joe knew the first time he saw her at the church that he had to have her and that in the end he’d be hurt in some way.

Orange was a quiet woman, serious, with a fierce desire to learn, and she reawakened that same yearning in Joe. Teaching him appealed to her, and when Joe called on Orange, the two sat outside on a log with a ragged primer she’d picked up somewhere, and she helped him with the words. She opened an arithmetic book, and discovered that Joe could figure. Maybe that was why he was good with mechanical things. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix, and Orange encouraged him to get a job working with the blacksmith. But Joe wouldn’t do it. He wanted to be as far away as possible from white people.

When he was in his early twenties, Joe married Orange, and they set to housekeeping in an old slave cabin on the farm on Hogpen Lane that Joe worked with his father. It was a one-room shack fit up with a door and a single glassless window with a heavy wooden shutter to keep out the cold and rain, but they treasured it up, and for the first time since he was eight years old, Joe knew real happiness. At night, as they looked out a hole in the roof at the stars, Joe satisfied himself with his wife’s smoky body, and in the first year of their marriage, Orange gave birth to a little girl. They named her Jane. She was a sweet child, obedient, and pretty, which caused a confusion in Joe’s breast. He was proud of his daughter’s fine looks, but he knew they would be a burden to her when she was older and white boys came sniffing around. He would not borrow trouble, however, not in the early years of his child’s life. So he gloried in the little girl. And when Orange became pregnant again when Jane was five, Joe looked at his wife’s protruding belly with gladness.

Orange had given birth the first time with so little trouble that Joe did not worry. Her labor had lasted only an hour or two, barely enough time for him to fetch his mother, who had grannied many of the birthings in the neighborhood. So when Orange went into labor with their second child late one afternoon, Joe sent Jane across the fields to fetch Ada, instead of going himself. He feared the baby might come before his mother arrived and he’d be needed.

Orange was still in labor when Jane returned with her grandmother, Ada, Joe’s father coming behind them. Ada went into the house while Joe sat in the shade with his father, thinking he ought to have a nice bottle of whiskey to celebrate after the baby was born. It would be good to share the bottle with the men who’d stop by, and to brag a little about the fine baby boy he’d produced—for it would be a son this time. Or so he hoped, because he didn’t believe he could love another little girl as fiercely as he did Jane. The two men sat on a bench that Joe had fashioned from a log and talked about crops and weather, stopping when they heard Orange’s cries. Joe wrung his hands at each moan, the sweat dripping down his face. “Don’t worry,” his father told him. That was the way it was with women in childbirth, paying for Eve’s sin, as they must. Every so often, Joe went to the door and looked in at his wife writhing on the bed, but then his mother would wave him away.

After several hours, when the baby did not come, Ada went outside and said she didn’t like the looks of things and asked Joe to go after an old lady down the road, the oldest liver in the area, who’d seen more childbirth than anyone.

Joe fetched her, and the two women worked with Orange through the night. From time to time, one of the old women came out of the shack and asked Joe to go to the creek for water. Or she’d rest a minute on the bench in the cool night air, her head against the rough boards of the cabin. When Joe asked to see Orange, he was told to stay away, although the old granny woman cackled once and said, “Might be a good idea you see the hurting you brought on your woman by pleasuring yourself.”

On the following morning, Ada leaned against the outside cabin wall, her head resting in her hand. “She’s got a hard time of it. The baby’s turned,” the woman explained. “It’s tearing up her insides, and she might not bear again. Some women are not meant to have but so many babies.”

“I don’t care about babies. You save Orange,” Joe told his mother, who nodded. She went back inside, and Orange cried out. But the cries grew softer, weaker during the day, and on toward evening, Joe’s mother told him she didn’t expect Orange would live through the night. “We can’t get the baby out, and she’s weak as a rag doll. You best prepare yourself, Joe.”

“You mean she’ll die?” Joe himself felt weak. “Can’t you do something?”

“I can’t, but the white doctor might. You go fetch him, Joe, ask him would he come, please.”

“He’ll come. I’ll make him come,” Joe said. He knew where the doctor lived—not far, maybe two miles—and he ran all the way. The doctor was sitting on his front porch with his wife, and Joe thought it was a good sign that the man was at home instead of out tending to some white patient. He ran onto the porch and tugged at his cap. “Please, sir, my wife—”

“What you doing on this porch, boy? Don’t you know you’re supposed to go to the back door?” the woman said.

“But I saw the doctor—”

The woman pointed to the back of the house. “You march right on over there.”

“Yes’m.” Joe turned, his shoulders slumped, and hurried to the kitchen door and knocked.

The woman ignored him as she remained in her rocker, saying something to her husband. After a few minutes, the two of them stood up and went inside, and finally she answered his knock at the back screen door.

“What do you want?” she asked Joe.

“Please, ma’am, my wife’s in labor, and the baby’s turned and won’t come out. Could the doctor come and see her? Please.”

“The doctor’s just sitting down to dinner now.”

“Yes, ma’am. But my wife’s about to die. She can’t hold out much longer.”

“Dinner will get cold.” The woman reached up and hooked the screen, then called, “Louis, this darky says his wife’s in labor. You want to tend her?”

“Oh, those people don’t have much trouble with it. I’ll have my supper first.”

Joe stood on the back stoop, smashing the fist of one hand into the palm of the other in anger. He watched while the woman dished up the supper and carried it into the dining room. Then the couple bowed their heads and gave thanks. After a while, the woman came back with the plates and filled them again. When she returned with the empty dishes, she took down two cups and saucers; then, remembering Joe, she said, “He says he’ll be along directly, soon as he has his coffee and his cigarette.”

Joe seethed. He thought of smashing through the screen and dragging the man out to his buggy. His pride told him to leave, but he couldn’t do that when Orange needed the doctor. So he waited, hating the man inside, who held Orange’s life in his hands. At last, the doctor came into the kitchen, unlatched the screen, and told Joe to go hitch up his buggy.

When Joe came out of the barn, leading the horse, because the doctor had not invited him to sit in the buggy and Joe thought he might have to trot alongside the conveyance on the way back to the farm, the doctor picked up his bag and climbed into the buggy. “Well, get in, boy,” he told Joe. “I can’t find your wife in the dark.” The doctor clucked at the horse, which started up at a slow pace. “I wouldn’t worry too much about her. The
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women generally get on just fine. Why, back in slavery days, a woman just stooped down in the field and the baby came out. Then she scooped it up and went on hoeing.” He chuckled. “I expect by the time we get to your place, it’ll all be over.” He leaned back and let the horse plod along.