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I ducked down under the windowsill but that didn't stop
her from calling.

"Who's up there spying on me?" she cried. "Come out
right now or I'll call my daddy."

I knew that if Miss Eloise called her father I'd get more
than a whipping from Big Mama's razor strap. He might
whip me himself until I was knocked out and bleeding like
the slaves I'd seen him bullwhip while they were tied to
the big wagon wheel in the main yard.

I stood up and looked out.

That was back before I met Tall John and he taught me about the word "nigger" and how
wrong it was for me to use such a term.

"Yes'm, Miss Eloise?" I said. "I been workin' up here.
Is it me you want?"

"You were spying on me," she said.

"No, ma'am," I assured her. "I's jes' workin'."

"Doin' what?"

If ever you tell a lie you should know where its goin
That's
what Mud Albert would tell me. I should have heeded
those words before telling Eloise that I was at work. Be
cause there was no work for a groom like me up in the high
part of the barn.

"Breshin' the horses," I said lamely.

"There ain't no horses in the top'a the barn," she said,
pointing an accusing finger at me. "You're malingering up
there, ain't you, boy?"

"I's sorry," I said, near tears from the fear in my heart.

"Come down here," Eloise said in a very serious tone.

I climbed down the ladder from the roof and ran
through the barn and to the yard, where the young white girl stood. She wore a yellow bonnet held under her chin
by a red ribbon, and a yellow dress with a flouncy slip un
derneath the skirt. She was eleven years old and pretty as
a child can be.

I came up to her with my head hanging down and my eyes on the ground.

"Yes'm?" I said.

"Were you spyin' on me, boy?"

"I was jes lookin', Miss Eloise. I didn't know you was
down here."

"Why you lookin' at your feet?" she asked. "You know
it's rude not to look at someone when you're talkin' to 'em."

"I ain't s'posed to look at you, ma'am. You's a white lady
an' niggers ain't s'posed to look at white ladies."

It was true. Even Fred Chocolate, Master Tobias's but
ler, was not supposed to look at a white woman straight on.

"You were lookin' at me from up in the barn," she said.

"No, ma'am," I lied. "I mean I looked out but I didn't
know that you was there."

"That's not true," she said.

"I swear it is," I said, still looking at my feet.

"Look up at me this instant, you insolent boy," she said

then.

I raised my head slowly. I had to look up because Eloise
was elevated above me, on the porch. When I saw her face there was a big smile on it.

"Don't be scared," she said. "I won't tell."

My heart skipped at her kind words. I felt as if she were
saving me even though it was her threats that I was afraid of.

"Do you want a molasses cookie?" she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I replied.

From a tin can on the swinging chair she brought out a big brown cookie. She knelt down in her pretty dress and
handed it to me.

"Now run along," she said. "And don't worry, I won't tell that you were lookin'."

I ran back into the barn and up to my crow's nest. Mama
Flore had let me taste the crumbs from cookies before but I never had a whole one, or even a proper piece. I sat up next to the window and ate my cookie, thinking of young
Eloise.

I was hoping that somehow she would remember me
and make me her page. That way I could always be near
her and eat sugary cookies every night of the week.

That was all before I met Tall John and learned that no
man or woman should serve another because that made
them a slave.

2.

Time went by and I stayed pretty small. But even still
Master Tobias one day told Flore that he reckoned I was
old enough to begin the lifelong chore of picking cotton.

"Maybe a few months out workin' will make him grow
into a man," I heard him say to Flore.

He told her that the next day he would send Mr. Stewart up to the barn with orders to drag me out to the slave
quarters. I knew that I had to go, and Big Mama Flore had
spent the night before talking and singing to me so that I
wouldn't be so scared. But when that mean-eyed, rat-faced, red-necked Mr. Stewart came to take me I went into a fit of
kicking and screaming. The whole time I kicked and
shouted I worried that Mr. Stewart was going to take me
out to the killin' shack for being so unruly. But as much as
I was afraid to be stretched I was even more scared of the
slave quarters.

Nothing I had ever heard about the slave quarters
sounded good. It smelled bad in there and it was too hot in
the summer and freezing cold in the winter. And every
night they chained your feet to an eyebolt in the floor. The men out there were mostly angry and so they were always
fighting or crying or just plain sad. But the worst thing they
said about the slave quarters was that once you were there
you stayed there for the rest of your life. You either worked
in the field or you stayed chained in your bunk. And so I
knew that once I went out there I'd never spend any time
with Mama Flore again.

Mr. Stewart would get hold of my wrist and drag me half
the way across the yard and then I'd twist one way or
t'other until I slipped from his grasp. Then I made a bee-
line back for the big house, screaming bloody murder and
for Big Mama Flore to come and save me.

Three times the evil overseer dragged me into the yard
and three times I broke away and tried to make it back to
Big Mama Flore's skirts. The white men who worked for
the plantation were all around the pigsty laughing at Mr. Stewart, which made him start to curse me.

He grabbed me by the shoulder and shouted, "You lit
tle nigger, you better com'on like I say or I'll whip you un
til you're so bloody red that they'll call you injun!"

I knew he was trying to scare me into being tame but between the pain in my shoulder and his reputation as a
slave-killer I couldn't help but bolt again. That time I was so scared that I outpaced the overseer and made it all the way to the side door of the big house. The door was open and I could see Mama Flore standing there. I ran as fast as

a wild pig but just as I got to the door Mama Flore slammed it in my face. I could still see her through the little window,
but then she pulled curtains closed.

All I could do was to look up at the fancy cloth and cry
out her name.

"Big Mama, help!"

I pulled at the door handle but it was latched. As I
grabbed onto that knob I could feel Mr. Stewart's grip on
my shoulder again. He dragged me off while I was yelling
for Big Mama Flore to come save me. I didn't fight any
more. I just let him drag me. I was still yelling but the pain in my heart was no longer fear of the slave quarters; I was
hurting because Mama Flore had abandoned me like Judas
in the story Mud Albert once told me about the man who became like the plantation master of the whole world.

My first moments in the slave quarters might have been
frightening if it wasn't for my broken heart over Big Mama
slamming that door on me. I had run to her my whole life.
When I'd fall and skin my knee or when the thunder
storms would rage in our valley. If I woke up from a night
mare in the barn I could always run to Mama Flore's bed in
the small alcove next to the kitchen.

I was an
inconsolable soul
as Tall John once told me that
all of mankind was.

"Human beings," John said, "are lost in the needs of their
bodies. Most of the time they're hungry or hurting or sleepy
or looking for something to satisfy those needs. They're so
busy taking care of bodily things that they don't see the
world all around them."

But John, and all of his big words, came into my life
a little later on
after my early experiences in the slave
quarters.

It was afternoon when Mr. Stewart tossed me into the
man-slaves' cabin.

"Not one more peep outta you, Nigger Forty-seven,"
he said, "or I will take you back to my cabin and drive
knives into your spine."

This threat cut off my crying for the few seconds that
the brutal overseer stared at me. I held back until he
stamped out of the room.

The slave cabins were long and narrow like the barracks
for soldiers in the army. The one that was to be my new
home was made all of wood with twenty-three two-tiered
bunks down each side and one feather bed with a pitted
brass frame up front.

There were, I knew, ninety-three slaves in the men's
slave cabin at any one time. When a man-slave died or got
too old to work or ran away or was sold off for one reason or
another there would always be a new slave to take his
place. It was the same with the women field slaves. The
women had one extra rule that the men didn't have
that
was female slaves were not allowed to get pregnant. If one
did, without Master's permission, then she was punished
and sometimes killed. Master Tobias didn't want to care
for a slave if she was pregnant and could not work. And he

didn't want worthless little pickaninnies running around
eating and taking up the women's attention.

Sometimes Tobias would want to have his strongest
male slaves reproduce and other times he might want to
take some comely slave woman to his bed. But other than that there was no unauthorized congress between slaves or
between the white workers and slaves. And so the women
had their separate cabin and numbered eighty-nine.

The stench of the slave cabin was unbearable to my
spoiled nose. There were the odors of sweat and urine and
vomit and general rot. And it was hot in there too. Between
the heat, the thick air, and my broken heart I felt that I might die right then and there.

"Well, well, well, what have we got here?" said Prit-chard, man-slave Number Twenty-five.

He was the only other soul in the cabin. That's because Pritchard had broken his leg three years earlier and it had healed badly. Him and the slave Holland and some others
were helping Master Tobias move a big flat stone from out
of the backyard so that Miss Eloise could grow a dozen
rose bushes in memory of her mother, the late Una Turner.

Holland and Pritchard, with the help of six or seven
other slaves and a mule, had dragged that boulder to the
edge of the garden and stood it up so they could let it
fall down the side of the small slope there. It was Master
Tobias's opinion that when the granite stone fell on the
smaller rocks down the hill that it would shatter and make
for smaller pieces that would have been easier to remove.

But they used the mule Lacto with a grappling hook to stand the stone up and Lacto must have seen a snake or
something down the hill and bucked and ran before Hol
land and Pritchard could make it clear of the falling flat
boulder. Pritchard tried to run but Holland was frozen with
fright. So Pritchard just got his leg busted while Holland
was crushed underneath the giant rock. You couldn't even
see his body the stone was so big.