All God's Dangers (4 page)

Well, I didn't have no knowledge of what surrenderin was. But it come to me like this: that was in the days of freein the colored people. My daddy was fifteen years old, he come through fifteen years in slavery. And he worked for the Shaws, the Shaws was his masters, white people, and that's where our name comes from. All them slavery-time colored people went in the boss man's name and their children went in that name; didn't have a name of their own or any other name to give their children but the master's name.

But really, I was too little to
know
anything, only what I definitely heard em say and I never did hear nobody say what the surrender was. I just decided it was the beginnin of the days of freedom. “Hayes was fifteen years old when it surrendered.” He was imprisoned in slavery for fifteen years—slavery were equal or worser than prison, but both of em bad and the poor colored man knows more about them two subjects than anybody.

The Bible says, “What has been will be again.” And Grandma Cealy said a right smart about this: that that day was comin. Colored people once knowed what it was to live under freedom before they got over in this country, and they would know it again. That this very freedom movement that's on now would come. I heard them words and I was old enough to understand. And when I got to be a little old boy, when I got big enough to catch on to what people said, and even to the words of the old people, and the Bible, it was instilled in me many a time: the bottom rail will come to the top someday. I taken that to mean a change in the later years, durin of my lifetime maybe. I believe, if that day come, the poor generation on earth will banish away their toils and snares. But won't nobody do it for em but themselves. Take me, I'm a colored man, I've come in the knowledge of what it feels like to move out of this back yonder “ism”; and I'm confident all of my race will someday move out from under earthly bondage.

My grandmother and other people that I knowed grew up in slavery time, they wasn't satisfied with their freedom. They felt like motherless children—they wasn't satisfied but they had to live under the impression that they were. Had to act in a way just as though everything was all right. But they would open up every once in a while and talk about slavery time—they didn't know nothin about no freedom then, didn't know what it was but they wanted it. And when they got it they knew that what they got wasn't what they wanted, it wasn't freedom, really. Had to do whatever the white man directed em to do, couldn't voice their heart's desire. That was the way of life that I was born and raised into.

M
Y
mother's name was Liza; she was Liza Culver. She was a deep yaller woman—her mother was a half-white woman. Her mother and daddy died before I was born—Grandpa Tom and Grandmother Jane Culver. My mother kept a lock of her mother's hair in a tin box about four inches long and near about the width of four fingers. My mother kept it as long as she lived. It was opened many a time and I seed the lock of hair in it—long, black hair, straight hair. My daddy said it was layin in that box growin, that hair growed—tellin what was told to me and accordin to my seein. Well, after my mother died, my daddy jumped up and married again and he done away with that lock of hair. I was absolutely sorry that it disappeared, I hated it. Because my mother had dearly kept that hair and therefore I felt strongly about it. I'd a held on to it knowin it was of my grandmother.

Grandpa Tom, who was due to be my granddad, it was said that he weren't my mother's daddy, said a Todd man, fellow by the name of Zeke Todd, was my granddaddy, my mother's daddy. But at the time my mother was born, her mother's husband was Tom Culver. My grandmother and granddaddy, Grandma Jane and Grandpa Tom, as I'd say, they was the mother and father of three girls—Liza Culver, Lydia Culver, and Virginia Culver—and eight boys, big healthy boys, all of em considered Grandpa Tom Culver's children. There was only one in the family I never did see and that was Uncle Hill Culver, one of the middle boys. He fell—that's the word we got—one Sunday, in Birmingham, he fell through the top of a three-story buildin to the floor of the first story and a scaffoldin fell behind him and busted his brains out. And that left seven boys.
And every one of them boys and every one of them girls looked like sisters and brothers. Looked like one man and one woman was the daddy and mother to all of em, regardless to what was said. Uncle Gates Culver, that was considered the oldest boy. I laughed and talked with Uncle Gates many a day; Uncle Sherman Culver, made a heavy, portly man; Uncle Jim Culver, smallest of the lot; Uncle John, made a big, heavy rascal; Uncle Grant Culver; Uncle Tom Culver; Uncle Junior Culver; Uncle Hill Culver. I've seed seven of them boys right with these eyes, before the death of em. Uncle John Culver was the baby. They appeared to be my uncles; they favored my mother, all those Culver boys and them Culver girls.

When my mother married my daddy, she taken them two baby boys at the death of
her
mother and raised em until they got to be grown men—Grandma Jane's two babies, the knee-baby, Uncle Sherman Culver, and the real baby, Uncle John Culver. Her other brothers and sisters was grown enough then, they could vouch for themselves, but the two little ones, my mother taken them in. I was a little fellow, I mean little, I weren't able to do nothin but eat and sleep when Uncle Sherman and Uncle John begin to board with us.

Good God, them two boys and my mother practically done all the field work. My mother especially done anything my daddy told her to do as far as cultivatin a crop out there—I seed her do it—that a man ought to done. She'd plow, she'd hoe; my daddy'd tell her, “Take that plow!” “Hoe!” And here's the way I seed her go many a day, and that was a every year's job for her. My daddy'd have his gun on his shoulder and be off on Sitimachas Creek swamps, huntin. And her and her little brothers would be in the field at work. She'd be out there with her dress rolled up nearly to her knees, just so she could have a clear stroke walkin. Pushed up and rolled up around her waist and a string tied around it and her dress would bunch up around her hips. She'd be in the field workin like a man, my daddy out in the woods somewhere huntin. Them boys would be plowin; if they was caught up with the plowin all three of em—my mother and her brothers—would be usin a hoe. My mother had to boss-instruct, she had to be a teacher to them boys, weren't nobody else there to teach em but her. She taught em how to plow, chop, work that crop every way—she raised em up in it. She was just a over-all leader for her two brothers. And when she taken down sick they was young men size but they were yet there. And they feared my daddy just like I had to fear him when I come along.
They called him Buddy and he was their brother-in-law. Uncle Sherman Culver and Uncle John Culver, my mother and daddy raised em right in the house with us. And when they got old enough to stand up and have man thoughts, they left.

I was nine years old when my mother died; I was too little to remember the date of the month but she died in August and I just lackin from the date she died up until the twenty-eighth day of December of bein nine years old. If I had a twenty-dollar bill this mornin for every time I seed my daddy beat up my mother and beat up my stepmother I wouldn't be settin here this mornin because I'd have up in the hundreds of dollars. Each one of them women—I didn't see no cause for it. I don't expect it ever come in my daddy's mind what his children thought about it or how they would remember him for it, but that was a poor example, to stamp and beat up children's mothers right before em.

I got wagon lines in my shed now, two-horse wagon lines; I used to drive my wagon with leather lines to hold them mules. The outside line catches one mule, outside her mouth to her bits; the other line catches the outside of the other mule's mouth—all them lines to them mules' mouths and a line from the one mule's mouth comes over and catches to the inside of the other mule's mouth and just so on. You pull on either one of them lines and you pull both mules thataway. Leather lines, the kind of lines my daddy kept up on a low loft in a old log barn. When he'd get unreasonably mad he'd jump up there and grab them lines out and double em up, or grab an old bull whip, had a staff bout a foot long, and he'd take up them lines or that bull whip and whip my mother down. He beat her scandalous. Jump up he would and grab the lines out of the loft, if them was the lines he wanted to whip her with; he'd double em twice, stand up before my mother's face and just strop her down.

She died with the dropsy. Swelled up all over her body; her feet and legs swelled to bust for several weeks before she died. She would just sit there in a rockin chair and her feet and legs swelled so bad until they shined. Well, the country wasn't full of doctors at that time but there was doctors and my daddy had a doctor to her. But he couldn't cure her. People come there givin advice and visitin, sittin with her, and they told my daddy to get some of these—there's a old bush and it gets to be a pretty good-sized tree, and it's
called a holly-hoke. Has leaves on it and them leaves has got stickers all around em. And they told my daddy to get him a holly-hoke, tear a twig off bout two foot long—had them old sticker leaves on it—and whip her feet. She stood it; it hurt plenty, I reckon, but she stood it. And he'd squat down by her or sit down in a chair and whip her feet, whip em light, just enough for them old stickers on them leaves to prick her skin. And good God, the water would run out of her feet into little pools on the floor, and he'd put cloths down to catch the water. He'd sit there and whip her feet—that didn't do her no good under God's sun. And the doctor my daddy had come in to see her, white man by the name of Seth Ames—we chaps always called him Dr. Ames—he couldn't do her no good.

She died in August. They buried her over here at Elam Baptist Church. All right. My daddy was one of these kind—just tell the straight truth like it was—he liked other women while he kept him a wife. And when she died in August he got in a plumb hurry to marry again, and three weeks to Christmas that same year he was married again.

My mother was the mother for six children and before she died she lost two of em to my knowin. And that left her when she left this world, that left four children—my sister Sadie, my brother Peter, my brother Henry, and myself. Henry was the next child born after me, I was the oldest boy. My sister Sadie was older than I was and Peter was the baby of us all.

Henry died one year to the month after my mother died. My daddy didn't seem to grieve over my mother—of course, I was quite young and I couldn't estimate him then like I could when I got older, but I know he was right off huntin him another woman and went and married TJ's mother. And when Henry died the next August there was a grief among we children but my daddy and his new wife didn't take it hard at all, not a bit, nobody did but we children. The child, Henry, he seemed to grow considerably while he was sick. He stretched out and got tall and he would tell my daddy a heap of times, “Papa, I hear a roarin. There's somethin roarin in my head.”

Don't know whether it was his imagination or it was true facts but that's what he said. “There's a roarin in my head. Roar like a train comin. Papa, don't you hear it?”

My daddy'd be sittin or standin by his bed. Said, “No, son, I don't hear it.”

Henry said, “Hold your head down here close to me—” He didn't realize that my daddy couldn't hear nothin through him. Just said, “Well, there's somethin roarin in my head.”

And my daddy had Dr. Seth Ames to treat Henry. He was a nice, kind man, but as far as his practiceship, I don't know whether he was on the dot or not. He told my daddy, “Hayes, I just can't locate his complaint, I just can't do it. It seems to me like it's a case of the St. Vitus Dance. It seems like the boy's worried with the St. Vitus Dance.”

Henry didn't live long after the doctor seed him; he went on away from here. And a year to the month after my mother died, we carried him to Elam Baptist Church over there by Apafalya and buried him. Well, my sister lived—that didn't leave but three of us then, me, my sister Sadie, and Peter. Sadie was three years older than I was and she lived to marry and her and her husband had three little boy children. He died and she married again, then she died. She didn't live long after she married the second time. Well, that didn't leave but two of us, me and Peter. No whole sister in the world.

A
FTER
my mother died, my daddy married TJ's mother. She was a Reed, Maggie Reed. And my daddy loved women, O God, he loved women. Old man Jubal Reed's daughter and old lady Adeline—used to be Adeline Milliken and after old man Jubal Reed married her, him and her had one child and she went in the name of Maggie Reed. And this old lady Adeline Reed, who was Adeline Milliken before Jubal Reed married her, she had had other men before him. I knowed em: old man Coot Ramsey come in contact with her enough to have four children and they all went under the Ramsey name—Roland Ramsey, Reuben Ramsey, Waldo Ramsey, Hector Ramsey. And the last time old lady Adeline—I don't say the first time and the last time, I say this: when I come in the knowledge of that family by my daddy marryin in it, she had married to a man by the name of Jubal Reed. She weren't married to old man Coot Ramsey—he just gettin children by this woman—and she went in the name of Milliken, Adeline Milliken. And my daddy married in that family to the only child that old lady Adeline Milliken and old man Jubal Reed had—she went in the name of Reed, Maggie Reed. And she was a half-sister to old man Waldo Ramsey; Adeline Milliken
was the mother for both of em. And I married Waldo Ramsey's daughter, in 1906, who was this old lady Adeline Milliken's granddaughter. My daddy married Waldo Ramsey's half-sister, Maggie Reed. And I jumped up and married Waldo Ramsey's daughter. That made Maggie Reed, you might say, my wife's half-auntie, by Waldo bein Maggie's brother by the same woman. Well, that drawed me in to be my stepmother's brother's son-in-law—that's the way we mixed.