All God's Dangers (90 page)

People wants baskets on top of baskets and got a whole lot of orders in here. But there's been a many orders that wasn't filled in this world. I just won't work myself to death. My eyes is bad now, too. You take them little boys runnin around here. I can see em with their sticks in their hands, runnin, see em good. But from here to the asphalt out yonder, I can't see a man from a mule, only by the size maybe or the shape and by the fact that you don't see no mules walkin these roads here nohow.

T
HESE
little old chaps here is Josie's great-grandchildren and we're raisin em up in place of their natural parents. That big gal here, Mary Beth took her from one of
her
stepdaughters, Annie Mae Ramsey, and raised her to where she's at today. Josie did not raise that gal; she'd keep her some days for Mary Beth but she never did keep her definitely. And this here brightest little boy is this gal's brother—both of em is Spencer Ramsey's grandchildren. And now, Mary Beth's own dear daughter's chap stays here too. Me and Josie got him just about the time he started to walk. Josie went to Boston and brought him home with her. Didn't go after him particularly, but she found out she could get him and she brought him home. I hired a fellow, drove me to Tuskegee one evenin to meet the bus to pick her up. And when it come in, there was Josie steppin off with a baby in her arms. His name is Alexander. He's stayed with us a little over three years. He's crazy about me now, and tell the truth, I like these little old chaps just like they was my very own.

These children will have a better time of life than ever been had by my color in history. They're goin and comin as the white children go and come, and right amongst the white children. And somethin I never thought I'd see—school buses travelin every day through the settlement. Change is on, and everything that aint changed goin to be changed—

M
Y
boyhood days was my hidin place. I didn't have no right to no education whatever. I was handicapped and handicapped like a dog. When I was deprived of book learnin, right there they had me dead by the throat. I was deaf and dumb, didn't know nothin and weren't given no chance to my rights enough to come in the knowledge of what was right and what was wrong. When I was a little boy comin along—and that runned until way up here when this equal rights movement taken place; that begin to bust these conditions wide open, and many eyes flew open to a great excitement. It's brought light out of darkness. I can just spy the good every day of my life that it's doin—to my first remembrance, here's what was runnin: I was born in 1885. From my birth and I reckon it was before my birth, just such conditions as I've explained was goin on and went on up until recent days. That's well above a hundred years from time to time of the change, well above a hundred years—this is the truth I'm givin; I've kept a record of a heap of things and it gives me a right to speak it—

After I become old enough to travel and go anywhere by myself, I went to them big days, commencement days at Tuskegee in the spring of the year. And I seed Booker Washington—after I was grown and got big enough. I'd heard a lot of talk about Booker Washington, Booker T. Washington. He was a pretty large-bodied man, and he wasn't so high and he wasn't so low, just a average man. But he was a important man, he was a principal there at that school. He was a noted man and he was a man that had quite a bit of influence with the big people in the northern countries, and he was a business man as a white man would be and he controlled and handled that school there at Tuskegee. I seed him and I heard him talk some on them celebration days, and I knowed he was over that school every way. And he'd travel yonder in them northern states and he'd go before them big moneyed men and the officials of the entire United States—he could meet with em and talk with
em and he was recognized. They gived that man piles of money to run this school business here in the state of Alabama. But I wouldn't boost Booker Washington today up to everything that was industrious and right. Why? He was a nigger of this state and well known and everything, but here's what his trouble was, to a great extent: he didn't feel for and didn't respect his race of people enough to go rock bottom with em. He leaned too much to the white people that controlled the money—lookin out for what was his worth, that's what he was lookin for. He was a big man, he had authority, he had pull in life, he had a political pull any way he turned and he was pullin for Booker Washington. He wanted his people to do this, that, and the other, but he never did get to the roots of our troubles. He had a lot of friends, he had a lot of courage, but it was all his way. He had a lot of anything a man needed for hisself, but the right main thing, he weren't down with that. Yet and still the veil was over the nigger's eyes. Booker Washington didn't try to pull that veil away like he shoulda done. He should have walked out full-faced with all the courage in the world and realized, ‘I was born to die. What use for me to hold everything under the cover if I know it? How come I won't tell it, in favor of my race of people? Why would I not care who sinks just so I swim?' Wrong-spirited. Booker Washington was—quite natural, there's nobody on earth perfect, but Booker Washington was a man got down with his country in the wrong way.

I didn't like conditions but what could I do? I had no voice, had no political pull whatever. They sang that song stoutly to me, too, let me know that the very best that I could do was
labor
and try to labor to a success under their rulins. I done it. You couldn't count no slackness on Nate Shaw about labor.

I worked all that I had to—as far as I can say, the Lord speaks somethin like this: if a thing is necessary to do on a Sunday, do it. Help the ox out of the mire as well on a Sunday as on a Monday. And that very thing have caused me to do a little work on a Sunday. If I was pullin fodder, in fall of the year in gatherin time, I'd pull it to beat the weather, come Sunday or Monday. But I never did go out and pick no cotton on a Sunday. But, pull some fodder on Friday or Saturday and it cured out; well, if I estimated that the rain liable to come, I scurried out there to get that fodder and carry
it to the barn. I've done that on a Sunday. That was necessary. It was no harm—

And in all, I had a hard way to go. I had men to turn me down, wouldn't let me have the land I needed to work, wouldn't sell me guano, didn't want to see me with anything. Soon as I got to where I could have somethin for sure and was makin somethin of myself, then they commenced a runnin at me, wantin to make trades with me.

I had business with many a white man and I come out of the little end of the horn with too many of em. When I got in Mr. Watson's hands, he thought he just goin to drive me to what he wanted, which was my destruction. He was goin to take what I had if I owed him; if I didn't owe him he was goin to take it. I'd a died and went home to my Savior before I'd a suffered him to do it. I just carried him three good bales of cotton on about a forty- or fifty-dollar debt—he told me, “Bring me the cotton, bring me the cotton.” I didn't have to do it, but I done it. If I had a second chance, I might not do it again—but tryin to avoid a storm by walkin right into it. Give him the cotton and be shed of him. I dumped it off in the warehouse, had it weighed and left it there for him. Then I go back in a few days and ask him for a settlement—“Aint no use of that”; told me just thataway and walked on about his business. He had me then. I done played into his hands. Still, I didn't let that excite me, I stayed cool for nearly a year.

Well, that was common, that was common. There was too many around that was takin the other fellow's labor. And he'd be takin more than one man's labor when he set down with his books. Farewell for some poor man, maybe several poor men.

I never tried to beat nobody out of nothin since I been in this world, never has, but I understands that there's a whole class of people tries to beat the other class of people out of what they has. I've had it put on me; I've seen it put on others, with these eyes. O, it's plain: if every man thoroughly got his rights, there wouldn't be so many rich people in the world—I spied that a long time ago. And I've looked deep in that angle. How can one man get out there and labor for his own way of life and get to be a rich man? Where is his earnins comin from that he's palmin off and stickin it behind? It come out of the poor little farmers and other laborin men. O, it's desperately wrong. There's many a man today aint able to support his family. There's many a man aint able to wear
the clothes that he should wear and accumulate nothin that he should have, and accomplish nothin that he should do. And who is the backbone of the world? It's the laborin man, it's the laborin man. My God, the big man been on him with both foots all these years and now don't want to get off him. I found out all of that because they tried to take I don't know what all away from me.

I'
VE
gotten along in this world by studyin the races and knowin that I was one of the underdogs. I was under many rulins, just like the other Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man and displeasin to God and still I had to fall back. I got tired of it but no help did I know; weren't nobody to back me up. I've taken every kind of insult and went on. In my years past, I'd accommodate anybody; but I didn't believe in this way of bowin to my knees and doin what
any
white man said do. Still, I always knowed to give the white man his time of day or else he's ready to knock me in the head. I just aint goin to go nobody's way against my own self. First thing of all—I care for myself and respect myself.

I've joked with white people, in a nice way. I've had to play dumb sometimes—I knowed not to go too far and let them know what I knowed, because they taken exception of it too quick. I had to humble down and play shut-mouthed in many cases to get along. I've done it all—they didn't know what it was all about, it's just a plain fact. I've played dumb—maybe a heap of times I knowed just how come they done such-and-such a trick, but I wouldn't say. And I could go to em a heap of times for a favor and get it. I could go to em, even the heavy-pocketed white man, if I couldn't get what I wanted out of one, I could get it out the other one. They'd have dealins with you, furnish you what you needed to make a crop, but you had to come under their rulins. They'd give you a good name if you was obedient to em, acted nice when you met em and didn't question em bout what they said they had against you. You begin to cry about your rights and the mistreatin of you and they'd murder you.

When I jumped up and fought the laws, that ruint me with the white people in this country. They gived me just as bad a name as they could give me; talked it around that I was quick-tempered, I was quick-tempered. The devil you better get quick-tempered or get some sort of temper when you know you livin in a bad country.

But there's some that wouldn't learn—my brother Peter, he didn't have no trouble with Watson; Simon Travis didn't have no trouble with him that I ever heard; Johnny B Todd, that wife of mine in there, her first husband, he didn't have no trouble with him at all. They just let him run over em and do as he pleased. I can't definitely say how come I growed up to be like I was and they growed up to be them, but I can estimate it: you take a bunch of children out there, sisters and brothers all, they'll grow up with different spirits in em.

My mother died in August and I was lackin from the date she died until the twenty-eighth of December of bein nine years old. And Peter was the baby; he weren't walkin when she died. That puts him near eighty today. I'm five or six years older than he is, I don't know definitely. But I do know that he stayed with my daddy until he was twenty-three years old.

You know you hardly ever find two brothers that operate just alike. There was a great difference in my and his operations; there was a great difference in my and his thoughts about what we wanted to accumulate in this world.

Peter's a good fellow. He got a lot of white friends back up in that settlement where he lives. He don't talk back to em—he got one white gentleman up there that takes a power saw and saws wood and hauls it to him. And here just before Christmas last year he had to go in the hospital at Tuskegee—some of em went down there to see him. He takes better with em than I do because he's been quiet all his life.

I just happen to be one of a different spirit. I've learned many a thing that's profitable to me, and I've learned a heap that aint profitable, but to learn anything at all is a blessin. And I've learned that whatever is in a person, a heap of his conditions is created in him by his life, and for the rest, he's born that way. In many cases I got a quick thought and a quick mind. So definitely, until sometimes I think I harms myself, I acts too quickly. I can't help it though, I was natured that way.

I come into the world with this against me: that if a man comes to take away what I have and he don't have a fair claim against me, I'll die before I stand quiet as a fence post and let him do it. If I die tryin to defend myself, why, let me go. I'm goin to try, definitely.