The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart (13 page)

“Where’s Miz Kathleen?” he said, hurrying over to me.

“She’s in the house. She’ll talk to them. But maybe you should just walk around outside so they see you and know there’s a man around.”

“What ’bout Miz Kathleen?”

“She’ll be all right,” I said.

We went out of the barn together and saw Aleta already headed back from the cabins. I thought to myself,
Don’t
hurry, Aleta … just keep looking like it’s nothing unusual!

I could hear them banging on the front door, then pretty soon a couple of them rode around to the back door by the kitchen since nobody’d answered in front.

It didn’t look too good—three rough white men, a colored girl hiding with her baby inside, scared out of her wits, a white girl inside the house dressed up like her mama, a little white girl coming through the fields, and Henry standing there with me watching it all and starting to get a confused look on his face, since he didn’t know anything about how we’d been dealing with people who came visiting.

By now the men were banging at the back door, and one of them was calling out. They hadn’t paid any attention to Henry or me. Most of the time it seemed like white folks didn’t even notice us coloreds.

Finally Katie stuck her head out the upstairs window.

“Hello,” she said down toward the men. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

The men looked up at her. And Henry looked up at her too, and his eyes were about as big as Katie’s all of a sudden when he saw her looking so different and trying to make her voice low so she would sound like a grown-up. But there was one person who wasn’t looking up at Katie, and that was me! I couldn’t have looked right then, but I was sure listening!

“You be Mrs. Clairborne, ma’am?” said one of them. His voice sounded a little uncertain, like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the face that had appeared in the upstairs window of the house.

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“Your husband back from the war, ma’am?” he asked.

“Yes, he is,” answered Katie. “He got back two months ago.”

“Could I talk to him, then?”

“I am sorry, but he is out in the woods with the men and one of the wagons getting some timbers.”

Katie paused and looked at me.

“Mayme, pump some fresh water for their horses.”

“Yes’m,” I said and turned slowly away.

“Is there something I can help you with?” asked Katie. As I went I saw Henry out of the corner of my eye standing there dumbfounded. The three men looked as confused as him, but then two of them led the three horses to the trough while the third one stood there and kept talking to Katie.

“No, I reckon there ain’t,” he said. “When do you expect him back?”

“About any time now,” Katie answered, glancing in the direction of the woods. “Don’t you think so, Henry? He and the other men ought to be back soon?”

Henry just stared back at her, then mumbled something that could have meant just about anything, but the man seemed to take it as a yes.

One of them wandered back from the water trough and the two men talked between themselves for a bit. I couldn’t hear anything, but they looked a little mystified about how this was turning out. Then one of them looked up toward Katie again.

“Word has it, ma’am,” he said, “that he’s got him a brother-in-law who was out west for a spell—that be your brother, ma’am?”

“That’s right … my brother Ward. Are you friends of his?”

“In a manner of speaking, ma’am. We’re trying to get in touch with him, and it’s a matter of some importance… . If you could tell us where he is, ma’am, we’d be much obliged.”

“I would like to help you,” said Katie. “But I’m afraid I haven’t seen or heard from my brother in years.—I am sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me. We’ve been passing a sickness around that’s very contagious, and I’m feeling faint. I think I need to go lie down. Good day, gentlemen.”

Katie pulled her head back inside and everything got quiet for a minute. The men kind of stood there looking at each other, not knowing quite what to do. There was nobody left to talk to but Henry standing over by the barn and me where I’d gone back to the laundry. And they didn’t seem too inclined to talk to either of us. Aleta was just wandering up too, but they didn’t pay any more attention to her than they had to me.

Finally they got back on their horses and rode away real slow, like they still didn’t know what to make of it all.

I glanced over at Henry. He still stood looking up at the empty window where Katie had been. Then he glanced over at me where I was pretending to be hanging the laundry, then down toward the slave cabins where smoke was now rising in the air from the fires Aleta had started, then finally back to where the men on their horses were just disappearing around the side of the barn.

“Well, if dat ain’t da beatenest thing I eber saw!” he finally mumbled to himself.

A T
ALK
W
ITH
H
ENRY

18

W
HEN IT WAS ALL OVER
, H
ENRY CAME INSIDE
and sat down. Katie was still made up to look older, and Emma and Aleta were laughing. But Henry had a serious look on his face.

“I reckon hit’s time you all tol’ me a little more er what’s goin’ on roun’ here,” he said.

His tone silenced us. Henry was such a peaceable and loving man, just one look from him was enough. I didn’t know much about such things yet, but later in my life when I understood a little more about how God works, I reckon what I’d say is that his looks could be convicting to your spirit.

That’s the kind of man Henry was. He knew when one of us was feeling down or sad, and a smile or the gentle touch of his rough hand on your cheek, or a squeeze round your shoulder in reassurance from his big strong arm was enough to make you know you were loved and that everything was going to be all right. But a stern look was enough to send a knife into your heart too. But a good knife. Cutting out bad things from inside you’s a good and necessary thing, and if it sometimes takes a little pain to get it done, I reckon that’s the price a person has to pay to grow up and become the kind of person God wants him to be—or who God wants
her
to be. A lot of folks don’t spend a lot of time thinking about who God wants them to be—they just spend their lives being who
they
want to be. And I can’t say I was thinking too much about it yet at that time. I was only sixteen. But I was starting to think about it, and having Henry around helped me think about it more because I kind of had the feeling that when he looked at me it was almost like God looking at me, and it made me think about things a mite different.

I’m sure most of the white folks who’d known Henry for years just looked at him and saw a quiet colored man who couldn’t speak as well as them, and who couldn’t even read, and took him for an ignorant man. That’s the trouble with people of all colors—they judge folks by what they think they see, which is usually only on the outside. But it’s what’s inside that counts. That’s what makes a person who he or she really is. And sometimes it takes a little work to dig down inside and see what someone’s made of, what kind of stuff their character has in it. That’s just about one of the most important things in life—learning how to do that, learning how to find out what people are made of.

Henry was a man who I had the feeling had been doing that most of his life. You could tell his eyes saw things that other people didn’t see, probably from spending so much time in his mind with God.

Henry had a saying that he said every once in a while that he said explained a lot about life. It was that the color of your skin ain’t the color of your heart. Then he’d say that the color of your heart was the most important thing in all of life. Was it dark and full of mean and selfish and unkind things? Or was your heart light and pink and warm and full of kind and unselfish things? Someday, he said, maybe not till we died, everything that was on the outside would fall away, and what color your skin was and where you lived and what people thought about you and how much money you had … none of that would matter because no one would see it anymore. The only thing they would be able to see was the color of your heart. Some hearts would be ugly and dark, and others would be warm and light and full of love. It wouldn’t matter what color your skin was then.

So on this day, as he looked around at all of us, I knew Henry was looking to see what color our hearts were.

“Uh … what do you mean, Henry?” said Katie after a minute.

“Jes’ dat I know you been all alone here an’ dat you been doin’ some pretendin’ ter git by. But effen dese ol’ ears ain’t mistaken, I heard you say some things dat weren’t true, Miz Kathleen. An’ I ain’t sayin’ hit’s right or wrong what you done, ’cuz I don’ know all dere is ter know, an’ dat’s da Lord’s job ter divide atween right an’ wrong an’ not mine, nohow. But I’s jes’ tryin’ ter git a grip on what color yer heart is in all dese strange goin’s-on.”

It was silent a minute. I knew Katie felt just the same as me about Henry. As determined as she could be sometimes, and as grown-up as she’d gotten about making decisions and running off rowdy white boys, she could be as tender as a little girl too. I reckon she and me and Emma were still little girls down inside, and yet halfway to becoming grown-up women at the same time. And sometimes it was confusing not knowing which one was making you feel the things you felt—the girl or the woman.

Right now the little girl in Katie came to the surface from Henry’s words, and she started to cry.

“I don’t know either, Henry,” she said softly, sniffling and wiping at her eyes and nose. “When Mayme and I first started, we talked about it some, and we knew lying was wrong, but we didn’t know what else to do. It started one day when Mr. Thurston came by and I just couldn’t tell him about what had happened. I was afraid. And then after that, we just kept telling people that my mama was still alive and that my daddy wasn’t home yet.”

“What wuz you afraid ob, chil’?”

“That they’d take me away, that my uncle Burchard would come and take Rosewood, that they’d hurt Mayme.”

“Yep,” said Henry like he did, nodding and thinking as he said it. “Yep … I kin see dat, all right. You wuz feared fer Miz Mayme.”

“Yes,” said Katie. “She practically saved my life. I couldn’t let anything happen to her.”

“Wuz you feared fer yerse’f?”

“I suppose … yes, I was afraid for myself too. I didn’t know what they might do to me. I didn’t want them to take me away someplace.”

“Yep … yep,” nodded Henry slowly. “I kin see dat it was a sore difficult thing, all right. ’Peers t’ me dat da color er yer heart wuz good enuff. You wuzn’t tryin’ ter do nobody no harm, an’ I can’t see dat no harm’s been done. An’ it don’t ’pear t’ me dat dose men was up ter no good, an’ so maybe what you done was right. But now we gots ter ax da Lord ’bout all dis.”

He looked around at the rest of us, then opened his big arms and drew us all together as much as he could. We put our arms around each other, and then Henry started to pray.

“Dear Lord,” he said, “we’s yer chilluns, an’ we’s tryin’ our bes’ ter figger out how t’ be good chilluns, but sometimes hit’s a mite hard, Lord. We know dat lyin’s wrong, but den Miz Kathleen an’ Miz Mayme’s been in some kind er difficult predikament here an’ dey’s jes’ tryin’ ter protect dereselves an’ Miz Aleta an’ Miz Emma an’ her little boy from what folks might do effen dey foun’ out. But, Lord, da truf ’s gotta come out sometime, an’ so we ax you what’s right ter be done an’ ter show us what you want us ter do ’bout it all.”

Henry gave us all a hug when he was through, then he left to go back to town. He said he would try to come back as soon as he could and would let us know if he found out anything more about the men.

K
ATIE
G
ETS
D
ESPERATE

19

I
WOKE UP ONE MORNING, AND WHEN
I
WENT
downstairs I was surprised to see the carpet pulled back and the trapdoor into the cellar open. I saw the light from a lantern and heard noise coming up from below.