The Emancipation of Robert Sadler (5 page)

Corrie gave her everything she could think of. She made special root teas, she made a syrup with molasses and some bitter leaves, she put hot poultices on her chest, but the cough wouldn't leave.

Then, to my complete horror, early in the winter the Missus moved me out of Buck and Corrie's shanty and into the Big House permanently. I was not allowed off the grounds, which meant I couldn't go to the quarter. They put me in the same room with the white sons, John and Thomas, who were eight and six years old, and baby Anna, who was almost two. My new chore was to mind baby Anna.

I sat crying on the woodbox in the kitchen the first morning I was ordered to live up at the Big House. Big Mac saw me, and he came striding over to me and slapped me hard across the cheek.

“There'll be no more of that, hear?” I was stunned. I knew nothing else to do but cry. I couldn't fight back; I couldn't even talk. I could only hate and cry.

It was almost noontime of the first day at the Big House when I got what you might call my official welcome. It came in the form of the dreaded overseer, Thrasher.

I had heard many terrible things about him, but I had never seen him. When the overseers came for their meals, I had made it my business to be out of sight. This day, however, I was caught off guard. Besides, the Big House was now my prison, and I was not allowed to go to the slave quarter anymore. I could go only as far as the woodpile, by orders of the master.

It was while I was coming from the woodpile with wood and sticks in my arms for the cookstoves in the kitchen that I met up with Thrasher. I was trying to hurry with my errand because I didn't want another biscuit pan in the head from Mary Webb.

Around the corner of the yard came Thrasher riding on his powerful brown and white horse, and he straightened in the saddle when he saw me. I stopped, bowed slightly, and tried to say “Good day, suh.”

Thrasher's voice boomed at me, “Niggerboy!”

I whirled in my tracks as he removed the long black whip he carried on the horn of his saddle. He raised his arm high in the air and the whip came cracking down on my neck and shoulders. The blow brought me to my knees with wood and sticks falling to the ground.

“You call me
Mr.
Thrasher, suh,
hear?”

Mary Webb came to the kitchen door when she heard the sound of the whip. Thrasher turned his rage on her.

“You better learn this here niggerchile how to talk right or he goin to be a sorry niggerchile, hear?”

“Yessuh, Massah Thrasher, suh,” she said in a high, mocking voice.

When I tried to get up, I wobbled on my feet and fell backwards in the dirt. Mary Webb watched me go down, wiped her nose on the back of her hand, and went back into the kitchen to finish her work.

The pain burned like a hot fire on my neck and shoulder. I finally struggled to my feet and dragged myself to the kitchen door of the Big House. Mary Webb was standing at the cookstove. Her eyes flashed when she saw me. Then in a high, shrill voice, she called, “Roberrrrrt! Where's that wood I tole you to git?”

It was the winter of 1917. I was six years old and so was Thomas Beal. We discovered one another the very day that Thrasher had given me the lash in the yard.

I stood by the doorway of the room I was to sleep in with the white children. The pain in my neck and shoulders was awful bad, and I was feeling nauseous; I wanted to lie down but I was afraid to in that room where the white children were.

Thomas saw me standing in the door and he said, “What's yor name, boy?”

“Robert,” I answered. (It came out like “Wobber.”) I wasn't sure if I was supposed to call him
sir
or not.

“My name is Thomas. Are you seven yet?”

I couldn't answer that. I didn't know if seven came before or after six.

“I'm gonna be seven and have a birthday,” Thomas told me proudly.

He showed me the bed he slept in and the bed his brother, John, slept in. Anna's crib was right near the little cot that had been set up for me. In addition to the little cot, there was a tiny dresser for me. I had nothing to put in it, of course. I stared at the room. There was a real ceiling, and the walls had blue flowered wallpaper on them. The bare wood floor was polished, and there were little rugs here and there. Pale blue curtains hung on the long, low windows, and the sun was shining in the room, making it seem warm and cheerful.

“Yoll ought to clean yourself up,” Thomas told me. “Yoll got blood all over you. Ugh.”

Big Mac washed me outside in the yard by the side of the house. “You do your own cleanin up after this, boy,” he told me. He washed me by pouring icy cold water from a bucket over my body and scrubbing me with a bar of tar soap. He used dried leaves as a scrub brush, but he was very gentle around the cut of the lash on my neck and shoulder.

“Got you good, boy,” he said with a tone of disgust.

After the icy bath, which left me chattering, came the worst part. It was the putting on of the new flax shirt. The coarseness of the fabric was like a million tiny pins sticking into my skin.

“In a few days this here shirt'll be smooth as a rose petal,” Big Mac assured me.

I stumbled inside after him, feeling feverish and cold. He fixed me a cup of sassafras tea and told me to drink it down. He even tied a clean rag around my wounds.

In spite of the pain I felt from the lash wound and the pricks of the shirt, I lay down that night in my new bed with a feeling of excitement. It was the first time I had ever slept in a real bed, and I was sleeping in it all alone. I had a blanket that was clean all for myself, too. I did not stir until the next morning when Big Mac tugged at my foot.

“Fires need lightin, boy,” he said in his soft voice.

I stared dumbly around me in the darkness. For a moment I had forgotten where I was. The pain in my neck and shoulder reminded me, and my body felt raw and sore from the scratching of the new shirt. I struggled out of bed into the cold air and hurried to the woodpile for sticks and wood to start the fires.

By 4:00 a.m. I had all of the fires lit, including the ones in the cookstoves. I was still in the kitchen when the dreaded crew of overseers filed into their special dining hall for breakfast. There were eleven of them, including Thrasher. They were mean men with dirty mouths. They looked like giants, and it seemed to me they hated everything, even each other. They all lived on the Beal Plantation in dwellings within a few minutes of the Big House. Some had families and some didn't. Most of them were heavy drinkers just like Mr. Beal, who was surely an alcoholic.

Thrasher caught sight of me and hollered across the room, “Niggerchile, you got some manners yit?”

I stood to my feet, “YessuhMassuhThrashuhsuh,” I mumbled.

Thrasher snorted. “What's your name, chile?”

“Wobber, suh, MassahThrashuhsuh.”

Thrasher laughed and the others laughed with him. “He's a
dumb
niggerchile too, ain't he? You want another lash, chile?”

“NosuhMassuhThrashuhsuh.”

Big Mac passed by with a bowl of hot biscuits and Thrasher's attention was then drawn to the food. I hurried for the broom and the scrub brushes to begin my chores. First the porch, then the steps, and then the yard. . . .

“We got a new black puppy. Want to see him?” John Beal walked through the front hallway with a stringy-haired friend his age.

“Nah. I knows what a nigger looks like. Ain't no different from any othern. They all looks the same.”

Big Mac told me that the white folks liked to have “little black puppies” around. Some folks had two or three of them like me sleeping in their bedrooms with them. It was our job to run around after the white masters, cleaning up their chamber pots and doing other dirty work they didn't want to do.

One day as I was finishing my work, Miss Harriet was taking the sheets off the children's beds to put into the laundry pile. She was a large, stern-faced woman, and this day her mouth was drawn tight and her eyes had a distant look.

“I done raised these chillren,” she said aloud. Although I was the only one in the room, I had the feeling she wasn't talking to me.

“I done nursed them all at my breast. Each one o' them. I done washed their bodies and tuk care of 'em when they was sick. I done fed 'em they meals and I done put 'em in the bed at night. . . .” Her voice trailed off and I saw a tear streaming down her face.

Later that morning Big Mac told me her own little two-year old boy had died the night before in the quarter.

The slave women bore children by their own men as well as by the white bosses, who used them whenever they wanted to. These women worked either in the field from 4:30 in the morning till after dark or, like Harriet, worked at the Big House all day and night. When they finally went home to their shanties and their own children for the few hours before they'd have to return to work, they'd be too exhausted to care for and feed their own families rightly. So the job was left up to the children themselves. The older children had the responsibility of taking care of the babies and little ones. Sometimes an old slave granny was put to work minding the children in the quarter when she got too old to go to the field.

I learned that Harriet had seven children of her own, and while the master's babies were sucking at her breast, her own children were going hungry down in the slave quarter.

Harriet had a husband once but he had been sold to a plantation owner in Alabama. “After he gone,” Big Mac said, “Harriet never smile no more.”

These were things my child's mind could not understand, but even if I couldn't understand, I felt bad about Harriet's baby dying because I remembered how bad I felt when Mama and my little sister, Ella, died. Dying was not good. It meant they weren't anymore. Just like my mama. She was there all the time, and then one day she wasn't there. She was no more. It makes you sad and it makes you lonesome.

Saturday night was supposed to be payday for the field hands. Since the Big House was now my prison, I could see what went on from there. The men would line up at the smokehouse, or the plantation store, and the boss there would give them their provisions—usually flour, sugar, some salt pork, beans, cornmeal, and some tobacco. Then they'd tell them how much they owed, and it was always more than what the pay was. So there was no exchange of money. Sometimes when they'd come for their pay the boss would say, “Master Beal is out of town. Won't be back till Monday. He'll pay yoll then.” Of course Master Beal would forget to pay them on Monday, and every day for that matter. It was very rare when he would throw a dollar or two their way.

With winter coming, shoes were needed and so was warmer clothing. Not everybody got shoes, and not everybody got another layer of clothing. Many field hands took sick and died in the winter months, and many were crippled up by the cold. I hoped I would get some shoes or maybe some trousers. I began to ask Harriet about it. She was indifferent, and I realized it was futile to continue to ask.

I missed Pearl. I longed to see her, and soon I became desperate to see her. Knowing that my punishment would be a whupping if I were caught, I began planning to sneak down to the quarter. I got my first chance one evening when the children were in bed sleeping. Master Beal was away, and Miss Harriet was upstairs with Mistress Beal. The house was still. I crawled out of bed, and barely breathing, moved through the kitchen, the porch, and then out the door and down the steps. I was careful to keep in the shadows of the yard. When I passed the woodpile and the stable, I came to the dirt path to the quarter and broke into a run.

When I reached Buck and Corrie's shanty, they were surprised and then excited to see me. Pearl held me in her arms and squeezed me so tight she took the breath out of me. We laughed and cried and hugged, and everybody talked at once.

“They gonna whup you for this, chile,” Pearl warned. She was coughing bad and she looked worn out and so thin. The wounds on her body still weren't completely healed. I asked her if they had given her any shoes, and she shook her head no. She wrapped her feet in rags to keep warm like many others. “Lissen here, chile,” she said. “We kin git beat and starved and worked to the bone, but we ain't dead yit. Them white devils kin do what they done to me and I is still here. You lissnin to me, chile? We is tough, you got that? And don't you be no weak crybaby. You be tough!”

The wind blew through the boards of the little shack, and we huddled before the fire in the hearth, and when it began to go out I put more sticks on it and then kissed Pearl goodnight. I promised myself the next time I came I would come bringing something for them all.

I knew there would be no way for Pearl to keep warm. There was the little pile of rags she slept on and a blanket Corrie had made, and that was all.

The moon was full and the sky covered with stars when I left the quarter. I ran up the hard, cold dirt of the path, rounded the yard, the stable, and the woodpile.

The Big House looked like a bulging, many-sided monster in the moonlight. The kitchen side jutted out like a long flat finger; the sun porch on the east side sat dark, cold, and square beneath the looming two-story arm behind it. Windows peered at me like enemy eyes.

My successful brief escape gave me new courage. My thought night and day now was when I could make another break for the quarter and what I could bring with me for my sister. I'd be tough, like Pearl said. Not a crybaby, no. Tough.

I began following Miss Harriet around as she cleaned the house. I would hold baby Anna and follow along behind Miss Harriet, learning where everything was. At first she didn't like it, but then she allowed me to tag along with her. When I saw the huge linen closet on the second floor filled with towels, sheets, pillows, and blankets, I made plans to steal a blanket for Pearl. Miss Harriet must have seen the expression on my face as I gazed into the closet. She lifted my chin with her big hand and looked me in the eye.

“I know what you be thinking. We is cold and shiverin an' they has got blankets enough to fill a room, Robert. But lissen up, chile, to what I'm sayin. Massah don't have no mercy nohow on no thiefs. Don't you start figurin a way to carry any o these fine blankets to the quarter, hear? Massah'll cut off yor lil black fingers!”

That week I was being trusted to give baby Anna her lunch. There was fresh fruit, sandwiches, cookies, and other wonderful things that made me feel faint to look at. I fed her under the watchful eye of Mary Webb, and if I so much as licked a crumb from the tabletop, she would scream and call for Mistress Beal and tell her I was eating the baby's food.

One afternoon I had peeled an orange for Anna, and I stuck one of the peels into my mouth. Mary Webb saw me from across the kitchen and let out a high, shrill scream. She rushed over to the table where I sat with the baby, grabbed me by my ear, and marched me into the sitting room where Mistress was sewing.

“This nigger done et Miz Anna's orange, Missis, I see'd him!”

Mistress put her sewing down, and with a stony glare at me, said in a low voice, “I'll speak to my husband about it. Now get out both of you.” I tried to protest but it was no use. Mary Webb hit me hard with the palm of her hand, and then yanking my ear, she pulled me back to the kitchen. I cried, knowing I would get the lash when the master came home.

Master Beal came home in time for dinner. After he had eaten, he came looking for me. “Robert,” he called, “come ere!”

He took me by the hand and in his other hand he held the dreaded leather strap. He led me out of the side door and took me around to the side of the house where Mac had given me my bath. Then he said, “Take off your shirt and lie down.” The grass was wet and cold, and the sky was already dark in the early evening. I could hear a cricket chirping happily near my cheek as the lash of the leather bit into my back.

When it was all over, Master Beal said, “You steal from me agin, boy, and I'll show your black hide what a whuppin' really tastes like, hear?”

“. . . yesssuhmassah . . . suh.”

And I watched him walk away, my face pressed into the dirt and the indigo sky above filled with stars.