Nightjohn Read online

  He smiled. “You sound like you’ve got tobacco.”

  “Not until I know what a letter is.…”

  “Why, it’s reading. You learn the letters first and then when you know them you string them together into words. I’ll trade you three letters for a lipful.”

  I knew about reading. It was something that the people in the white house did from paper. They could read words on paper. But we weren’t allowed to be reading. We weren’t allowed to understand or read nothing but once I saw some funny lines on the side of a feed sack. It said:

  100 lbs.

  I wrote them down in the dirt with a stick and mammy gave me a smack on the back of the head that like to drove me into the ground.

  “Don’t you take to that, take to writing,” she said.

  “I wasn’t doing it. I was just copying something I saw on a feed sack.”

  “Don’t. They catch you doing that and they’ll think you’re learning to read. You learn to read and they’ll whip you till your skin hangs like torn rags. Or cut your thumb off. Stay away from writing and reading.”

  So I did. But I remembered how it had looked, the drawings on the sack and in the dirt, and it still puzzled me. I dug in my dress and found the tobacco but held it.

  “You saying you can read?”

  He nodded.

  “I give you something to read, you can read it? Just like that?”

  “I can.”

  There was some yellow light from the windows of the big house and it came through the doorway and made a light patch on the dirt floor.

  “Come on.”

  I led him to the light patch and squatted. I used my finger to scratch what I remembered in the dirt. The floor was hard packed and I had to rub hard to make it show right.

  “There.”

  He squatted and squinted.

  “Why, those ain’t letters. Those are numbers.”

  “Numbers?”

  He nodded. “Sure is. Says one hundred. Then there’s those three letters on the end. They don’t work for me as a word. Just L B S—don’t say a word. It must mean something to somebody.”

  “Can you teach me that?”

  “To read?”

  “To read what I just put there in the dirt—can you teach me?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Well, mought be if I had some tobacco.…”

  I dug the sack out of my shirtdress and gave him a pinch. He put it in the side of his mouth.

  “Way it works,” he said, “is you got to learn all the letters and numbers before you can learn to read. You got to learn the alphabet.”

  “Alphabet?”

  He nodded. “There be lots of letters, and each one means something different. You got to learn each one.”

  “Those three you said back in the dark corner? Can you teach me those?”

  “I sure can.” He used the edge of his hand to rub out what I had written in the dirt. Then he made a drawing with his thumb.

  A

  “Tonight we just do A.” He sat back on his heels and pointed. “There it be.”

  I looked at it, wondered how it stood. “Where’s the bottom to it?”

  “There. It stands on two feet, just like you.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means A—just like I said. It’s the first letter in the alphabet. And when you see it you make a sound like this: ayyy, or ahhhh.”

  “That’s reading? To make that sound?”

  He nodded. “When you see that letter on paper or a sack or in the dirt you make one of those sounds. That’s reading.”

  “Well that ain’t hard at all.”

  He laughed. That same low roll. Made me think of thunder long ways off, moving in a summer sky. “There’s more to it. Other letters. But that’s it.”

  “Why they be cutting our thumbs off if we learn to read—if that’s all it is?”

  “ ’Cause to know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it’s bad for them. They thinks we want what they got.”

  I thought of what they had. Fine clothes and food. I heard one of the house workers say they ate off plates and had forks and spoons and knives and wiped their mouths like they wiped their butts. “That’s true—I want it.”

  “That’s why they don’t want us reading.” He sighed. “I got to rest now. They run me ten miles in a day and worked me into the ground. I need some sleep.”

  He moved back to the corner and settled down and I curled up to mammy in amongst the young ones again.

  A, I thought. Ayyy, ahhhh. There it is. I be reading.

  “Hey there in the corner,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I be John.”

  “I be Sarny.”

  “Go to sleep, Sarny.”

  But I didn’t. I snuggled into mammy and pulled a couple of the young ones in for heat and kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t sleep and thought:

  A.

  FOUR

  Come a hard time then.

  Come a awful, hard time.

  There be a girl before then named Alice. She slept in the other end of the quarters and as soon as she got big she went to work in the fields picking and hoeing. But she was addled in the head, off dreaming sometimes, and mammy said one day that they would sell her. But her body was all right and they in the white house decided she be a good breeder so they set her for that.

  She didn’t take well to it and fought and they tied her to make it happen, in the breeding shed back of the quarters but it went bad on her head and her thinking. When it was done she was worse than before.

  She wandered in the yard and sometimes even went up to the white house. Except for the house servants and gardening we weren’t allowed to the white house and when the master one day caught Alice he took her to the wall of the spring house.

  The spring house was where we got drinking water. It was made of stone and with heavy walls. They had rings of iron to be made in the walls many years past, big rings of iron with chains and shackles and they put Alice there and tore her clothes off.

  Then the master he whipped her his ownself with a rawhide whip cut from an old gin belt used on the cotton gin. Sometimes he doesn’t whip and makes a field hand do it and stands with his pistol in his belt and smiles.

  But sometimes he likes to take the whip and this time he whipped her until her back was all ripped and bleeding. We had to watch. Every time there was somebody to be on the wall of the spring house and be whipped or other punishments we all had to watch.

  When it was done and she had screamed until she sounded like pigs being cut he made mammy to go to the salt house and get salt and rub it in the cuts to make more pain.

  I never heard a sound like that. I’d seen men whipped but never that kind of sound, cutting like that, high and higher until it whistled in my ears.

  Then he left her to hang there until the next day. The flies they came and mammy went out and covered her back with a cloth and kept some of them off so they wouldn’t make maggots in the cuts.

  Next morning they took her down and they was some maggot eggs but not so bad. I helped mammy clean Alice. We took her in the quarters and mammy she rubbed grease on Alice’s back and I sat and held her hands because she kept trying to reach around and push mammy’s hand away.

  All the time she don’t say anything. Not a thing. Not even the silly things she used to say and when we were done she lay on the floor in the corner like she was broken. Broken inside.

  Mammy made her some root tea that smelled of bark but Alice wouldn’t drink it. She just lay there all that night and the next three, four days. During that time John came and I talked to him about A, traded tobacco with him. For two nights he didn’t do no work on the trade and went to sleep right after the trough because the master worked him so hard. On the third night after I traded for A—sometime that same night Alice ran.

  My life is short, but some live long and the one th
ing we know, short or long—it’s wrong to run. Not wrong because it’s wrong. But wrong because nobody ever gets away.

  I’ve seen two to try it. Both men. One was an old man named Jim who just couldn’t take no more and one night he up and cut.

  They set after him the next morning with dogs. Only the master, he don’t only go his ownself but took five or six field hands with him to see so they can carry what they see back to tell us.

  The dogs be mean. He feeds them things to make them mean. Blood things. Sometimes he’ll take them to the fields and should a man or woman work a little behind the others, or behind the best man, who is whipped to speed—why, he sets the dogs on the slow one. And he don’t pull them off right away, neither. Lets them go until they taste blood and want more of it.

  They’s mean, the dogs. They’s big and red with tight hair and heads like hogs and mean as Waller his ownself. He keeps them in a stone pen by the side of the horse barn and they slobber and chew at the gate each time we walk by. Dirt mean.

  Jim, he ran at night too but it didn’t help. The field hands told us later. He cut and ran down to the river, ran in the water for a goodly distance, then on the top of a fence rail for as long as the fence ran and then dropped to the ground and just moved.

  The dogs followed him all the way. The hands said that one dog even got up and ran on the top rail of the fence. Only took half a day and they caught Jim.

  The last bit, when he heard the dogs singing him, baying on him, Jim climbed a tree. Problem was, the tree wasn’t higher than he could reach, nearly, and as high as he got, the bottom of him hung down where the dogs could reach him.

  The master set the dogs on him and they tore and ripped what they could reach until there wasn’t any meat on Jim’s legs or bottom. The dogs ripped it all off, to hang in shreds. The field hands say he still didn’t let go, nor never did. Even when he was dead his hands didn’t let go and the master made the field hands leave him there. They’s some wanted to take Jim down and bury him but he made them to leave him that way, hanging by his hands in the tree, for the birds to eat.

  Second man was young. Name of Pawley. He wasn’t a big enough hand to be allowed to be a breeder in the quarters and so he went to looking. He snucked away and met a girl at a plantation down the road a piece and they sat in the moonlight with each other some nights. Pawley he made it back before wake-up time every night but one, the last one. He fell asleep in his girl’s arms, fell asleep in the moonlight.

  So they from the white house set out with the dogs and Pawley he didn’t run, or try to get away. He was on his way home but they let the dogs to have him anyway, tear him up to bleed but not kill him. Then the master he tied him down and cut him like he did the cattle so he wouldn’t run to girls no more, but the cut went wrong and Pawley he laid all night and bled to death without ever making a sound in the corner of the quarters.

  So don’t nobody run. Besides, I don’t think there’s a place to run to. I heard talk once of some land, some land north but it’s far away and it was only talk. Not something to know. Just something to hear. Like birds singing, the talk of the land north, or the wind in the trees.

  But Alice cut and run that night.

  She didn’t get far. Down to the river and then sideways some. Her back was still ripped and sore and she must have moved slow. She might have kept moving all night but hadn’t gone more than to the other end of the cotton fields—an easy small walk. Then she pulled herself under some brambles and was there when they found her.

  He let the dogs to have her.

  Didn’t matter what she’d gone through, or that her thinking wasn’t working right. The field hands with him told us he smiled his big white smile like the big white house, pale maggot white like his skin smile and let the dogs to have her. She didn’t fight them or try to get away and they just tore at her. Tore at her until her whole front was torn and gone and she was bleeding from the chest.

  She didn’t die.

  Alice be too tough for her ownself good. She didn’t die and he made the hands to carry her back and put her in the quarters. Mammy sewed up what she could with canvas thread and greased and patched and she lived.

  She be like Pawley. She didn’t make sounds even while mammy was pulling at the torn flaps of skin and sewing them on her chest. Not a sound. Just stared and stared at the wall.

  That night John called to me as he came past where I was trying to sleep.

  “Tobacco girl—time for another letter.”

  I had been all day helping mammy and was tired and sad for Alice, how she be at the other end of the quarters, but I went just the same. I still had two letters coming for that first pinch of tobacco.

  He was sitting on his heels in the open doorway.

  I squatted next to him. “What’s the next one?”

  He used a stick with a sharpened end on it and wiggled in the dirt two half circles:

  B

  “Bee,” he said. “It be B.”

  “That sounds crazy.…”

  “That’s how you say the letter. B. It’s for behh or be or buh or boo. That’s how a B looks and how you make the sound.”

  I made it sound in my mouth, whispering. “So where’s the bottom to it?”

  “I swear—you always want to know the bottom to things. Here, here it is. It sits on itself this way, facing so the two round places push to the front.”

  Suddenly he’s gone. One second he’s there, the next he’s slammed sideways and gone.

  “What in the hell are you doing to her?”

  Mammy was standing there, big and black and tall in the moonlight. “What you doing to this girl?”

  She had come from the side and fetched John such a blow on his head that it knocked him back into the wall and on his back.

  He come up quick and didn’t cower none.

  “Nothing. Not like you think. I’m teaching her to read.”

  “That’s what I mean,” mammy said. “What in the hell are you doing? Don’t you know what they do to her if they find her trying to read? We already got one girl tore to pieces by the whip and the dogs. We don’t need two.”

  I’d been quiet all this time, watching. Didn’t seem so bad, what he was doing. Teaching me a few letters to know. Maybe a word or two. So I said it. “Doesn’t seem so bad—”

  “Bad?” Then she hissed like a snake. “Child, they’ll cut your thumbs off if you learn to read. They’ll whip you until your back looks knitted—until it looks like his back.” She pointed to John, big old finger. “Is that how you got whipped?”

  He shook his head. “I ran.”

  “And got caught.”

  “Not the first time.”

  She waited. I waited.

  “First time I ran I got clean away. I went north, all the way. I was free.”

  I’d never heard such a thing. We couldn’t even talk about being free. And here was a man said he had been free by running north. I thought, How can that be?

  “You ran and got away?” mammy asked.

  “I did.”

  “You ran until you were clean away?”

  “I did.”

  “And you came back?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed and it sounded like his voice, like his laugh. Low and way off thunder. It made me think he was going to promise something, the way thunder promises rain. “For this.”

  “What you mean—this?”

  “To teach reading.”

  It’s never quiet in the quarters. During the day the young ones run and scrabble and fight or cry and they’s always a gaggle of them. At night everybody be sleeping. But not quiet. Alice, she’s quiet. But they’s some of them to cry. New workers who are just old enough to be working in the fields cry sometimes in their sleep. They hurt and their hands bleed and pain them from new blisters that break and break again. Old workers cry because they’re old and getting to the end and have old pain. Same pain, young and old. Some snore. Others just breathe loud.


  It’s a long building and dark except for the light coming in the door and the small windows, but it’s never quiet. Not even at night.

  Now it seemed quiet. Mammy she looked down at John. Didn’t say nothing for a long time. Just looked.

  I had to think to hear the breathing, night sounds.

  Finally mammy talks. Her voice is soft. “You came back to teach reading?”

  John nodded. “That’s half of it.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “Writing.” He smiled. “Course, I wasn’t going to get caught. I had in mind moving, moving around. Teaching a little here, a little there. Going to do hidey-schools. But I got slow and they got fast and some crackers caught me in the woods. They were hunting bear, but the dogs came on me instead and I took to a tree and they got me.”

  Another long quiet. Way off, down by the river, I heard the sound of a nightbird. Singing for day. Soon the sun would come.

  “Why does it matter?” Mammy leaned against the wall. She had one hand on the logs, one on her cheek. Tired. “Why do that to these young ones? To Sarny here. If they learn to read—”

  “And write.”

  “And write, it’s just grief for them. Longtime grief. They find what they don’t have, can’t have. It ain’t good to know that. It eats at you then—to know it and not have it.”

  “They have to be able to write,” John said. Voice pushing. He stood and reached out one hand with long fingers and touched mammy on the forehead. It was almost like he be kissing her with his fingers. Soft. Touch like black cotton in the dark. “They have to read and write. We all have to read and write so we can write about this—what they doing to us. It has to be written.”

  Mammy she turned and went back to her mat on the floor. Moving quiet, not looking back. She settled next to the young ones and John he turned to me and he say:

  “Next is C.”

  FIVE

  Come more hard times.

  A week goes by, then another week. It’s the time of year for planting and the field hands have to work until they drop. Waller whips them past that and they get so tired they don’t know up from down.

  But John works with me. Not each night, because he’s too tired. Some of them to work in the fields can’t even walk back. Have to be carried by others. But some nights he works with me.