CHAPTER SIX

The trees along the road were thick and tall. We took a curve. Flocks of quail sailed up and over a field, brown, sailing down, blending.

"Will you promise to tell me my fate?" I heard. "Sir?"

"Will you?"

"Right now, sir?" I asked with embarrassment. It is up to you. Now, if you like.

I was silent. His voice was serious, demanding. I could think of no reply. The motor purred. An insect crust crushed itself against the windshield, leaving a yellow, mucous smear.

"I don't know now, sir. This is only my junior year..."

"But you'll tell me when you know?"

"I'll try, sir."

"Good."

When I took a quick glance into the mirror he was smiling again. I wanted to ask him if being rich and famous and helping to direct the school to become what it was, wasn't enough; but it's was afraid.

"What do you think of my idea, young man?" he said. I don't know sir. I only think that you have what you're looking for. Because if I fail or leave school, it doesn't seem to me it would be your fault. Because you helped make the school what it is."

"And you think that enough?"

"Yes, sir. That's what the president tells us. You have yours, and got it yourself, and we have a lift ourselves up the same way."

"But that's only part of it, young man. I have wealth and a reputation and prestige - all that is true. But your great Founder had more than that, he had tens 9f thousands of lives dependent upon his ideas and upon his actions. What he did affected your whole race. In a way, he had the power of a king, or in a sense, of a god. That, I've come to believe, is more important than my own work, because more depends upon you. You are important because if you fail. I have failed by one individual, one defective cog; it didn't matter much before, but now I'm growing old and it has become very important..."

But you don't even know my name, I thought, wondering what it was all about.

"... I suppose it is difficult for you to understand how this concerns me. But as you develop you must understand that I am dependent upon you to learn my fate. Through you and your fellow students I become, let us say, three hundred teachers, even hundred trained mechanics, eight hundred skilled farmers, and so on. That way I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested. I also construct a living memorial to my daughter. Understand? I can see the fruits produced by the land that your great Founder has transformed from barren day to fertile soil."

His voice ceased and I saw the strands of pale blue smoke drifting across the mirror and heard the electric lighter snap back on its cable into place behind the back of the seat.

"I think I understand you better, now, sir," "Very good, my boy."

"Shall I continue in this direction, Sir?"

"By all means," he said, looking out the countryside.

"I've never seen this section before. It's new territory for me."

Half-consciously I followed the white line as I drove, thinking about what he said. Then as we took a hill we were swept by a wave of scorching air and it was as though we were approaching a desert. It almost took my breath away and I leaned over and switched on the fan, hearing its sudden whirr.

"Thank you," he said as a slight breeze filled the car. We were passing a collection of shacks and log cabins mow, breached white and warped by the weather. Sun-tortured shingles lay on the roofs like decks of water-soaked cards spread out to dry. The house consisted of two square rooms joined together by a common floor and roof with a porch on between. As we passed we could look through to the field beyond. I stopped the car at his excited command in front of a house set off from the rest.

"Is that a log cabin?"

It was an old cabin with its chinks filled with chalk-white clay, with bright new shingles patching it's roof. Suddenly I was sorry that I had blundered down this road. I recognised the place as soon as I sae the group of children in stiff new overalls who played near a rickety fence.

"Yes, sir. It is a log chain," I said.

It was the cabin of Apollo zephyr, a sharecropper who had brought disgrace upon the black community. Several months before he had caused quite a bit of outrage up at the school, and now his name was never mentioned above whisper. Even before that he has seldom come near the campus but had been well liked as a hard worker who took good care if his family's need and as one who told the stories with a sense of humour and a magic that made them come alive. He was also a good tenor singer, and sometimes when special white guests visited the school he was brought up along with the members of a country quartet to sing what the officials called "their primitive spirituals" when we assembled in the chapel on Sunday evenings. We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang, but since the visitors were awed we dared not laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds Apollo zephyr made as he led the quartet. That had all passed now with his disgrace, and what of the part of the school officials had been an attitude of contempt blunted by tolerance, had now become a contempt sharpened by hate. I didn't understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear. How all of us at college hated, the black-belt people, the "peasants," during those days! We were trying up lift them up and they, like Zephyr, did everything it seemed to pull us down.

"It appears quite old," Mr Leo said, looking across the bare, hard stretch of yard where two women dressed in a new blue-and-white checked ginghams were washing clothes in an iron pot. The pot was soot-black and the feeble flames that licked its sides showed pale pink and bordered with black, like flames in mourning. Both woman moved with weary, full-fronted motions of far gone pregnancy.

"It is, sir," I said. "That's one and the other two like it were built during slavery times."

"You don't say! I would never have believed that they were so enduring. Since slavery times!"

"That's true, sir. And the white family that owned the land when it was a big plantation still lives in town."

"Yes, he said, "I know that many of the old families still survive. And individuals too, the human stock goes on, even though it degenerates. But these cabins!" He seemed surprised and confounded.

"Do you suppose those women know anything about the age and history of the place? The older one looks as though she might."

"I doubt it, sir. They-they don't seem very bright." " Bright?" he said, moving his cigar. "You mean that they wouldn't talk with me?" he asked suspiciously.

"Yes, sir. That's it." "Why not?"

I didn't want to explain. It made me feel ashamed, but he sensed that I knew something and pressed me.

"It's not very nice, sir. But I don't think those women would talk to us."

"We can explain that we're from the school. Surely they'll talk then. You may tell then who I am."

"Yes, sir," I said, "but they hate us at the school. They never come there..."

"What?"

"No, sir."

"And those children along the fence down there?" "They don't either, sir."

"I don't really know, sir. Quite a few folks out this way don't, though. I guess they are too ignorant. They are not interested.

"But I can't believe it."

The children had stopped playing and now looked silently at the car, their arms behind their backs and their new oversized overalls pulled tight over their little pot bellies as though that too were pregnant.

"What about their men folk?"

I hesitated. Why did he find this so strange? "He hates us, sir," I said.

"You say be; aren't both the women married?"

I caught my breath. I'd made a mistake. "The old one is, sir," I said reluctantly.

"What happened to the young woman's husband?" "She doesn't have any – That is... I–"

"What is it young man? Do you know these people?"

"Only a little, sir. There was some talk about then up on the campus a while back."

"What talk?"

"Well, the young woman is the old woman's daughter ..."

" And?"

"Well, sir, they say... I mean they say the daughter doesn't have a husband."

"Oh, I see. But that shouldn't be so strange. I understand that your people – Never mind! Is that all?"

"Well, sir ..."

"They said that her father did it."

"What!"

"Yes, sir ... that he gave her the baby."

I heard the sharp intake of breath, like a toy-balloon suddenly deflated. His face reddened. I was confused, feeling shame for the two women and fear that I had talked too much and offended his sensibilities.

"And did anyone from the school investigate this matter?" he asked at last.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"What was discovered?"

"That it was true – they say."

"But how does he explain his doing such a-a-such a monstrous thing?"

He sat back in the seat, his hands grasping his knees, his knuckles bloodless. I looked away, down the heat- dazzling concrete of the highway. I wished we were back on the other side of the white line, heading back to the quite green stretch of the campus.

"It is said that the man took both his wife and his daughter?"

"Yes, sir."

"And that he is the father of both their children?"

"Yes sir." "No, no, no!"

He sounded as though he were in great pain. I looked at him anxiously. What had happened? What had I said?

"Not that! No ..." he said, with something like a horror. I saw the sun blaze upon the new overalls as the man appeared around the cabin. His shoes were ran and new he moved easily over the hot earth. He was a small man and he covered the yard with familiarity that would have allowed him walk in the blackness with the same certainty. He came and said something to the woman as he fanned himself with a blue bandanna handkerchief. But they appeared to regard him sullenly, barely speaking, and hardly looking in his direction.

"Would that be the man?" Mr. Leo asked. "Yes, sir. I think so."

"Get out!" he cried. "I must talk with him." I was unable to move. I felt surprised and a dread and resentment of what he might say to Zephyr and his women, the questions he might ask. Why couldn't he leave them alone!

"Hurry!"

I climbled from the car and opened the rear door. He clambered out and almost ran across the road to the yard, as though compelled by some pressing urgency which I could not understand. Then suddenly I saw the two women turn and run frantically behind the house, their movements were heavy and flat-footed. I hurried behind him, seeing him stop when he reached the man and the children. They became silent, their faces clouding over, their features becoming soft and negative, their eyes bland and deceptive. They were crouching behind their eyes waiting for him to speak – just as I recognised that I was trembling behind my own. Up close I saw what I had not seen from the car. The man had a scar on his right cheek, as though he had been hit in the face with sledge. The wound was raw and moist and from time to time he lifted his handkerchief to fan away gnats.

"I, I –" Mr. Leo stammered, I must talk with you!"

"All right," Zephyr said without surprise and waited.

"Is it true