CHAPTER SEVEN

I mean did you? "Suh?" Apollo asked, as I looked away.

"You have survived," he blurted. "But is it true...?

"Suh?" the farmer he said, his brow wrinkling with bewilderment.

"I'm sorry, Sir," I said, "but I don't think he understands you.

He ignored me, staring into Zephyr's face as though reading a message there which I could not perceive.

"You did and are unharmed!" he shouted, like his blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation. Zephyr looked helplessly at me. I looked away. I understood no more than he.

"You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed" "No suh! It feels all right."

"You do? You feel no inner turmoil, no need to cast out the offending eye?"

"Suh?"

"Answer me!"

"I'm all right, suh," Zephyr said uneasily. "My eyes is all right too. And when I feels polly in my gut, I take a little soda and it goes away."

"No, no, no! Let us go where there is shade," he said, looking about excitedly and going swiftly to where the porch cast a swath of shade. We followed him. The farmer placed his hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off, knowing that I could explain nothing. We sat on the porch in a semi-circle in camp chairs, me between the sharecropper and the millionaire. The earth around the porch was hard and white from where wash water had long been thrown"

"How are you faring now?" Mr. Leo asked. "Perhaps I could help. We ain't doing so bad, suh. 'Fore they heard 'bout what happen to us out here I couldn't git no help from nobody. Now lotta folks is curious and goes outta they way to help. Even the biggity school folks up on the hill, only there was a catch to it!

They offered to send us clean outta the country, pay our way and everything and give me a hundred dollars to git settled with. But we like it here so I told them No. Then they sent a fellow too, and he said if I didn't leave, they were going to turn the white folks loose on me, It made me scared me. But I thought when they first come out here that they were different from when I went up there a long time ago looking for some book learning and some points on how to handle my crops. That was when I had my own place. I thought they were trying to help me, on accounts I got women due to birth "bout same time.

"But I got mad when I found out they were trying to git rid of us because they said we were a disgrace. Yes, I got real mad. So I went down to see Mr. Buchanan, the boss man, and I told him about it and he gave me a note to the sheriff and told me to take it to him. I did that, just like he told me. I went to the jailhouse and gave Sheriff Barbour the note and he asked me to tell him what happened, and I told him and he called in some more men and they made me tell it again. They wanted to hear about the girl lots of times and they gave me something to eat and drink and some tobacco. Surprised me, because I was scared and expecting something different. Why? I guess there ain't a coloured man in the country who have ever got to take so much of the white folks' time as I did. So finally they told me not to worry, that they were going to send word up to the school that I was to stay right where I am. Their big niggas didn't bother me, neither. It just goes to show you that no matter how big a nigga gits, the white folks can always cut him down. The whit folks took it up for me. And the white folks took to coming out here to see us and talk with us. Some of them were big white folks, too, from the big school way cross the state, Asked me lots about what I thought about things and about my folks and the kids and wrote it all down in a book. But best of all, suh, I got more work now than I have ever had before...."

He talked willingly now, with a kind of satisfaction and no trace of hesitancy or shame. The old man listened with a puzzled expression as he held an unlit cigar in his delicate fingers.

"Thing's pretty good now," the famer said. "Every time I think of how cold it was and what a hard tune we are having I gits the Shakes."

I saw him bite into a plug of chewing tobacco. Something tinkled against the porch and I picked it up, gazing at it from time to time. It was a hard red apple stamped out if tin.

"You see, suh, it was cold and we didn't have much fire. Nothing but wood, no coal. I tried to git help but wouldn't nobody help us and I couldn't find no work or nothing." It was so cold all of us had to sleep together; me the old lady and the girl. That's how it started, suh."

He cleared his throat, his eyes gleaming and his voice taking on a deep, incantatory quality, as though he had the story many times. Flies and fine white gnats swarmed about his wound. That's the way it was, he said. "Me on one side and the old lady on the other and the girl in the middle. It was dark, plum black. Black as the middle of a bucket of tar. The kids were sleeping all together in their bed over the corner. I must have been the last one to go sleep, because I was thinking about how to git some grub for the next day and about the girl and the young boy what was starting to hang around her. I didn't like him and he kept coming through my thoughts and I made up my mind to warn him away from the girl. It was black dark and I heard one of the kids whimper in his sleep and the last few sticks of kindling cracking and settling in the stove and the smell of fat meat seemed to git cold and still in the air just like meat grease when it gits set in a cold plate of molasses.

And I was thinking about the girl and this boy and feeling her arms besides me and hearing the old lady snoring with a kind of moaning and a groaning on the other side. I was worrying about my family and how they were going to eat and all, and I thought about when the girl was a little like young'uns sleeping over in the corner and how I was her favourite over the old lady. There we were, breathing together in the dark. Only I could see them in my mind, knowing them like I do. In my mind I looked at all of them one by one. The girl looks just like the old lady did when she was young and I first met her, only better looking. You know, we getting to be a better looking race of people.

"Anyway, I could hear them breathing and though I hadn't been it made me sleepy. Then I heard the girl say, 'Daddy,' soft and low in her sleep and I looked, trying to see if she was still awake. Bur all I can do is smell her and feel her breath on my hand when I go to touch her. She said it I couldn't be sure I had heard anything, so I just laid there listening. Seems like I heard a whippoorwill calling and I thought to myself, go on away from here, we'll whip old will when we find him. Then I heard the clocks up there at the school striking four times, lonesome like.

"Then I got to thinking about way back when I left the farm and went to live I the mobile and about a girl I has me then I was young then – like this young fellow here. We lived in a two story house alongside the river, and at night in the summer time we used to lay in the bed and talk and after she'd gone off to sleep I'd be awake looking out at the lights coming up from the water and listening to the sounds of the boats moving along. They used to have musicians on them boats, and sometimes I used to wake her up to hear the music when they come up the river. I'd be laying there and it would be quiet and I could hear it coming from way off. Like when you quail hunting and it's getting dark and you can hear the boss bird whistling trying to get the covey together again, and he's coming towards you slow and whistling soft, cause he knows you somewhere around with your gun. Still he got to round them up, so he keeps on coming.