47

_9.

Neither Eighty-four nor I carried the cotton bag that day. John lugged the big bag up and down the rows of cotton bushes while we stuffed the sack full.

The whole time John sweet-talked Eighty-four.

"Bein' a slave ain't half bad," he said in the long shadows of the late afternoon, "if'n you could be lucky as me standin' between a good friend and a beautiful girl."

"You should let me carry that sack now, Johnny," Eighty-four said with a smile. "Yo' back must be achin' sumpin' terrible."

And there it was again, just one word. Not even a word but just adding the e sound at the end of his name and I knew that Eighty-four was smitten with Tall John the flatterer.

At the end of the day we had pulled more cotton than any other three slaves on the whole plantation. We knew that because Mud Albert kept count.

When we walked the stony path back to the slave quarters Eighty-four made sure that she was walking next to my friend. She even held his hand for a while, making sure that Mr. Stewart wasn't anywhere to see them.

John seemed to genuinely like Eighty-four. This perplexed me because no one else I knew had ever said a kind word about her. So when we came to the fork in the road where the men and women split off from each other, I went up to John and asked him about our work-mate.

"Why you so sweet to that sour girl?" I asked.

"Tweenie?" John said with a smile. "She's something else. That girl could work a whole farm by herself. I don't think that I've ever met a woman so strong or so full of love."

"But she jes' a field slave," I argued.

"That's what you say about yourself," John pointed out.

"But you on'y met her today."

"I only met you yesterday," he countered.

"But you said that you come here lookin' for me. You lookin' for Eighty-four too?"

"No," John said. He stopped walking and so did I. "I wasn't looking for Tweenie but when I saw her I felt all of the pain she feels over her lost children. My heart went out to her. Her loss and mine are very much alike."

"How did you know about the babies that Mastuh took from her?" I asked.

He pointed at me and said, "Neither master nor nigger be."

"Numbah Twelve!" Mud Albert shouted. "Forty-seven! Get yo black butts movin'."

We hurried off before John could tell me how he knew about Eighty-four's babies. I had been with him every moment so I knew that none of the other slaves had told him. But I forgot about that mystery for a while because we were running and Albert was angry and my stomach was growling with hunger.

The men hustled into the slave cabins and Ernestine brought us our porridge.

I wasn't particular about what I ate by that time. Whatever they put in front of me I sucked down while looking around for more. Slaving is hungry work. I was hungry morning, noon, and night. I dreamed about corn cakes and strawberries. Sometimes I would suck on a bite-sized rock just to pretend that I was eating.

That night after a full day of picking cotton I was so tired that all I wanted to do was eat, then sleep. But in the middle of our supper the men started asking John questions.

"Where you from?" Charlie Baylor asked.

"Where we're all from," John said as if that was the only answer and why didn't Charlie know it.

"And where's that?" Billy Branches asked.

"Don't you know where you from?" John asked back.

"I rolled out from a burlap sack on a mud flat in the rain," Number Eight, also known as Coyote Pete, said. "My mam was the hangin' tree. My daddy din't know his own name."

The men all laughed at Pete's made-up rhymes.

"His name was Africa," Tall John pronounced, "whether he knew it or not."

The men all stopped laughing then. I sat up from my bunkbed to see if maybe they were angry with my friend.

"What you know 'bout the jungle, niggah?" Frankei, Number Eleven, asked angrily.

"Not a thing Brotha Frankie," John replied. "I know about the great civilizations of Kush and Nubia. I know about the blood of kings."

"You come from Africa?" Mud Albert asked then.

"I been there."

"So you are High John the so-called conqueror?"

"No," John said, not me. But he is among you."

High John?" Champ said. "Here? Which one of us is it?"

The men all lokked around at each other.

"Why, Forty-seven of course," Tall John said.

The men all started laughing, guffawing actually. Mud Albert laughed so hard he had to get down on one knee and hold his sides.

"Him?" Black Tom said.

"That runt?" Billy Coco added.

"How can you spect us to believesumpin' like that, Johnny?" Mud Albert asked. He had finally gotten back to his feet. "Forty-seven her haven't hardly evah been off the plantation. Why, he don't even have a proper name."

"Is you High John?" a slave we called Three-toed Bill asked me.

"Go on!" I said angrily

I was hoping that Tall John would stop his foolish talk, but that wish was not to be granted.

"Sure he is," John said. "Maybe you don't know it. Maybe he don't know it. But that's the way of the Conqueror. He ain't a man's flesh and bone alone. He's a spirit from the homeland. He burrow doen here or there for a while, do his business, end then he move on."

"An' how come you know that if' n you ain't him?" Mud Albert asked. He was no longer laughing.

The rest of the men sobered up too.

"At some othah time High John's spirit mighta passed through me, yeah," John said. "That's why when I see Forty-seven here I can see in him the spirit of the Conqueror. He might not know it yet but this boy is destined for greatness. An' if you stick close enough to him you might jes' find yourself wearing the chains of freedom."

"Chains'a freedom!" Three-toed said. "What the heck do that s'posed to mean?"

"It means many things, my friend," John replied. "And if you follow Forty-seven and you listen when he calls – you might just learns."

Boy is jest a fool," Sixty-three said, meaning John.

The other men seemed to agree and so they turned away towards their bunks.

Our chains were put on and the lights were put out. When the cabin was filled with snores I turned to John.

"What was all that nonsense you tellin' them about me? I ain't no High John the Conqueror."

"How would you know that?" my friend asked in the dark.

"I know who I am," I said.

"Not if you call yourself nigger," he said. "Not if you call Tobias Master. You have no idea of who you are destined to be, Forty-seven."

"But you do?"

"Yes."

"An' what will I be?" I was afraid of the answer but still I had to ask. The other men might have thought that John was the teller of tall tales but I had experienced his magic. I knew to take that boy seriously.

But that was not to be a night of answers.

"Go to sleep, Forty-seven," he said. "You need your rest."

Those words were like a blindfold being pulled over my eyes. No sooner than he said them I was in a deep sleep. I dreamed that I wore a cape made of redbird feathers and a crown made from broken slave chains. I marched from plantation to plantation and from each one a hundred and more slaves took their places behind me. Behind them the white men who had been our masters scratched their heads and watched us go.

The next three days passed in pretty much the same way. During the daylight hours Eighty-four, Tall John, and I picked cotton as a team. Eighty-four was completely infatuated with my friend. She was always touching his arm and grinning at him. He continued to flatter her, calling her pretty and beautiful even though I couldn't see (at that rime) what he saw in her.

They were both always laughing and grinning, except on the afternoon of the second day. That was when John asked Eighty-four about her babies.

"Tell me about your children, Tweenie," he said out of the blue. We were working on our eighth bag of cotton.

"I cain't talk about it," Eighty-four said with a tear in her voice. "It's a hurt in my heart."

"But maybe if you talk about it," John pressed, "then maybe you could stop it from hurtin'."

"You think so?" she asked. "'Cause you know I be thinkin' 'bout them all the time."

John stopped walking and even set down the half-filled sack of cotton. He put his hands on Eighty-four's shoulders and she went down on her knees like I've seen some women do when Brother Bob touched someone, saying that they were now one with the Holy Spirit.

John went down on his knees too and I looked around to make sure that no white man or Mud Albert was anywhere to see. I wanted to keep pulling cotton so that we didn't get in trouble but the hurt in Eighty-four's face made me mute.

"Dey's LeRoy an' Abraham," Eighty-four said softly. Tears were cascading down her berry black cheeks. "Dat's what I named 'em even though I knew that evil-hearted Mr. Stewart meant to take'em from me. Dey was so pretty… an' each time I give birth when I seed LeRoy, an' latah Abraham, I loved 'em so much that it hurt. An' den, when dey took 'em away, it hurt so bad I was sho I'd die. Dey was so young, but Mama Flore said dat dey new master's be good to 'em 'cause dey'd grow up into mens that'd be good workers."

Eighty-four began to howl then and John took her into his arms. I was sad for Eighty-four's loss and I was scared that somebody would hear her and punish us for malingering. And I was also amazed because John was crying along with Eighty-four. It was then that I realized that he felt lost in the same way that Abraham and LeRoy were lost.

The next morning Mud Albert had me take John out to the west field to see if there were any ripe peaches on a tree that the slaves had found out around there. Mud Albert called that tree his private orchard. John and I took a shortcut past the hanging tree.

On the way John was in a good mood. He was talking to me about my future.

"One day," he said, "many years from now you will think back on these days and say that it all must have been a bad dream…"

He didn't finish because when we got close to that tree

he grabbed his head and fell to the ground just as if Champ Noland had cuffed him. He screamed in pain.

"What is this place?" he pleaded. He writhed on the ground and white foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. "Why has there been so much suffering here?"

I got down on my knees and grabbed him by the shoulders.

"This is where they hangs killers an' robbers an' slaves gone wrong," I said. "What's the mattuh?"

He pointed up at the branch where I had once seen Tommy Brown hanging with his neck broken and his fat tongue sticking through dead lips. They hung Tommy for stealing a chicken from the Master's henhouse.

I had also seen Billy Lukas, slave Number Six, swinging in a breeze from that branch. They hanged Billy because Loretta McLaughry, a white woman, had said that he was leering at her as she was riding down the road in her buggy.

John yelled again and then begged me to take him out from there. I did what he asked.

"More than a hundred men have been murdered under that tree," he said when we were far from there. "Murdered."