“You come out of there,” my mother called.
“Naw,” I cried.
“Come out or I’ll beat you to within an inch of your life,” she said.
“Naw,” I said.
“Call Papa,” Granny said.
I trembled. Granny was sending my brother to fetch Grandpa, of whom I was mortally afraid. He was a tall, skinny, silent, grim, black man who had fought in the Civil War with the Union Army. When he was angry he gritted his teeth with a terrifying, grating sound. He kept his army gun in his room, standing in a corner, loaded. He was under the delusion that the war between the states would be resumed. I heard my brother rush out of the room and I knew it was but a matter of minutes before Grandpa would come. I balled myself into a knot and moaned:
“Naw, naw, naw…”
Grandpa came and ordered me from under the bed. I refused to move.
“Come out of there, little man,” he said.
“Naw.”
“Do you want me to get my gun?”
“Naw, sir. Please don’t shoot me!” I cried.
“Then come out!”
I remained still. Grandpa took hold of the bed and pulled it. I clung to a bedpost and was dragged over the floor. Grandpa ran at me and tried to grab my leg, but I crawled out of reach. I rested on all fours and kept in the center of the bed and each time the bed moved, I moved, following it.
“Come out and get your whipping!” my mother called.
I remained still. The bed moved and I moved. I did not think; I did not plan; I did not plot. Instinct told me what to do. There was painful danger and I had to avoid it. Grandpa finally gave up and went back to his room.
“When you come out, you’ll get your whipping,” my mother said. “No matter how long you stay under there, you’re going to get it. And no food for you tonight.”
“What did he do?” my brother asked.
“Something he ought to be killed for,” Granny said.
“But what?” my brother asked.
“Shut you up and get to bed,” my mother said.
I stayed under the bed far into the night. The household went to sleep. Finally hunger and thirst drove me out; when I stood up I found my mother lurking in the doorway, waiting for me.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said.
I followed her and she beat me, but she did not use the wet towel; Grandpa had forbade that. Between strokes of the switch she would ask me where had I learned the dirty words and I could not tell her; and my inability to tell her made her furious.
“I’m going to beat you until you tell me,” she declared.
And I could not tell her because I did not know. None of the obscene words I had learned at school in Memphis had dealt with perversions of any sort, although I might have learned the words while loitering drunkenly in saloons. The next day Granny said emphatically that she knew who had ruined me, that she knew I had
learned about “foul practices” from reading Ella’s books, and when I asked what “foul practices” were, my mother beat me afresh. No matter how hard I tried to convince them that I had not read the words in a book or that I could not remember having heard anyone say them, they would not believe me. Granny finally charged Ella with telling me things that I should not know and Ella, weeping and distraught, packed her things and moved. The tremendous upheaval that my words had caused made me know that there lay back of them much more than I could figure out, and I resolved that in the future I would learn the meaning of why they had beat and denounced me.
The days and hours began to speak now with a clearer tongue. Each experience had a sharp meaning of its own.
There was the breathlessly anxious fun of chasing and catching flitting fireflies on drowsy summer nights.
There was the drenching hospitality in the pervading smell of sweet magnolias.
There was the aura of limitless freedom distilled from the rolling sweep of tall green grass swaying and glinting in the wind and sun.
There was the feeling of impersonal plenty when I saw a boll of cotton whose cup had spilt over and straggled its white fleece toward the earth.
There was the pitying chuckle that bubbled in my throat when I watched a fat duck waddle across the back yard.
There was the suspense I felt when I heard the taut, sharp song of a yellow-black bee hovering nervously but patiently above a white rose.
There was the drugged, sleepy feeling that came from sipping glasses of milk, drinking them slowly so that they would last a long time, and drinking enough for the first time in my life.
There was the bitter amusement of going into town with Granny and watching the baffled stares of white folks who saw an old white woman leading two undeniably Negro boys in and out of stores on Capitol Street.
There was the slow, fresh, saliva-stimulating smell of cooking cotton seeds.
There was the excitement of fishing in muddy country creeks with my grandpa on cloudy days.
There was the fear and awe I felt when Grandpa took me to a sawmill to watch the giant whirring steel blades whine and scream as they bit into wet green logs.
There was the puckery taste that almost made me cry when I ate my first half-ripe persimmon.
There was the greedy joy in the tangy taste of wild hickory nuts.
There was the dry hot summer morning when I scratched my bare arms on briers while picking blackberries and came home with my fingers and lips stained black with sweet berry juice.
There was the relish of eating my first fried fish sandwich, nibbling at it slowly and hoping that I would never eat it up.
There was the all-night ache in my stomach after I had climbed a neighbor’s tree and eaten stolen, unripe peaches.
There was the morning when I thought I would fall dead from fear after I had stepped with my bare feet upon a bright little green garden snake.
And there were the long, slow, drowsy days and nights of drizzling rain…
At last we were at the railroad station with our bags, waiting for the train that would take us to Arkansas; and for the first time I noticed that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a “white” line and a “black” line. During my visit at Granny’s a sense of the two races had been born in me with a sharp concreteness that would never die until I died. When I boarded the train I was aware that we Negroes were in one part of the train and that the whites were in another. Naïvely I wanted to go and see how the whites looked while sitting in their part of the train.
“Can I go and peep at the white folks?” I asked my mother.
“You keep quiet,” she said.
“But that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?”
“Will you keep still?”
“But why can’t I?”
“Quit talking foolishness!”
I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it. I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched, it seemed, except in violence. Now, there was my grandmother…Was she white? Just how white was she? What did the whites think of her whiteness?
“Mama, is Granny white?” I asked as the train rolled through the darkness.
“If you’ve got eyes, you can see what color she is,” my mother said.
“I mean, do the white folks think she’s white?”
“Why don’t you ask the white folks that?” she countered.
“But you know,” I insisted.
“Why should I know?” she asked. “I’m not white.”
“Granny looks white,” I said, hoping to establish one fact, at least. “Then why is she living with us colored folks?”
“Don’t you want Granny to live with us?” she asked, blunting my question.
“Yes.”
“Then why are you asking?”
“I want to
know
.”
“Doesn’t Granny live with us?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“But does she
want
to live with us?”
“Why didn’t you ask Granny that?” my mother evaded me again in a taunting voice.
“Did Granny become colored when she married Grandpa?”
“Will you stop asking silly questions!”
“But did she?”
“Granny didn’t
become
colored,” my mother said angrily. “She was
born
the color she is now.”
Again I was being shut out of the secret, the thing, the reality I felt somewhere beneath all the words and silences.
“Why didn’t Granny marry a white man?” I asked.
“Because she didn’t want to,” my mother said peevishly.
“Why don’t you want to talk to me?” I asked.
She slapped me and I cried. Later, grudgingly, she told me that Granny came of Irish, Scotch, and French stock in which Negro blood had somewhere and somehow been infused. She explained it all in a matter-of-fact, offhand, neutral way; her emotions were not involved at all.
“What was Granny’s name before she married Grandpa?”
“Bolden.”
“Who gave her that name?”
“The white man who owned her.”
“She was a slave?”
“Yes.”
“And Bolden was the name of Granny’s father?”
“Granny doesn’t know who her father was.”
“So they just gave her any name?”
“They gave her a name; that’s all I know.”
“Couldn’t Granny find out who her father was?”
“For what, silly?”
“So she could know.”
“Know for what?”
“Just to know.”
“But for
what
?”
I could not say. I could not get anywhere.
“Mama, where did Father get his name?”
“From his father.”
“And where did the father of my father get his name?”
“Like Granny got hers. From a white man.”
“Do they know who he is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t they find out?”
“For what?” my mother demanded harshly.
And I could think of no rational or practical reason why my father should try to find out who his father’s father was.
“What has Papa got in him?” I asked.
“Some white and some red and some black,” she said.
“Indian, white, and Negro?”
“Yes.”
“Then what am I?”
“They’ll call you a colored man when you grow up,” she said. Then she turned to me and smiled mockingly and asked: “Do you mind, Mr. Wright?”
I was angry and I did not answer. I did not object to being called colored, but I knew that there was something my mother was holding back. She was not concealing facts, but feelings, attitudes, convictions which she did not want me to know; and she became angry when I prodded her. All right, I would find out someday. Just wait. All right, I was colored. It was fine. I did not know enough to be afraid or to anticipate in a concrete manner. True, I had heard that colored people were killed and beaten, but so far it all had seemed remote. There was, of course, a vague uneasiness about it all, but I would be able to handle that when I came to it. It would be simple. If anybody tried to kill me, then I would kill them first.
When we arrived in Elaine I saw that Aunt Maggie lived in a bungalow that had a fence around it. It looked like home and I was glad. I had no suspicion that I was to live here for but a short time and that the manner of my leaving would be my first baptism of racial emotion.
A wide dusty road ran past the house and on each side of the road wild flowers grew. It was summer and the smell of clay dust was everywhere, day and night. I would get up early every morning to wade with my bare feet through the dust of the road, reveling in the strange mixture of the cold dew-wet crust on top of the road and the warm, sun-baked dust beneath.
After sunrise the bees would come out and I discovered that by slapping my two palms together smartly I could kill a bee. My mother warned me to stop, telling me that bees made honey, that it was not good to kill things that made food, that I would eventually be stung. But I felt confident of outwitting any bee. One morning I slapped an enormous bee between my hands just as it had lit upon a flower and it stung me in the tender center of my left palm. I ran home screaming.
“Good enough for you,” my mother commented dryly.
I never crushed any more bees.
Aunt Maggie’s husband, Uncle Hoskins, owned a saloon that catered to the hundreds of Negroes who worked in the surrounding sawmills. Remembering the saloon of my Memphis days, I begged Uncle Hoskins to take me to see it and he promised; but my mother said no; she was afraid that I would grow up to be a drunkard if I went inside of a saloon again while still a child. Well, if I could not see the saloon, at least I could eat. And at mealtime Aunt Maggie’s table was so loaded with food that I could scarcely believe it was real. It took me some time to get used to the idea of there being enough to eat; I felt that if I ate enough there would not be anything left for another time. When I first sat down at Aunt Maggie’s table, I could not eat until I had asked:
“Can I eat all I want?”
“Eat as much as you like,” Uncle Hoskins said.
I did not believe him. I ate until my stomach hurt, but even then I did not want to get up from the table.
“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” my mother said.
“Let him eat all he wants to and get used to food,” Uncle Hoskins said.
When supper was over I saw that there were many biscuits piled high upon the bread platter, an astonishing and unbelievable sight to me. Though the biscuits were right before my eyes, and though there was more flour in the kitchen, I was apprehensive lest there be no bread for breakfast in the morning. I was afraid that somehow the biscuits might disappear during the night, while I was sleeping. I did not want to wake up in the morning, as I had so often in the past, feeling hungry and knowing that there was no food in the house. So, surreptitiously, I took some of the biscuits from the platter and slipped them into my pocket, not to eat, but to keep as a bulwark against any possible attack of hunger. Even after I had got used to seeing the table loaded with food at each meal, I still stole bread and put it into my pockets. In washing my clothes my mother found the gummy wads and scolded me to break me of the habit; I stopped hiding the bread in my pockets
and hid it about the house, in corners, behind dressers. I did not break the habit of stealing and hoarding bread until my faith that food would be forthcoming at each meal had been somewhat established.