Whiter Than Snow (7 page)

The doctor was right. It was over. Orange lay on the bed, one old woman on each side of her. The granny woman mopped Orange’s forehead with a rag dipped in water while Ada prayed. “Well, it can’t be all that bad,” the doctor said, and took off his coat. But he left his hat on, and Joe forever remembered that. The doctor did not take off his hat for Orange. The doctor’s jovial expression turned sour, and he said, “Why didn’t you tell me this was serious, boy? Your woman’s already dead. I’m past doing anything.”

Tears streaming down his face, Joe knelt down on the floor and raised his hands to heaven. “Please, Lord,” he begged.

“Even the good God can’t do anything,” the doctor said, putting his coat back on. He started for the door, then turned to Joe. “I don’t suppose you got anything to pay me for my trouble.”

Still on his knees, Joe looked up at the white man and asked, “How much?”

“A dollar.”

“I’ll bring it to you.” He laid his head on the bed beside Orange’s body and cried. Later that day, they buried Orange and the baby, a girl.

Joe thrashed over in his mind about that doctor, let his feelings fester. He thought not to pay, but then the doctor would tell it about that Joe was shiftless, just like all the other Negroes. So after a few days, Joe took the money out of a can that was buried under the front steps of the house, a dollar in nickels and dimes and pennies, and that evening he walked into town and went to the back door of the doctor’s house. The woman was away, and the doctor himself answered, pushing open the screen. “What you want?” The man frowned at Joe.

“I brung your money. You said a dollar.”

Then a look of recognition crossed the white man’s face. “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t think you’d pay.”

“I said I would.”

He held out his hand. “What have you got for me? I charge white folks two dollars but Negroes only one.”

Joe looked at the greedy hand and the smug look on the doctor’s face, and suddenly he could not control himself. The hurt from Orange’s death and the hatred that he had saved up since he was a boy welled up inside of him, and he could not stop it. He threw the money at the doctor, and before the white man could react, Joe said, “I got something else for you.” He made a fist with his hand and smashed the doctor in the face, knocking him to the stoop. “You killed my wife, who wasn’t any harm to you. You did it as sure as if you’d stuck a knife in her. You had your supper, and you let Orange die. I’ll kill you and go to hell and pay for it.” Joe stood over the man, ready to hit him again, to stomp on him. But for the first time in his life, he saw that a white man was afraid of him, and that was victory enough.

He took a step backward, and then the awful realization of what he’d done hit him as surely as if the doctor had stood up and punched Joe in the stomach. He’d struck a white man, and he’d threatened to kill him. A lynch mob would come for him, just as it had for the teacher. Joe turned and ran home as fast as he could, dug up the money can again and emptied its contents into his hand. He filled a sack with corn bread and fatback and wrapped it in his second pair of overalls. He shoved his knife and his mouth harp into his pocket. Then after he went to the door to listen for the dogs and horses but heard nothing, he snatched up Jane’s extra dress and Orange’s old primer and added them to his pack. Not even stopping then to look around for anything he might have missed, he made for his parents’ house, where Jane was staying, and snatched up the girl. “We got to run,” he told his mother. “I’m a wicked fellow. I hit the doctor. He’ll be killing mad.”

“I dread to see that, though he deserved it,” Ada replied. “Oh yes, that white man deserved a whipping.” Then she became aware that Joe had picked up Jane, and she said, “Leave the girl be. You can’t do for her. Besides, they catch her with you, they’ll string her up, too.”

“They’ll do that if they find her here.”

“We’ll hide her.”

“I got nothing else. I’d as soon take a beating as leave her behind.”

The old woman understood, and instead of protesting further, she asked, “Where are you going?”

Joe shook his head. “As far away as ever I can get.”

Ada looked around frantically for something to give her son, but all she saw was the stack of flapjacks she’d fried up for dinner. “Take these,” she said, putting them down his shirtfront. Then she watched as her son ran off across the field, the small girl on his shoulders. When she could no longer see him, Ada sank down on her knees and blessed God and said a prayer to keep her kinfolks safe.

Joe did not know that the doctor never told another white person what the black man had done to him. He blamed a screen door for slamming against his face, and because townsfolk knew that the doctor’s wife was a big chunk of a woman who was handy with a frying pan, they didn’t believe the story, and they snickered behind his back. Nobody even considered that the doctor might have been hit by a colored man.

A week later, the doctor went out to Hogpen Lane, to the cabin where Joe’s mother was clearing out the few things that her son had left behind. She looked up with alarm, but with confusion, too, because she did not understand why white men had not come there earlier, hunting Joe.

“Joe’s gone. Don’t ask me where, for I’m not knowing. He’ll nevermore be back,” she said.

The doctor nodded, for that was the way when a black man broke Negro law. Only whites got justice. Blacks got lynched. He took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he sat down on the dirty bench by the door and twirled the hat in his hands. “When I started my practice, I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath. I don’t expect you know what that is, do you, auntie?”

“No, sir.”

“It means I swore to treat people who needed me, no matter who they were or whether they could pay. Somewhere over the road I’ve traveled, I forgot about that, and I let this woman, this Orange, die.”

The old woman waited while the doctor looked out across the fields. The cotton was up and the white just beginning to show. The work would be harder for the family without Joe.

“I guess I’m saying Joe doesn’t have to worry on my account. I told it about that I walked into that fool screen door and broke my nose.” He stood and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat, then stepped down off the porch and climbed into his buggy. “Good day to you, auntie.”

Jane squalled and squalled as Joe ran through the cold night, and at last he set the girl down. “Baby, your mammy is dead, and we are running away and won’t ever come back home,” he said, rubbing her bare feet, for the child had never had a pair of shoes in her life, and her feet were cold. “If the white men catch us, we’ll get a killing. If you squawk like that, they’ll hear us. So you have to be still. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

And Jane did, because while she was only five, she was a black girl, and she’d already known meanness. She nodded, and Joe relaxed a little, thinking it would be good to eat something and then realizing that he’d held the flapjacks in his shirt for hours and hadn’t even known it. He shared them with the girl, and they ate the cold dinner and drank water from a stream. Joe fashioned his overalls into a sling and tied the child to his back, and while she slept, he ran on. In the night, he passed one town and then another, and when he crossed the railroad track of a third, he waited just beyond it for a westbound train. He didn’t know where he was headed, only that it would be far away. The white men would look for him going north, so he figured he’d head west, and he and Jane could cover more miles in a train than by foot. Besides, he couldn’t tote the girl forever. Although Jane was a little spare-made child, Joe’s back hurt from the carrying of her.

He sat in the grass as the sky turned gray in the east, hoping a train would come through before the light was up. Jane was awake now, and as they sat in the weeds beside the track, they ate the corn bread Joe had snatched up, although he did not build a fire to fry up the fatback. Just before the sun broke the horizon, they heard a long whistle and felt a rumbling along the rails. They ducked their heads as the engine passed, although an engineer wouldn’t think much about a Negro man and child sitting beside the track watching the train. Joe scanned the boxcars of the slow-moving freight train until he saw one with its doors open. Carrying the child, he ran along the train, letting the open car come up beside him. Then he pushed Jane into the boxcar and pulled himself up.

In the dark of the car, Joe thought the two of them were alone. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw two men in the corner of the freight car, one of them holding a bottle, and both of them looking at Jane. They were colored, although Joe knew a black man could be as treacherous as a white one. Jane, frightened, curled up beside her father, and Joe put his left arm around her. Then he reached into his pocket with his right hand and removed the knife with its long, narrow blade, which caught the morning light.

The two men looked at the knife and then at Joe, and Joe could sense their fear. “You can put it away,” one said. “We don’t mean no harm.”

“Glad of it.” Joe scratched his face with the blade, scratched it where the men would see the ugly scar on his cheek. Then he flexed his muscles and put down the knife. At least if the men attacked him, they’d know they were in for a fight.

One of the men offered Joe the bottle, which he’d corked and was ready to roll across the car, but Joe shook his head. In a while, the two men finished the whiskey and tossed the bottle out the car door; then they lay down and began to snore.

“Pappy, I’m not sleepy,” Jane whispered. So Joe slept, too, while Jane kept watch.

Later, when they were all awake and Jane slept, the two men told Joe they were running off because they’d robbed a white store. “What’d you do?” one asked.

Joe didn’t trust them, so he said, “I’ve done nothing. My wife let me go, said I wasn’t ever going to see my girl again. So I fooled her and snatched up the baby, and now it’s my wife that can’t see her.”

One of the men chuckled and asked, “Where you headed to?”

Joe scratched his head. “Can’t say. Maybe New York City.”

“Well, you ain’t going to get there on this train. It’s going all the way to Kansas City.”

So that was where Joe ended up for a time. He found a job there, working in a warehouse, leaving Jane to care for herself in the room in which they lived. But he was restless. He saved up a little money, and after a time, he and Jane caught another freight, letting themselves off at Topeka for a while and then at Hugo, in eastern Colorado, and finally in Denver. Joe liked Denver, was surprised to discover that black people lived in houses there as nice as the ones white people owned back where he came from. But more than that, he was intrigued with the mountains that rose up to the west. He’d never seen mountains before, and the blue range drew him. So one day, he and Jane climbed aboard a train whose last stop was a town on the Swan River—Swandyke.

As soon as his feet touched the ground, Joe knew Swandyke was where he would stay. He couldn’t say why, and later it seemed odd to him that he liked it so much, because Swandyke was different from home, and there weren’t any farming jobs, just mining. It might have been the town’s bustle, compared to the laziness of the South, or the dry air and cold nights, instead of the everlasting heat and damp he was used to. Or perhaps it was the white man on the platform at the depot who had accidentally shoved Jane up against the wall when he turned around with his suitcase. He’d stopped and taken off his hat and said, “I’m sorry, young lady. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

Joe stared at the man in astonishment, because he had never heard a white person apologize to a black one. Then he said, “Naw, boss, she’s tough.”

The man fished in his pocket for a nickel and handed it to Jane and said, “You buy yourself a treat now.”

Joe asked the man outright if he knew of any jobs for a black man. “I can’t say as how I know of any especially for a Negro, but there’s jobs at the Fourth of July Mine for a man who’ll work. You go up to the office there and tell them Jim Foote sent you.” So later in the day, after he had set up a campsite under a pine tree, he left Jane and went up to the mine.

“You ever worked in a mine before?” the man in charge of employment asked Joe.

“No, sir, but I work hard. I’m stout enough to pull a freight car, and I’m a good hand to fix machinery. Mr. Jim Foote sent me.”

The man nodded. “I’ll start you up top, unloading ore carts. If you work out, I’ll move you into the mill. No drinking on the job. It’s a fireable offense.”

And so for several weeks, Joe worked in a white man’s job, while Jane stayed in the camp by herself, picking wildflowers, watching the squirrels and camp robbers, building villages of pine needles. From time to time, she saw other children, but they were white, and she was afraid of them, so she hid herself.

Toward the end of summer, Joe came back to the campsite and found a white woman talking to Jane. He looked at her warily, but she didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve come to make a proposition,” she said.

Joe narrowed his eyes as he stared at the woman and tugged at his hair, a gesture he’d put aside after he’d started at the mill, because the workers there expected him to act like a man, not a shiftless darky. But this was a white woman, and they were alone, and he wished she’d go away.