High Rider Read online

  His sister’s bravery brought tears to his eyes. He gently removed her hand, knelt, and laid his palm on her cheek. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, child. This ain’t your affair no more.” He took her in his arms and held her as if she were gossamer. “You wait right here for me. I’ll be back soon. I promise.” The words tumbled out with a bravado he did not feel.

  He stood, gave her thin shoulder a squeeze, and walked out into the yard. Once the other slaves saw him, they came out of their quarters too, bowing to Chambers, assembling in family groups without a whisper among them, fear and apprehension etched on their faces.

  Chambers transferred his whip to his left hand and drew a pistol with his right. He aimed it at John’s chest. “You will remove your clothing and go directly to the whipping tree. I will not repeat myself. I will shoot you instead.”

  John would never forget that voice, as cold as the creek in winter. To ignore its command would have meant certain death. In a strange way he felt relieved—he was only going to be whipped and not executed. He undressed, frightened and embarrassed at the same time, trying to still his trembling body. But he held his head high in defiance and walked to the sycamore with as much dignity and grace as he could muster. Chambers instructed another slave to tie John’s wrists together around the bole. Not until John was securely bound did the planter holster his pistol. Before administering the beating he cracked his whip in the air, and many of the slaves recoiled at the sound, particularly those who had felt its awful bite on their backs. He set to work with a fury they had never seen before. John heard his mother’s and sisters’ high keening, which tore into his soul as much as the whip tore into his flesh. He kept repeating in his mind, “Oh, Mama and baby sisters, don’t you be weepin’ for me now! Don’t you be weepin’!” and soon he was no longer certain whether the words were contained in his mind or if he was crying them aloud. He fought to stay conscious through the whipping, so that he could walk away from it strong and defiant, but the excruciating pain became more than he could bear and he blacked out.

  •

  That had been several years ago. Sometimes it seemed like a bad dream, but the ugly scars across his back and rump testified to its reality. (And often they itched terribly.) The days immediately following the whipping were the hardest John had ever endured, Nettie and his mother comforting him in the evenings after work by rubbing a soothing balm into his wounds. Yet he felt a modest victory, because Chambers had never gone near Nettie again.

  Not long after the incident, the rumours of war became reality, and that was accompanied by new rumours of the abolition of slavery. When the war ended and abolition became law, John did not understand how life could still be so difficult. Despite his inability to read or write, he understood the writing on the wall. It spoke to him with glaring clarity: South Carolina was no place for a coloured man. To make matters worse, most of the state, including the area around Georgetown, fell into an economic slump. The rice crops, which supplied most of the country, failed because there were no slaves to work the plantations, and many planters, so accustomed to keeping their tidy profits to themselves, were unwilling to negotiate wages with freedmen. Even if they had, they would have been short of workers because the labour of women and children was no longer available to them. And more than ten thousand black men had gone north with General William Tecumseh Sherman when he and his Union army had marched through South Carolina on their way home from their destructive tramp through Georgia.

  On an immediate level, the war and Reconstruction had done what John’s former slave master had not—split up the Ware family. Four of his brothers had joined Sherman and stayed in the North after the war, and his three remaining brothers, believing that there was a greater tolerance for coloured folk there, had later joined them. But John wasn’t interested and stayed behind with his two sisters and their parents. Nettie and Millie were live-in domestic servants in Georgetown, and John worked as a blacksmith for a thoughtful white Republican named James Ball. Together, the three siblings supported their parents, with whom John lived in a small wood-frame house at the edge of town, where other coloureds had gathered to form a community. But two years had passed since the Confederacy surrendered, and even a fool could see that the Southern Democrats, with their racist policies and white supremacy beliefs, were going to control the region. John’s position was that they could control whatever they wanted but it wasn’t going to include him.

  Hope for a decent future lay in some place other than South Carolina, or anywhere in the Lower South for that matter. Therefore, it was time to go, to leave behind this land of cruel deeds committed by heartless, single-minded people. He would walk west into Texas; he would go as far as it took to put the last plantation behind him, until he found the ranches with horses and cattle that he had heard so much about. The stories excited him, because he had always loved horses. His former master had kept a pair in a small stable, and John had enjoyed cleaning out their stalls and caring for them. He had a natural affinity for the animals, but then most white folks had always considered him and his kind a related species.

  His parents did not want him to go west. Instead, they implored him to go north, to find a wife and raise a family among his own kind. It was safer, they insisted. Heading west meant running a gauntlet of the Ku Klux Klan several hundred miles long, and only God knew what he would find in Texas.

  “Near as I could learn,” said his father sagely, “coloured folk are as scarce as trees out that way. Mostly white folks an’ Indians. How’re you s’posed to find a wife in that bunch?”

  John shrugged, knowing he would never be able to offer any responses that would satisfy his father. “Settlin’ down ain’t somethin’ on my mind just yet. And far as I know, there ain’t no ranches up north.”

  John told James Ball that he was leaving and that he would never forget the kindness shown him. “Ah, it weren’t so much kindness as it was respect, John,” Ball said. “If a man don’t hold respect for all God’s creatures, what good is he on this earth? Anyway, I’m truly sorrowed to see you go—you been a mighty fine hire and any man out west would be doin’ himself a great favour by takin’ you on.”

  At the end of the day, John collected his pay, a small bonus that Ball called “travelling money,” and a note of reference. He visited Crowley’s store on Front Street, a place he had avoided because it always reminded him of what he did not have and could not afford to get. He purchased a rain tarp, a blanket, a tin pot to boil water in, a cup, a good clasp knife, and a flint to light fires. At home, he gave half of the remaining money to his parents and then he visited his sisters to say goodbye. Nettie sniffled her way through the parting and hugged John as if she did not ever want him to go. They had formed a special bond after Chambers had raped her and John had risked his life for her. But the incident had turned her world darker, and she had never been the same. In the deeper shadows at the edge of her mind lurked men in the guise of their former master, and it instilled in her an unshakable fear. Unlike Millie, her younger sister, she never spoke of the possibility of marriage. John did not like leaving her and boasted that he would own a ranch one day and would send for her. Perhaps it was a hollow boast, but he could think of nothing better to say and he wanted to leave her with good feelings.

  That night sleep eluded him. After breakfast the following morning, he wrapped a single change of clothing in his bedroll, along with a package of biscuits his mother had baked, tied a rope to each end, and slung it behind him with the rope slanting across his chest. He kissed his tearful mother and doubtful father goodbye, stepped out onto the road in the still, post-dawn air, and put his back to the rising sun. He was twenty-two years old. Spread out before him was a world he knew very little about.

  •

  John remained on the road in front of the plantation as the clip-clop of horse hooves coming up the oak-edged driveway grew louder. John’s heart rate accelerated as Sebastian Chambers, mounted on a grey mare, rode out onto the road and turned tow
ard him, apparently on his way to Georgetown. John had seen his former master around the village a couple of times but had always avoided any encounters, uncertain of what he’d do if their paths crossed. But it is curious how fate sometimes plays its hand in a man’s life, how stepping out in new directions can sometimes take him to places he never imagined he’d go. Now, with no one else in sight, John saw an irresistible opportunity.

  Chambers appeared to be paying John scant attention as the gap between them closed, but the planter was intentionally directing his horse toward John so that he would have to step out of the way. John kept his head down to hide his eyes from Chambers, letting the horse get close to him. As it brushed by, he reached up and yanked the planter from the saddle. Startled, the horse whinnied and galloped several yards down the road, while John dragged his sputtering bundle into a grove of pine trees and threw him to the ground. Chambers got to his knees and held up his arms, cowering.

  “Don’t kill me,” he pleaded. “I have no money!”

  John sneered. “I don’t want your money! Do you remember me?”

  Chambers shook his head. He looked awful and it was difficult to believe he was the same man who, without a stitch of compassion, had dictated the terms of John’s life for so many years. But along with fear, John could see recognition dawning in his captive’s bloodshot eyes. He lifted his shirt, half-turned, and displayed his scars.

  “You did this to me when I was a boy. And you hurt my baby sister so bad she ain’t never been right. Maybe you disremember but I don’t. It’s been stuck like a knife in me every day.”

  Without a gun and a whip to fall back on, Chambers’s belligerence and arrogance had vanished. He whined, “I could have you arrested for this!”

  “Well, you better make sure they hang me quick ’cause I’ll find you and beat you until you’re blacker than me. Truth of the matter is, I could do that right now and it’d be no more than a snake like you deserves.”

  Chambers remained kneeling in the pine straw, his lips quivering, perhaps imagining all sorts of horrid punishments, but said nothing. He looked terrified, a look that John had seen on many a slave’s face before Chambers took his whip to them. For the first time in his short life, he understood what real power over another human being felt like. It filled every nook and cranny of his body and he knew that he could do anything he wanted to this man. He could beat him to a pulp or he could kill him and no one would ever be the wiser. Yet he sensed the danger in carrying it too far, of having to live with the consequences. He reached down, grabbed the planter by his coat lapels, and hauled him to his feet. Chambers seemed much shorter than John remembered, and twice as contemptible. His face was flushed red and his breath reeked of whisky. He covered his face with his arms, fearing a punch. John drew him close. “Look at me!” he demanded.

  Chambers moved his arms and John glared into his eyes. “You’re lookin’ into the face of your master, boy,” he hissed. “You belong to me now and it’ll mean your life to forget it! I see anybody on my tail and I’ll be back for you, and there’ll be no good place for you to hide. You clear on that?”

  He held Chambers’s eyes. The man nodded that he understood.

  “Speak to me, boy! I want to hear you say it loud!”

  “I understand, sir,” Chambers whimpered, his eyes glistening with tears.

  John cast him aside like a corn husk used for privy paper. The planter staggered, smacked into a tree, and tumbled to the ground. He rose up on one elbow, breathing hard, sobbing now. He would not look at his captor. Satisfied, John left him there, returned to the road, and continued on his way. He knew that Nettie, gentle soul that she was, would be proud of how he handled himself. He also knew that while it would be better to forget Chambers and everything connected to him, it probably wouldn’t be happening any time soon. Maybe not until John had grown so old that his memory failed him completely.

  TWO

  I’m just passin’ through.

  As John made his way through South Carolina, asking for directions when he needed to, he did odd jobs for food, mostly for coloured folk but once for a sympathetic white family. All along the way, he found other black men in transit, most still looking for displaced members of their families—wives and children, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to give true meaning to their freedom. Three weeks later, he reached the Savannah River, the murky waterway separating his home state from Georgia. An amiable freedman who lived off the river’s bounty and a vegetable garden rowed him to the far side. John offered to pay him but the man refused, saying, “I got a boat, a roof over my head, I eat when I want and I work when I want, and I got plenty of both. Don’t need your money.”

  Georgia had not yet recovered from the war. The destruction left in the wake of Sherman’s march to the sea was still evident as John passed burned-out plantations and desperate coloured folk (who even in their crisis shared with him what little food they had). And of all the white folk he would meet over the course of his journey, it was the Georgians who acted the most defeated, the most bewildered by the Confederacy’s loss and the added insult-to-injury presence of Federal soldiers still occupying the large towns. Some were angry, too, and a dark-skinned man had to use great care not to step on any toes. As an old, grey-haired black man put it, “We mighta got emancipated on paper, but we still Jim Crow to them, and that ain’t no better than a draft mule. Last week a coloured boy over to Newman town was burnt at a stake. Talk is some white folks carted off bones for souvenirs once the flesh was gone. The people who done the burnin’ musta been ghosts ’cause when the Federals got there, nobody’d seen nothin’.”

  Alabama was as bad if not worse. After John crossed the Chattahoochee River, a freedman warned him to keep alert because the Klan was everywhere. Sometimes they seemed to materialize out of thin air and their favourite tree decoration was Jim Crow; indeed, they had lynched a black man the previous week for looking at a white man’s wife the wrong way. “You be okay in the big towns where there’s Federals; otherwise you’d best be careful. You see a pack of white men on the road, you prob’ly seein’ the makin’s of a lynchin’ party.”

  John heeded the man’s advice and gave small towns a wide berth; in isolated areas, he hid in copses when he saw two or more whites together, unless they were a family. He felt safer in Montgomery town because of the large contingent of Federal soldiers, but he did not linger. The Alabama leg of his journey was often hunger-filled. He could not find much work and spent a considerable amount of time searching in the woods for food, eating catsear leaves and greenbrier buds, plants he and his fellow slaves had foraged on the plantation. He found blackberries, past their season and desiccated, but made a kind of soup from them. Once, he got lucky and came upon a creek in which the water level had dropped, leaving ponds here and there along the edges. He followed it away from the road for a hundred yards or so, until he came to a pond that still had a small stream running into it and another running out. Two good-sized catfish were visible in the shallow water, so he gathered stones and built dams at each end, making escape impossible. He used his knife to fashion a spear from a willow bush branch and waded into the water. He stood stock-still. When the first fish swam by, he stabbed at it and missed. After several failed attempts, he realized that the fish was not where it appeared to be, that the water was somehow distorting its position, so he made the necessary adjustment. He speared one and then the other, grabbing them behind the gills and flinging them onto the bank. He whetted his knife on a stone, gutted his catch, and made a fire. He boiled water from the pond and picked leaves from a sassafras tree to brew tea. The fish soon sizzled over the fire, and there was plenty left over to take with him.

  Sometimes there was nothing better than losing himself in thought as he walked along, as it was a good way to put miles at his back without noticing them too much. However, it could prove to be a dangerous pastime in Alabama, so he kept an alert eye on both the road ahead and the road behind, even though it made the state se
em much broader than its two hundred miles. Near the outskirts of Demopolis, an industrial town about thirty miles from the Mississippi border, he passed a log house set well back from the road in a sparse grove of pine trees. The entire front yard was a vegetable garden, split up the middle by a path. Two black women were working in the garden, one bent over pulling at something, perhaps weeds, the other using a hoe. It seemed to him a perfect place to obtain some food for his labour. He walked up the path and when the women saw him coming, they stopped working, their stares following him. Both were tall and thin with grey streaks in their hair, and the one holding the hoe looked older.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” he said, doffing his hat. “It’s a fine day for gardenin’, ain’t it? I’m just passin’ through, bound for Texas, and since I don’t see no menfolk around, wondered if I could trade some hard work for a meal. I’m John Ware, recent from South Carolina.”

  Both women appraised him. The older one spoke. “Well, John Ware from South Carolina, I can tell by your manners that your mama raised you right, and you surely look like you be capable of handlin’ a man’s work. I be ’Liz’beth Adams and this be my sister, Emma, but you can call her Em and me Liza. Or ma’am, if that sets better with you. There’s a heap of small logs in back in need of sawin’ and splittin’ and pilin’, and if you can see fit to do that for us, why we’ll see fit to set one more place at the supper table.”