James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

I know this was a whorehouse, but it weren’t bad at all. Fact is, I never knowed a Negro from that day to this but who couldn’t lie to themselves about their own evil while pointing out the white man’s wrong, and I weren’t no exception. Miss Abby was a slaveholder true enough, but she was a good slaveholder. She was a lot like Dutch. She runned a lot of businesses, which meant the businesses mostly runned her. Whoring was almost a sideline for her. She also runned a sawmill, a hog pen, a slave pen, kept a gambling house, had a tin-making machine, plus she was in competition with the tavern across the street that didn’t have a colored slave like Pie to bring in money, for Pie was her main attraction. I was right at home in her place, living ’round gamblers and pickpockets who drank rotgut and pounded each other’s brains out over card games. I was back in bondage, true, but slavery ain’t too troublesome when you’re in the doing of it and growed used to it. Your meals is free. Your roof is paid for. Somebody else got to bother themselves about you. It was easier than being on the trail, running from posses and sharing a roasted squirrel with five others while the Old Man was hollering over the whole roasted business to the Lord for an hour before you could even get to the vittles, and even then there weren’t enough meat on it to knock the edges off the hunger you was feeling. I was living well and clean forgot about Bob. Just plain forgot about him.

But you could see the slave pen from Pie’s window. They had couple of huts back there, a canvas cover that stretched over part of it that was fenced all ’round, and once in a while, between my scamperings ’round working, I’d stop, scratch out a clean spot on the glass, and take a peek. If it weren’t raining, you could see the colored congregated and bunched up out in the yard near a little garden they put together. Otherwise, if it was raining or cold, they stayed under the canvas. From time to time I’d take a look out the window to see if I could spot old Bob. Never could, and after a few weeks I got to wondering about him. I spoke to Pie about it one afternoon while she sat on her bed combing her hair.

“Oh, he’s around,” she said. “Miss Abby ain’t sold him. Let him be, darling.”

“I thought I might bring him some victuals to eat.”

“Leave them niggers in the yard alone,” she said. “They’re trouble.”

I found that confusing, for they done her no wrong, and nothing they could do would hurt Pie’s game. She was right popular. Miss Abby gived her the run of the place, let her choose her own customers more or less, and live as she wanted. Pie even closed down the saloon at times. Them coloreds couldn’t hurt her game. But I kept quiet on it, and one evening I couldn’t stand it no more. I slipped down to the slave pen to see about Bob.

The slave pen was in an alley behind the hotel, right off the dining room back door. Soon as you opened that door you stepped into an alley, and two steps across it and you was there. It was a penned-in area, and beside it was a little open area in the back where the colored set on crates, played cards, and had a little vegetable garden. Behind that was a hog pen, which opened right to the colored pen for easy tending of Miss Abby’s hogs.

Inside both them pens combined—the pen where they fed the pigs and the pen where the slaves lived and kept a garden—I reckon it was about twenty men, women, and children in there. Up close it weren’t the same sight that it was from above, and right then I knowed why Pie kept away and wanted me off from it. It was evening, for most of ’em was out working during the day, and the dusk settling on that place, and the swill of them Negroes—most of ’em dark-skinned, pure Negroes like Bob—was downright troubling. The smell of the place was infernal. Most was dressed in mostly rags and some without shoes. They wandered ’round the pen, some setting, doing nothing, others fooling ’round a bit in the garden, and there in the middle of ’em, they kinda circled ’round a figure, a wild woman cackling and babbling like a chicken. She sounded like her mind was a little soft, babbling like she was, but I couldn’t make out no words.

I walked to the fence. Several men and women were working along the back end of it, feeding hogs and tending the garden there, and when they seed me they glanced up, but never stopped working. It was twilight now. Just about dark. I stuck my face to the fence and said, “Anybody see Bob?”

The Negroes gathered at the back of the pen working with shovels and rakes kept working and didn’t say nary a word. But that silly fool in the middle of the yard, a heavyset, settle-aged colored woman setting on a wooden box, cackling and babbling, she got to cackling louder. She had a large, round face. She was really off her knob the closer you got to her, for up close, the box she set on was pushed deep into the muddy ground nearly up to its top, it was wedged so deep, and she set on it, commenting and cackling and warbling about nothing. She seen me and croaked, “Pretty, pretty, yeller, yeller!”

I ignored her and spoke generally. “Anybody seen a feller named Bob?” I asked.

Nobody said nothing, and that feebleminded thing clucked and swished her head ’round like a bird, gobbling like a turkey. “Pretty, pretty, yeller, yeller.”

“He’s a colored feller, ’bout this high,” I said to the others.

But that crazy thing kept her mouth busy. “Knee-deep, knee-deep, goin’ ’round, goin’ ’round!” she cackled.

She was feebleminded. I looked to the other Negroes in the pen. “Anybody see Bob?” I said. I said it loud enough for all of ’em to hear it, and nar soul looked at me twice. They busied themselves on with them hogs and their little garden like I weren’t there.

I climbed the first rung of the fence and stuck my face high over it and said louder, “Anybody see B—” and before I could finish, I was struck in the face by a mud ball. That crazy fool woman setting on the box scooped up another handful of mud by the time I looked, and throwed that in my face.

“Hey!”

“Goin’ ’round. Goin’ ’round!” she howled. She had got up from her box, came to the edge of the fence where I was, picked up another mud ball, and throwed that, and that one got me in the jaw. “Knee-deep!” she crowed.

I flew hot as the devil. “Damn stupid fool!” I said. “Git! Git away from me!” I would have climbed in there and dunked her head in the mud, but another colored woman, a tall, slender slip of water, broke off from the rest on the other side of the pen, dug the crazy woman’s box out the mud, and come over. “Don’t mind her. She’s feebleminded,” she said.

“Don’t I know it.”

She set the crazy woman’s box down by the edge of the fence, set her own down, and said, “Sit by me, Sibonia.” The crazy coot calmed down and done it. The woman turned to me and said, “What you need?”

“She needs a flogging,” I said. “I reckon Miss Abby would flog her righteous if I was to tell it. I works inside, you know.” That was privileged, see, to work inside. That gived you more juice with the white man.

A couple of colored men pushing that hog slop ’round with rakes and shovels glanced over at me, but the woman talking to me shot a look at them, and they looked away. I was a fool, see, for I didn’t know the dangerous waters I was treading in.

“I’m Libby,” she said. “This here’s my sister, Sibonia. You awful young to be talking about flogging. What you want?”

“I am looking for Bob.”

“Don’t know no Bob,” Libby said.

Behind her, Sibonia hooted, “No Bob. No Bob,” and chucked a fresh mud ball at me, which I dodged.

“He’s got to be here.”