James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

“At the sawmill. They killing me out there.” He glanced at me. “I see you living high.”

“Why you giving me the evil eye? I ain’t got run of this place.”

He glanced nervously ’round the pen. “I wish they’d’a kept me at the sawmill. These niggers in here are gonna kill me.”

“Stop talking crazy,” I said.

“Nobody talks to me. They don’t say nar word to me. Nothing.” He nodded at Sibonia in the back corner, cackling and crowing on her wooden crate. The coloreds surrounded her, working the ground garden with rakes and shovels, making a silent wall ’round her, pushing dirt, slinging up rocks and weeding. Bob nodded at Sibonia. “That one there, she’s a witch. She’s under a mad spell.”

“No, she ain’t. I owe her now on account of you.”

“You owe the devil, then.”

“I done it for you, brother.”

“Don’t call me brother. Your favors ain’t worth shit. Look where I got ’cause of you. I can’t hardly bear to look at you. Look at you,” he snorted. “All high-siddity, playing a sissy, eating well, living inside. I’m out here in the cold and rain. And you sportin’ that new, fancy dress.”

“You said running ’round this way was a good idea!” I hissed.

“I ain’t say get me kilt!”

Behind Bob, a sudden hush come over the yard. The rakes and hoes moved quicker, and every head snapped down to the ground like they was tending work hard. Someone whispered in a hurried fashion, “Darg!” and Bob quickly slipped over to the other side of the yard. He got busy with the rest ’round Sibonia, pulling weeds in the garden.

The back door of a tiny hut on the other side of the slave pen opened up, and a huge colored feller emerged. He was nearly tall as Frederick, but just as wide. He had a thick chest, wide shoulders, and big, thick arms. He wore a straw hat and coveralls and a shawl around his shoulders. His lips was the color of hemp rope, and his eyes was so small and close together, they might as well have been shoved in the same socket. That fool was ugly enough to make you think the Lord put him together with His eyes closed, guessing. But there was power in that man, too, he was raw powerful, and looked big enough to pick up a house. He moved quick, slipping to the edge of the pen a minute and pausing there, peering in, air whooshing out huge nostrils, then he moved along the side to the gate to where I stood.

I backed off when he come, but when he got close, he removed his hat.

“Evening, pretty redbone,” he said, “what you need at my pen?”

“Pie sent me here,” I lied. I didn’t think it was a good thing to bring Miss Abby up, just in case he said something to her about it, for while I had never seen him inside the saloon, knowing he was boss of that yard meant he could pass word to her some kind of way. I weren’t supposed to be there and reckoned he knowed it.

He licked his lips. “Don’t mention that high-siddity bitch to me. What you need?”

“Me and my friend here”—I pointed to Bob—“was just having a word.”

“You soft on Bob, girl?”

“I ain’t soft on him in no way, form, or fashion. I is here to merely visit him.”

He smirked. “This is my yard,” he said. “I tends to it. But if the missus say so, it’s all right, it’s all right. If she don’t, you got to move on. You check with her and come back. Unless”—he smiled, showing a row of huge white teeth—“you can be Darg’s friend. Do old Darg a sweet favor, give him a li’l sugar. You old enough.”

I would step off to hell before I touched that monster-looking nigger with a stick. I backed off quick. “It ain’t that important,” I said, and I was gone. I took one last look at Bob before I cut inside. He had his back turned, pulling weeds in the garden fast as he could, the devil keeping score. I betrayed him, is how he felt. He didn’t want no parts of me. And I couldn’t help him. He was on his own.

I got nervous about the whole bit and told it to Pie. When she heard I was in the yard, she was furious. “Who told you to consort with them outside niggers?”

“I was looking in on Bob.”

“Hell with Bob. You gonna bring trouble for us all! Did Darg say sumpthing ’bout me?”

“He didn’t bring a word on you.”

“You’s a bad liar,” she snapped. She cussed Darg for several minutes, then throwed me in for good measure. “Keep off them low-down, no-count niggers. Either that, or don’t come ’round me.”

Well, that done it. For I loved Pie. She was the mother I never had. The sister I loved. Course I had other ideas, too, ’bout who she was to me, and them ideas was full of stinkin’, down-low thoughts which weren’t all bad when I thunk them up, so that stopped me from thinking about Bob and Sibonia and the pen altogether. Just quit it altogether. Love blinded me. I was busy anyhow. Pie was the busiest whore on the Hot Floor. She had heaps of customers: Pro Slavers, Free Staters, farmers, gamblers, thieves, preachers, even Mexicans and Indians lined up outside her door. Me being her consort, I was privileged to line ’em up in order of importance. I come to know quite a few important people in this fashion, including a judge named Fuggett, who I’ll get to in a minute.

My days was generally the same. Every afternoon when Pie got up, I brung her coffee and biscuits and we would set and talk about the previous night’s events and so forth, and she’d laugh about some feller who’d made a fool of hisself on the Hot Floor one way or the other. Being that I cavorted all over the tavern and she spent the night working, she missed out on events in the saloon, which privileged me to give her the gossip on who done what and who shot John and the like downstairs. I didn’t mention the slave pen to her no more, but it was always on my mind, for I owed Sibonia, and she didn’t strike me as the type a body ought to owe something to. Every once in a while Sibonia would slip word for me through some colored or other to come out to see her and live up to my promise of teaching her letters. Problem was, getting out there was tough business. The pen could be seen from every window in the hotel, and the slavery question seemed to be putting Pikesville on edge. Even in normal times, fistfights was common out west on the prairie in them days. Kansas and Missouri drawed all types of adventurers—Irishman, German, Russian, land speculators, gold diggers. Between cheap whiskey, land claim disputes, the red man fighting for their land, and low women, your basic western settler was prone to a good dustup at any time. But nothing stirred up a row better than the slavery question, and that seemed to press in on Pikesville at that time. There was so much punching and stabbing and stealing and shouting on account of it, Miss Abby often wondered aloud if she ought to get out of the slave game altogether.

She often set up in the saloon smoking cigars and playing poker with the men, and one night, while she throwed cards at the table with a few of the more well-off fellers from town, she piped out, “Between the Free Staters and my niggers running off, slavery’s getting to be a bother. The real danger in this territory is there’s too many guns floating around. What if the nigger gets armed?”

The men at the table, sipping whiskey and holding their cards, laughed her off. “Your basic Negro is trustworthy,” one said.

“Why, I’d arm my slaves,” said another.

“I’d trust my slave with my life,” said another. But not long after that, one of his slaves drawed a knife on him, and he sold every single slave he had.

I was mulling these things in my head, course, for I was smelling a rat in all of it. Something was happening outside of town, but word on it was thin. Like most things in life, you don’t know nothing till you want to know it, and don’t see what you don’t want to see, but all that talk about slavery was drawing water for something, and not long after, I found out.