John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Treat the damn mules better than us.”

Achille points out to a trio of smallish men hacking at a stand of cane. “You want to trade places with them?”

Royal just squeezes the rock.

“Ever chop cane, Roy?”

“No.”

“That sugar will eat a man up.” Achille frowns out at the field as they pass, their smoke spreading behind them, drifting downward. “Harvest season one year when I was only un ti boug , my maman say go find your père cause it was nearly dark and he not home. I walk out by the field and there I see him, lay out on his face in the red dirt of the road and I know from how he looks he is dead. Not move a thing. But when I come close he is breathing. Just so weary he can’t make it home without he lie down and sleep some, right there in the road.”

Royal turns to watch the cane-cutters disappear behind the rear of the train.

“So I sit by him and maybe one hour, two hour, he wake up and see me, don’t say a word, just stand and start out for home. Let me carry his long knife.”

“Them boys not really cuttin sugar,” says Cooper. “They just practicin. Sneak up on Corporal Junior here some night and whack! whack! ” He makes a chopping gesture to Junior’s neck.

“Only if you fall asleep on sentry duty,” says Junior.

They pass a shacky-looking mill, a single water buffalo plodding in a circle to turn spiked, hardwood rollers while one man jams stalks of green cane in between them, snapping and cracking, the juice running down a bamboo trough the carabao carefully steps over into a huge iron pot smoking over a furnace sunk in a pit, another Filipino pulling the crushed cane out to be spread in the field while a third, a sinewy, sweat-pouring man in nothing but a loincloth, feeds the furnace from a stack of dried stalks, all of them looking like they’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. The smoke from the pot, smelling of burned sugar, drifts across the track as the soldiers roll by.

“Them people change place with any of us up on these rocks in a minute,” says Achille, shaking his head. “Workin that sugar eat a man right up.”

San Fernando is a big town or a small city and the train station is the grandest they’ve seen outside of Manila. The church and the casa municipal and some of the nicer houses have been knocked apart by American artillery or burned down by the rebels before they left but life is going on here, market day, women walking with big wide baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, no hands, women plucking chickens to sell while they’re still flapping, a band with an accordion and a fiddle and a boy drumming on some kerosene cans on the platform and the people about their business, putting up with the soldiers from different units walking among them like they put up with the typhoons that sweep through or the daily rain showers or the stifling heat, just another unchangeable thing in the world. The soldiers pass their rifles down and jump off the gondola and are lined up in twos with Company F and marched double time through the streets.

“I gots to wee-wee, Sarge,” calls Hardaway.

“You can do that when we get where we’re going,” says Jacks without turning around.

“Where that is?”

“They’ll tell us when we get there.”

They are marched double time through San Fernando, sweat-sticky and covered with ash, and head away on a wagon road to the northeast. A pack of little boys follow for a while, laughing and pointing excitedly at the smoked yankees, the boldest working up the nerve to dart forward and touch Royal on the back of his hand.

In Cuba after the Dons surrendered, the little boys, skinny and hungry as they were, would lug your rifle for you on a long march, three, four, five miles hoping maybe you’d stop to eat and they get a scrap of hardtack out of it. Raggedy-ass, smiling, every color you could imagine. Here the word has come down that you don’t even let them near, any googoo over ten year old as like to cut your throat as look at you.

“Look like we the first colored been up this far,” says Too Tall. “Folks don’t know what we about.”

“Then it’s up to me to spread the news,” says Coop.

Clouds hang low in the broad sky. Companies H and F in dusty blue march down the red dirt road between deep green rice paddies dotted white with cattle egrets, one hundred twenty men with rifles on their shoulders and two dozen coolies staggering after them under packs and cases. It is rice-harvest time, women in broad hats bending to sickle handfuls of the stalks close to the ground, then binding them into bundles hung on tentlike wooden racks to dry. The Filipinas are careful to keep their faces turned away, but a huge carabao steps forward to get a closer look, chewing, snot running from its nose, a cloud of flies lifting and following, then resettling on its glistening black hide when it stops at the edge of the dirt road.

“Lookit that, Too Tall mama come out to greet us.”

“She that good-lookin, Too Tall, how come you so ugly?”

“And what that big ole thing hanging twixt her legs?”

“Googoos come after you sorry-ass niggers,” says Too Tall, who is dark-skinned and used to this, expects it, even, “don’t count on no help from me.”

“Somethin wrong,” says Corporal Pickney suddenly, looking up into the sky.

“What that?”

“It aint rainin.”

“Got to wait till they not one tree left we can stand under,” says Gamble, “then she gonna dump on us. I see one way over there.”

“My people had come to these islands, see what the weather is like, they would of kept on sailin.”

“Sailin, shit. Didn’t nobody in your family ever get let up on the deck to look at no islands, man.”

“I’m talkin way back. Story is they sailed in boats, knew how to swim—”

“If they was ever in the water it was with a rope around their ankle, some white man trolling for alligators.”

“Couldn’t use you for bait. Scare them gators away.”

“This enemy territory, less you all forgot,” calls Sergeant Jacks. “Might want to keep that noise down.”

“We aint sneaking up on nobody, Sarge,” Cooper calls back. “Hell, they can see for clear twenty miles across these fields.”

“Yeah, right about now they gone to wake General Aggy up from his nap, tell him the 25th is coming to grab his little googoo ass.”

“Can’t catch nobody you can’t find.”

“Hey, if we was to catch him—”

“Aguinaldo, shit,” says Coop. “Aggy aint but just one damn general. These people got more generals runnin around in these boondocks — hell, you own a pair of shoes they gone make you a Captain at least.”

“What’s this?”

Junior steps out of formation and pulls off a square of paper tacked to a telegraph pole.

“Junior mama left him a grocery list.”

There is a drawing of a black man at the top of the paper, hanging dead from a tree, his head cocked at an unnatural angle.

“ To the Colored American Soldier —” reads Junior.

“That be us,” says Hardaway.

“ Why do you make war on us, freedom-loving men of the same hue, when at home the whites lynch your brothers in Georgia and Alabama— ”

“And Mississippi and Florida and Texas—”

“ It is without honor that you shed your precious blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purpose — to make you the instrument of their ambition. Your hard work will make extinction of your race— it’s very well written,” says Junior, scanning down the page.

“—and Kansas and Missouri and Indiana—”

“The googoos think we gonna join up with them?”