Never Too Late (2 page)
Authors: Michael Phillips
“Look out!” cried several of the riders, hurriedly getting their own mounts out of the way.
“Don't let him through!” shouted another. “Keep the circle tight . . . shoot him if he tries to make a break for it!”
The instant the horses from inside stampeded past them, they closed ranks, guarding every inch of the perimeter so that no human could follow the horses and escape.
The explosions of gunfire, followed so quickly by a plume of smoke rising from the liveryâa tinderbox of straw and dried woodâbrought everyone running out of stores and homes looking about to find the cause of the commotion. Mr. Watson was one of the first men into the
street. Glancing toward the livery, he shouted for the fire brigade. Within seconds a dozen men were running toward the scene.
In the bank, someone shouted, “The livery's on fire!”
At Watson's mill, Jeremiah Patterson had been working inside. He too heard the shouts and was only seconds after his boss into the street. Ward and Templeton ran up to join him from the direction of the bank. The instant he saw where the smoke was coming from, Jeremiah sprinted ahead of them toward the livery.
People were running and shouting from everywhere now.
Inside the burning building, the dense, suffocating smoke was so thick that Henry could see nothing. All was blackness about him. He grabbed a bucket half full of water from near the anvil and doused it over his head and shirt, then dropped to the floor, avoiding the smoke and trying to breathe the little air coming through what openings it could find beneath the flames. Any possible route of escape was gone.
Already flames from the front of the livery rose crackling into the sky. The building was too far gone for the makeshift fire brigade to hope to accomplish anything. Though men were shouting and running from all corners of town, one look at the place and they knew it was too late. Whatever they might have tried to do otherwise, most slowed down as they drew closer, intimidated at the sight of a circle of hooded men surrounding the blaze. No livery stable was worth getting killed for by
that
crowdâthey would probably be crazy enough to start shooting if someone made a move to help. All they could attempt to
do now was keep the fire from spreading.
As more and more people reached the scene, no one held out much hope that life would be found inside once the flames began to subside.
I don't suppose Negroes in the United States of America would ever be able to think of themselves apart from slavery
.
It was slavery even more than the color of our skin that defined who we wereâas individuals and as a race. Some of us were lighter (like me, because I was half white). Some were darker. But all of us who had been bought and sold before the War Between the States had been slaves together, whatever the shade of our skin
.
Of course there were lots of free blacks in the United States, mostly in the North. There were free blacks like Henry in the South too. Some of them had had kind white owners who had freed them on their own. Others had managed to buy their freedom. And then some, like Henryâthough I doubt there were too many like himâwho had won their freedom on a bet over whether or not Henry could break a wild horse. When he'd accomplished the feat, Henry's former owner was mad as a March hare thinking Henry'd honey-fuggled him. But because he'd made the bet in front of another white man, he couldn't back down. So Henry gained his freedom and had eventually wound up in Greens Crossing
.
But what I was fixing to say was that I doubted even free blacks in this country could think of themselves apart from slavery either. To be a Negro in those days was either to be a slave yourself, or to hurt from the sting of slavery for the rest of your race. We were all free now, several years after the war, thanks to Abraham Lincoln. But we all still hurt from the memories
.
Probably blacks in the United States would always hurt from it, no matter how much time passed. Maybe slavery would always be part of what it meant to be an American Negro
.
I had only known one black person in all my life who had never been a slave ever. His name was Micah Duff and he'd come from up North. He had recently married our friend Emma and they were now on their way out west. Micah hadn't been a slave, but now he was married to Emma, who had been. They'd lost Emma's little boy William because of slavery. And so even free Micah Duff would always know the pain of slavery too
.
Since I'd grown up as a slave, I had only learned to read a few years agoâthanks to my friend and cousin Katie Clairborneâthough I still wasn't that good a reader. I hadn't had much schooling either, because slaves weren't taught much of anything except how to work hard. Everything I knew about what I reckon you'd call the bigger world out beyond Rosewood (that's the plantation where Katie and I lived) I'd learned from books or from Katie or from my papa, Templeton Daniels. But I still didn't know
much about history or the rest of the world and other countries, or even other places in this country
.
But I was about to find out about somebody who'd grown up a long way from North Carolina, just as far away as Micah Duff had been in Chicagoâalthough in the other direction. She was from a place not far from New Orleans, down where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It's a place where the weather can get mighty severe sometimes
.
A W
ORLD
L
ONG
B
EFORE THE
W
AR
2
A
N AUTUMN BONFIRE HAD ALMOST BURNT ITSELF
out under the Louisiana night sky.
The remaining embers glowed dull orange in a bed of ash. The black revelers from the slave village on the De Seille plantation who had gathered after dusk to sing hymns and spirituals had mostly dispersed to their cabins.
A black girl of six or seven still sat staring into the dying fire, her back propped against a tree in drowsy content, eyes nearly shut. The words of the last hymn echoed again in her brain.
When we's in that glorious place
All dem tears gone from our face
We be free
.
A rustling in the brush roused her. She opened her eyes to see a tall boy three or four years older. He crept forward, then crouched over the dying embers and prodded them with a long stick.
“What you doin', Mose?” asked the girl.
“You still here, Seffie?” the boy said, glancing around.
“I got sleepy.”
“I gots me some nuts for roastin',” said Mose. “Want one?” He held out a plump pecan in its shell.
She shook her head. “I ate enuff already.”
“Den you'd bes' be goin',” said the boy she had called Mose. “I heard yo' mama axin' 'bout you.”
Slowly she rose and wandered toward the fire.
“You really gwine roast dem nuts?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“It's too late.”
“Not fo me. Da fire's jes' right fo roastin'.”
He tossed three or four pecans from his pocket into the edge of the ashes, then stirred at them with his stick to keep them from bursting into flame.
“Where you git dem nuts?” asked the girl.
“Off de groun' where dey fell off da trees ober yonder.”
“Will you git me a stick, Mose, so I kin play wiff da fire too.”
“I ain't playin', Seffie. I's roastin' dese nuts. 'Sides, you's too young ter play wiff a fire like dis. Fire's dangerous. Ain't nuthin' ter play wiff nohow.”
Seffie sat down and stared into the red-orange embers, mesmerized by the glow, as Mose continued to poke and prod at his little stash of nuts, whose shells were now blackening and smoking.
After another minute or two, he rolled them out of the fire toward him with the end of his stick, then anxiously waited for them to cool.
“You shore you doesn't want one er dese nice nuts, Seffie?”
he said, picking one up and tossing it back and forth in his hands as he blew to cool it down enough to hold.
But his young companion had grown sleepy again.
Slowly she rose, leaving Mose alone with the dying fire and the treasure of his few nuts.
When the girl called Seffie reached the row of shacks, a big black woman swept down on her and hustled her inside one of the smaller cabins.
“Seffie, where you been?” scolded the girl's mother. “I been lookin' all roun' fo you! Come on, git in here. Hit's long past time you wuz in yo bed.”
The child came in and was soon asleep in the corner with her older brothers and sisters. She awoke only an hour or two later from loud shouts and pounding feet.
When she opened her eyes, flickering shapes and a strange glow filled the cabin. Smoke stung her eyes and throat.
“Mama! Mama!” she cried. “What is it?”
“Hurry, chil', git on yo feet an' follow me,” said her mother, snatching her hand and yanking her to her feet.
The little cabin was full of people. The youngest children, two toddlers and a baby, were crying, and Seffie's mother and a crippled toothless old woman they all called “Aunt Phoebe” were trying to save what few possessions they had in case the cabin went up in flames.
Hurrying out into the chilly night air, the cause for the uproar was immediately visible. The woodshed and a large pile of dried chunks of oak waiting to be stacked inside were on fire and sending flames twenty or more feet into the air. Tiny hot glowing cinders sprayed upward and floated on a southerly breeze ominously toward the slave
village. All the black men were running with water buckets from the stream and dousing the walls and roofs closest to the blaze. The master and several of his men from the big house were there, boots hurriedly pulled on over nightclothes, shouting out orders to make sure the fire did not spread.
Early the next morning, while a few wisps of smoke still rose from what had been the pile of split oak and the woodhouse, the overseer shouted for all the slaves to come out from their cabins.
“That fire last night wasn't no accident,” he said in a stern voice as soon as they were gathered. “The master gave you permission to have your bonfire and sing your songs and now look what's happened. Our next winter's wood supply and the woodhouseâthey're all gone. You're going to have to cut and haul us a whole new batch of wood, and that's after your regular work is done. The master's mighty upset with all of you and he told me to thrash every one of you unless I bring him the name of whoever let that fire spread, 'cause he knows it came on account of that fire of yours and wasn't no accident. So unless you want whippings all around, he wants to know who it was.”
He stopped and stared around at the thirty or forty silent black faces with a look that said he secretly hoped no one would speak up so that he could have the pleasure of whipping every one of them.
A long uncomfortable pause followed. A young black boy of eleven or twelve suddenly stepped forward.