“I carried up furniture,” Lavender says, “and washed the windows, but never come for socializing. I suppose if it be known I was here now, you might say you ast me.”
“Sure,” I told him, and then you know how a person will feel self-pity when he’s sick: “I reckon you’re the only one who cares whether I live or die. You’re the only one who come.”
“You just don’t recall,” he says. “The Lady was here all the time, and the Reverend made his prayers and I reckon had he not you’d be stone-cold and they’d have dug a hole in the ground and drapped you in and shoveled the earth back on and stomped it down.”
“Well,” I says, “so long as it didn’t happen I wish you wouldn’t go on about it in such detail. Do you figure it was God who saved me when asked by the Reverend?”
Lavender gets a sly look. “That doctor ain’t likely to have done it when he run Lucy off from giving you any of her tonic what is made from roots and suchlike and will cure any ailment. I tell you, there was a time when everything I et turned to poison and my stomach felt like a fishnet. Lucy give me her tonic and inside a week I could chew up and swally a bone like a dog and never tell the difference from a bowl of mush.”
I said: “Why don’t you set upon the chair there?”
“I wouldn’t mind it a-tall,” says he and does as much, a little stiff at first and then gradually taking his ease. “Say now, that was a funny thing, you taking me for an Indian. I never knowed they was black.”
I just realized I had a mustard plaster on my chest, because it started to itch, and so I was scratching while we talked.
I says: “I saw a Cheyenne dark as you down on the Solomon’s Fork. They called him Mohkstavihi, which is the same name they give to any colored person like yourself.”
“Black Man?”
“No, Black White Man.”
He laughed out loud at that, then stopped short and nodded serious. “I got to burn leaves now,” he says and goes out. I wonder if I had hurt his feelings, but it was the truth, which is supposed to make you free.
However, back he come the following day, when Mrs. Pendrake had gone out shopping again and the Reverend was in his study, and this time Lavender never feared Lucy on account of he got bold enough to ask Pendrake’s permission to see me, which was granted.
He also took the chair without being asked, which was O.K. by me, for owing to my upbringing I never had no views on how fresh you should let a darky get, though that was a worrisome thing to plenty of whites in Missouri.
It turned out that Lavender was fascinated by Indians. I have said Mrs. P. listened that first day to my experiences, but that was the end of it, so I suppose she did then just to be mannerly. And anybody else I run into would have rather died than asked me about that subject, I reckon.
But Lavender couldn’t get enough of it. I would have thought he was going to write a book had he not been illiterate.
After a time he says: “That dark Indian you told me about seeing on the Solomon River, I been thinking on him, and I figure he might be kin.” Lavender was a smart fellow; he couldn’t read nor write and never had a day of schooling, but he knowed a great deal of things. He started talking now about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, who we hadn’t yet got around to in the school, for their names was new to me.
“Why,” he says, “them white men went up the river until it got so skinny they could stand with one foot on the right bank and one on the left, and then found the tiny hole it trickled out of, and could have stuck a finger in it and stopped it off, and you wouldn’t have had no more Missouri River but just a big ditch of mud two thousand miles long, dryin’ and crackin’ in the sun.”
I didn’t believe him, but later I heard it was true-I mean about Lewis and Clark being real people; whether they could have stopped off the Missouri with one finger was another thing.
“Captain Lewis and Captain Clark took along a colored man named York, and the Indians had never seen a colored man before and thought York was painted black, so would spit on their hands and try to rub York’s color off, and when they couldn’t, they’d tell all the other redskins for miles around and they would all come and try to rub the paint off him too.
“York was the most interesting thing the Indians found about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark. And you know what he done, for he was right humorous, he told them Indians he had started life as a wild animal and Captain Clark caught him in a snare and tamed him into a man. Then he roared and showed his teeth and the Indians would run away. But they took a great liking to York, give him presents and had him lay with their women so as to get some black babies.”
Lavender raised his eyebrows. He said: “Now it is likely if you was to go out there today you would run into some of his offspring, which it looks to me like you done. York was a first cousin to my granddaddy. I believe he was the most famous person in my family.”
“It could be,” says I.
“The more I think about it, the surer I am,” Lavender says, and then he leans over close to me, keeping his voice down: “I don’t mind telling you I’m fixing to go out there myself.… Now you go and mention that to Lucy and I’ll be in trouble.”
“You ain’t taking her along?”
“That’s my reason for leaving,” he whispers, while looking fearfully towards the doorway. “You let a woman catch you and you’ll have reason to be sorry for it every minute of the day. Now the Reverend bought me from my old master and he freed me according to law. I have heerd him say: ‘No man must own another.’ Then he makes me marry Lucy, for I expect he believe it’s all right for a woman to own a man. The way I look at it, I had one benefit from law and one defect, so I am even now and before I get to losing I want to go out where they don’t have any laws a-tall and are purely savage.”
“Maybe we should go together,” I said. Until that minute I never had thought of running away from the Pendrakes, for they had treated me well, but I had been in civilization for a couple of months now and still couldn’t see no sense to it whenever Mrs. P. wasn’t around. Now I was sick in this shameful way: you hadn’t ought to be made ill by the rain, which is a natural thing. What it meant was that I wasn’t living right. About the only time I felt proper in town is when I throwed that kid Luke English to the ground and went for my knife. And I believed my blood was getting watery from the lack of raw buffalo liver. The only thing I learned so far that seemed to take real root was lustful yearnings, and the Reverend told me they was wrong.
“If you can wait till I am better-” I began.
But Lavender frowned and said: “I ain’t going to listen to that talk. The difference between me and you is I am colored and you is a boy. Now nobody has no call to stop a colored man who ain’t a slave from running off, but if he takes a boy with him, he got trouble with the law again.”
“Listen,” says I, “once we get beyond Fort Leavenworth, I’ll be taking
That hurt his pride and he mumbled some with his eyes down, and he allows: “Well, I’m going tonight, anyway. I would wait if I could, but I cain’t.”
“What difference would another few days make?” For I thought to be up within that time.
“Ever hour is a living agony,” says Lavender. “It is a monstrosity of nature for man to be ruled by woman.”
I figured he got them words from something Pendrake said, so I asked if Lucy give him so much trouble, why didn’t he get advice on it from the Reverend?
“Look here,” Lavender tells me, “I ain’t going to say nothing against your Daddy.”
“He is my Pa,” says I, “only in that law you was talking about, and it is a wondrous thing how a man can get himself new relatives by signing a piece of paper.” It made a real mark on Lavender that I never held a high opinion of law, either, and like himself was a victim of it, though not in his discomfort.
He sort of shrugs with his mouth and says in a low voice: “He ain’t going to get none in the usual way.”
My back started to ache from a twitch of muscle, and I shifted my position in bed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” But I knowed well enough, and my back felt worse at the new angle.
Lavender winced and drew back. “I don’t want to get me in trouble.”
“I thought you was going to run off tonight.”
He opened his eyes. “That’s right,” he says and grins in relief. “That’s right, I sure am.”
“You reach me over that paper and pencil on the desk, I’ll draw you a map of where to find the Cheyenne.” I told him quite a number of useful items on how to get along with the Indians, concluding with: “Now you can be
