gone.”
“Nonsense,” father said. “Lock up your house and we’ll take you on to Aunt Rachel’s.”
“‘Twont do no good,” Nancy said. She didn’t look at father now, but he looked down at her, at her long, limp, moving hands. “Putting it off won’t do no good.”
“Then what do you want to do?” father said.
“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “I can’t do nothing. Just put it off. And that don’t do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain’t no more than mine.”
“Get what?” Caddy said. “What’s yours?”
“Nothing,” father said. “You all must get to bed.”
“Caddy made me come,” Jason said.
“Go on to Aunt Rachel’s,” father said.
“It won’t do no good,” Nancy said. She sat before the fire, her elbows on her knees, her long hands between her knees. “When even your own kitchen wouldn’t do no good. When even if I was sleeping on the floor in the room with your chillen, and the next morning there I am, and blood ”
“Hush,” father said. “Lock the door and put out the lamp and go to bed.”
“I scared of the dark,” Nancy said. “I scared for it to happen in the dark.”
“You mean you’re going to sit right here with the lamp lighted?” father said. Then Nancy began to make the sound again, sitting before the fire, her long hands between her knees. “Ah, damnation,” father said. “Come along, chillen. It’s past bedtime.”
“When yawl go home, I gone,” Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. “Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady.”
Mr. Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. One morning his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone.
We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings.
“Nonsense,” father said. “You’ll be the first thing I’ll see in the kitchen tomorrow morning.”
“You’ll see what you’ll see, I reckon,” Nancy said. “But it will take the Lord to say what that will be.”
VI
WE LEFT HER sitting before the fire.
“Come and put the bar up,” father said. But she didn’t move. She didn’t look at us again, sitting quietly there between the lamp and the fire. From some distance down the lane we could look back and see her through the open door.
“What, Father?” Caddy said. “What’s going to happen?”
“Nothing,” father said. Jason was on father’s back, so Jason was the tallest of all of us. We went down into the ditch. I looked at it, quiet. I couldn’t see much where the moonlight and the shadows tangled.
“If Jesus is hid here, he can see us, can’t he?” Caddy said.
“He’s not there,” father said. “He went away a long time ago.”
“You made me come,” Jason said, high; against the sky it looked like father had two heads, a little one and a big one.
“I didn’t want to.”
We went up out of the ditch. We could still see Nancy’s house and the open door, but we couldn’t see Nancy now, sitting before the fire with the door open, because she was tired. “I just done got tired,” she said. “I just a nigger. It ain’t no fault of mine.”
But we could hear her, because she began just after we came up out of the ditch, the sound that was not singing and not unsinging. “Who will do our washing now, Father?” I said.
“I’m not a nigger,” Jason said, high and close above father’s head.
“You’re worse,” Caddy said, “you are a tattletale. If something was to jump out, you’d be scairder than a nigger.”
“I wouldn’t,” Jason said.
“You’d cry,” Caddy said.
“Caddy,” father said.
“I wouldn’t!” Jason said.
“Scairy cat,” Caddy said.
“Candace!” father said.
III. THE WILDERNESS
Red Leaves
I
THE TWO INDIANS crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. Neat with whitewash, of baked soft brick, the two rows of houses in which lived the slaves belonging to the clan, faced one another across the mild shade of the lane marked and scored with naked feet and with a few homemade toys mute in the dust. There was no sign of life.
“I know what we will find,” the first Indian said.
“What we will not find,” the second said. Although it was noon, the lane was vacant, the doors of the cabins empty and quiet; no cooking smoke rose from any of the chinked and plastered chimneys.
“Yes. It happened like this when the father of him who is now the Man, died.”
“You mean, of him who was the Man.”
“Yao.”
The first Indian’s name was Three Basket. He was perhaps sixty. They were both squat men, a little solid, burgherlike; paunchy, with big heads, big, broad, dust-colored faces of a certain blurred serenity like carved heads on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra, looming out of a mist. The sun had done it, the violent sun, the violent shade. Their hair looked like sedge grass on burnt-over land. Clamped through one ear Three Basket wore an enameled snuffbox.
“I have said all the time that this is not the good way. In the old days there were no quarters, no Negroes. A man’s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for them who prefer sweating to do!”
“They are like horses and dogs.”
“They are like nothing in this sensible world. Nothing contents them save sweat. They are worse than the white people.”
“It is not as though the Man himself had to find work for them to do.”
“You said it. I do not like slavery. It is not the good way. In the old days, there was the good way. But not now.”
“You do not remember the old way either.”
