'Do you like it when I beat on you like this?' Champ hit Pritchard again.
'No. No. I'm sorry. I's jes' doin' it to help out. I's jes' tryin' to help Mud Albert out.'
'If you evah touch that boy again I will kill you,' Champ said, and then he hauled off and delivered a terrible blow. 'Kill you.' And he hit him again.
Champ beat Pritchard until the lame slave wrapped
himself around the big man's ankles, dripping blood and tears on Champ's bare feet.
I wanted Champ to stop hitting Pritchard but I knew that you couldn't interfere with men when they were fighting mad.
Finally Champ stamped away, leaving Pritchard like a heap of bloody rags.
'You okay, boy?' Champ asked me.
Looking up at him I thought I knew what angels must be. Because even though I was in terrible pain I realized that Champ had saved my life. And having those feelings I began to cry. I thought that a strong man like Champ would be disgusted with a crybaby, but instead he sat down and put his big hand on my back.
'It's okay, boy,' he said. 'We all cry when they burn us like that. I'm just sorry you didn't have us around you to help you feel bettah about the pain.'
3.
Mud Albert came back that evening with the rest of the slaves. Everyone was tired from a full day of picking cotton.
Ernestine, the cook's helper-slave, dragged a cast-iron pot out to the cabin and served us sour porridge in dirty wooden bowls. We were each given a big serving of the foul slop. I couldn't eat a bite of it.
'You gonna eat yo' suppa?' a small man I came to know as Julie asked.
'Naw.'
'Then hand it ovah to me.'
Julie took my bowl and started feeding himself with both hands. This is because they didn't give us forks or spoons to eat our mush. After all, we were slaves, not civilized human beings.
Mud Albert was the oldest man on the Corinthian or any nearby plantation. He walked with a limp and had many folds in his black face. His forehead was high and elegant. The only hair he had left was at his temples and gray. But for all his age Mud Albert was the most respected
man among us slaves. He was fair and deliberate and he never, in anyone's memory, did a wrong thing to another man or woman.
Albert had sent Champ back to the cabin to see if I was there. Champ was to bring me out to the cotton fields but instead he stayed with me after Pritchard crawled away.
Albert and the other slaves came back at sunset, after fourteen backbreaking hours of picking cotton. That's the way ninety-nine percent of the slaves worked back in 1832 from sunup to sundown, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year.
When Albert saw my branded skin he took a jar out from under his brass bed. That was his bed because Albert was the head slave in charge of all the other field slaves. It was his job to make sure that we were all chained in every night and that we worked hard and that we didn't run away. For all that responsibility Master Tobias gave him a brass bed that was too old for white people to sleep in anymore.
Albert scooped a handful of foul-smelling paste out of the jar. Then he smeared this glop on my burns. It hurt even more and I yelled out but Albert told me that the lard and herbs would help to heal my shoulder.
After that Albert assigned me to Champ's cot.
The slaves all slept two to a bunk. We didn't have the space for the luxury of our own beds.
Before Albert turned down the lantern he went around chaining each one of us by our ankles to an eyebolt in the floor. They chained us down at night because it was accepted as general knowledge that a slave was most likely to decide to run in the dark.
I was happy to be there next to Champ but it was hard going to sleep with such a big man. He tossed and rolled in his sleep and sometimes pushed me almost out of the bed. But I never complained. I knew that Albert put me there so that Champ could watch over me and protect me from any other slaves like Pritchard who were jealous of the easy life I had before coming out to live with them.
One day, after I had been working in the cotton fields for a while, Mud Albert told me that it went hard for most young boys out among the man-slaves.
'Boys is soft and tendah,' he told me. 'And men are rough. Boys need a mother's touch, but they won't put them among the women because it's forbade for male and female slaves to live together that is unless the master says it's all right.'
'Why?' I asked in the hot morning out among the cotton plants that seemed to go on forever.
'You'll know one day, boy,' Albert said. 'But right now you don't have to worry acause Champ done said that he's lookin' out for you and after they seen what he done to Pritchard they gonna know bettah than to mess wit' you.'
'How come Champ ain't mean an' angry like Pritchard, Mud Albert?' I asked.
'Because Champ is the biggest, toughest, hardest-workin', friendliest slave anybody done ever see'd. He
gets to visit with slave women all around the county and because'a that he don't get so rough.'
I counted my blessings that I knew Mud Albert and Champ Noland. But for a long time I forgot that it was Big Mama Flore that made my acquaintance with them.
