Belle City Page 5

  "Then did I tell you, Little Miss Ruth, 'bout all the fish Hiram and them bringin' back from the river later on tonight, and 'bout them chickens First Freeman bringin' from over in Belle City later on tonight, and 'bout how it's gon' be better'n Christmas when you wake up in the morning?"

  Ruthie was hopping from foot to foot. "No, sir. You didn't tell me none of that."

  "It's all true, Little Miss Ruth. We gon' have ourselves so much good food to eat at this Juneteenth Celebration, folks just might get tired of eatin'! Can you 'magine that?"

  "No, sir," Ruthie said, dancing about Uncle Will as he started moving the wood pieces into a pile with his foot. "I don't think I could ever get tired of eating!" Especially, she thought, not tired of eating food roasted on spits over a fire or wrapped in leaves and roasted on rocks that were surrounded by hot coals. That was the best food ever—potatoes and corn and turnips and fish and chicken and squirrel and rabbit—all roasted until their outsides were crisp and crunchy and the insides flavorful and smooth and juicy. "I wish we could have Juneteenth all the time. Can we, Uncle Will? Can we have Juneteenth all the time?"

  "You know we cain't do that, Little Miss. I b'lieve I tol' you why last Juneteenth when you asked, didn't I?"

  "Tell me again, Uncle Will. Tell me again," Ruthie said. She knew that Juneteenth was important, and she knew that it made Uncle Will both happy and sad.

  "Well," he said, digging his pipe and tobacco out of his pocket, "Juneteenth is the day when slaves got the news they was free. It was way long time after the law said they was free, but some folks didn't want 'em to be free so they didn't tell 'em. And since we couldn't read or write and didn't have no way to find things out other than what white folks told us, we didn't know the freedom had come 'til it was some time in June, 'round the thirteenth or the sixteenth. And way back then, bein' free for the first time, the freedom and the feelin' it give us, that was all we had to celebrate."

  "But now, we got fish and chicken and yams to roast," Ruthie yelled.

  "We surely do, Little Miss, and thank God for it, but don't forget we didn't always have food to eat, and don't forget there's a whole lot of us still ain't got food to eat." And, just like that, the sadness was back, covering the old man like a blanket.

  "But you got food, Uncle Will. And you got us."

  "And thank God for it," he said again, sounding like he was praying.

  ***

  Jonas watched his Ma while she cooked. He liked watching her. He thought she was pretty, but mostly he liked watching her because he thought she was nice. Every now and then she'd look over at him and give him a small smile, or, when she passed by him, she'd touch his head or his face—just a small, gentle touch—but it was nice. He liked how it felt to be touched by her. He couldn't imagine a hug or a kiss because the last time he'd received that kind of attention from her he'd been a baby of two or three years, and he didn't remember it, and he'd never in his life received that kind of expression of sentiment from his father. Of course, neither had any of the other children—the son or the daughters.

  "Why is Pa mad all the time?"

  Jonas's mother looked at him, as surprised as he himself was that he had voiced his thoughts about his father. None of them did that—Zeb's children or his wife. She wiped her hands on her apron and tried unsuccessfully to return a strand of red-gold hair to the bun at the back of her neck. "I don't really know, Jonas, but if I had to guess..."

  "What would you guess, Ma?" he prompted when she'd been silent for several seconds.

  "He's disappointed. That would be my guess," she said, sitting down at the table by him.

  "About what?"

  "About his life, and how it's turned out."

  Jonas was puzzled, confused. "Is somethin' wrong with Pa's life?"

  She gave him a sad smile. "Your Pa is no good as a farmer, and he knows that, but he doesn't know why. He thinks because he has land, it should produce for him, and things don't work that way, Jonas. Remember that: Everybody has a talent for something, and we should do what we can do, not what we want to do." She got up from the table and, walking sadly, if it could be said that a walk was sad, went to the stove.

  Jonas studied his mother as she returned to the business of making their dinner. That was another reason he liked his mother: She knew things. Things from books and things about people and even things about animals. She didn't like farming or the land, and she was fearful of most forest critters, especially snakes and bugs, but she always seemed to know things about them. She also knew enough to help him keep up with his reading and writing when he couldn't get to school regularly. He'd often heard his father say that his wife had married beneath herself, and while Jonas didn't really understand what that meant, he understood what 'disappointed' meant, but what was his pa disappointed about? Maybe because the cotton wouldn't grow on his farm and everything grew on Ruthie's farm? "Ma?"

  "What is it, Jonas?"

  "Do you hate Colored people like Pa does? You don't, do you?"

  She sighed heavily and looked over her shoulder toward the back door, then craned her neck to look toward the front parlor, though they both knew that Zeb should be out in the fields. "You shouldn't be talking about that."

  "Yes'm, I know," he said, and waited.

  She sighed again and her shoulders drooped, and she shook her head. "I been treated too bad in my life to give bad treatment to another human being."

  "Who treated you bad, Ma?" Jonas had raised his voice, and the final word was little more than a squeak. His mother looked up in surprise, then she crossed to him and rested both her hands on top of his head.

  "My baby child is no more a baby."

  "Huh?"

  "Your voice, Jonas: It's changing. You'll sound like a man soon. You'll be a man soon."

  "Who treated you bad, Ma?"

  "Everybody until I met your Pa."

  "Why?"

  The sigh from his mother's chest was so deep this time that Jonas thought he could feel the pain that caused it. "Because I was a slave, too. That's not what it was called, but that's what I was. I was sold by my father to pay a debt, and the man who owned me brought me to this place, here to Georgia, when I was just a lass."

  "From Scotland?"

  "Scotland is where I was born, but I came here from England—the man who bought me was English, and he took me there first, and then he brought me here when he came looking for gold." She suddenly shook her head furiously causing long tendrils of hair to fly about her face. She brushed them away impatiently. "Seems that he didn't have any more money than my father, but he did have a title, which meant that he could demand payment of a debt from my father. I was that payment, and I remained his property until your father bought me from him."

  Jonas didn't know what to say, in part because he didn't really understand what he'd just been told, but also because he couldn't imagine his father having enough money to buy anything.

  "What's a title?"

  "Something we don't have here in this country, thank the dear Lord."

  "How much did you cost, Ma?"

  Corrinne Maxwell Thatcher laughed, a high, sweet sound that Jonas had never heard before, and so delighted was he that he laughed, too. And then he hugged her. Tightly. And then he ran out the back door and across the yard and into the woods because he was crying and he didn't know why, but he did know that grown men didn't cry and his Ma had said that soon he would be a man, and she knew things like that.

  ***

  The first thing Ruthie heard when she opened her eyes on Juneteenth celebration morning was First Freeman snoring. Her Pa and Uncle Will and her big brothers all snored, but it was nothing like the sound made by First Freeman: It would terrify a person who didn't know anything about snoring since it sounded more like a prowling, growling animal than a sleeping man. She and Tobias and Little Si had tried to stay awake the night before until the man from Belle City arrived, but as it got later and later, Ma finally made them go to bed. Knowing how late he had
arrived and listening to him snore, Ruthie knew that he would not awaken any time soon. She also knew—she could tell by the otherwise quiet house—that everybody was awake, up and out of the house, except herself and First Freeman, and she jumped up from her pallet on the floor of her parents' bedroom. She rolled up her sleep things in a tight cylinder and shoved it under her parents' bed—she'd sleep in here for as long as First Freeman was their guest—and hurried into the bathroom, out again, into the kitchen to grab whatever was left over from breakfast, and out into the yard where preparations were underway for the Juneteenth Celebration.

  If Ruthie had ever been to a fair, she'd think that the yard between her house and the fields looked like a fair grounds. Maybe a hundred people milled about, maybe more. Tents and lean-tos had been set up in a semicircle, and cloth and material of every color imaginable adorned the simple structures, giving them a magical quality. Some of the material blew in the breeze and if she'd known anything about flags, she could have thought that people were flying colors of kin or ancestors—red and yellow and orange and green. Half a dozen firepits had been dug and already the scent of smoking and roasting meat permeated the air.

  Ruthie took her time leaving the immediate yard of her house, so mesmerized was she by the sight that stretched out before her. She realized that she didn't know many of the people her eyes found and studied. Many of them were old people like her Uncle Will. They were slaves, she thought to herself, and she studied them to see if they, like Uncle Will, looked both powerful and sad, but they just looked old, some of them older than Uncle Will. Then she spied her brothers, and she took off at a run.

  "Hey, Girl," Si said when she reached them.

  "'Bout time you got up," Tobias said. "Day's half gone," he added, sounding like their Pa, who thought the day was half gone any time the sun cracked the horizon. He looked off in the distance. "I'm s'pozed to be helpin' Pa gut and skin some deers to go on the spits, but I don't see him. Y'all see him?"

  Ruthie and Little Si surveyed the crowd. "Yonder," Ruthie said, pointing like a hunting dog. Tobias nodded, patted his brother on the back and his sister on the head, and trotted off. "What're you gonna do?" she asked Si.

  He made a face. "Gut all them dang fish Mr. Hiram brung from the river. Never seen so many dang fish in my whole life."

  "I'll help you."

  Si shook his head. "We need more wood. Pa said to tell you. Take the short axe and bring back as much as you can find and lay it out in the yard." Ruthie nodded and turned back toward the house. "And Ma said keep this side of that big pecan tree."

  She stopped and turned back to face her brother. "What for, Si?"

  He looked a little funny, like giving the answer caused a cramp in his guts. "Uncle Will says the dogs been actin' funny 'round that tree. He said somebody been climbin' up in it."

  Ruthie knew exactly who that 'somebody' was. So did Si. Ruthie nodded that she'd obey her mother. "Whistle for me if Mr. First Freeman gets up before I get back," she said, and she trotted off to the tool shed to get the short-handled axe she needed to cut the felled tree limbs into smaller pieces and the big burlap bag she needed to carry the wood. She ran into the house and grabbed her book off the kitchen table—she didn't go anywhere anymore without a book tucked into her waistband—and within a couple of minutes, she was deep into the shady depths of the forest. The dim quiet wrapped around her, familiar as her mother's embrace. Ma was right: She was as at home in these woods as in their house.

  Her eyes immediately adjusted to the filtered light, and she began to search for tree limbs the right size. She and Si already had gathered up the smaller branches and limbs, those they could break by hand. Now she needed to find ones slightly larger, ones she could chop into pieces with the hand axe and stuff into the burlap bag. She wondered only briefly at the need for more wood. Even though Pa and Uncle Will had said there was more than enough to cook for the Juneteenth Celebration, if they said more wood was needed, then more wood was needed.

  Ruthie worked quickly, and in half an hour, the burlap bag was full. Despite the relative cool of the forest, she was hot and sweating. She also was hungry. She hesitated only briefly in her decision not to go home immediately. She took her book from the rope she tied around her waist to shorten her dress and sat on the cool ground with her back against an oak. As she always did, she ran her hands over the book's cover, then studied the front image. She knew one word on the cover and part of another. Then she opened the book to the first page and studied it, picking out all the words she knew. There weren't many. Ma said she'd taught them everything she knew; if they were to learn more, they'd have to go to Belle City as there wasn't, and most likely never would be, a school for Colored children in Carrie's Crossing. So, that meant it wasn't likely that they'd ever learn more than they already knew because every time anybody talked about moving to Belle City, Uncle Will got hopped-up mad. He didn't get mad at First Freeman anymore, and the Belle City man now visited at least twice a month, always bringing goods and gifts, but First Freeman didn't talk anymore about how much better things were for Colored people where he lived. At least not when Uncle Will could hear him.

  Ruthie closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the rough bark of the tree and tried to imagine what Belle City was like—tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a city instead of on a farm, to go to school, to see Colored doctors and teachers and Colored schools and banks. She tried her best but no picture came to mind. No matter, she told herself. One day she'd go to Belle City and see all those things, then she wouldn't have to imagine. With a deep sigh, she closed the book and got to her feet. Then, in one swift, fluid movement, she grabbed the hand axe, whirled around and hurled it at the big, old pecan tree thirty feet away. Head over handle, the axe rotated as it flew through the air, making a whistling sound. The blade buried itself into the trunk of the pecan tree with a loud thunk.

  "Hellfire and damnation!" Jonas screamed as he jumped away from tree trunk, waving his arms and jumping up and down. "You might coulda kilt me, Ruthie Thatcher."

  "Why are you hidin' behind that tree, Jonas?"

  "Why are you tryin' to kill me?"

  "If I was wantin' to kill you, you'd be dead."

  He looked at her standing there, tall and straight and clear-eyed, and he knew what she said was true. "What's that book you're read...you can read, Ruthie Thatcher? Can you?"

  "Can you?"

  He nodded, then shrugged. "Some little bit. Pa don't let me go to school much on account of he needs me in the fields, but yeah, I can read some. Can you?"

  Ruthie shrugged too but didn't answer that question directly. "There ain't no school for Colored 'round here. But I 'spect you already know that."

  Both her tone and her words gave Jonas pause. "There ain't no school for Colored nowhere," he said, making it more of a question than a statement.

  "There's lots of 'em," Ruthie said, "over yonder in Belle City. Colleges, too. I'm goin' to one of 'em too."

  Jonas gave her a hard, steady look, the kind of look that would root out and wither deceit or a lie. He got back the same hard, steady look, the kind of look that spoke truth to power. "What's that book you been readin'?"

  Ruthie took the book from her waistband and handed it to him, watching him carefully, not letting on that she neither knew the name of the book or what it was about. His reaction both surprised and irritated her: He slapped the book against his thigh and gave her a wondering look.

  "Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It's just about the best book in the whole, wide world. Don't you think so, Ruthie? Ain't this just the best book in the whole wide world?"

  Ruthie took the book from him, stuck it back in her waistband, and turned her attention to the task of freeing the axe blade from the trunk of the pecan tree. She had hurled it with all her might, and it was buried deep. "I don't know," she said to him, keeping her attention on the axe and the tree trunk. "Why don't you read it to me so I can find out."

&nbs
p; A stillness seemed to settle over the forest, as if all the living beings in it were waiting for the boy's response. "All right, Ruthie Thatcher. I'll do that," Jonas said. "When? We can meet right here at the pecan tree—"

  "No, we cain't. Uncle Will knows somebody has been at this tree, climbing up in it. He's gon' leave the dogs down here. You got to stay away from this tree. You hear?"

  "I hear," Jonas said. "Where can we read that your Uncle Will and your Pa and my Pa won't find out and skin us alive?"

  Ruthie thought for a moment then said, "There's another big old pecan tree down by the wide part of the creek."

  "I know the one you mean," Jonas said, grinning widely. "You were hiding up it that first day I met you."

  Ruthie remembered and was about to say so when she heard a faint but sharp whistle. "I got to go." She gave the axe a final tug, freeing it from the tree, and slung the bulging burlap bag over her shoulder. "Bye, Jonas," she said, and she was moving through the dense woods so surely and so swiftly that Jonas would only watch in awed amazement.

  Danged Injuns, he thought to himself as she disappeared from view without having made a single sound. Then he remembered and called out, "When?"

  Silence. Then he heard, "That tree'll tell you when."

  "What?" Jonas yelled at the forest. "Say what, Ruthie?" Jonas ran in the direction of Ruthie's disappearance. Then he stopped. There was nothing before or behind him but the dense forest. "Hellfire and damnation!" He kicked at the forest floor, scattering twigs and dead leaves. Then, aware that Ruthie probably was all the way back home now, he focused on his return to home and bent down to gather the twigs he had unearthed in his anger and frustration for, just as Ruthie never traveled without her book, Jonas no longer traveled without his burlap bag. Wishing that he, too, had a short-handled axe, Jonas knelt down and began searching beneath the leafy carpet that covered the ground for twigs and small tree limbs and branches. He had learned that going home with something useful kept his Pa's anger at bay. And for the first time ever, Jonas allowed himself to explore the reasons for his father's behavior based on what his ma had told him: Was he so angry all the time because he was no good as a farmer? And if he didn't farm, what would he do? What could he do?