47

"Dey's LeRoy an' Abraham," Eighty-four said softly. Tears were cascading down her berry black cheeks. "Dat's what I named 'em even though I knew that evil-hearted Mr. Stewart meant to take'em from me. Dey was so pretty... an' each time I give birth when I seed LeRoy, an' latah Abraham, I loved 'em so much that it hurt. An' den, when dey took 'em away, it hurt so bad I was sho I'd die. Dey was so young, but Mama Flore said dat dey new master's be good to 'em 'cause dey'd grow up into mens that'd be good workers."

Eighty-four began to howl then and John took her into his arms. I was sad for Eighty-four's loss and I was scared that somebody would hear her and punish us for malingering. And I was also amazed because John was crying along with Eighty-four. It was then that I realized that he felt lost in the same way that Abraham and LeRoy were lost.

The next morning Mud Albert had me take John out to the west field to see if there were any ripe peaches on a tree that the slaves had found out around there. Mud Albert called that tree his private orchard. John and I took a shortcut past the hanging tree.

On the way John was in a good mood. He was talking to me about my future.

"One day," he said, "many years from now you will think back on these days and say that it all must have been a bad dream. . . ."

He didn't finish because when we got close to that tree

he grabbed his head and fell to the ground just as if Champ Noland had cuffed him. He screamed in pain.

"What is this place?" he pleaded. He writhed on the ground and white foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. "Why has there been so much suffering here?"

I got down on my knees and grabbed him by the shoulders.

"This is where they hangs killers an' robbers an' slaves gone wrong," I said. "What's the mattuh?"

He pointed up at the branch where I had once seen Tommy Brown hanging with his neck broken and his fat tongue sticking through dead lips. They hung Tommy for stealing a chicken from the Master's henhouse.

I had also seen Billy Lukas, slave Number Six, swinging in a breeze from that branch. They hanged Billy because Loretta McLaughry, a white woman, had said that he was leering at her as she was riding down the road in her buggy.

John yelled again and then begged me to take him out from there. I did what he asked.

"More than a hundred men have been murdered under that tree," he said when we were far from there. "Murdered."

10.

John, Eighty-four, and I picked cotton for the next days. On my last day in the slave cabin all the men gathered around John because they were used to him entertaining them with some wild and unpredictable talk.

"If you so smart," Silent Sam, slave Number Forty-six, asked John, "why'd you give yourself up to be one'a Mas-tuh Tobias's slaves?"

"I don't know about you," John replied, "but I ain't no slave."

"You ain't?"

"No, suh I ain't."

"Den what you doin' pickin' cotton like a slave?"

"I'm pickin' cotton 'cause I wanna pick cotton, of course."

Upon hearing this every man in the cabin, including me, broke out into laughter.

"So that mean if you didn't wanna pick cotton you wouldn't have to," Sam speculated.

"Dat's right."

"An' how you gonna get away wit' that?"

"No gettin' away to it, brothah. If I didn't wanna pick cotton I jes' wouldn't do it."

"But then they gonna beat you."

"That's what freedom's all about," John said in a serious voice. "Free is when you say yea or nay about what you will and will not do. Nobody can give you freedom. All freedom is, is you."

There was no more laughing that night. I could see in the men's faces that they were wondering about John's words. Many of them had thought the same words that he spoke out loud.

I turned in with the rest and went to sleep, not realizing that that was to be my last night as a slave.

"Lemme take this next bag, John," Eighty-four said when my friend reached down to get our next sack the next day. We had filled four bags of cotton already.

"Thas okay, Tweenie," John said as he threw the sack over his shoulder. "Me'n Forty-seven have to go in the afternoon so I might as well tote till then."

"Where you goin'?" she asked. There was the pain of loss in her voice.

"Tobias wanna see me."

It was the first I'd heard of it.

"Mastuh?" Eighty-four asked.

"Tobias," John said again.

"What you got to do wit' him?"

"Maybe if he ain't lookin'," John said instead of answering her question, "I'll grab some sugar an' put it in my pocket. An' the next time they send me out here I'll give that sugar to you for bein' so sweet."

For a second there I thought that there was something wrong with Eighty-four's face but then I realized that she was grinning. One of her lower teeth was missing but m was still a nice smile. The power to bring happiness into that sad slave's face was greater than healing my hands, taming the master's dogs, and putting the plantation to sleep all rolled together.

"You the one sweet," Eighty-four said to John.