47

The slave cabins were long and narrow like the barracks for soldiers in the army. The one that was to be my new home was made all of wood with twenty-three two-tiered bunks down each side and one feather bed with a pitted brass frame up front.

There were, I knew, ninety-three slaves in the men's slave cabin at any one time. When a man-slave died or got too old to work or ran away or was sold off for one reason or another there would always be a new slave to take his place. It was the same with the women field slaves. The women had one extra rule that the men didn't have that was female slaves were not allowed to get pregnant. If one did, without Master's permission, then she was punished and sometimes killed. Master Tobias didn't want to care for a slave if she was pregnant and could not work. And he

didn't want worthless little pickaninnies running around eating and taking up the women's attention.

Sometimes Tobias would want to have his strongest male slaves reproduce and other times he might want to take some comely slave woman to his bed. But other than that there was no unauthorized congress between slaves or between the white workers and slaves. And so the women had their separate cabin and numbered eighty-nine.

The stench of the slave cabin was unbearable to my spoiled nose. There were the odors of sweat and urine and vomit and general rot. And it was hot in there too. Between the heat, the thick air, and my broken heart I felt that I might die right then and there.

"Well, well, well, what have we got here?" said Prit-chard, man-slave Number Twenty-five.

He was the only other soul in the cabin. That's because Pritchard had broken his leg three years earlier and it had healed badly. Him and the slave Holland and some others were helping Master Tobias move a big flat stone from out of the backyard so that Miss Eloise could grow a dozen rose bushes in memory of her mother, the late Una Turner.

Holland and Pritchard, with the help of six or seven other slaves and a mule, had dragged that boulder to the edge of the garden and stood it up so they could let it fall down the side of the small slope there. It was Master Tobias's opinion that when the granite stone fell on the smaller rocks down the hill that it would shatter and make for smaller pieces that would have been easier to remove.

But they used the mule Lacto with a grappling hook to stand the stone up and Lacto must have seen a snake or something down the hill and bucked and ran before Holland and Pritchard could make it clear of the falling flat boulder. Pritchard tried to run but Holland was frozen with fright. So Pritchard just got his leg busted while Holland was crushed underneath the giant rock. You couldn't even see his body the stone was so big.

Master Tobias had been wrong about the stone shattering. It stayed in one piece and so Tobias said that they'd just leave it there for Holland's gravestone.

They called the horse doctor for Pritchard. After he surveyed the damage to the screaming slave's leg the veterinarian advised Tobias to put Pritchard down.

"That nigger's never gonna walk right again, Tobias," he said. "It's no different than I would tell you about a plow animal."

But slave Number Twenty-five cried and begged the Master not to kill him. He said that he could do carpentry work around the cabins and on the house.

"Fs still useful, Mastah," I remember the miserable man crying. "Don't do me like a dawg. Fs still a useful nigger, you'll see."

Tobias told Pritchard that he would think about it on the ride to Atlanta. He said that he'd be gone for nine days and when he came back he would make the decision of whether or not to put Twenty-five to sleep.

Before Tobias left that rat-faced Mr. Stewart asked what he should do about replacing Holland.

"What was his number?" Tobias asked.

"Forty-seven, sir."

"Save that number and give it to Psalma's bastard when he's ready."

It was the custom on the Corinthian Plantation to give all field slaves numbers. If they got a name along the way that was fine but they would be known to Master and the overseer by number in all of their record-keeping books.

For the first years of my life the only name I knew was babychile because that was all Mama Flore ever called me. Her friends in the big house all called me Baby for short, and if Master Tobias referred to me all he ever said was Psalma's bastardwith acid on his tongue.

For nine days after the accident that maimed him Pritchard cried and dragged himself around the yard trying to work even though his leg must have hurt terribly. At night he would cry to himself and pray out loud to God to save him from being put down.

Master Tobias came back to find that Pritchard had made himself a rude crutch and a toolbox and he hobbled right up to Tobias's horse and said, "What you want me to fix up first, Mastuh?"