1THE glad days that dawned gave me liberty for the free play of impulse and, from anxiety and restraint, I leaped to license and thoughtless action. My mother arrived one afternoon with the news that we were going to live with her sister in Elaine, Arkansas, and that en route we would visit Granny, who had moved from Natchez to Jackson, Mississippi. As the words fell from my mother’s lips, a long and heavy anxiety lifted from me. Excited, I rushed about and gathered my ragged clothes. I was leaving the hated home, hunger, fear, leaving days that had been as dark and lonely as death.

2While I was packing, a playmate came to tell me that one of my shirts was hanging damp upon the clothesline. Filled more with the sense of coming freedom than with generosity, I told him that he could have it. What was a shirt to me now? The children stood about and watched me with envious eyes as I crammed my things into a suitcase, but I did not notice them. The moment I had learned that I was to leave, my feelings had recoiled so sharply and quickly from the home that the children simply did not exist for me any more. Their faces possessed the power of evoking in me a million memories that I longed to forget, and instead of my leaving drawing me to them in communion, it had flung me forever beyond them.

3I was so eager to be gone that when I stood in the front hallway, packed and ready, I did not even think of saying good-bye to the boys and girls with whom I had eaten and slept and lived for so many weeks. My mother scolded me for my thoughtlessness and bade me say good-bye to them. Reluctantly I obeyed her, wishing that I did not have to do so. As I shook the dingy palms extended to me I kept my eyes averted, not wanting to look again into faces that hurt me because they had become so thoroughly associated in my feelings with hunger and fear. In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I did not and could not share their spirit.

4(After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure.

5(Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.)

6Granny’s home in Jackson was an enchanting place to explore. It was a two-story frame structure of seven rooms. My brother and I used to play hide and seek in the long, narrow hallways, and on and under the stairs. Granny’s son, Uncle Clark, had bought her this home, and its white plastered walls, its front and back porches, its round columns and banisters, made me feel that surely there was no finer house in all the round world.

7There were wide green fields in which my brother and I roamed and played and shouted. And there were the timid children of the neighbors, boys and girls to whom my brother and I felt superior in worldly knowledge. We took pride in telling them what it was like to ride on a train, what the yellow, sleepy Mississippi River looked like, how it felt to sail on the Kate Adams, what Memphis looked like, and how I had run off from the orphan home. And we would hint that we were pausing for but a few days and then would be off to even more fabulous places and marvelous experiences.

8To help support the household my grandmother boarded a colored schoolteacher, Ella, a young woman with so remote and dreamy and silent a manner that I was as much afraid of her as I was attracted to her. I had long wanted to ask her to tell me about the books that she was always reading, but I could never quite summon enough courage to do so. One afternoon I found her sitting alone upon the front porch, reading.

9“Ella,” I begged, “please tell me what you are reading.”

10“It’s just a book,” she said evasively, looking about with apprehension.

11“But what’s it about?” I asked.

12“Your grandmother wouldn’t like it if I talked to you about novels,” she told me.

13I detected a note of sympathy in her voice.

14“I don’t care,” I said loudly and bravely.

15“Shhh—You mustn’t say things like that,” she said.

16“But I want to know.”

17“When you grow up, you’ll read books and know what’s in them,” she explained.

18“But I want to know now.”

19She thought a while, then closed the book.

20“Come here,” she said.

21I sat at her feet and lifted my face to hers.

22“Once upon a time there was an old, old man named Bluebeard,” she began in a low voice.

23She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me. She told how Bluebeard had duped and married his seven wives, how he had loved and slain them, how he had hanged them up by their hair in a dark closet. The tale made the world around me be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. Enchanted and enthralled, I stopped her constantly to ask for details. My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me. When she was about to finish, when my interest was keenest, when I was lost to the world around me, Granny stepped briskly onto the porch.

24“You stop that, you evil gal!” she shouted. “I want none of that Devil stuff in my house!”

25Her voice jarred me so that I gasped. For a moment I did not know what was happening.

26“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wilson,” Ella stammered, rising. “But he asked me—”

27“He’s just a foolish child and you know it!” Granny blazed.

28Ella bowed her head and went into the house.

29“But, granny, she didn’t finish,” I protested, knowing that I should have kept quiet.

30She bared her teeth and slapped me across my mouth with the back of her hand.

31“You shut your mouth,” she hissed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

32“But I want to hear what happened!” I wailed, dodging another blow that I thought was coming.

33“That’s the Devil’s work!” she shouted.

34My grandmother was as nearly white as a Negro can get without being white, which means that she was white. The sagging flesh of her face quivered; her eyes, large, dark, deep-set, wide apart, glared at me. Her lips narrowed to a line. Her high forehead wrinkled. When she was angry her eyelids drooped halfway down over her pupils, giving her a baleful aspect.

35“But I liked the story,” I told her.

36“You’re going to burn in hell,” she said with such furious conviction that for a moment I believed her.

37Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breath-taking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella’s whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway. I realized that they could not understand what I was feeling and I kept quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella’s room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land.

38One afternoon my mother became so ill that she had to go to bed. When night fell Granny assumed the task of seeing that my brother and I bathed. She set two tubs of water in our room and ordered us to pull off our clothes, which we did. She sat at one end of the room, knitting, lifting her eyes now and then from the wool to watch us and direct us. My brother and I splashed in the water, playing, laughing, trying our utmost to fling suds into each other’s eyes. The floor was getting so sloppy that Granny scolded us.

39“Stop that foolishness and wash yourselves!”

40“Yes, ma’am,” we answered automatically and proceeded with our playing.

41I scooped up a double handful of suds and called to my brother. He looked and I flung the suds, but he ducked and the white foam spattered on to the floor.

42“Richard, stop that playing and bathe!”

43“Yes, ma’am,” I said, watching my brother to catch him unawares so that I could fling more suds at him.

44“Come here, you Richard!” Granny said, putting her knitting aside.

45I went to her, walking sheepishly and nakedly across the floor. She snatched the towel from my hand and began to scrub my ears, my face, my neck.

46“Bend over,” she ordered.

47I stooped and she scrubbed my anus. My mind was in a sort of daze, midway between daydreaming and thinking. Then, before I knew it, words—words whose meaning I did not fully know—had slipped out of my mouth.

48“When you get through, kiss back there,” I said, the words rolling softly but unpremeditatedly.

49My first indication that something was wrong was that Granny became terribly still, then she pushed me violently from her. I turned around and saw that her white face was frozen, that her black, deep-set eyes were blazing at me unblinkingly. Taking my cue from her queer expression, I knew that I had said something awful, but I had no notion at that moment just how awful it was. Granny rose slowly and lifted the wet towel high above her head and brought it down across my naked back with all the outraged fury of her sixty-odd-year-old body, leaving an aching streak of fire burning and quivering on my skin. I gasped and held my breath, fighting against the pain; then I howled and cringed. I had not realized the meaning of what I had said; its moral horror was unfelt by me, and her attack seemed without cause. She lifted the wet towel and struck me again with such force that I dropped to my knees. I knew that if I did not get out of her reach she would kill me. Naked, I rose and ran out of the room, screaming. My mother hurried from her bed.

50“What’s the matter, mama?” she asked Granny.

51I lingered in the hallway, trembling, looking at Granny, trying to speak but only moving my lips. Granny seemed to have gone out of her mind, for she stood like stone, her eyes dead upon me, not saying a word.

52“Richard, what have you done?” my mother asked.

53Poised to run again, I shook my head.

54“What’s the matter, for God’s sake?” my mother asked of me, of Granny, of my brother, turning her face from one to another.

55Granny wilted, half turned, flung the towel to the floor, then burst into tears.

56“He... I was trying to wash him,” Granny whimpered, “here,” she continued, pointing, “and... that black little Devil....” Her body was shaking with insult and rage. “He told me to kiss him there when I was through.”

57Now my mother stared without speaking.

58“No!” my mother exclaimed.

59“He did,” Granny whimpered.

60“He didn’t say that,” my mother protested.

61“He did,” Granny sighed.

62I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself. My mother picked up the wet towel and came toward me. I ran into the kitchen, naked, yelling. She came hard upon my heels and I scuttled into the back yard, running blindly in the dark, butting my head against the fence, the tree, bruising my toes on sticks of wood, still screaming. I had no way of measuring the gravity of my wrong and I assumed that I had done something for which I would never be forgiven. Had I known just how my words had struck them, I would have remained still and taken my punishment, but it was the feeling that anything could or would happen to me that made me wild with fear.

63“Come here, you little filthy fool!” my mother called.

64I dodged her and ran back into the house, then again into the hallway, my naked body flashing frantically through the air. I crouched in a dark corner. My mother rushed upon me, breathing hard. I ducked, crawled, stood, and ran again.

65“You may as well stand still,” my mother said. “I’m going to beat you tonight if it is the last thing I do on this earth!”

66Again she charged me and I dodged, just missing the stinging swish of the wet towel, and scooted into the room where my brother stood.

67“What’s the matter?” he asked, for he had not heard what I had said.

68A blow fell on my mouth. I whirled. Granny was upon me. She struck me another blow on my head with the back of her hand. Then my mother came into the room. I fell to the floor and crawled under the bed.

69“You come out of there,” my mother called.

70“Naw,” I cried.

71“Come out or I’ll beat you to within an inch of your life,” she said.

72“Naw,” I said.

73“Call Papa,” Granny said.

74I trembled. Granny was sending my brother to fetch Grandpa, of whom I was mortally afraid. He was a tall, skinny, silent, grim, black man who had fought in the Civil War with the Union Army. When he was angry he gritted his teeth with a terrifying, grating sound. He kept his army gun in his room, standing in a corner, loaded. He was under the delusion that the war between the states would be resumed. I heard my brother rush out of the room and I knew it was but a matter of minutes before Grandpa would come. I balled myself into a knot and moaned:

75“Naw, naw, naw....”

76Grandpa came and ordered me from under the bed. I refused to move.

77“Come out of there, little man,” he said.

78“Naw.”

79“Do you want me to get my gun?”

80“Naw, sir. Please don’t shoot me!” I cried.

81“Then come out!”

82I remained still. Grandpa took hold of the bed and pulled it. I clung to a bedpost and was dragged over the floor. Grandpa ran at me and tried to grab my leg, but I crawled out of reach. I rested on all fours and kept in the center of the bed and each time the bed moved, I moved, following it.

83“Come out and get your whipping!” my mother called.

84I remained still. The bed moved and I moved. I did not think; I did not plan; I did not plot. Instinct told me what to do. There was painful danger and I had to avoid it. Grandpa finally gave up and went back to his room.

85“When you come out, you’ll get your whipping,” my mother said. “No matter how long you stay under there, you’re going to get it. And no food for you tonight.”

86“What did he do?” my brother asked.

87“Something he ought to be killed for,” Granny said.

88“But what?” my brother asked.

89“Shut you up and get to bed,” my mother said.

90I stayed under the bed far into the night. The household went to sleep. Finally hunger and thirst drove me out; when I stood up I found my mother lurking in the doorway, waiting for me.

91“Come into the kitchen,” she said.

92I followed her and she beat me, but she did not use the wet towel; Grandpa had forbade that. Between strokes of the switch she would ask me where had I learned the dirty words and I could not tell her; and my inability to tell her made her furious.

93“I’m going to beat you until you tell me,” she declared.

94And I could not tell her because I did not know. None of the obscene words I had learned at school in Memphis had dealt with perversions of any sort, although I might have learned the words while loitering drunkenly in saloons. The next day Granny said emphatically that she knew who had ruined me, that she knew I had learned about “foul practices” from reading Ella’s books, and when I asked what “foul practices” were, my mother beat me afresh. No matter how hard I tried to convince them that I had not read the words in a book or that I could not remember having heard anyone say them, they would not believe me. Granny finally charged Ella with telling me things that I should not know and Ella, weeping and distraught, packed her things and moved. The tremendous upheaval that my words had caused made me know that there lay back of them much more than I could figure out, and I resolved that in the future I would learn the meaning of why they had beat and denounced me.

95The days and hours began to speak now with a clearer tongue. Each experience had a sharp meaning of its own.

96There was the breathlessly anxious fun of chasing and catching flitting fireflies on drowsy summer nights.

97There was the drenching hospitality in the pervading smell of sweet magnolias.

98There was the aura of limitless freedom distilled from the rolling sweep of tall green grass swaying and glinting in the wind and sun.

99There was the feeling of impersonal plenty when I saw a boll of cotton whose cup had spilt over and straggled its white fleece toward the earth.

100There was the pitying chuckle that bubbled in my throat when I watched a fat duck waddle across the back yard.

101There was the suspense I felt when I heard the taut, sharp song of a yellow-black bee hovering nervously but patiently above a white rose.

102There was the drugged, sleepy feeling that came from sipping glasses of milk, drinking them slowly so that they would last a long time, and drinking enough for the first time in my life.

103There was the bitter amusement of going into town with Granny and watching the baffled stares of white folks who saw an old white woman leading two undeniably Negro boys in and out of stores on Capitol Street.

104There was the slow, fresh, saliva-stimulating smell of cooking cotton seeds.

105There was the excitement of fishing in muddy country creeks with my grandpa on cloudy days.

106There was the fear and awe I felt when Grandpa took me to a sawmill to watch the giant whirring steel blades whine and scream as they bit into wet green logs.

107There was the puckery taste that almost made me cry when I ate my first half-ripe persimmon.

108There was the greedy joy in the tangy taste of wild hickory nuts.

109There was the dry hot summer morning when I scratched my bare arms on briers while picking blackberries and came home with my fingers and lips stained black with sweet berry juice.

110There was the relish of eating my first fried fish sandwich, nibbling at it slowly and hoping that I would never eat it up.

111There was the all-night ache in my stomach after I had climbed a neighbor’s tree and eaten stolen, unripe peaches.

112There was the morning when I thought I would fall dead from fear after I had stepped with my bare feet upon a bright little green garden snake.

113And there were the long, slow, drowsy days and nights of drizzling rain....

114At last we were at the railroad station with our bags, waiting for the train that would take us to Arkansas; and for the first time I noticed that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a “white” line and a “black” line. During my visit at Granny’s a sense of the two races had been born in me with a sharp concreteness that would never die until I died. When I boarded the train I was aware that we Negroes were in one part of the train and that the whites were in another. Naïvely I wanted to go and see how the whites looked while sitting in their part of the train.

115“Can I go and peep at the white folks?” I asked my mother.

116“You keep quiet,” she said.

117“But that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?”

118“Will you keep still?”

119“But why can’t I?”

120“Quit talking foolishness!”

121I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it. I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and never touched, it seemed, except in violence. Now, there was my grandmother.... Was she white? Just how white was she? What did the whites think of her whiteness?

122“Mama, is Granny white?” I asked as the train rolled through the darkness.

123“If you’ve got eyes, you can see what color she is,” my mother said.

124“I mean, do the white folks think she’s white?”

125“Why don’t you ask the white folks that?” she countered.

126“But you know,” I insisted.

127“Why should I know?” she asked. “I’m not white.”

128“Granny looks white,” I said, hoping to establish one fact, at least. “Then why is she living with us colored folks?”

129“Don’t you want Granny to live with us?” she asked, blunting my question.

130“Yes.”

131“Then why are you asking?”

132“I want to know.”

133“Doesn’t Granny live with us?”

134“Yes.”

135“Isn’t that enough?”

136“But does she want to live with us?”

137“Why didn’t you ask Granny that?” my mother evaded me again in a taunting voice.

138“Did Granny become colored when she married Grandpa?”

139“Will you stop asking silly questions!”

140“But did she?”

141“Granny didn’t become colored,” my mother said angrily. “She was born the color she is now.”

142Again I was being shut out of the secret, the thing, the reality I felt somewhere beneath all the words and silences.

143“Why didn’t Granny marry a white man?” I asked.

144“Because she didn’t want to,” my mother said peevishly.

145“Why don’t you want to talk to me?” I asked.

146She slapped me and I cried. Later, grudgingly, she told me that Granny came of Irish, Scotch, and French stock in which Negro blood had somewhere and somehow been infused. She explained it all in a matter-of-fact, offhand, neutral way; her emotions were not involved at all.

147“What was Granny’s name before she married Grandpa?”

148“Bolden.”

149“Who gave her that name?”

150“The white man who owned her.”

151“She was a slave?”

152“Yes.”

153“And Bolden was the name of Granny’s father?”

154“Granny doesn’t know who her father was.”

155“So they just gave her any name?”

156“They gave her a name; that’s all I know.”

157“Couldn’t Granny find out who her father was?”

158“For what, silly?”

159“So she could know.”

160“Know for what?”

161“Just to know.”

162“But for what?”

163I could not say. I could not get anywhere.

164“Mama, where did Father get his name?”

165“From his father.”

166“And where did the father of my father get his name?”

167“Like Granny got hers. From a white man.”

168“Do they know who he is?”

169“I don’t know.”

170“Why don’t they find out?”

171“For what?” my mother demanded harshly.

172And I could think of no rational or practical reason why my father should try to find out who his father’s father was.

173“What has Papa got in him?” I asked.

174“Some white and some red and some black,” she said.

175“Indian, white, and Negro?”

176“Yes.”

177“Then what am I?”

178“They’ll call you a colored man when you grow up,” she said. Then she turned to me and smiled mockingly and asked: “Do you mind, Mr. Wright?”

179I was angry and I did not answer. I did not object to being called colored, but I knew that there was something my mother was holding back. She was not concealing facts, but feelings, attitudes, convictions which she did not want me to know; and she became angry when I prodded her. All right, I would find out someday. Just wait. All right, I was colored. It was fine. I did not know enough to be afraid or to anticipate in a concrete manner. True, I had heard that colored people were killed and beaten, but so far it all had seemed remote. There was, of course, a vague uneasiness about it all, but I would be able to handle that when I came to it. It would be simple. If anybody tried to kill me, then I would kill them first.

180When we arrived in Elaine I saw that Aunt Maggie lived in a bungalow that had a fence around it. It looked like home and I was glad. I had no suspicion that I was to live here for but a short time and that the manner of my leaving would be my first baptism of racial emotion.

181A wide dusty road ran past the house and on each side of the road wild flowers grew. It was summer and the smell of clay dust was everywhere, day and night. I would get up early every morning to wade with my bare feet through the dust of the road, reveling in the strange mixture of the cold dew-wet crust on top of the road and the warm, sun-baked dust beneath.

182After sunrise the bees would come out and I discovered that by slapping my two palms together smartly I could kill a bee. My mother warned me to stop, telling me that bees made honey, that it was not good to kill things that made food, that I would eventually be stung. But I felt confident of outwitting any bee. One morning I slapped an enormous bee between my hands just as it had lit upon a flower and it stung me in the tender center of my left palm. I ran home screaming.

183“Good enough for you,” my mother commented dryly.

184I never crushed any more bees.

185Aunt Maggie’s husband, Uncle Hoskins, owned a saloon that catered to the hundreds of Negroes who worked in the surrounding sawmills. Remembering the saloon of my Memphis days, I begged Uncle Hoskins to take me to see it and he promised; but my mother said no; she was afraid that I would grow up to be a drunkard if I went inside of a saloon again while still a child. Well, if I could not see the saloon, at least I could eat. And at mealtime Aunt Maggie’s table was so loaded with food that I could scarcely believe it was real. It took me some time to get used to the idea of there being enough to eat; I felt that if I ate enough there would not be anything left for another time. When I first sat down at Aunt Maggie’s table, I could not eat until I had asked:

186“Can I eat all I want?”

187“Eat as much as you like,” Uncle Hoskins said.

188I did not believe him. I ate until my stomach hurt, but even then I did not want to get up from the table.

189“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” my mother said.

190“Let him eat all he wants to and get used to food,” Uncle Hoskins said.

191When supper was over I saw that there were many biscuits piled high upon the bread platter, an astonishing and unbelievable sight to me. Though the biscuits were right before my eyes, and though there was more flour in the kitchen, I was apprehensive lest there be no bread for breakfast in the morning. I was afraid that somehow the biscuits might disappear during the night, while I was sleeping. I did not want to wake up in the morning, as I had so often in the past, feeling hungry and knowing that there was no food in the house. So, surreptitiously, I took some of the biscuits from the platter and slipped them into my pocket, not to eat, but to keep as a bulwark against any possible attack of hunger. Even after I had got used to seeing the table loaded with food at each meal, I still stole bread and put it into my pockets. In washing my clothes my mother found the gummy wads and scolded me to break me of the habit; I stopped hiding the bread in my pockets and hid it about the house, in corners, behind dressers. I did not break the habit of stealing and hoarding bread until my faith that food would be forthcoming at each meal had been somewhat established.

192Uncle Hoskins had a horse and buggy and sometimes he used to take me with him to Helena, where he traded. One day when I was riding with him he said:

193“Richard, would you like to see this horse drink water out of the middle of the river?”

194“Yes,” I said, laughing. “But this horse can’t do that.”

195“Yes, he can,” Uncle Hoskins said. “Just wait and see.”

196He lashed the horse and headed the buggy straight for the Mississippi River.

197“Where’re you going?” I asked, alarm mounting in me.

198“We’re going to the middle of the river so the horse can drink,” he said.

199He drove over the levee and down the long slope of cobblestones to the river’s edge and the horse plunged wildly in. I looked at the mile stretch of water that lay ahead and leaped up in terror.

200“Naw!” I screamed.

201“This horse has to drink,” Uncle Hoskins said grimly.

202“The river’s deep!” I shouted.

203“The horse can’t drink here,” Uncle Hoskins said, lashing the back of the struggling animal.

204The buggy went farther. The horse slowed a little and tossed his head above the current. I grabbed the sides of the buggy, ready to jump, even though I could not swim.

205“Sit down or you’ll fall out!” Uncle Hoskins shouted.

206“Let me out!” I screamed.

207The water now came up to the hubs of the wheels of the buggy. I tried to leap into the river and he caught hold of my leg. We were now surrounded by water.

208“Let me out!” I continued to scream.

209The buggy rolled on and the water rose higher. The horse wagged his head, arched his neck, flung his tail about, walled his eyes, and snorted. I gripped the sides of the buggy with all the strength I had, ready to wrench free and leap if the buggy slipped deeper into the river. Uncle Hoskins and I tussled.

210“Whoa!” he yelled at last to the horse.

211The horse stopped and neighed. The swirling yellow water was so close that I could have touched the surface of the river. Uncle Hoskins looked at me and laughed.

212“Did you really think that I was going to drive this buggy into the middle of the river?” he asked.

213I was too scared to answer; my muscles were so taut that they ached.

214“It’s all right,” he said soothingly.

215He turned the buggy around and started back toward the levee. I was still clutching the sides of the buggy so tightly that I could not turn them loose.

216“We’re safe now,” he said.

217The buggy rolled onto dry land and, as my fear ebbed, I felt that I was dropping from a great height. It seemed that I could smell a sharp, fresh odor. My forehead was damp and my heart thumped heavily.

218“I want to get out,” I said.

219“What’s the matter?” he asked.

220“I want to get out!”

221“We’re back on land now, boy.”

222“Naw! Stop! I want to get out!”

223He did not stop the buggy; he did not even turn his head to look at me; he did not understand. I wrenched my leg free with a lunge and leaped headlong out of the buggy, landing in the dust of the road, unhurt. He stopped the buggy.

224“Are you really that scared?” he asked softly.

225I did not answer; I could not speak. My fear was gone now and he loomed before me like a stranger, like a man I had never seen before, a man with whom I could never share a moment of intimate living.

226“Come on, Richard, and get back into the buggy,” he said. “I’ll take you home now.”

227I shook my head and began to cry.

228“Listen, son, don’t you trust me?” he asked. “I was born on that old river. I know that river. There’s stone and brick way down under that water. You could wade out for half a mile and it would not come over your head.”

229His words meant nothing and I would not re-enter the buggy.

230“I’d better take you home,” he said soberly.

231I started down the dusty road. He got out of the buggy and walked beside me. He did not do his shopping that day and when he tried to explain to me what he had been trying to do in frightening me I would not listen or speak to him. I never trusted him after that. Whenever I saw his face the memory of my terror upon the river would come back, vivid and strong, and it stood as a barrier between us.

232Each day Uncle Hoskins went to his saloon in the evening and did not return home until the early hours of the morning. Like my father, he slept in the daytime, but noise never seemed to bother Uncle Hoskins. My brother and I shouted and banged as much as we liked. Often I would creep into his room while he slept and stare at the big shining revolver that lay near his head, within quick reach of his hand. I asked Aunt Maggie why he kept the gun so close to him and she told me that men had threatened to kill him, white men....

233One morning I awakened to learn that Uncle Hoskins had not come home from the saloon. Aunt Maggie fretted and worried. She wanted to visit the saloon and find out what had happened, but Uncle Hoskins had forbidden her to come to the place. The day wore on and dinnertime came.

234“I’m going to find out if anything’s happened,” Aunt Maggie said.

235“Maybe you oughtn’t,” my mother said. “Maybe it’s dangerous.”

236The food was kept hot on the stove and Aunt Maggie stood on the front porch staring into the deepening dusk. Again she declared that she was going to the saloon, but my mother dissuaded her once more. It grew dark and still he had not come. Aunt Maggie was silent and restless.

237“I hope to God the white people didn’t bother him,” she said.

238Later she went into the bedroom and when she came out she whimpered:

239“He didn’t take his gun. I wonder what could have happened?”

240We ate in silence. An hour later there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the front porch and a loud knock came. Aunt Maggie ran to the door and flung it open. A tall black boy stood sweating, panting, and shaking his head. He pulled off his cap.

241“Mr. Hoskins... he done been shot. Done been shot by a white man,” the boy gasped. “Mrs. Hoskins, he dead.”

242Aunt Maggie screamed and rushed off the porch and down the dusty road into the night.

243“Maggie!” my mother screamed.

244“Don’t you-all go to that saloon,” the boy called.

245“Maggie!” my mother called, running after Aunt Maggie.

246“They’ll kill you if you go there!” the boy yelled. “White folks say they’ll kill all his kinfolks!”

247My mother pulled Aunt Maggie back to the house. Fear drowned out grief and that night we packed clothes and dishes and loaded them into a farmer’s wagon. Before dawn we were rolling away, fleeing for our lives. I learned afterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who had long coveted his flourishing liquor business. He had been threatened with death and warned many times to leave, but he had wanted to hold on a while longer to amass more money. We got rooms in West Helena, and Aunt Maggie and my mother kept huddled in the house all day and night, afraid to be seen on the streets. Finally Aunt Maggie defied her fear and made frequent trips back to Elaine, but she went in secret and at night and would tell no one save my mother when she was going.

248There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear. I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins was buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she able to claim any of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.