Yes, of course you are; because you failed to pay the poor wench on Saturday night the three dollars which is her princely emolument for fourteen hours a day of sweaty drudgery seven days a week; because “it slipped your mind,” because you couldn’t bear to let it go in one gigantic lump—could you?—because you thought you’d hang on to the good green smell of money just a little longer, didn’t you?—let it sweat away in your stocking and smell good just a little longer—didn’t you?—break the poor brute’s heart on Saturday night just when she had her mind all set on fried fish, gin, and f——g, just because you wanted to hold on to three wadded, soiled, and rumpled greenbacks just a little longer—dole it out to her a dollar at a time—tonight a dollar, Wednesday night a dollar, Friday night the same…and so are left here strapped and stranded and forlorn, where my father would have paid and paid at once, and kept his nigger and his nigger’s loyalty. And all because you are a woman, with a woman’s niggard smallness about money, a woman’s niggard dealing towards her servants, a woman’s selfishness, her small humanity of feeling for the dumb, the suffering, and afflicted soul of man—and so will fret and fume and fidget now, all flustered and undone, to call me forth with:
“Here, boy!—Pshaw, now!—To think that she would play a trick like this!—Why as I say, now—child! child!—I don’t know what I shall do—I’m left here all alone—you’ll have to trot right down and see if you can find someone at once.”
Aye! to call me forth from coolness, and the gladed sweetness of cool grass to sweat my way through Niggertown in the dreary torpor of the afternoon; to sweat my way up and down that grassless, treeless horror of baked clay; to draw my breath in stench and sourness, breathe in the funky nigger stench, sour wash-pots and branch-sewage, nigger privies and the sour shambles of the nigger shacks; to scar my sight and soul with little snot-nosed nigger children fouled with dung, and so bowed out with rickets that their little legs look like twin sausages of fat, soft rubber; so to hunt, and knock at shack-door, so to wheedle, persuade, and cajole, in order to find some other sullen wench to come and sweat her fourteen hours a day for seven days a week—and for three dollars!
Or again, perhaps it will be: “Pshaw, boy!—Why to think that he would play me such a trick!—Why, I forgot to put the sign out—but I thought he knew I needed twenty pounds!—If he’d only asked!—but here he drove right by with not so much as by-your-leave, and here there’s not a speck of ice in the refrigerator—and ice cream and iced tea to make for supper.—You’ll have to trot right down to the icehouse and get me a good tencent chunk.”
Yes! A good tencent chunk tied with a twist of galling twine, that cuts like a razor down into my sweaty palm; that wets my trouser leg from thigh to buttock; that bangs and rubs and slips and cuts and freezes against my miserable knees until the flesh is worn raw; that trickles freezing drops down my bare and aching legs, that takes all joy from living, that makes me curse my life and all the circumstances of my birth—and all because you failed to “put the sign out,” all because you failed to think of twenty pounds of ice!
Or is it a thimble, or a box of needles, or a spool of thread that you need now! Is it for such as this that I must “trot around” some place for baking powder, salt or sugar, or a pound of butter, or a package of tea!
For God’s sake thimble me no thimbles and spool me no spools! If I must go on errands send me out upon man’s work, with man’s dispatch, as my father used to do! Send me out with one of his niggers upon a wagon load of fragrant pine, monarch above the rumps of two grey mules! Send me for a wagon load of sand down by the river, where I can smell the sultry yellow of the stream, and shout and holler to the boys in swimming! Send me to town to my father’s brick and lumber yard, the Square, the sparkling traffic of bright afternoon. Send me for something in the City Market, the smell of fish and oysters, the green, cool growth of vegetables; the cold refrigeration of hung beeves, the butchers cleaving and sawing in straw hats and gouted aprons. Send me out to life and business and the glades of afternoon; for God’s sake, do not torture me with spools of thread, or with the sunbaked clay and shambling rickets of black Niggertown!
“Son, son!…Where has that fool boy got to!…Why, as I say now, boy, you’ll have to trot right down to….”
With baleful, brooding vision he looked towards the house. Say me no says, sweet dame: trot me no trots. The hour is three o’clock, and I would be alone.
So thinking, feeling, saying, he rolled over on his belly, out of sight, on the “good” side of the tree, dug bare, luxurious toes in cool, green grass, and, chin a-cup in his supporting hands, regarded his small universe of three o’clock.