Behind them, his mother ran with Summer in her arms, the sack of food swinging against her thigh. Of all the things Hampton remembered, what he remembered most clearly was the way his father smelled on the night the family escaped, his face buried in his father’s neck, the shotgun barrel bumping against his back with each step his father took. The scent he recalled was something he had not smelled since, yet he often found himself longing for it: the earthiness of his father’s skin, the damp delta soil, and the perfume of the humid Mississippi night.
“That white man wanted blood for his daddy’s honor,” Hampton’s mother would say many times in the years that followed. His parents had been sharecroppers, both of them born to former slaves. Hampton grew up hearing his mother tell the story. “Old Newcomb was holding out on us, and your daddy knew it. But every year, he’d put his specs on and thumb through his books and say, ‘Sorry, Glen, you just barely broke even.’ But your daddy knew it was a lie, and he finally called him on it. Said, ‘No, sir. Not this year, Mr. Newcomb. I need my money.’ And that was it. Newcomb’s son came around that night, drunk, banging on the door, screaming for your daddy to come out. People killed over honor back then. They still do. Well, your daddy had his honor too.
“Of course we had to leave. You can’t kill a white man down south, especially not in Mississippi, and expect to live.” And leaving was what they had been doing that night as they fled across the cotton field.
They had run to Hampton’s grandfather’s house. The old man lived five miles away on a different plantation. He couldn’t have been much older than sixty, but his stooped and arthritic body had been broken by field work and former masters long before it had been freed. Hampton’s mother went inside and roused her father. The old man lit a lantern and led them through the woods to a neighbor’s cabin that sat tucked back in the trees, where the family hid in a crawl space beneath the floorboards. The earth there was musky, and even now Hampton’s nose remembered it, just like his ears remembered his mother’s whispered prayers and his bones still felt the thundering heartbeat where he leaned against his father’s chest and waited.
At dawn came the sound of a horse-drawn wagon creaking to a stop out front. A door opened and someone lifted Hampton and then Summer into the weak light of the early morning and carried them outside, where their grandfather waited by the wagon. Hampton’s father helped Hampton climb into the back, set Summer on his lap. The sound of brief goodbyes, his grandfather’s voice, his mother’s crying, his father saying, “Come on, now. Time to go.” His parents climbed into the wagon. The driver, a man whose face he could not remember, snapped the reins. Hampton’s last memory of the land from which he’d sprung was the image of his grandfather standing with the shotgun in his hand. He lifted it over his head in goodbye. Then he turned back toward the forest and the path that would lead him home. They never saw the old man again.
Whoever had driven the wagon dropped them at the train station in Vicksburg. In the brief hours they’d spent beneath the floorboards of the house, a collection had been taken up, and the money was now used to purchase the family’s tickets. Hampton had clear memories of the colored car because the colored cars had not changed since that day. He could still smell the train and hear the great hiss of the engine because, as a Pullman porter, he would smell and hear those things for the rest of his life.
It was not until the train had left the station that Hampton’s father allowed himself a sigh and his mother allowed herself to shed any tears of fear she’d kept behind her eyes since fleeing only hours before. Hampton knew they must have been a sight, this family of four covered in mud and brambles, nothing with them but two ill-stuffed sacks and the dirty clothes they wore. He would laugh at the sight of these country folks if he had not been one of them.
It was at the next stop, Yazoo City, that the porter came to them and bent to his father’s ear and whispered something that Hampton could not hear. Hampton’s father turned to his mother, took her hands and kissed them, bent his head, and held her palms to his forehead. He picked up Summer where she lay sleeping on the seat and placed her in his lap, buried his face in her hair, and closed his eyes. Hampton listened as his father took deep breaths.
The porter said, “They’re going to come on,” and Hampton’s mother began to cry. His father put his arm around her, pulled her toward him, kissed her on the mouth. He lowered Summer onto her lap. He reached for Hampton, pulled him close so that he stood before his father, nearly eye-level. “You be a man for her,” his father said. He spread his heavy hand across Hampton’s chest, ran his palm along his face and over his head, the work-worn calluses catching in Hampton’s hair. He reached into the front pocket of his overalls and removed the folded bills and slipped them into Hampton’s hand.
People in the car understood what was happening and what was about to happen. They began to move away from the family. Hampton looked up and saw two police officers standing above him. They reached down, took Hampton’s father by his shoulders, raised him to his feet. Hampton watched them escort his father through the car and off the train. His mother sobbed, pulled Summer to her chest, reached a hand toward Hampton. “They just going to talk to him,” she said. “They just going to talk to him.”
She was still saying that as the brakes released, the cars moved forward, and the train left the station. She was still saying it as the train pulled farther away, gathered speed, and rocketed north.
Hampton sat down beside his mother, felt her hand on his shoulder, leaned toward her as she pulled him close. She’d buried her face in Summer’s hair, but he could feel her body heaving in sobs. Summer tapped her mother’s arm, said, “Mama, Mama.” Hampton looked down at the money his father had given him. He unfolded the bills, saw that they’d been wrapped around the old photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day. He stared down at their young, unsmiling faces as they stared back at him.
He kept the photograph in his wallet after that, and for years he teased his mother about not smiling in what she referred to her as her wedding picture.
“Why ain’t you and Daddy smiling if y’all were so happy?”
“People didn’t smile in photographs back in those days,” she always said. “Aside from us getting married, there wasn’t nothing to smile about.”