IV
The hanging episode was scarcely history before Nat and I got into another scrape, illustrating the brilliant Forge method of shaping childhood.
The execution of martial enemies being a bit too strenuous, the fertile little Mayo boy hit on “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.” He assured all witnesses that it was capital sport playing “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.”
In all our town, however, there was no colored boy, let alone a small colored boy, available as the slave to escape and be hunted. But that did not hamper the Mayo boy’s ingenuity.
“One of us can black himself and be the slave,” he suggested.
“What with?” I demanded. “Ma won’t let us have any matches to burn cork. Besides, we couldn’t get cork enough anyhow.”
“I know what’s good and black that we can get a lot of,” Benny Mayo promised. “You all come with me and I’ll show you.”
He led us down behind the Mayo barn. Several old carts, hayracks and farm implements were stored there.
“Now then, Nathan, you take off all your clothes and we’ll black you,” Benny directed. “This ain’t goin’ to hurt you. How can it?”
“I won’t do it unless Billy will!” Nathan objected stoutly.
I submitted.
We disrobed, au naturel. The little Mayo boy and the others set to work on us.
From the inside of the wagon hubs was scooped the blackest, deadliest grease the malignity of man has ever invented. The axles of the vehicles, especially one old dump cart, were rich with it.
Over the sunburned pelts of our little bodies the stuff was smeared in handfuls. It smelled frightfully but we remembered how it must feel to be a real slave, and stood it as stoically as possible.
From head to foot we were covered with the green-black “goo.” Our handlers took especial care to rub it well into our hair and ears. When that smearing “was called a job”, we were Africans with a vengeance. And the odor shrieked to heaven.
“But we can’t put on our clothes with this stuff all over us!” wailed Nat suddenly.
“Slaves in a dismal swamp don’t need no clothes,” the Mayo boy contended. “Start off just like you are and it’ll make it harder to hunt you.”
“But somebody might see us without any clothes and arrest us!”
“That’s why it’s goin’ to make it harder to hunt you; you’ll keep out of sight better without clothes.”
The dismal swamp was a cat-tail bog over on the Hastings farm. Thither by back lanes we were escorted, the “ferocious bloodhounds” being the Mayo boy’s sky terrier, Pink, and Nat’s shepherd dog, Ned, with the aforesaid immunity from the depredations of skunks.
Nat and I were turned loose like two justly celebrated gold-dust twins, minus all concessions to civilization. And in the next two hours we became relieved that there had been an Emancipation Proclamation.
As the afternoon waned, the mosquitoes were bad enough. But Nat’s little sister, Edith, had beheld our “making-up” from afar, and about the time we entered the Dismal Swamp, she reached our mothers and told her story. Two highly exasperated, grim-lipped women ultimately joined the “bloodhounds” and outdid them. For our mothers found us and the dogs did not.
Splashed with mud and slime on top of our coating of axle grease, scratched by brambles and bruised by limbs of dead trees which protruded from the most unexpected places, the slaves in the dismal swamp finally found a soft spot to sit down and weep with a great lamentation. We had a disturbing hunch from our experience in the bog water that our Ethiopian camouflage was not going to be removed with any such dexterity as the Mayo boy had assured us so glibly.
The posse finally surrounded us. There was no escaping through that cordon. Our mothers’ skirts were bedraggled.
Their shoes squeegeed water at every step. But they bagged us. And the expression on their faces when they held us at arm’s length was sickening. Somehow we felt that again the Mayo boy had “spoofed” us. The Mayo boy was not among those present when we were taken into custody, by the way.
“We’re slaves in a Dismal Swamp,” explained Nathan, when his mother had firmly entwined her fingers around a slippery ear.
“Well, in mighty short order you’re going to be two sorrowful boys in a darned dismal wash-dish!” prophesied that wrathful lady. And she looked at my mother, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.
“Anna,” gasped my horrified mother, “—suppose—suppose—it won’t wash off!”
“Then I’ll set fire to my young one and burn it off!” avowed Mrs. Forge grimly. Whereupon Nathan began caterwauling and his asseverations that he didn’t mean to do it became as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
Through the ups and downs of thirty years I have made many strange journeys over many rough pathways. Not one of them has equaled the awfulness of traversing those two miles of oozy bog that summer afternoon, dragged wrathfully by a grim woman whose concentration was glued on the impending ordeal of separating me from that unspeakable coating of slime and grease.
“When I catch that Mayo young one,” announced my mother, “I’ll skin him alive!”
“Amen!” affirmed Anna Forge. She gave Nathan a yank that pulled him over a boghole as though he were greased. Which he was. Greased thoroughly, adequately, irrevocably.
We got as far as the Forge homestead, and my mother decided to stop there and cleanse her offspring in company with her neighbor, rather to lighten the labor—to say nothing of the color of her boy—by sharing it.
They tried rain water and they tried soap. They tried cold water and they tried hot. None of it made any more impression than as if they’d been trying to wash a duck. They tried scraping it off with a paddle, as one scrapes butter from a slice of bread. In certain localities this last went so far as to disclose that deep down under the mass we were young humans of the Aryan persuasion. In our babyhood we might even have been pink. But at present we were anything but pink. We were a sort of blue-mauve-green.
“My God!” cried the nearly hysterical Mrs. Forge. “There’s going to be no getting this off successfully short of boiling ’em!” Thereat, the woman’s neurasthenia got the better of her and she wept.
“Anna, stop your blubbering! I’m going to try kerosene,” my mother announced. “Billy may go round the rest of his life smelling like the dirty end of a grocery store, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I ‘seen my duty and I done it.’” And she whacked a little French boy for meddling with her washcloths.
The two women pooled all the kerosene they could find in the neighborhood. It wasn’t the fairly cleanly product that may be purchased in 1921. It is debatable which was rankest in taste, feeling or smell—that yellowish coal oil or the devilish massage-muck which now ran down our shivering bodies in streaks. Filling a tub with it, mother started in, determined, like Grant, to fight it out along that line if it took all summer. The prospects were that it would take all summer.
I forget in how many “waters” of oil, hot steam and soapsuds they washed us. Somewhere around thirty-seven. There is no reason to doubt the figure. So much concentrated washing had never happened to either of us before. Thank God, it has never been needed since.
Nat and I were two sick boys—physically as well as spiritually—long before those ablutions were completed. A sizable number of persons of color, sold into servitude, have undoubtedly been lost in swamps. But Nathan Forge and his biographer were the first in history who were captured, dragged out and washed in thirty-seven “waters” before being slated for additional chastisement.
Vividly I recollect little Nathan’s plaintive plea at about the thirty-fifth “water”, when he gradually began to exhibit evidences of Caucasian extraction.
“Ma, are you goin’ to lick me?” he demanded, gazing timorously up into his mother’s twitching countenance. It was the fearful, pitiful interrogatory of a naked, shivering, thoroughly chastened little boy who had taken the word of a fellow man at its face value and discovered, like the psalmist of old, that all men are liars.
“I’m too done up to lick you! I’m going to let your father lick you!” his mother assured him.
“Anna Forge, are you crazy?” my mother exploded.
“No, but I’m going to see that some discretion is put in his make-up if I have to brand it in with an iron!”
“You may brand in more than discretion, Anna.”
“I’ll take my chances!”