Near the creek stood the schoolhouse for the black children on the plantation. A log house with a doorway cut in one end, and fitted with a rude door made of clapboards swung on iron hinges. The big chimney at the other end was overspread with clay mortar. This cabin occupied a lovely spot, overshadowed with a great oak tree from whose roots a small spring trickled and ran to join the larger stream behind it.
Big Sue said there were too many children to get inside the schoolhouse at one time. Half of them had recess while the other half recited lessons. The teacher taught with a long keen whip in her hand, and she made every child learn the lessons. One word missed brought a sharp cut across the palm of the offender’s hand. Two words brought four cuts that would not soon be forgotten. Big Sue said she had never bothered to learn to read and write. She didn’t have any use for either. Sometimes she’d like to read a new receipt. Still, she could cook better out of her head than most people could cook out of a book.
The old people didn’t believe in book learning. They thought learning signs and charms more important, and they discouraged having a school. But Zeda’s girl, raised right on the plantation, was the teacher, and she worked wonders with the children. Lijah had never liked books. Playing and riding and shooting and swimming interested him more. He’d have made a good conjure doctor. Once he put some of his own hair in a hole in a tree, and it cured his sprained ankle. He cut an elder stick for Maum Hannah’s asthma, and tied it by the neck and hung it up in the loft, and it cured her, too. For a while, before he ran away, he saved all his toe-nails and finger-nails to put in his coffin, but that was so much trouble he quit after he got one little bottle full. It takes a lot of learning to be a good conjure doctor, for there’s black magic as well as white. Magic can save as well as kill. Breeze ought either to pray now or start learning magic. He was almost twelve.
The path ran close to a group of trees surrounded by an old rusty iron fence, where tombstones gleamed white. Deep shadows rippled whenever a breeze made its way through the thick, moss-hung woods. Enormous live-oaks stood at regular intervals, all of them festooned with trailing moss that made a weird roof overhead.
Cicadas chanted shrilly in a tangle of rose vines and honeysuckles. White oleanders and japonicas crowded one another, the fragrance of the blossoms mingling with the stench of decaying leaves and wood. Raising the rusted creaking latch of the iron gate, Big Sue tipped inside the enclosure where gnarled roots of the old trees crawled across the paths and slipped under pink-plumed tamarisk bushes. They disappeared, but they tilted the heavy tombstones, and crumbled the brick foundations from under marble slabs thick with words.
Some of the graves were smooth and clean, others were smothered with vines stretched across sunken hollows. Plantation masters and mistresses had been crumbled, melted, to feed blind groping roots.
Big Sue went toward a corner where a massive gray stone marked a grave. “Old Cap’n lays here. Gawd! Dat was a man! Not scared o’ anyt’ing or anybody! Mean! Jedus, he was mean!”
Big Sue sighed. How times change! That same man lying in his grave had lorded it over this whole Neck, once. Not only over the black people who worked his fields after freedom the same as in slavery days, but over the white people too. Most white people hereabout now were trash. Poor buckra. Gray-necks. Children and grandchildren of overseers. When the war to free the slaves was going on they stayed home and sold whisky. They ran under the bed and hid if anybody started a racket. They made money and saved their skins. Some of them owned plantations now, and lived in houses whose front doors had been shut to their grandfathers!
Times had changed. The man who had ridden over this country with the loosest rein and the sharpest spur, was down under the ground feeding tree roots and worms to-day. One little boy, one lone grandson, was all that was left of his seed, and he was being raised up-North, among Yankees. The child’s own ma was dead and his stepma had taught him the strange ugly speech of the Yankees. Enough to make his grandpa turn over in his grave! Wouldn’t the old man curse!
This land must be too rich, too rank for white people to thrive on it. Their skins were too thin, their blood too weak to bear the summer heat, and the fevers and sickness that hid in the marsh in the daytime, then came out to do their devilment after dark.