All God's Dangers Read Online Free PDF Page A

come in the knowledge of what it feels like to move out of this back yonder “ism”; and I’m confident all of my race will someday move out from under earthly bondage.
    My grandmother and other people that I knowed grew up in slavery time, they wasn’t satisfied with their freedom. They felt like motherless children—they wasn’t satisfied but they had to live under the impression that they were. Had to act in a way just as though everything was all right. But they would open up every once in a while and talk about slavery time—they didn’t know nothin about no freedom then, didn’t know what it was but they wanted it. And when they got it they knew that what they got wasn’t what they wanted, it wasn’t freedom, really. Had to do whatever the white man directed em to do, couldn’t voice their heart’s desire. That was the way of life that I was born and raised into.
    M Y mother’s name was Liza; she was Liza Culver. She was a deep yaller woman—her mother was a half-white woman. Her mother and daddy died before I was born—Grandpa Tom and Grandmother Jane Culver. My mother kept a lock of her mother’s hair in a tin box about four inches long and near about the width of four fingers. My mother kept it as long as she lived. It was opened many a time and I seed the lock of hair in it—long, black hair, straight hair. My daddy said it was layin in that box growin, that hair growed—tellin what was told to me and accordin to my seein. Well, after my mother died, my daddy jumped up and married again and he done away with that lock of hair. I was absolutely sorry that it disappeared, I hated it. Because my mother had dearly kept that hair and therefore I felt strongly about it. I’d a held on to it knowin it was of my grandmother.
    Grandpa Tom, who was due to be my granddad, it was said that he weren’t my mother’s daddy, said a Todd man, fellow by the name of Zeke Todd, was my granddaddy, my mother’s daddy. But at the time my mother was born, her mother’s husband was Tom Culver. My grandmother and granddaddy, Grandma Jane and Grandpa Tom, as I’d say, they was the mother and father of three girls—Liza Culver, Lydia Culver, and Virginia Culver—and eight boys, big healthy boys, all of em considered Grandpa Tom Culver’s children. There was only one in the family I never did see and that was Uncle Hill Culver, one of the middle boys. He fell—that’s the word we got—one Sunday, in Birmingham, he fell through the top of a three-story buildin to the floor of the first story and a scaffoldin fell behind him and busted his brains out. And that left seven boys.And every one of them boys and every one of them girls looked like sisters and brothers. Looked like one man and one woman was the daddy and mother to all of em, regardless to what was said. Uncle Gates Culver, that was considered the oldest boy. I laughed and talked with Uncle Gates many a day; Uncle Sherman Culver, made a heavy, portly man; Uncle Jim Culver, smallest of the lot; Uncle John, made a big, heavy rascal; Uncle Grant Culver; Uncle Tom Culver; Uncle Junior Culver; Uncle Hill Culver. I’ve seed seven of them boys right with these eyes, before the death of em. Uncle John Culver was the baby. They appeared to be my uncles; they favored my mother, all those Culver boys and them Culver girls.
    When my mother married my daddy, she taken them two baby boys at the death of
her
mother and raised em until they got to be grown men—Grandma Jane’s two babies, the knee-baby, Uncle Sherman Culver, and the real baby, Uncle John Culver. Her other brothers and sisters was grown enough then, they could vouch for themselves, but the two little ones, my mother taken them in. I was a little fellow, I mean little, I weren’t able to do nothin but eat and sleep when Uncle Sherman and Uncle John begin to board with us.
    Good God, them two boys and