Let the Circle Be Unbroken Read Online Free PDF Page B

left as well, going through the dining room and Mama and Papa’s room to the room Big Ma and I shared. There I finally shed the school dress and slipped into the comfort of well-worn pants. My first impulse was to toss the dress on a chair, but knowing the fussing that was sure to come, I was about to hang it up when I heard a wagon turning into the drive, and deciding on first things first, tossed it anyway and ran outside.
    The wagon rolled to a stop and Mr. L.T. Morrison stepped down. An awesome figure, Mr. Morrison was over seven feet tall with skin that was black, hair that was gray, and bulging muscles of an ironlike hardness despite his sixty-three years. He smiled down at me in his gentle way and spoke in a voice that rolled low and deep.
    “Hello, Mr. Morrison,” I said quietly.
    He walked to the back of the wagon where a hay loader was sitting and lifted it out, a task that should have taken two men. I followed him as he took the hay loader into the barn, then out again and helped him clear the rest of the wagon. After a while he looked down at me curiously. “You mighty quiet there, Cassie.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Anything the matter?”
    I looked up at him. “T.J. got himself a trial . . . next month.”
    He appeared just a bit surprised, then softly touched my head with his giant hand. “That’s better’n nothin’, Cassie.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said, continuing the unloading. But he and I both knew it wasn’t much better.
    When the boys came out, they spoke to Mr. Morrison, who watched us all with worried eyes; then the four of us crossed the road to the forest. Hearing the thudding echo of an axe beating out a dull rhythm, we followed the trail that wound through pines and oaks and sweet gums to a vast clearing where standing trees gave way to those that had fallen more than a year ago when lumbermen had come and chopped them down.
    Mama stood alone near the pond chopping one of the fallen trees for firewood. A tall, thin woman with fragile beauty in a strong-jawed face, she hardly looked to have the strength needed to swing the axe in such a hefty fashion, but her looks were deceiving. She had been born in the Delta, a sharecropper’s daughter, and she knew hard work. At nineteen she had come to Spokane County to teach; a year later she had married Papa. Since then she had worked as hard as he to keep the farm going, and when Papa had gone to work on the railroad in Louisiana, Mama had not only run the farm but had continued to teach as well. That is, she had taught until Harlan Granger had decided it was too dangerous to have her teaching and she had been fired, supposedly for destroying school property. But everyone knew what the real reason was: Mama had organized a boycott against the Wallaces, white brothers who ran the store on the Granger plantation, and Harlan Granger hadn’t liked that, not one little bit. And when Harlan Granger didn’t like something he always did something about it.
    She stopped chopping as we entered the clearing and smiled at us. Sinking the axe into a log, she took off theraw leather gloves she wore and the scarf which revealed long hair neatly pulled into a chignon at the nape of her neck. “How was school?” she asked.
    “All right,” said Stacey, looking around. “Where’s Papa?”
    Mama wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and went over to the water pail. “He’s down farther.”
    “Mama, y’all hear?”
    “Hear what, honey?” She uncovered the pail and dipped out some water with a ladle.
    “’Bout T.J.” Mama looked at Stacey, the ladle at her lips. “Come next month, he gonna get a trial.”
    Mama lowered the ladle without drinking. “Where’d you hear that?”
    “At school. Clarence found out when he gone home for dinner. Mr. Lanier was there and he’d just come back from Strawberry. Said that’s all folks talking ’bout.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “What this mean, Mama?” Christopher-John asked. “This mean T.J. gonna