Nightjohn Read Online Free PDF Page A

rags on them. You run along. I be fine.”
    Took forever, waiting on the day. Mammy hanging that way. I thought once of running to the fields to tell John. Wouldn’t do no good. Driver working the fields, he see me coming he just put me to work. They say if you can walk to the fields you can work. So I be working and not here and John couldn’tdo nothing anyway. They just keep him there no matter what I say.
    So nothing.
    Waller he keep his white maggot ownself in the white house all the day. Don’t come out but once to see me standing by mammy. The sun works across the sky, cooking her. I brought her water again and a piece of cornbread I’d been saving since morning food but she shook her head.
    “I’ll just throw it up when he comes to whipping me. You go now—get the rags ready for my back and the salt.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Yes. You can. Go do it.”
    Finally it came on to be dark and the hands come in from the field. Part of the afternoon I had the young ones to make a trough of cold food so they had enough to eat. They had to walk past the spring house and they saw mammy but there wasn’t nothing they could do.
    I went up to John and told him what had happened.
    “Damn.” He shook his head. “I should have warned you about making words.”
    “I knew. I was just excited. To be making my first word. I got to writing it in the dirt and he caught me. Waller caught me. He’s going to whip her. Mammy. Going to whip her into rags.”
    John didn’t say anything. He looked to where mammy hung on the spring house. His eyes were flat. “Bastard.”
    I was going to say more, say can you stop it, can you say something, but I heard the door on the white house open and Waller came out. He made gas and spit like he’d just ate a big meal and walked across the yard. Stopped.
    “All of you get out here and watch.” He bellered like an old bull, then turned. Didn’t go to the spring house. Didn’t have a whip.
    Instead he went to the barn and went inside.
    Come out in a breath or two and he was carrying a horse harness.
    He went to the buggy by the carriage shed and hooked the harness like he had a horse in it, except it was empty.
    Then he went back to the spring house. Looked at mammy.
    “You going to tell me who’s teaching them to read?”
    Mammy been hanging but she stood now and gave him the big eye again. “I don’t know nothing about reading or writing.”
    “God damn you.”
    He hit her with his fist. Then he unhooked her from the chains and ripped her clothes from off her body and dragged her naked to the harness.
    “Put it on—I feel like a ride in the buggy.”
    Mammy put the collar around her neck with the lines going back to the buggy. Stood there. Looking up at the sky. I couldn’t keep my eyes down. But the men did, they didn’t look at her. Looked at the ground.
    Waller climbed into the buggy and sat in the seat. He reached under the footboard and come up with a whip.
    “Pull, damn you.”
    The whip snaked out from the buggy seat like it was alive and flicked and blood come on mammy’s shoulder. Big cut. She started pulling but it wasn’t good enough. She strained and heaved and the wagon it moved and Waller kept saying:
    “Faster, damn it, faster.”
    And the whip come again and again, blood running down her back, the buggy moving across the yard and I hear in back of me:
    “She don’t know nothing. It was me that taught the girl the letters.”
    I turned and John was standing there. He had stepped forward and he pointed to mammy.
    “Let her be. She don’t know nothing about it. It was all me.”
    Waller looked at him the way a cat looks at a mouse caught in a corner. He smiled. Ugly smile.
    “Well—I might have guessed.” He stepped down from the buggy and moved to John. “Why don’t you just go over there and put yourself in those irons on the spring house wall?”
    I thought John wasn’t going to do it. He held for one, two blinks of my eyes. Waller had the whip in his