Chapter III: Part II (2)

Atkinson had been busy with plans for his client’s defence, wondering whether he had not better bring Mamba forward and let her tell her story. The social turn taken by the court jarred him from his line of thought. He uttered a surprised affirmative to the comment. The judicial features above the desk smiled pleasantly down upon him, and the agreeable voice with its almost imperceptible drawl led the conversation among the amenities that usually preface an acquaintanceship.

Beyond the small circle of their talk the courtroom waited. Here and there a chair leg creaked or a foot shuffled. Beyond the window a huckster cried his fish in a deep baritone song. In the negroes’ section the tension drew out until it became almost tangible in the air of the room. And at the desk the three men chatted of the relative merits of the Charleston and New York climates. They might have been in a club, or at a chance meeting after business hours. Finally the judge touched on the case.

“And so you are interested in this woman, Mr. Atkinson. Very good of you to assist us, I am sure. Perhaps you will tell me what you know of the affair.”

Atkinson explained his connection with Mamba and Hagar. His interest seemed to be entirely understood by his hearers. The fact that he had espoused the woman’s cause was taken as a matter of course. As briefly as possible he told the story as he had got it from Mamba.

When he had finished the judge looked inquiringly at the prosecutor, and asked: “And what do you know about her, Mr. Dawson?”

“She’s been in the police court several times, Your Honour. Nothing serious: hot suppers, lodge meetings, and the like. There’s nothing vicious about her.”

His Honour pondered: “Still, she has a police record. That’s got to be considered. Evidently the town is no place for her. Ought to get her out of it and give her another chance.” He continued to speak, but now his glance took the other two into consultation: “A two-year suspended sentence ought to do. Give her six hours to get out of the city. Then put her on her good behaviour. If she is arrested anywhere in the county, or enters town again for any purpose whatever, the sentence will become immediately operative. Does that appeal to you as a fair adjustment, Mr. Atkinson?”

It had never occurred to that gentleman that he would be consulted in so important a matter as the actual measure of punishment, but he managed to say that he thought it not only very fair but decidedly generous.

“I am glad that you feel that way about it, sir,” His Honour replied, then shook hands over the desk, expressed pleasure in the meeting, and nodded to the clerk.

An involuntary whisper lifted and died in the negro section. The bailiff bawled for order in court. The clerk called upon Hagar to arise and receive sentence.

Slowly and lucidly the judge made his pronouncement and explained its purport. Then he ordered court adjourned for the day.

The deputy who was to take charge of Hagar until she should leave the city led her from the room, and a bewildered George Atkinson got to his feet and made for the open.

When he was on the pavement again he found that Mamba had accompanied him. She had been so quiet during the proceedings that, in his absorption, he had forgotten her, and the presence of the child which she held tightly by the hand struck him with the impact of a fresh surprise. Mamba caught his hand, shook it, tried to speak, then turned suddenly and followed Hagar. He stood looking after the strange old figure. Age with its back to the wall, fighting for something against great odds. His heart contracted with an unfamiliar spasm of pity, then expanded with a desire to protect. All feeling of boredom had passed during the trial. He had espoused a cause. For the moment he had put his best into it. Now, with the fight behind him, he could not let it go. It kept tagging along beside him, plucking at the sleeve of his mind. It made him think about something that had nothing to do with cotton seed. It started something in his brain like the slow turning up of a light. This negro business; millions and millions of them. Race problem. What to do with the whole mass. You came up to that, and it was there before you like a wall without a gate. One either stood there battering his hands to pieces on it, or he walked away and made it his business to forget. But this old woman, now, and her great ungainly daughter, and that child that they had a way of speaking about with their voices lowered; this was something different. These three were not a race problem. They were individual entities battling with destiny, needing a leg up most terribly. The weak throwing themselves on the mercy of the strong. Mamba--Hagar--the child--not negroes now: but to his mind just isolated human beings driven by some obscure urge toward a vague elusive goal, as he was--his wife--his children. Was that the feeling behind the law as he had found it in the court that morning? Was it the key to the puzzling attitude of the men he knew who could be so callous to the mass, yet who responded with exaggerated generosity to the need of a known individual?

He came to a street crossing, and his alert mind leaped to grapple with actualities, suddenly and keenly cognisant of the world about him. Over the cobbles at his feet a low cart was being dragged by an aged goat. In it sat a crippled negro. His head was bare to the sun, and his face wore the vacuous look that is common to both dreamers and fools. His hat lay upward in his lap, and there were a few pennies in it. The sight was a familiar enough one to Atkinson. He had seen the beggar every day, and yet his existence had never impinged upon his consciousness. Now he saw him differently. “God!” he thought. “What a hell of a joke for life to play on a man.” He fumbled in his pocket, drew out a dollar bill, and dropped it in the hat. The face below him became incredulous. Slow fingers picked the bill up and felt it, turning it over and over. Atkinson pulled himself together. “Can’t stand here all day looking like Santa Claus,” he told himself.

He turned on his heel and stepped briskly away, but his half-solved problem was not to be outdistanced; it was with him again, insinuating itself between his mind and the image of yesterday’s quotation board. Individuals--human beings--that’s the answer, perhaps. Can’t lift the mass. No use to try, it’s too vast. Can’t get hold of the edges of it, and if one did it would probably drop and smash things to pieces. But when you know of one who is catching hell, got to be decent, human. And leave the race problem to God and the great-grandchildren.

He was at his office now. Squaring his shoulders, he took the steps two at a time, opened the door, and exclaimed briskly, “Afternoon, Johnson. Got yesterday’s reports ready?”

* * * * *

Saint Wentworth sat in the little room behind the camp commissary, his brow furrowed with the intensity of his mental concentration. Before him, propped upon a table, was a self-instruction book of music, and his fingers were busy finding chords on the neck of a battered guitar. The open page showed diagrams of the strings with black dots where the fingers were to fall for each chord. Some of the combinations were awkward for his unaccustomed hands, but he hung doggedly to each until he could find it with his eyes lifted from the page before he passed on to the next. At first glance one would have said that his three years at the phosphate mines had changed him but little in appearance. As he sat in the half light of the little room between the fading day against the small window and the flickering illumination of the open fire, he showed the same slightly stooping shoulders, the colourless hair with its flaring cowlick, and the old lack of compression about the mouth which is to the conventional mind an infallible symbol of weakness. Only when he finally closed the book, laid the guitar aside, and, with hands jammed deep into trousers pockets, commenced to wander about the room, would one have noticed differences. Changes that became evident, not so much in the physical appearance of the man himself as in his interrelation with the room. He was one of those not uncommon people who find expression in the things with which they surround themselves; people for whom no evaluation can serve that does not take the setting into account. There were books on a shelf, plays, biography, poetry, a modern novel or two; the astonishingly varied collection that in age may mean only the dilettante, but in youth the seeker. An etching was given one of the four walls to itself: an extremely well done piece of work by a young Charleston artist--the gateway of old St. Michael’s with its wrought-iron urns and scrolls. A small but fine plaster of the Nike was given the mantel. A couch against one of the walls was covered with brown burlap, and had pillows of orange and lemon upon it. The draperies at the single window were the colour of sunlight. Now day was retreating rapidly behind the panes. The fluctuations of firelight grew more noticeable on walls and furnishings, thrusting mellow shafts under the table and into corners--possessing the room. Saturday night, and the negroes would soon be coming to do their shopping.

Wentworth cast a long look about him, sighed, and passed through the door into the commissary with its familiar odours--kerosene from the barrel in the corner, cabbages--the smells seeming stronger and more sour in the dusk. Then he caught a clean wholesome whiff from a pile of print cotton goods at his elbow. He threw some wood on the coals in the small open fireplace, lighted the lamps, and stepped through the outer door onto the little piazza. A cold red sunset burned low behind the serried pines, and over the eastern marshes the mists thickened and swirled, bringing night in from the Atlantic wrapped in their folds.

A group of negroes approached, their resonant voices preceding them. They were in high humour. To-night they could commence to buy on next week’s wages. The exhaustion of credit that invariably pinched them during the latter half of each week was now happily at an end until next Wednesday, or even Thursday if one were careful. Maum Vina, with her kind, peering eyes, and Reverend Quintus Whaley, fat and unctuous, were the first to enter. Behind them groups of twos and threes gathered before the store, climbed the steps, and entered the building. Loud chaffing and banter filled the air. Most of the women were swinging bottles by strings to be filled with kerosene for their lamps, and some brought jugs for molasses. The men were covered with dust from the mining pits. This was the hour when labour was forgotten, friends met, and gossip was exchanged. The commissary building glowed hospitably. The open fire crackled on the hearth, and several oil lamps flickered in the draught and sent ribbons of smoke up among the rafters.

Wentworth waited on Ned first because he knew that he was in trouble and ought to hurry back to Dolly. His customer was a small black negro in late middle life, with a grizzled moustache, and large teeth between which was clenched a cheroot that added a smell like burning leather to the other odours in the room. He was pondering over a selection from several bolts of black and white cambrics and cotton flannels. He smoked steadily while he held the widths of cloth against a soap box, black for the outside and white for the lining, appraising the effect with his head cocked speculatively on one side. From time to time he would look up and speak to an acquaintance. It seemed to Saint that he was deliberately protracting his errand, enjoying the importance that it gave him. And there was a smugness about him that was annoying. Saint remembered the sounds of weeping that he had heard when he had passed his cabin, and the stricken face of Dolly as she looked from the door. Now he spoke sharply, “If you’re sure the box is large enough, say what cloth you want and get through. I haven’t all night to give you.”

Ned produced a stick about eighteen inches in length and placed it in the box, where it fitted nicely. “Ain’t yo’ see, suh, dat he size? He ain’t but a six mont’ ole baby, an’ he always been puny.”

“Well, come along, then. Cambric or flannel?”

“Gib me dis”--and the man indicated the cambric--“two yahd black and two yahd white. Dat flannen cos’ too much, anyhow.” He added a package of tacks to his purchase. His gaze went longingly to a glass jar filled with large candy balls of striped red and white. “An’ put in t’ree ob dem candy ball fuh sweeten my mout’,” he concluded. He spat the cheroot loudly into the fire and put one of the candies in his cheek, where it looked like the symptom of an acute toothache. Then around the obstruction he said, “Now, suh, please gib me a cherry bounce an’ I’ll be gone,” and he started optimistically toward the keg which contained the sticky sweet drink that the negroes loved.

“No, I don’t,” said Wentworth sternly. “Get on back to Dolly. You ought to be ashamed to be hanging around the store and your woman alone with your dead baby.”

“Dolly tek on too much, Chief. Baby is plentiful. Dey comes an’ dey goes.” And with this philosophical comment he took his departure.

A young woman who was passing behind the speaker heard his remark and sucked her teeth loudly at him. “Ole rooster wid young pullet oughtn’t to crow so loud,” she flung after his retreating figure.

There was some laughter from the group at the fire, but an old woman, Maum Vina, with the bright peering eyes, spoke soberly. “Yo’ hadn’t ought to laugh at ole Ned like dat. Dat can’t do no good. What if Gilly Bluton is run after Dolly, he done de same by plenty odder gal roun’ here. When a man know dat anodder man is runnin’ after he ’oman, dat one t’ing. But when he know dat odder people know, den he goin’ fight. Yo’ mus’ want to hab killin’ in dis camp, enty?”

“Well, he ain’t gots no right to strut so,” the young woman said defiantly. “An’ Gilly ain’t no gawd. He can bleed same as any odder man. What de matter wid dese mens roun’ here, anyhow, dey ’fraid um so?” She cast a look of scorn around the circle which the men chose to ignore. But old Vina was undaunted: “Yo’ ain’t use’ to talk like dat ’bout Gilly,” she said. “Mus’ be he done quit goin’ to yo’ house now.”

Saint turned to wait on the next customer, then instinctively followed her gaze toward the door. A stranger had entered. In the small and intimate neighbourhood a new face was sure to claim attention, but this arrival was such a striking figure that her sudden appearance created a minor sensation. The noise around the fire seemed to recoil upon itself, leaving a poised question in the air. All eyes were fixed upon the open door, and the great bulk of the woman who filled it. She stood for a moment blinking in the light, then crossed with a heavy tread and faced Wentworth across the counter. In a deep, mellow voice, she said: “Is yo’ know me, Mr. Saint?”

He shook his head in mystified denial.

“Well, Ah is hear lot ’bout yo’. Ah is Mamba’ gal. Ma sen’ me down here an’ ax can yo’ fin’ me some work.”

Saint had heard about the trouble during his last week-end in the city. It had only confirmed him in an antagonism that he had always felt toward Hagar. She was a thoroughly bad lot. Mamba’s excuses for her delinquencies had never convinced him of her innocence. She would undoubtedly be a bad influence in the camp, and if he let her stay he would be answerable to the company for her behaviour. Mamba had no right to put her problem up to him in that fashion. Well, anyway, there was no work for a woman in the camp. He would only have to tell her so and send her on her way.

“That would be simple enough if you were a man,” he said. “There’s plenty of work in the pits, but we don’t use female labour. You’ll have to hunt somewhere else.”

But his visitor did not take his dismissal. Instead, she drew a step closer and looked at him incredulously out of eyes that might have been Mamba’s own. “Ma didn’t tell me no other place to go,” she explained. “All she say was for me to come to yo’ an’ tell yo’ she done sen’ me.”

Saint thought: “Confound the old woman. Is there no limit to her audacity?” He met the singularly bright gaze that was bent upon him. In some uncanny way it seemed to evoke Mamba herself. It gave him the same melting twist in the pit of his stomach that he had felt when she had cozened those spurious letters of recommendation out of him three years before. “But I tell you we only employ men,” he repeated in a voice that was weakly argumentative.

She unbuttoned her sleeve and jerked it back to the shoulder, then held out her arm, turning it slowly. Under the dark skin the muscle of the forearm rippled. She bent the arm upward at the elbow, and the biceps bunched. She gave a low, confident laugh. “Ain’t dat all right?” she asked.

The negroes began to laugh and whisper. A woman in the pits--who ever heard of such a thing!

Saint regarded the demonstration of muscle and laughed. “It certainly is,” he answered her. Then, quite to his own surprise he found himself adding: “If you want to try it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.” He took down an account book. “And while you’re here you might as well give me your name.”

The woman hesitated, biting her full lower lip with strong white teeth. Finally she asked: “Ain’t yo’ gots one in dere dat Ah can use?”

Saint wondered if she hadn’t one of her own.

“Ah did hab one what Ma gib me, but it’s done wore out.”

He spun the pages of his book and stopped at one that showed an open account. There had been the usual purchases--rice, grits, molasses, candy, cheroots, amounting to perhaps a dollar, pleading mutely from the page for settlement. He read the name at the top of the sheet--“Baxter--how’ll that do?” he inquired.

The woman repeated the word slowly as though to accustom her tongue to its use.

The negroes were regarding the performance with undisguised interest. Now Maum Vina spoke impulsively: “Do, Mr. Saint, don’t gib she dat bad-luck name. Don’t yo’ ’member Baxter done got drownded loadin’ a schooner?”

There was a moment of superstitious silence, while the negroes’ eyes seemed to grow as they watched her, placing an absurd importance on the simple matter. The woman’s voice broke the silence: “Ah guess Ah’ll take it, anyhow. It gots a good sound to it, an’, aftuh all, Ah ain’t so lucky mahse’f.” Then she seemed arrested by the drama of her predecessor. She reached across the counter and dropped a long index finger on the writing.

“When he buy dat bittle he been well an’ hongry, an’ he nebber lib long ’nough to pay for um. Ain’t dat so?”

Saint nodded assent.

“Po’ Baxter,” she apostrophised. “Yo’ ain’t mean to cheat nobody. If Ah lib long ’nough Ah’s goin’ settle dat bill fuh yo’.”

Saint had to leave her then to serve his customers. It was an interminable business--two cents’ worth of grits, three cents for molasses, a penny invested in a herring, salt pork, kerosene--and so it went with each shopper. When he had time to notice Baxter again she had joined the group in the doorway and seemed already to have made her place among them.

Near closing time Gilly Bluton came in. They heard his buggy drive up and stop outside. Then he entered, elbowing his way through the crowd around the door, with a young woman clinging to his arm. “What make yo’ don’t stand back an’ gib de lady room!” he demanded irritably.

They crowded back then, not breaking up and scattering, but opening for him in two closely standing divisions. There was a hostile significance in the way they massed, leaving the man and his partner more room than they needed, as though their touch were evil. But Bluton chose to ignore them and swaggered over to the show case where luxuries were exhibited. The man was a mulatto with negro predominating, but among the negroes of the camp, most of whom retained the sooty blackness indicative of undiluted Gullah blood, he seemed of a different race. The contrast was accentuated by the fact that he could read and write, and figure with great rapidity. Talents which, applied with energy and cunning and without conscience, resulted in his acquisition of most of the wages of the labourers that were not previously retained by the commissary or appropriated by the magistrate. He always wore store clothes of extreme cut, and never spent money unless he had an audience. The woman who accompanied him was not a resident of the camp, but lived at Red Top, a neighbouring hamlet. She glared her defiance and flaunted her triumph before the local belles.

With white people Bluton had an ingratiatingly confidential manner, and he now made the purchase of a highly coloured box of candy for the young woman appear as an especially intimate transaction between Saint and himself. Not that he presumed an equality, he was much too astute for that. But he always managed to give an impression to watching negroes that his basis of contact with the whites differed from theirs. Finally he purchased a real cigar from the solitary box which was housed under the cash till, lighted it, and turned leisurely to survey the group at the door.

Saint despised the man, and the necessity of serving him was the one real humiliation of his humble vocation. But Bluton was a person of importance and the one negro who had it in his power seriously to inconvenience the company if he were given a grievance. This had been intimated to Saint when he came to work at the mines. It had been pointed out that the negro’s position as the confidential employé of Proc Baggart, the magistrate, would enable him so to demoralise the labour that the operation of the camp would be thrown decidedly out of gear. They would like to have sent him packing, but he was too deeply entrenched, and he knew it, and the power that it gave him.

He stood for a moment lolling against the counter and looking disinterestedly at the group around the door that was now breaking up into pairs and individuals and straggling away toward the cabins. The older ones left in silence. The younger women and men told Bluton good-night, some boldly calling him Gilly, and the timid ones Mr. Bluton. Some regarded him with fawning wonder in their stupid eyes. The man nodded absently in response, then he shot after them: “What’s the use yo’ boys sayin’ good-night? I ’spec’ I’ll be seein’ yo’ all at de game ’bout nine o’clock. Dis Saturday night, ain’t it?”

Baxter had been sitting on a box beside Maum Vina, who had promised to put her up for the night. Now she and the old woman rose and called a good-night to Wentworth.

Bluton turned slowly and met her gaze. Without shifting his eyes he removed the cigar from his mouth and crossed slowly until he stood before her; then he looked her up and down.

“Whar did yo’ come from, Big Gal?” he asked at length, his large, facile mouth mocking her with its smile.

The woman was standing in the doorway, with the night behind her, and the flickering lamps pointing up high lights in her boldly modelled face, bringing out glints of dark amber in her wide eyes. As the man approached, her body tensed defensively, and lifted itself to its full height. There was nothing humorous about the wrapped wool of her head--the shabby clothes. She was invested in a sudden natural dignity.

“Ah come from Sabannah,” she told him. “Ah come ’cause Ah wants to. An’ my name ain’t Big Gal. It’s Baxter.” Her gaze never wavered, the glints of amber giving it a strange lucence as it held Bluton’s eyes. For a moment they stood without movement. A sense of impending drama drew wire-tight through the room--twanged the nerves of susceptible onlookers.

Maum Vina’s cackle, timid but urgent, jangled across it. “Come on, daughter. Time to go home,” she said gently. She took Baxter’s hand and drew it toward the door.

Bluton laughed shortly, uncomfortably, lowered his eyes, and folded his loose lips tightly over the cigar. The girl by the show case, who had been standing with a chocolate in her fingers, ran over and caught her man by the arm, glaring defiance at Baxter. The big woman regarded her with a look of supreme contempt, then turned without a word and went with Maum Vina. Behind her the tense atmosphere went suddenly slack.

Bluton collected his faculties and, stressing each word exaggeratedly, called after the disappearing figure: “All right, Sistuh, jus’ as _you_ say, ob course.”

* * * * *

Saint experienced some difficulty in getting Baxter on the pay roll. No one could look at her and doubt her ability to perform even that gruelling labour. But this was the fatal objection: there was no precedent for it. Women worked in the fields, the home, bore children. But the mines were for the men. Then, too, the mining was done by gangs composed of two negroes each, and no man was willing to risk the ridicule of having a female partner. The prospect was becoming dark indeed when Saint discovered that an aged negro called Drayton was going to be laid off because he was becoming feeble and none of the younger negroes would take him on as pit partner. He arranged that Baxter should have a try-out with the old man. The woman had no idea what the work would be like, but she had superlative confidence in her muscle. And, too, the open country, the sense of space, and the cool yielding sand beneath her feet gave her a sense of harmony with her surroundings.

At the field’s edge on that first morning she was joined by Drayton, a grizzled little man with a wisp of a moustache and old, stubborn eyes. There was a story that when he was in his prime and a schooner was being loaded with rock against time, he had wheeled and dumped five hundred barrow loads of four hundred pounds each without pausing even for food and had earned the record wage of seven dollars in a single day by his feat. Ever since this achievement he had strutted like a little cockerel, and the story was always on his lips. He would say to the big lazy bucks: “How much barrow can yo’ load in a day?” When he got the answer he would always cluck his tongue in scorn and tell of his own record. He knew well that they would be glad to turn upon him when his hand grew feeble and his ultimate hour of humiliation arrived. But his worst fear had never conjured up the idea of having to work with a woman. To-day the sweet winter air was as wormwood on his tongue.

They stood in the open looking each other up and down, these strangely mated partners. Then, in a deep, bullying voice that no one had ever heard him use before, the old labourer took the offensive. “Spec’ me tuh make mine han’ out ob yo’, enty! Well, Ah ain’t gots no time fuh foolin’. Ah spec’ yo’ done heah ’bout dat time Ah done roll fibe hundred barrow in a day, enty? Well, dat de kin’ ob a man yo’ gots fuh partner. Ef yo’ can’t keep up wid me, Ah goin’ quit, yo’ onnerstan’!”

Baxter looked at the agitated little figure and saw the surrender masquerading behind bluster and noise, and her heart went out to him, but before she could reply the other negroes caught sight of them, and whoops of derision rent the air.

“Do look, Daddy Drayton gots he nurse wid um.” “Whar dem fibe hundred barrows now, Daddy?” Hats were hurled into the air, and bodies bent double in spasms of laughter.

Baxter had been missing Lissa terribly, and now a flood of maternal yearning rose and overwhelmed her. She saw the old man turn on his tormentors and grimace fiercely at them, like an old and toothless dog who must seem so much fiercer than a young one because he is so uncertain of himself. She was full of tenderness for him. She would have debased herself if she could have propped up his toppling dignity thereby. She was sorry that her huge body made him seem all the smaller by comparison. She wished that she could shield him, help him over his bitter hour.

“Ah t’ank yo’ fuh take me on,” she said humbly. “Ah heah how yo’ is de bes’ man on de field. Ah ain’t nuttin’ but a ’oman, but Ah is goin’ do de bes’ Ah can.” And so they turned their backs on the jeering crowd, and entered upon their strange partnership.

The field to be mined was a large one. The axe men had gone before them and cleared it of forest, and it waited, clean and bare, for the diggers. Presently the foreman came around and assigned a “task” to each pair of workers, or, if they were industrious, two together, while he was about it. A “task” was a rectangle four by six feet in size. The labour consisted in digging one’s way slowly downward, throwing out the earth, which was called the overburden, and uncovering, at a depth of about six feet, the layer of phosphate rock deposit. Then the real labour commenced, for the rock, which lay in a stratum of about a foot in thickness, had to be broken into small pieces with a pick and thrown up out of the pit with a shovel by hand. This work was usually done by one of the partners, while the other had the far easier task of wheeling the rock in a barrow to the little railroad and dumping it in a pile for the cars.

Baxter spat upon her hands and closed them about the pick handle. The first stroke drove the implement into the soil up to the handle socket. Drayton’s eyes widened, and he could not restrain a grunt of admiration. The woman dug most of the day, and when they got to the rock, she elected to pick it out while he rolled it to the cars, telling him that she wanted to keep away from the men who were gathered at the tracks.

Once the foreman came up and looked into the pit. He was a gentleman, and his people had for generations been used to appraising negro labour. The hole had reached its depth of six feet, and the woman was standing on the bare floor of rock into which she was driving her pick. She paused and looked up. The pit had been full of sun all day, and the work terribly heavy. Baxter had thrown off her outer waist, and through her undershirt the man could see the swell of powerful shoulder and back muscles, the high lift of her chest as it rose and fell on long, unhurried breaths. He turned to Drayton with a wink. “You’re not such a damned bad picker, after all,” he observed.

The old man smiled; then, in the new, deep voice of authority, he ripped out some unnecessary instructions to the woman. She answered submissively: “Yas, suh. T’ank yo’, suh.” And he wheeled his barrow off toward the tracks.

She glanced up out of the pit full into the amused eyes of the white man, and a look of absolute comprehension passed between them. “You know men, Baxter, you’ll do,” he said with a grin as he turned away.

By the time that Saturday night came the jibes at Drayton’s expense had ceased and he was the secret envy of most of the lazy young pit men in the field.

Baxter for her part had earned eight dollars for the week’s labour. She had settled in old Maum Vina’s cabin, and she owed half of her income to the commissary for supplies which she had contributed to their living. That first Saturday night she turned her back on the allurement of gossip and laughter at the store, took her four dollars, tied it up in a corner of her handkerchief, dropped it in her bosom, and went home to bed. There would be a long journey to-morrow, and she must be up and on her way in the early morning.

* * * * *

The next morning Baxter found that Maum Vina was going to spend the day at Red Top, and, as their way would be the same for several miles, they started off together. The day was flawless, and the early sun sent its level radiance over the broad marshes, flooding the barren winter wastes with gold until they looked like fields of ripened grain. Down the tunnelled road under the live oaks the light shot, edging the stalactites of Spanish moss with filaments of fire. A red bird fell like a live coal out of the sky into a roadside casena bush and whistled three confident notes up into the face of the new day. The air had a tang to it and lifted the travellers into a good stride. As Baxter strode along life throbbed upward through the soles of her Sunday shoes and filled her with a sense of well-being. This was reinforced when she lifted her hand to her breast, where she could feel her four big silver dollars tied in the corner of her bandana.

As the pair stepped briskly along Baxter stole a sidelong glance at her companion, studying her in this first moment of leisure that they had enjoyed together. The old woman had a strange habit. In the house she was just like every one else, but as soon as they were out upon the open road she walked with bent head. Her large clay pipe clenched between her jaws wreathed her face in rank tobacco smoke, and through it her eyes could be seen, bright and eager, sliding from side to side of the road, missing no crevice or rut in their scrutiny. Presently she referred to this unusual behaviour, and told her companion the cause.

Twenty years before, when her old man had died and left her penniless, a conjure woman had told her not to worry, that she would find money in the road before she was too old to look after herself, and that she would die in affluence. Since then the years had been cruel. She had seen her two children go into the little graveyard with the father. Age had stripped her down to that last pitiful hope. But there was not a shadow of a doubt in her mind that some day she would find her fortune lying at her foot. But already her sight was failing a little, the keen eyes missing things that they would have seen easily enough even a year ago. So she must hurry and cover many miles of road while she could, and she must be careful, too. Who knew but what the money would be there in the road right around the next corner? Once, in the excitement of the recital, she raised her eyes while she talked to Baxter, then, in a panic, she made her wait for her while she trotted back and returned, searching the ground.

The younger woman was impressed. “Ah wish tuh Gawd Ah had somet’ing like dat tuh look forward tuh,” she said enviously. “Ah ain’t gots nuttin’ but bad luck gib tuh me when Ah talks tuh one ob dem cunjers.”

Presently they approached a bend in the road and heard the rattle of a rapidly driven vehicle. Then a light buggy swung the curve into full view and raced toward them behind the finest span of trotters that Baxter had ever seen. Before her the fore legs flashed up and down with the precision of pistons, and she got a fleeting impression of broad muscular chests under glistening chestnut coats, eyes showing glints of white, and mouths quivering open to the relentless pull on the bits. The driver was pushing them hard, using the whip against tight lines, and they were upon the two pedestrians in a flash. As Maum Vina snatched Baxter’s big, slow-moving body to the side of the road, the woman looked up in sudden anger at the man. Not personal resentment so much as a militant pity for the horses which were being so hardly used. The appraising of strangers was not a calculated business with her. She had always had instinctive first impressions, and experience had taught her that they were far more accurate than subsequent pondered judgments. Now, for the first time in her life, she was actually frightened at what she saw in a human face. The head was held straight on the rather spare shoulders, and a broad-brimmed felt hat shaded a long face that was shaped like a coffin--broadest at the high cheek bones, and tapering only slightly to an extravagantly long, square chin. The eyes were narrowed against the wind, and a broad, thin gash of a mouth was drawn in a tight, fixed smile. Under the shading hat brim the skin showed with a fungous-like pallor, most unusual in a country where the white men were used to working out under a subtropical summer sun. A shower of sand from the spurning hoofs stung the women’s faces. They stood watching the vehicle diminish down the perspective of the avenue, take a far curve, disappear.

“Sweet Jedus!” ejaculated Baxter in a hushed voice. “Who dat rattlesnake, Mauma?”

Then, while they pursued their way, the old negress told her about Proc Baggart and the part that he played in the lives of the negroes of his section. She was an amazingly astute old creature. In the moments when her eyes were not employed upon their eternal quest they had looked into people’s souls and minds and told her what they saw there. She knew much more about the operation of Baggart’s magisterial office than a negro was supposed to know. She also knew enough to feign ignorance, which for one of her race is the ultimate in human wisdom. Baggart was the law for the mining district. First as constable, then as magistrate, he had killed six negroes. The last killing had been rather spectacular and had served well to put the fear of God into the onlookers. The victim had been drinking, and instead of scurrying to the roadside at the approach of the buggy had remained in the middle of the road. He shouted something unintelligible at the magistrate, who replied by shooting him dead from the buggy seat with a shotgun; then, with a Saturday night gang of fifty negroes about him, driving the vehicle over the body and proceeding deliberately upon his way to give himself up and go through the form of a trial.

The magistrate, it seemed, made more money than any man in the county. There were things called taxes that the negroes were supposed to pay, but they were afraid to go to the house in town to find out about them, because it looked like a jail. So the magistrate waited awhile until the taxes got penalties--a process which to Maum Vina’s mind was similar to that by which an evil she-dog will eventually come home with a litter of still more evil puppies--then he sent for the negroes to come and pay him what he claimed. Sometimes he would send official-looking little blue papers by the constable. At other times he would just send word that such a negro was wanted. Once a new negro in the camp had asked for a receipt for his tax money, but after that he was hounded so that he had to go away. Then there were the dogs. That was where Gilly made most of his money, it was said. He would come slipping around when no one was looking, and if he saw a dog in a yard he’d report it to the magistrate. If the negro didn’t have a license, and of course no one ever did, he’d have to raise ten dollars for Baggart, or sometimes twenty, if he wasn’t civil. Gilly would get half of that as informer. That gave him mighty keen eyes. And Gilly also ran the big crap game just outside of the Company’s land. Everybody knew that the building belonged to Baggart and that he must be in on the game, because it was never raided. They all knew that the dice were crooked, but it was the only safe place to play. An independent game out in the bushes always managed to leak out, and the offenders were given stiff fines or jail sentences. When the old woman finished her recital she was at her turn-off, and without lifting her glance from the white sand of the road she said good-bye and left Baxter to her meditations.

For the greater part of an hour the big woman’s road led between woods, and she strode along with bowed head. Her thoughts were now upon her errand, and her darkly brooding expression gave place to a smile of happy anticipation. Abruptly the road left the woods, and her glance leaped free over the broad marshes and the silver ribbon of the Ashley to the city lying low along the horizon with the glamour of the morning sunlight upon it. Up the river, faint but very clear, came the familiar music of St. Michael’s bells calling the white folks to service. An exquisite pang of nostalgia twisted the listener’s heart. Now, in the crowded court on East Bay, in the long Sunday leisure, she would have been combing Lissa’s hair out for her, trying to straighten it so that she could be in the new style and not have to wear it wrapped like the older negroes. And while she worked she would have been listening to the talk, and sharing the laughter. Then to-night there would have been church, and singing with her friends.

She came in sight of the bridge--a taut thread of white stretched between the city and her destination at the end of the road. Fear assailed her. Perhaps she was late. She quickened her pace to a lumbering trot.

When she reached the bridge two figures were waiting: Mamba in her Sunday black, and Lissa in a new cloth coat, a recent gift of her grandmother, and of which not even one of the Battery white folks need have felt ashamed.

Baxter panted up, huge, hot, and dusty. She greeted Mamba hastily, “Hello, Ma! How yo’ been?” then fell on her knees in the dirt of the road and strained the child to her breast, drawing her finger tips along the soft cheek with her characteristic gesture. As always she was awed by the miracle that this fragile thing could be the fruit of her great crude body. After a moment, with gentle pushing movements, the child released herself from the enfolding arms and stood looking at her mother. Then, with the frank callousness of youth, she sidled over and leaned against Mamba’s clean, stiff Sunday black. A little dashed in spirit, Baxter got to her feet and fumbled in her bosom for her handkerchief. Then she untied the knot, biting it free with her strong white teeth, and handed Mamba four silver dollars.

“If Ah is careful, Ma,” she said, “Ah can count on dat each week, an’ when Ah git hardened some more, maybe Ah can do better.”

The old woman took the money and put it in a handbag that she carried. She was preoccupied with her calculations for the child, half forgetting the mother, who stood there waiting for a word of approval. But after a moment Mamba smiled her new smile, grim and rather terrifying with its big masculine teeth, and admitted: “Dat ain’t so bad.”

She stood pondering a moment longer, her lips moving silently to some thought, then she went on more brightly: “Now, if yo’ can keep dat up steady, we can start dem music lessons for Lissa. Ah got her in the infant choir las’ Sunday ebenin’, an’ de leader say she gots de bes’ voice in de Sunday school. She say dat fuh three dolluh a week she can tek she right on up so she can earn a libbin’ singin’ out ob books an’ teachin’.”

They stayed for a while longer, sitting beside the road and saying the inconsequential things that always crowd up in the moments before a parting, while the real words that should be carried away to be remembered afterward elude the mind. For Baxter the glory had somehow gone out of the sunlight. The sight of Lissa leaning against her grandmother filled her with a new sort of loneliness that hurt her more than the past days of separation. Finally she rose to go. This time she did not take the child in her arms and kiss her, but patted the little head gently with her big hand. “Well, so long,” she said, and turned abruptly away.

* * * * *

The winter passed slowly for Baxter that first year at the mines, for it was not merely a succession of days and weeks, but one of those periods in a human life when a new agony yields slowly to custom, and custom becomes a commonplace with which one can go on living without flinching.

Every Sunday brought Mamba to the bridge head, but Lissa was in the regular Sunday school now and did not want to miss the singing and companionship of the other children. So she came only occasionally to see her mother. When she did she was strange and diffident, preferring to sit by Mamba on the roadside embankment as they talked. The child’s music teacher had got her into the Sunday school of the stylish mulatto church which was attended by only the most prosperous of the coloured citizens. Rumour in the negro quarter had it that there was a door at the entrance of the church painted tan and that, when an applicant for a pew passed through it, his complexion was observed by the vestry. If it showed darker than the door there were no pews for rent. Whether or not this was malicious humour on the part of the full-blooded negroes, there is no way of knowing, but the fact remained that, while they might scoff, it could not be denied that membership in the Reformed Church meant entrée to the coloured _haut société_. And so Mamba had gladly let Lissa go with her friend while she continued to attend her humble place of worship near the old East Bay tenement.

No better method could possibly have been devised in the old city, where the caste system among negroes went to exaggerated extremes, of making a colour snob of Lissa. The mother felt this instinctively, but her first definite impulse to try to prevent it was immediately suppressed by Mamba’s inflexible determination to give the girl her chance to the new negro life that she felt to be so full of possibilities.

“Yo’ an’ me, Hagar--what de hell is we?--Nuttin’! But Ah ain’t no fool at schemin’, an’ yo’ gots de strength. Look like we ought fuh gib dat gal a chance ’tween us.”

And so the spring wore away. The green and brown of the winter woods gave place to the spilled gold of jessamine, and the wood lilies marched in white battalions through the swamp proclaiming the Easter season. In the open, deciduous trees hung like puffs of yellow smoke against soft horizons, and in the swamps pollen spread a glaze coloured like verdigris over the pools.

Then came the hot days, with the sunlight trembling in waves over the denuded mining fields, and impounding its heat in the pits where Baxter laboured with her great body for her child and learned to spend her thwarted maternity on Maum Vina and old Drayton, who had to be humoured like a child while he was kept happy by her apparent submission to his authority. But the physical labours, at any rate, had not been without compensation. Her muscles were like iron and were no longer a vast half-directed force but a perfectly disciplined machine.

* * * * *

July came, and in its second week a spell of record-breaking heat. Baxter’s pit was out in the centre of the field and would get no shade all day. Wednesday--and to-night there would be a church service, and after that a “love feast” under the auspices of the lodge. All over the fields the men were taking it at half speed. As they were paid by the output they were not pushed by the foremen, and when they carried a barrow to the cars they would sprawl for a few moments in the strip of shade. But Baxter could not afford to lag. The sun had come up in a smother of red haze; later it had climbed above it, but the moisture had flowed sluggishly along the earth and settled in the pits. Out of an intolerable grey-blue dome the sun struck directly down into the humid excavations, making of each a veritable Turkish bath. Baxter had stripped to the limit that her self-respect would allow and swung along steadily, lifting ten pounds of rock with every hoist of the shovel and hurling it out for old Drayton to barrow to the cars.

When knocking-off time came she was conscious of physical exhaustion for the first time since she had got her muscles hardened to the work.

Church night, lodge meeting, and “love feast” all rolled into one! What a night it was going to be! Everywhere the negroes were beginning to show excitement, cutting pigeon wings and shuffling. Mouth organs were coming from pockets and overwhelming the evening birds in the casenas and scrub oaks.

For two months the white men who worked at the plant had been spending the nights on the high sandy ridge three miles away where there was no fever in hot weather. They would scurry off at sundown as though the devil were after them, and would not dare to return until after sunup. But the negroes were immune to malaria. They could stay. Unnumbered generations behind them along the swarming Congo--in the swamps of Angola--had tolerated the breed to the poison, had given them this heritage of safety and these months of freedom from the surveillance of the white man. What a God-given dispensation of nature! From moonrise until to-morrow’s sun--a negro country. Even Proc Baggart, who feared neither god nor devil, wouldn’t dare to prowl in the malarial lowlands. When the white men were there no liquor was sold on the mining company’s property, and there was comparatively little drinking among the negroes. But now! Negro country! Who cared for rules with no one to enforce them!

Bluton appeared with a buggy load of half-pint dispensary flasks which he had brought from town and which he resold at double price, until every cent left of last week’s wages in the camp went into his pockets. The negroes hated to patronise him--the yellow hound, the rattlesnake! Why hadn’t one of them thought of going for it?--but they never did--and Bluton always remembered and had the jump on them every time. Now he got in his empty buggy and drove off with the money, telling them frankly that, if he came back later, he wasn’t going to risk a pocketful of change in that gang.