Chapter I

I was born at Restwell, two miles from the small town of Whitechurch, in the county of ---- in Virginia. The night of my birth, by going to the top of Lone Tree Hill behind Restwell, one might see the smoke and flare of a dying battle and hear in diminuendo the guns of North and South. I know this because Daddy Guinea went up there and heard and saw and told me about it when I was six years old and sitting with him in his cabin over the fire.

"'Fo' de Lawd, dat's so!" said Daddy Guinea. "De tree shivered an' Guinea shivered. De sky low down wuz on fire lak you burnin' breshwood, an' de guns holler hoarser 'n bullfrogs! Dey soun' jes' lak de folks in hell buttin' dey haids togedder. 'N' yo' father was dere an' yo' grandfather an' yo' uncle Gilchrist an' mo' ob yo' cousins dan you could shake er stick at! An' er passel ob other folk. An' de folk on de other side--de Yanks. An' de light flicker lak breshwood burnin', an' de guns holler lak bullfrogs in hell, whar dere ain't no water! An' de tree shiver an' Guinea shiver."

"Did I shiver, Daddy Guinea?"

"I don' know 'bout de shiverin', but I sho know dat you hollered! I come down from Lone Tree Hill, an' de big house wuz lighted up, an' I heard you hollerin' befo' I got to de kitchen door."

"What was I crying about?"

Daddy Guinea scraped the sweet-potatoes that we were roasting out of the ashes. "Dat's er question with er powerful lot ob joints! Dar now! De ashes off de little, long 'tater, jes' lak you laks hit!"

My father, my grandfather, and Uncle Gilchrist came safely from the battle visible from Lone Tree Hill. But three months later in a skirmish a hundred miles from Restwell my father was killed. So I do not remember him. A daguerreotype and a photograph--_carte de visite_--show a strong, irregular face. He was twenty-six when he died, and I was his only child. I was born and he was killed in the second year of the war. I was three years old when came the Surrender. At present my native region found itself midseas in that long and trying episode called Reconstruction. South of Mason and Dixon at this moment in history it was called Domination. War, Surrender, Reconstruction, or Domination--they were but words to a six-year-old, yet words with something mystic, awful, wrapped around them. He could not but feel that, watching the faces of the grown-ups who spoke them.

Daddy Guinea was old and bent and charcoal black and seamed. He had been born at Restwell, but his father and mother were born in Africa. He was one of the handful of men and women, slaves once but now free, who stayed on at Restwell after the war. He was free, but made no great fuss over it, took his wage in kind and in the very few dollars my grandfather could give him, and once told me, "I wuz all de time free in er place inside!"

Now, sitting in the cabin that was dark save for the hearth-fire, waiting for the sweet-potato, watching Daddy Guinea's manipulations, all of a sudden he linked and brought together for me the feel of all the negro folk that I knew intimately or had casually viewed. He was like them and not like them, as all the others were like one another and yet had their differences, so that I never mistook Uncle Plutus for Mandy's Jim, nor Mandy for Aunt Esther, nor Mammy for either of these, nor one of the children with whom I played for another. Daddy Guinea, now bending, now rising, from the fire, was certainly Daddy Guinea. Yet, like the giant shadow upon the wall and ceiling, there was something around that was holding Daddy Guinea and Uncle Plutus, Mandy's Jim and Mandy and Aunt Esther and all the others. I don't suppose in the least that sitting there, a small boy roasting sweet-potatoes, I consciously entertained an idea of race or accomplished a considerable synthesis. Yet I did, with a sudden sense of wideness, of novelty, open into a perception, not of Daddy Guinea or Mammy or Uncle Plutus or Esther, but of colored people. I was due to meet often in life, am due still to meet often, that sense of generalization. It came then, as it comes now, with the breath of space, with a dawnlike, happy surprise.

I sat staring into the embers. "Don' you lak yo' sweet-potato?" asked Daddy Guinea. "Eat hit!"

When it was eaten he took me home to the big house. Outside the cabin was darkness and stars, the sound of the river and wind in the oaks. Also a whippoorwill was crying: "Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!" I pressed close to Daddy Guinea.

Mammy waited for me in the kitchen door. "Never wuz such a chile for gallivantin' off to cabins! Come in an' say yo' prayers an' 'celerate yo'self into bed!"

I always said my prayers kneeling beside my mother. Now I said them and climbed into my bed and she kissed me good night. She went out of the room, and Mammy, who had a bed in the corner, sat at a table by the lamp and hemmed a great white neckerchief. It was a warm night. Moths came in at the windows and flew around the light. Mammy's shadow moved on the wall. Her head nodded, up and down went her arm. I lay upon my side and watched the shadow. The room was large and square and the whippoorwill's voice, no less than the moths, came in at the window. I grew lonely, and to brighten matters sat up and demanded a drink of water. Mammy brought it to me in my silver mug and told me to go to sleep. I held her by her ample apron.

"Daddy Guinea saw them fighting from Lone Tree Hill. Did you see them, Mammy?"

Mammy looked down at me, and with a large, brown hand pushed the hair from my forehead. "You go to sleep, honey! Yo' haid's as damp as a dish-rag! It's a hot night. You go to sleep!"

"Did you see them?"

"No! Where'd I fin' time to go up to Lone Tree Hill? First I wuz wukkin' with yo' mother, an' den I wuz holdin' you in dese two hands. Now you lay right down an' go to sleep!"

I obeyed her, but in the nighttime I woke, terribly afraid. At my loud crying my mother came in.

"Dar now!" said Mammy. "First you waked yo'self, an' den you waked Mammy, an' den you waked yo' mother!"

I clung to my mother. "Daddy Guinea said the sky was like brushwood and the guns were like bullfrogs in hell, where there isn't any water!"

My mother sat down beside me on the bed. "There, Michael--there, Michael!"

"And I wouldn't ever tell! I was down at the big gate and a colored man came by and he came over and made a face at me. And he said, 'You were beaten poor--and I hope you'll be beaten poorer!' And he pulled my hair and he said, 'I couldn't useter do that!' And he said: 'Don't you dare go tell! If you do I'll come at night and make mincemeat of you!'" I burst into a loud cry. "I've told--I've told!"

"Michael! Michael!"

"Will he make mincemeat of me?"

"No! He can't. He was a poor fool!"

Mammy's voice came from the other side of the room. "Dat's jest what he wuz! Some no-'count, po' colored trash!"

I lay for a moment, quieted, in the bend of my mother's arm. But then came new perturbations, salt tears. "What did we do to the colored people? What did they do to us?"

"My Lawd!" exclaimed Mammy. "Listen to dat chile!"

My mother moved upon the bed. "Mammy, I'll stay with him until he goes to sleep. Suppose you go lie down upon the little bed in my room."

"Ef you wants to talk to him, Miss Cary, I ain't gwine listen!"

"What should I care if you did! But, Mammy, you go get your sleep--"

Mammy, sheets and pillow in her arms, went into the next room. My mother retook her place beside me. "Michael, I think sometimes that you are as old as I, or that I am as young as you! Now let's talk to each other and get rid of being afraid!"

She had on a muslin wrapper tied with a blue ribbon. I remembered it always, I thought. In the years since I could notice she had had few new clothes. Now I wiped away my tears with her flowing sleeve.

"What did we do to the colored people?"

After a moment she answered. "There isn't anybody here but just ourselves. I am going to tell you how I see things. You've got a mind under that tousled hair. Let us straighten out things together! ... Our great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers and great-great-great-grandfathers robbed the colored people out of Africa. They didn't ask to come out of Africa. The white folk, North and South, and English, and everybody else, just stole them or bought them from other robbers that were black. The white folk wanted to make wealth with them or out of them. They brought them over the sea in ships called slave-ships. The white men who took them were slavers. The white folk who bought them were slave-holders. The words, slave, slaver, slaveholder were written over everything. For all the words of goodness that were written, these words were written, too!"

"Written where, mother? Written over where we live?"

"Yes! Written over where we live. But it isn't to be forgotten," said my mother, with a kind of passionateness, "that on a time--and no such far time, either--they were written over everywhere else on earth! They are written over some places still. It's a matter of progression in time and place, and over varying obstacles, and they wouldn't always have been written over us!"

I hardly think that she was speaking directly to me now, though we did talk all manner of things over together, she and I. She was genial, with vision and reach and an independence of speech that brought her into disfavor with many. Now she sat upon the bed in the white wrapper and blue ribbon and seemed to brood upon the darkness outside the window. The lamp had been lighted again and the moths flew around it. There came, too, the odor of the lilies in the garden. The whippoorwill had stopped calling, but there mounted and entered a whole tide of little cricket sounds.

"Was the war about the colored people?"

My mother turned her face to me. "As I see it, it was partly about that and partly about another thing, called Theory of Government, and partly, I reckon, about other things.... Oh, Michael, it was a dreadful war!"

She bent herself and clung to me, and I cried again because she was crying. But she did not cry a long time. She shook her tears away and made a face at me and laughed so that I might laugh. "It's over! We're all in the Union again, or will be one day when those we fought think we're punished enough! And the slaves are free!"

"Are you sorry, mother?"

"No!"

"And they're not sorry?"

"The slaves? No!"

"Well--"

"Well--isn't it--we should be happier than we were? And some day we shall be--some day we shall be, Michael!"

"The war killed father and made us poor."

"Yes, yes! It killed father and made us poor. So many fathers and so much poverty! And pain and humiliation.... Everybody concerned, through long ages, might have been wiser, I think! Our great-grandfathers everywhere, our fathers, ourselves, and all. North and South and over all the world. Pain and wreck and darkness.... But if nights are long, days are long, too, Michael! And there is a place--I believe it!--where there is no night. And we are going to travel out of the night, Michael, Michael! You and I and father and all of us--"

"And the colored people--"

"Yes, yes--and the colored people!"

"Mammy wouldn't hurt us. Nor Daddy Guinea, nor Uncle Plutus, nor Mandy's Jim, nor Mandy, nor Aunt Esther--"

"No, no! They're good people. Almost all the colored people I've ever seen were good people."

"But the man at the gate--"

"He was giving back the harm of the past. But maybe at the bottom he wasn't wicked. Don't be frightened at him, Michael, and don't be angry at him. All your life try to understand and to like all colors of people."

She rose from beside me and walked up and down in the room, and then, going to a window, stood there looking out. The warm wind lifted her hair. When she came back to me her voice was gay and rich and kind, as I liked it--as I like it now, down all the years, around me and with me in the midst of the years! "Now I am going to sing 'Happy Land!' And you are going to shut your eyes and go to sleep."

She sang and I went to sleep. And in the morning, when I waked, the sun was shining and Mammy was making her bed, and I remembered that I was going for blackberries with Ahasuerus, Aunt Esther's twelve-year-old. I seem somewhere to have heard that, had the old régime continued, Ahasuerus would have been given to me for body-servant. But it had not continued, and Ahasuerus was my equal before the law. It did not trouble me then, nor has it troubled me since.