All God's Dangers (79 page)

So, I started comin down there from my house, talkin with Josie, correspondin her. They was all there in the house—Josie and Spencer and Mary Beth and Spencer's children by his first wife and his and Mary Beth's children, four of em, three girls and a boy. And pretty soon they stripped up and moved off the old home place into a bigger house on Mr. Gil Kirkland's place. Well, me and Josie had decided to marry at that time, and one day I went down there to talk with her. I don't know where she was when I got there, but she was washin for white folks regular, off somewhere and due to be home soon. And I was settin there lookin and listenin and Spencer was plowin some right beside the house there in a field for Mr. Gil Kirkland.

People had been talkin that he was goin with another woman then and had Josie's daughter for a wife. And sure enough, Spencer was plowin and this little old woman come around and went out there to where he was. I was settin there, listenin at em; of course, it weren't none of my business, I didn't interfere with em at all, just listenin and lookin out. And he just fair cussed her in every kind of way, Spencer did, and there was a ditch just a few steps beyond the house just before you hit the cultivatable land, and Spencer pushed that woman into that gap. She fell over like a sack of flour but she got right up and walked out of that patch. He didn't hurt her, but not because he didn't try to hurt her, she just wasn't hurt. That revealed to me the kind of man was livin in the house with Josie and her daughter. It weren't too long before Mary Beth quit him and he died.

So, lingered along, lingered along, and I corresponded Josie a little over a year before I married her. I knowed her well, then. The oldest daughter Simon Travis had, him and Mary Butterfield—it's a good idea to consider everything that comes to your remembrance about a family when you go to marry. I knowed her family well and they was well spoken of. And Josie was a woman that there never was no outcries over her principles and character, never was. She was just Josie Todd—first she was Josie Travis—a good woman, hard workin woman. She always stayed clear of men, stayed in clean places. I never did hear talk of no men runnin at Johnny B
Todd's wife, in my other wife's lifetime. She was a widow woman and I'd never seen or heard nothin wrong about her. She proved to be a straight, devout woman. And when I walked in I was the only man that walked in there regular. She gived me her attention and I gived her mine.

After I went to see Josie and talk with her two or three times I caught their condition: they was livin almost from hand to mouth. Them children's mother and their grandmother was all that was backin em up. Josie worked for em until she was just a big frame and that was all. And Mary Beth was workin, the best of her time, right across the river for Mrs. Guy Mahoney. Mrs. Mahoney runned a hotel there in Calusa and Mary Beth put in several years there.

I told Josie one day, “It appears to me, under the conditions, as far as I can see, you is sufferin for help. You and Mary Beth havin a hard time raisin her children, and then has these other children on you too, which aint no kin to you noway.”

She said, “Yes, I has to work in and out.”

I just come out and told her, “Well, now, don't stay here and suffer. I'll help you, as free as the water run; I'll help you, accordin to our agreement”—we had just got engaged to marry—“Whatever you get in the need for, if you aint got it, all you got to do is notify me and I'll help you all I can.”

One time she said she had to go buy her some shoes; didn't have a change of shoes and the shoes she had was worn through and didn't have the money to get a new pair. I gived her the money—I was a workin man, farmin, makin baskets. I weren't workin to get rich.

Well, Mary Beth quit Spencer Ramsey and got engaged to Jim Foote. It happened all of a sudden—and I'd heard that they was goin to marry and I come down there to the marriage. Josie spoke, and she was talkin bout people marryin, and I was standin out in the yard at that time when I heard Josie speak. She come right close to the door and they was all rejoicin in there over the marriage and all and Josie said, “It's goin to be me next.” Spoke that right at her daughter's marriage, “It's goin to be me next.” I looked around when I heard that. And I trembled like a young man will do. She didn't say nothin about it was me she was goin to marry but that was already sealed between us. And several months after Mary Beth married Jim Foote we was married.

I figured, accordin to what I heard, before me and Josie married and after, too, that some of my children didn't approve at me marryin her; had no objections to me marryin but wanted me to marry somebody else. They wanted to meddle and touch things they had no business—Mattie Jane, my second girl, she wanted me to marry a woman over here by the name of Sadie Rowe. Sadie Rowe had been married three times. Her first husband was a Morehead—they tell me a man got a wife and she's got a white liver, she'll kill him in nature affairs; he got to be strong enough in constitution to stand that woman. Well, I knowed this woman done had three husbands and two of em lived with her until they died. And she had two sets of children.

Durin of Morehead's lifetime, I didn't never travel worth anything through this settlement where he was livin with Sadie. My work was other ways, all around and back to Opelika, Tuskegee, Union Springs, Crane's Ford—that was my rangin place. And I didn't know so much about her second husband who stayed in this country; in the meantime of them days I was in prison. And some of em got to talkin after she married her third husband—my first wife told me this, while my family was livin over on the Courteney place. They belonged to the same church, Pottstown Baptist Church, and Sadie would visit her—folks got to talkin bout this third fellow she married, across the river, and my wife said that some of em told him that Sadie had a white liver; she had lost two husbands. In a very few weeks after they told him that, he pulled up and left her, got away from there. And he's dead now, as well as Sadie is.

I
T
was noticeable to me in my thoughts that some of my children might not appreciate this woman I married. I moved out—didn't wait for nothin, I moved Josie right out to a house to herself, on the Mosley place. Stayed six years in that old house there and it weren't fittin for the devil to live in. It wouldn't rain in there much but it was one of the nastiest places—we moved in there right after Jerry Hatch, poor colored farmer, moved out. Vernon's wife and Mattie Jane and Josie went over there and boiled water in their washpots and scalded that old buildin out. That gived us a clean house to live in but it didn't do nothin against the termites. Even
the well went bad; it was passable enough when we moved onto the place by strainin it and all, but it needed cleanin before we moved away.

Didn't get no acres from Mosley, just got the house and the yard. Had a one-horse farm with Vernon, right across the road, as long as I lived on Mr. Mosley's place. Nobody livin there but me and Josie. Her grandchildren would come and go, but nobody livin there but me and her. Mattie Jane stayed over in the family house on Vernon's place where I left her.

Right after I cleared out of there, men commenced a hangin around at Mattie Jane. One fellow from down here at State Street, not only him but there was other fellows come in, and some of em, I detected, wanted to run over her. Mattie Jane told me herself, and there's others would talk it, this fellow from State Street would go up there, and one night, he called her and she failed to open the door for him, she refused him. Well, he took out at her—how some men will do women!—got out of his car and walked around the house, callin her and knockin the house. I heard about it before the rumor spread in the community and I decided, ‘Um-hmm, after awhile you'll attempt to knock her door down and go in at her.' I just laid low because Garvan was supposed to be livin in the house with her. He and his wife occupied two rooms of that house, but they stayed down by State Street with her mother and daddy as much as they stayed up there. So this fellow kept a comin up there and weren't nobody there regular enough to protect Mattie Jane and her two little chaps—the world could see that that was her dead husband's little boy baby; called him Thomas, named for his daddy, and not only named, but he's the very spirit of Thomas Galloway, he's just like the twin of his daddy.

One day this fellow drove his car over in my yard on Mosley's place. I walked out—I don't know what he come there for; made a mistake, no doubt. I walked right out into the yard and told him to his head—he didn't get out of his car—“It looks like some trouble wants to start up there by my daughter's and Garvan's. I want to talk with you a little about that”—I was mad as the devil, too—“Up there at that house where my daughter stays who aint got no husband, it's goin to be hell to pay one of these nights.” He looked at me. I said, “There's goin to be hell to pay and I want you to know this: there aint nary a boy I got goin to be in it. It's goin to be me—if some of that crap goin on up there like it's been goin on for
the last few nights don't cease. Watch your points, sir, watch your points.”

He could see in my eye I meant it. Quit comin there altogether, and after that I spoke to Mattie Jane about it. Said, “It must be somethin attractin that fellow up there, but I done gived him his walkin papers. I don't think he'll be havin nothin to do with you no more.”

She jumped up and got mad with me, sassed me out. I never did
see
nothin wrong, but as my old daddy used to say, I could tell by a little what a great deal means. Still and all, he runnin up there at her and she barrin the doors against him, didn't want him up there—or did she? And when I told her she'd better stop her part, and talked to her a little too deep about what people would be sayin if he kept a comin up there and what he might do to her—“He liable to come in here and beat you up”—she flew hot at me, told me I was talkin to her like some kind of dog.

I said, “I don't
know
that there's somethin goin on wrong, but I'm warnin you and tellin you the worst could happen.”

My whole family come up respectable; but noticin and watchin em through life, I seed that some of em wasn't walkin up to the chalk line—they was varyin a little someway. Then it was time for me to talk to em. But I did not put a bridle on em like my daddy did to me; it wasn't necessary. My children growed up in the world—I never did have to whip em much at all. We talked to our children and they was very eager to obey our rulins. They was well cared for by me and their mother.

Well, she didn't like me anticipatin her and she let me know it. I listened at her, took it in. But I knowed that a bad report would go out after a while if somebody didn't cut that fellow off; I knowed his acts wouldn't do and I thought I'd try to stop him in time.

O
NE
time I fell out with Vernon but it didn't last long with me. I got plumb hurt to my heart because it didn't seem like I had gived him sufficient cause, or any cause that day to do what he done and say what he said. Me and Josie had been married about a year when this happened. I had my own theory about how it come about, but I had no fact and I has none today.

Now one Sunday we went to Litabixee to a funeral—me and Vernon and Vernon's wife; went to the death of a sister to my dead sister's first husband. This fellow Sam Jones, who married Sadie,
it was his sister they was havin a funeral for. We got on Vernon's truck—now this is family business, close, a man talkin bout his son. Some people of a family wants to keep what their folks done hid; I think it ought to come on, whatever it takes, let the tail go with the hide, it'll bring more. And so, we went out by Henry Shaw's, Sadie's boy, first cousin to Vernon. At that time he lived out above Apafalya, on the road between Litabixee and Opelika where the road forks up above a colored church, up in there about a beer joint. Vernon decided he'd drive up there to Henry's because that was the death of Henry's auntie.

And when this happened between me and Vernon later that day, I couldn't tell, but I had a deep thought: while we was there at Henry's that mornin waitin on him to get ready to go with us, I noticed him and Vernon go off around the house to theirselves. Well, when I was in prison, his mother told me that he come home, once or twice, actin out of place and all—he'd been drinkin a bit and she gived him the devil about it. I was surprised him doin that but I never said nothin to him, I just watched him—so, that Sunday, him and Henry went around the house there before we left to the funeral. I don't know what in the devil they was doin, but knowin that he'd drink a little whiskey at that time, had been gettin high off it, I decided that was the case, the reason he later acted like he did.

It was a peaceable quiet Sunday. I discovered Vernon and Henry was out somewhere and I went around the house and found em there together, and apparently they was talkin bout some hogs. Yet and still there wasn't no trouble and when Henry got ready we all went on to Litabixee. Well, when we got up there we stayed quite late over in the evenin. And some of the neighbors of that family where that woman was deceased at was around there sellin candy. Me and Vernon mostly set out in the truck; it was kind of slow around there, everything movin in a slow motion, and I got up and went to them parties' house twice and bought some candy. And when I'd come back to the truck I'd offer him some. We'd set there, eat some candy, and we set there peaceable and quiet all day. Well, later over in the evenin, when all of em got done pokin around and got ready to carry the corpse to the cemetery, we followed. Vernon drove his truck through peace and quiet. Now, whiskey's the kind of thing, sometimes it works slow—