But what you can’t imagine is close as the next sunrise. Walking on that sidewalk hadn’t been the end of anything, only the beginning. I couldn’t forget what it felt like, the day hard as wood below me, and me somewhere up above it. I had never been so high before, not like a bird but still somehow taken by the sky.
But the lightness I was feeling had darkness round the roots, a darkness lit up by George Washington’s body. There was always a price to be paid, whether you were walking or standing still. What happened to Mr. Washington should’ve stopped me from walking on that sidewalk, but it didn’t. It encouraged me. No one should die for nothing. Mr. Washington refused to be a nigger. If everybody refused, maybe there wouldn’t be any niggers.
Daddy wanted me to never forget my place, but I couldn’t go back to the day before. I was stuck right in the middle of
that
day and what it’d done to me. I couldn’t forget the day I became a man. When you stand up for the first time, that day you remember. And I couldn’t
forget Mr. Washington lighting up the woods. I didn’t even know how to walk until he showed me what can happen if you remember who you are. So I never really got down from that sidewalk, not in my head.
I remember Mama telling me about how Moses went up the mountain and talked to God, and how the conversation he had with the Almighty changed him, so when he came down from that place it was still burning in him till his face was bright with what God had said. Well, I ain’t talked to God, but when I was on that sidewalk maybe I was walking with God. Maybe it was He made my back so straight and put a light in my eyes that others could see, who parted the white folks before me sure as the Red Sea before Moses.
I didn’t know that once I got up on that sidewalk I could never get down again. When you carry your head high and look straight out at people, your head becomes light and it ain’t a burden at all. Walking the way a man was meant to walk lessens the weight on his heart. I raised my head and found I could never lower it again. I was born at least twice into this world. The first time was through my mother, Lucinda. The second time was right in the middle of that sidewalk.
But if you were to follow that sidewalk out of town, it would lead into the woods and the night, lead to what was left of George Washington. He showed me the way out of the dark by the fire of his own body, and the light of his body still burns in my mind, showing me where I need to go. Am I wrong to make a lantern out of a dead man’s body?
Well, it didn’t take long for Mama and Daddy to notice their child wasn’t a child anymore, and no wonder. The real problem was that others could see what my walking had done to me, more clearly than I could see it myself. I was still too young to realize that a colored man who knew he was a man was dangerous.
I didn’t care what most people thought, but I didn’t like it when Mama and Daddy started treating me different. They began to look at me like there was someone standing on the other side of me. I
didn’t know who that person was, and neither did they. I’d become a stranger to them and maybe to myself. If you woke up one day and saw somebody in your home you’d never seen before, that would get your attention. Well, I’d become that somebody, and I guess we were all waiting for an introduction.
One cold morning a few months after my little stroll in town, when the sky was dark with clouds of birds heading south and the sound of them almost too much for air to hold, I heard Grandma Sara talking to my mama. She said, “Don’t worry, honey. Elijah’s just findin out he’s been a boy all these years, and now he ain’t.”
I was still lying in bed, and they must’ve thought I was asleep, but I was wide awake and listening to every word. I hate surprises, especially the painful kind, and what’s the use of eyes if you don’t take the trouble to see or ears if you don’t take the time to hear? All those birds singing and squawking, why do they go to all that trouble if people working in fields from sunup to sunset don’t bother to listen to what they’re saying? Not many do, but it sounds good to hear singing when your body aches and wants to stop.
I was thinking like this one night after dinner, when the dishes had been cleaned and put out of the way, and we were all in the main room by the stove. The time of year it was meant that the night was chilly, so there was a fire burning, and I was sitting there more asleep than awake. I wasn’t ready for any surprise, and this one caught me with no defenses.
Even before Daddy spoke, I could feel his stare on my back, and it was hotter than the fire.
Eventually he started up. “Elijah, we been talkin about you, your mama and me.” The pause then was so heavy it made me turn completely round in my chair.
Mama and Daddy were looking at me in a way I had never seen before, and Daddy must’ve got something in his eyes, cause I could see water from them catch the firelight and pull it down his cheeks.
“Well, boy.” Another pause. “We think Spartanburg ain’t a good place for you no more. As a matter of fact, I’m certain of it. I mean,
it’s never been a good place for someone colored, but now it’s worse cause you’re grown up.”
I was trying hard to follow where he was going. The first thing he said perplexed me so much, I was having trouble paying good attention, but the trail he was laying out for me, well, someone born without eyes could follow that, only I didn’t want to.
“See, Elijah,” he continued, “you’re a man now, and round here that can get you killed. If you decide it’s not safe to be a man, you’re still gonna die, but it’ll take a bit longer. Down here we call that gettin to the next day.
“But you, you startin to have thoughts you ain’t supposed to have, and pretty soon you gonna have dreams you ain’t supposed to have, so something’s got to be done quick, and it comes to this.”
He stopped again, and I saw there wasn’t anything in his eyes that hadn’t been there all along, but held back. Everything that had ever been done to him, held back till now, and I was the one tipping the bucket, so what he’d never want to show was spilling out. And I knew Daddy wasn’t talking about just me, he was talking about himself and Mama and Grandma Sara, all of us sitting there watching him try to hold back.
“Daniel,” whispered Grandma Sara, “we talked about doin this and agreed to it, so you need to just say it. Don’t make truth a stranger in your own home. You know he’s truly grown up, and he’s just too big to fit into anything as small as South Carolina.”
She paused, then went on. “And you know that if Elijah stays, he’s gonna get noticed, and so are we.” She turned her head and swept the whole room with her gaze, then lifted her right hand with the fingers out and grabbed the air. “I know it ain’t much,” she said, “but it’s all we got.”
My father nodded heavily, and I could see him trying to find the right words when no word was strong enough to carry what he was trying so hard to say, trying so hard not to feel. And I realized Daddy wasn’t just trying to save me, he was trying to save his family. Then he couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Elijah, you gonna have to leave, leave this cabin, leave Spartanburg. Leave this week, and you can’t ever come back!”
I felt his words hit me like a blow somewhere deep down where a fist couldn’t hope to reach, and I got dizzy from the jarring and the pain. I hadn’t been thinking about any doorway right here in my home, but suddenly I saw the hole that opened whenever I pulled open our front door, and on the other side of it someplace I’d never been before. I was having trouble getting my breath.
“Daddy,” I whispered somehow without air in me, “why are you tellin me to go away?”
My father shook his head. “No, Elijah,” he said softly. “You already gone away. You been gone for weeks, ever since you walked on that sidewalk. Your body’s still here hopin you’ll come back, but you so far away you can’t even hear yourself talk.”
He stopped again, and then he talked for some time.
“What I’m sayin, Elijah, is you need to find where you gone off to. You need to get acquainted with who you becomin, but you can’t do it here cause it’s just not safe for you no more. I don’t know if it’s safe for you anywhere, but my suggestion is that you walk north, and keep goin that way till you find yourself up North. Seems to me up North is where you can figure out who you are.
“And you gonna need a job. Well, my suggestion is that you join the army. They’ll put a uniform on you, and a proud man in a uniform is just a soldier, but round here a proud man is some uppity nigger askin for a lesson. There’s plenty of white folks who would love to teach you that lesson, and most of us had to learn it just to live, but it ain’t livin, Elijah. It’s just gettin to the next day.
“I want you to leave, Elijah, so one day you can write to me and tell me about what happened next week or next month or next year. Never mind the next day, cause here all you got is tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and all the tomorrows that’ll ever be, and they all the same till you dead. But if you leave, maybe you can learn how to really put words down on paper, words that mean something, words like the deacon uses on Sunday, maybe even better than the deacon,
but you’ll need more schoolin than a bunch of Sundays. You’ll need this year and next year too. I could’ve used some of that myself.”
And then he smiled, which I wasn’t expecting, and said, “Now, next year, that sure does sound like a good place. You got to plan on gettin to next year, figure it out some before you go, yeah. Ain’t everyone who can get to next year.
“So one day, young man, you gonna write to me from someplace I never heard of, tell me bout what you doin weeks and months and years down a road I’ll never see. But I can see you on it, walkin it, breathin the air there, just like you walked on that sidewalk I ain’t ever touched.
“You let me know, Elijah, where you goin and when you get there and where you been, and you’ll be the first person of my blood who got past tomorrow.”
I sat there like stone, my head hung low, and if it hadn’t been for my backbone my head would’ve been rolling on the floor. What could I say? Leave home? It was one thing to think it, and I’m not saying I never thought it, but it was something else to hear it out loud. It was clear Daddy’d been thinking about it a lot, but the way he talked bout a life I ain’t even lived yet, everything just coming out all neat and tidy, well, that scared me. Joining the army, that was something too crazy to imagine.
“Daddy,” I choked out, forgetting to call him “Sir.” “Daddy, if I go and join the army, people are goin to shoot at me! I could get killed!”
He said, “That’s possible, Elijah.”
Then I went crazy and I was yelling at my daddy. “Possible!” I shouted. “That’s possible?” I yelled again. “I’m the only child you got—”
I stopped cold cause I couldn’t believe I said it out loud. Something I was never supposed to say.
I wasn’t Mama and Daddy’s only child.
I looked over at Grandma Sara, and she was looking at me and whispering something under her breath, like she was waiting for me
to take back the words. I ain’t her, I can’t pull hurtful things out of the air. But I had to say something.
“Daddy,” I said. “Mama,” I whispered, seeing that her head was down in her hands, “if I leave Spartanburg, what’ll happen to you without me, what’ll happen to me without you? Put a uniform on me? Daddy, if I put on a uniform, it’s certain before God someone’s gonna take a shot at me!”
I heard my voice ring in that little cabin like struck iron, like an anvil splattered with hot metal. Then my father stood up again like it was him I’d struck, and the hot iron of his own words started flowing like it could never stop.
“Elijah,” he said, “yeah, if you join up with the army, you gonna get yourself a uniform, that’s true. And one day you gonna find yourself at one end of a field, not that different from the one outside our door, and there gonna be other soldiers, like you and not like you, at the other end of that field, and you gonna be shootin at them and they shootin at you. And it’ll be hell, boy, I know it’ll be hell, but those boys won’t know you, Elijah. They won’t know or care who you are, whose family you are, you just another soldier they takin aim at. It won’t be personal, and they might miss.”
He stopped and I thought he was done, cause he looked over at Mama until she raised her head and told him something, told him without even moving her eyes or opening her mouth. But then he started again.
“And yeah . . . you had a brother way before you was even born, and he escaped from the plantation we was on cause he couldn’t be a slave, and yeah, he went north and joined the army and got killed in the war.”
The ground beneath me dropped away and my stomach fell into the hole. I’d known I had a brother somehow, but I didn’t know how I knew. It never seemed real cause I didn’t know hardly anything about him, except that he wasn’t here. It was just a hundred half-remembered little looks between my father and mother, or how Grandma Sara would sometimes sigh for no reason when she looked
at me—all that went through my head in an instant. I finally knew what they meant, heard the sound of what never got said and the quiet that covered up every day since that day. The day my brother left home and done exactly what I was about to do.
Meanwhile, Daddy hadn’t stopped talking. “. . . it wasn’t personal, his luck just run out. But if you stay here in Spartanburg, Elijah, and you keep walkin where you can’t be walkin and talkin what you can’t be talkin, some white man round here will take aim at you.
“And then it’ll be personal, cause he gonna know who you are and what you done, and when it’s personal, people aim a whole lot better. That man’s gonna shoot you down. Luck won’t play into it at all. They gonna bring you to me and I’m gonna pick you up with these hands—”
And he stopped talking and moved his big old hands up and down right in front of my face, and then they were fists, and I kept waiting to feel the blow come down hard, but it never did. He opened his hands up again, and they were yellow and brown inside and open to God like the field outside.