Debt Peonage

                                                                         Chapter 1                                                                                                                            

     THE LITTLE BLACK STICK WENT THAT WAY, up and down, with a little curve off its right side. He shifted in his seat, then scraped a shoe on the floor, but there was still no sound in his head.   

     She hesitated. Waiting too long might shame him, but too soon could shame him, too. She studied the gash on his neck that had nearly killed him weeks ago, then touched the two tall sticks with the line in between.

     “This one looks different,” she said, and now touched the shape with the curve. “But it makes the same sound as that. Remember? What sound is this?”  

     As John Way struggled to make sound and sense of these letters, Althea spied the white spaces between the printed lines on the page before them. Showing faint through the paper’s thinness she read detucesrep and snos, examples of a curious thing she had tried to give meaning to years before.  As a child those reverse words seemed to belong to a separate world “on the other side of the page - the place words come from, before they become words...” - only she wasn’t sure what she meant.  When she tried to explain it to Mama, at twelve, her mother had just studied Althea’s face and nodded.  Everybody on Mama’s side could read young. But Althea…

     Now, with her Bible, violently twisted and torn though it was, she was teaching reading and writing and, yes, the Word to a grown man. In the silence she became aware again of the perspiration and wood smoke and turpentine smells rising from Little John’s stained overalls and worn cotton jersey. It was the look and smell and curse of all the men of Birds Eye, but she did not pull away. Birds Eye filled her with sadness. Anger, too. Its sons, persecuted. 

     Then John emitted a breathy “hhh” sound.  

     “Yes!” she exclaimed, and made a clap of her hands that startled him. “And it starts which word?”

     “That one is, uh, `Hallowed?'”

     “And this one?”

     “Um, `heaven?’

     “That's right.” she said. “But see? Both these shapes make the `aitch’ sound. In `Hallowed’ it’s a capital, a big letter, because it starts a special word. But  here: in `heaven’ it’s a regular aitch. A small aitch.” 

     Little John looked back, searching the page for the meaning to her strange words.  “S’hard, Miss Althea” he said, briefly bowing his head. 

     “I know,” she said. “But you’re learning. You’re getting it.” 

     Birds Eye was aught but a turpentine quarter, not even a village. It got its name, so it was said, on account of how the Bible says the good Lord keeps His eye on everybody, including the sparrow, only it didn’t seem like He ever much looked down here. It had a big still with pipes and tanks for cooking pine sap into turpentine, a company store, a schoolhouse, and forty-four shanties not counting those two there that burned down, with some scattered around the perimeter and others so close you could hear your neighbors snore and sneeze and fart and all else their bodies did. Some were made of bark log with a shake roof sagging this way and that. The newer were of board with tar paper on top and sleds on the underside for towing, only they leaned some, too.  All were but a room or two or three with a cookstove and a zinc top table at one end, with common privies on the outside. 

     Most everybody slept on cotton blankets or straw pallets, three and four or more children in some. There were little windows without glass,  some with chicken wire to keep out the squirrels and birds. Folks said rattlesnakes could climb up a wall only that was a lie, but it was true you could meet a snake in these parts anytime. 

     Althea and Little John met Sundays after church, at the school house, and today was their second lesson teaching him to read. At their first Althea had written the alphabet in capitals and lower case, and a prayer in big letters below it. John Way didn’t know a whole lot that was in the Bible, but he pretty much remembered this prayer.  

     “Each time you look at it,”  she told him that first day,  “pray one word at a time out loud, and put your finger on it. Like this.” She then laid her finger on the big circle that began the first word.  

     “Our,” she said. 

     “Our,” he repeated.  

     It was springtime six years ago, April or so as he remembered it, that Little John was walking on a dirt road, whittling on a stick and humming about the everlasting arms, when a white man on a horse passed him by.  “Why ain’t you workin?’” he demanded to know.  John said he didn’t have no job, and the rider man said as how that made him a vagrant, and he was deputized to arrest vagrants. “Y’all don’t look like no deputy,”  John said. He should have known better. The rider looked him up and down and spat, then backed his horse around to show him the rifle holster on his saddle. John was made to follow behind three miles to a warehouse in Century, by the Alabama line.

     The rider tied up his horse and took John inside. After a time a fat man with a straw hat came in from the back wiping his hands on a rag. The rider man told John to step up, as this was a justice of the peace, only he didn’t wear a robe. Then the judge said boy, you have to pay a fine of twenty dollars “on account of you’se a vagrant.” It was the law in Florida all right, only they didn’t much use it against white boys. 

     Little John said he didn’t have twenty-five cents, and the white men laughed, and the rider told the judge that Villeroy Naval Stores Co. would pay the fine and this boy could work it off. “Naval stores” being the name for making turpentine in these parts. The judge just nodded. He’d done this at least fifty times, maybe a hundred.  John said nothing.  

     Then the judge asked John what was in his pocket.  John showed him his whittling knife and the judge said he must have stolen it, and upped the fine to thirty dollars. John got angry, said it was his from his daddy, but the judge said “Be quiet boy.  You carryin’ a weapon. I’ll put you on the gang,” and John just hung his head. “You got the right idea,” said the judge. “Best you make no trouble,” and he sentenced John to working seven months in turpentine to pay off his fine. Took his knife, too. Put it right in his own pocket. Six years later John was still trapped in debt to Birds Eye.  

     After a long time praying for deliverance John had come to despair of church and Jesus and all hope. He wasn’t stupid except when he got liquored, which he did from time to time.  Last time was March, when he got into a card game called ‘skin’ with two boys passing through. Up on the hill they made a campfire. After a time and some laughs and John losing money he saw they were cheating him, only now he was drunk, so he up and socked the closer man on his ear, only the man was big as John was small. Might have just knocked John down with a fist and walked away. Instead he pulled a three-sided hack file out of his shirt and stuck John between the neck and collarbone. Punctured his lung. John fell down and they were gone, and when Rupert found him he was still as a log, blood bubbles coming out of his neck. 

     Rupert fetched a barrow and took him home. John’s woman, Eula, was all shrieking and praying, sure John would die in front of their girls, only Rupert ran up the hill and got him a medicine from Miss Mary. Eula made a plaster, patched his neck and made a tea of it. John had a mumbling fever for three days before it broke, only his right arm was sore and weak for a long time after. Promised Jesus he would give up gambling and drinking if the Lord would free him from turpentine. 

     Four weeks later Miss Althea Walker showed up, riding part way in on a mule cart. She was dark skinned, finely dressed, taller than most men. She was seventeen.