The Last Ballad(85)
He was never able to recall whether there had been much of a moon in the sky that night, so perhaps it was the light coming from inside the cabin that allowed Hampton to see the body of the white man where it lay at the bottom of the steps.
“Don’t look,” his father had whispered. He’d hugged Hampton tight to his chest. “Don’t look,” his father had said again, but Hampton had looked anyway.
His father had given the body a wide berth as he’d stepped into the yard. The man’s face was turned and shadowed in a way that Hampton could not see it. But he could see that the man wore a dark suit, that his dark tie had fallen over his right cheek, that his white shirt had been blown open and soaked through with blood. The fingers of his right hand remained closed around a small silver gun. Hampton looked beyond the body and noticed something white resting at the edge of the darkness. At first he thought that the white object must have been a chicken, and he wondered why his father did not stop and grab it and take it with them. But soon Hampton saw that what he’d mistaken for a chicken was the white man’s hat.
His father did not begin running until they reached the edge of the field.
Behind them, his mother ran with Summer in her arms, the sack of food swinging against her thigh. Of all the things Hampton remembered, what he remembered most clearly was the way his father smelled on the night the family escaped, his face buried in his father’s neck, the shotgun barrel bumping against his back with each step his father took. The scent he recalled was something he had not smelled since, yet he often found himself longing for it: the earthiness of his father’s skin, the damp delta soil, and the perfume of the humid Mississippi night.
“That white man wanted blood for his daddy’s honor,” Hampton’s mother would say many times in the years that followed. His parents had been sharecroppers, both of them born to former slaves. Hampton grew up hearing his mother tell the story. “Old Newcomb was holding out on us, and your daddy knew it. But every year, he’d put his specs on and thumb through his books and say, ‘Sorry, Glen, you just barely broke even.’ But your daddy knew it was a lie, and he finally called him on it. Said, ‘No, sir. Not this year, Mr. Newcomb. I need my money.’ And that was it. Newcomb’s son came around that night, drunk, banging on the door, screaming for your daddy to come out. People killed over honor back then. They still do. Well, your daddy had his honor too.
“Of course we had to leave. You can’t kill a white man down south, especially not in Mississippi, and expect to live.” And leaving was what they had been doing that night as they fled across the cotton field.
They had run to Hampton’s grandfather’s house. The old man lived five miles away on a different plantation. He couldn’t have been much older than sixty, but his stooped and arthritic body had been broken by field work and former masters long before it had been freed. Hampton’s mother went inside and roused her father. The old man lit a lantern and led them through the woods to a neighbor’s cabin that sat tucked back in the trees, where the family hid in a crawl space beneath the floorboards. The earth there was musky, and even now Hampton’s nose remembered it, just like his ears remembered his mother’s whispered prayers and his bones still felt the thundering heartbeat where he leaned against his father’s chest and waited.
At dawn came the sound of a horse-drawn wagon creaking to a stop out front. A door opened and someone lifted Hampton and then Summer into the weak light of the early morning and carried them outside, where their grandfather waited by the wagon. Hampton’s father helped Hampton climb into the back, set Summer on his lap. The sound of brief goodbyes, his grandfather’s voice, his mother’s crying, his father saying, “Come on, now. Time to go.” His parents climbed into the wagon. The driver, a man whose face he could not remember, snapped the reins. Hampton’s last memory of the land from which he’d sprung was the image of his grandfather standing with the shotgun in his hand. He lifted it over his head in goodbye. Then he turned back toward the forest and the path that would lead him home. They never saw the old man again.
Whoever had driven the wagon dropped them at the train station in Vicksburg. In the brief hours they’d spent beneath the floorboards of the house, a collection had been taken up, and the money was now used to purchase the family’s tickets. Hampton had clear memories of the colored car because the colored cars had not changed since that day. He could still smell the train and hear the great hiss of the engine because, as a Pullman porter, he would smell and hear those things for the rest of his life.
It was not until the train had left the station that Hampton’s father allowed himself a sigh and his mother allowed herself to shed any tears of fear she’d kept behind her eyes since fleeing only hours before. Hampton knew they must have been a sight, this family of four covered in mud and brambles, nothing with them but two ill-stuffed sacks and the dirty clothes they wore. He would laugh at the sight of these country folks if he had not been one of them.
It was at the next stop, Yazoo City, that the porter came to them and bent to his father’s ear and whispered something that Hampton could not hear. Hampton’s father turned to his mother, took her hands and kissed them, bent his head, and held her palms to his forehead. He picked up Summer where she lay sleeping on the seat and placed her in his lap, buried his face in her hair, and closed his eyes. Hampton listened as his father took deep breaths.