The Emancipation of Robert Sadler by Robert Sadler, Marie Chapian Page A

and cheerful.
    â€œYoll ought to clean yourself up,” Thomas told me. “Yoll got blood all over you. Ugh.”
    Big Mac washed me outside in the yard by the side of the house. “You do your own cleanin up after this, boy,” he told me. He washed me by pouring icy cold water from a bucket over my body and scrubbing me with a bar of tar soap. He used dried leaves as a scrub brush, but he was very gentle around the cut of the lash on my neck and shoulder.
    â€œGot you good, boy,” he said with a tone of disgust.
    After the icy bath, which left me chattering, came the worst part. It was the putting on of the new flax shirt. The coarseness of the fabric was like a million tiny pins sticking into my skin.
    â€œIn a few days this here shirt’ll be smooth as a rose petal,” Big Mac assured me.
    I stumbled inside after him, feeling feverish and cold. He fixed me a cup of sassafras tea and told me to drink it down. He even tied a clean rag around my wounds.
    In spite of the pain I felt from the lash wound and the pricks of the shirt, I lay down that night in my new bed with a feeling of excitement. It was the first time I had ever slept in a real bed, and I was sleeping in it all alone. I had a blanket that was clean all for myself, too. I did not stir until the next morning when Big Mac tugged at my foot.
    â€œFires need lightin, boy,” he said in his soft voice.
    I stared dumbly around me in the darkness. For a moment I had forgotten where I was. The pain in my neck and shoulder reminded me, and my body felt raw and sore from the scratching of the new shirt. I struggled out of bed into the cold air and hurried to the woodpile for sticks and wood to start the fires.
    By 4:00 a.m. I had all of the fires lit, including the ones in the cookstoves. I was still in the kitchen when the dreaded crew of overseers filed into their special dining hall for breakfast. There were eleven of them, including Thrasher. They were mean men with dirty mouths. They looked like giants, and it seemed to me they hated everything, even each other. They all lived on the Beal Plantation in dwellings within a few minutes of the Big House. Some had families and some didn’t. Most of them were heavy drinkers just like Mr. Beal, who was surely an alcoholic.
    Thrasher caught sight of me and hollered across the room, “Niggerchile, you got some manners yit?”
    I stood to my feet, “YessuhMassuhThrashuhsuh,” I mumbled.
    Thrasher snorted. “What’s your name, chile?”
    â€œWobber, suh, MassahThrashuhsuh.”
    Thrasher laughed and the others laughed with him. “He’s a dumb niggerchile too, ain’t he? You want another lash, chile?”
    â€œNosuhMassuhThrashuhsuh.”
    Big Mac passed by with a bowl of hot biscuits and Thrasher’s attention was then drawn to the food. I hurried for the broom and the scrub brushes to begin my chores. First the porch, then the steps, and then the yard. . . .

7
    â€œWe got a new black puppy. Want to see him?” John Beal walked through the front hallway with a stringy-haired friend his age.
    â€œNah. I knows what a nigger looks like. Ain’t no different from any othern. They all looks the same.”
    Big Mac told me that the white folks liked to have “little black puppies” around. Some folks had two or three of them like me sleeping in their bedrooms with them. It was our job to run around after the white masters, cleaning up their chamber pots and doing other dirty work they didn’t want to do.
    One day as I was finishing my work, Miss Harriet was taking the sheets off the children’s beds to put into the laundry pile. She was a large, stern-faced woman, and this day her mouth was drawn tight and her eyes had a distant look.
    â€œI done raised these chillren,” she said aloud. Although I was the only one in the room, I had the feeling she wasn’t talking to me.
    â€œI done nursed them all at