Whiter Than Snow by Sandra Dallas Page A

earth and the white cotton peek from the boll. Riley sang songs from slavery days that had been passed down to him from his own father, and as there were no white men to oversee them, the father straightened his shoulders and lifted his head as he stood in the shade of a tree, explaining the workings of nature to the boy. Sometimes, when the sun beat down hot enough to melt a person’s eyeballs, his father waved Joe off, telling him to put down his hoe and take off his overalls and swim in the pond. Riley Cobb was a kind man who alternated between beating blackness into his son to teach him how to survive and wanting the boy to have a little time of joy before he understood what a burden it was to be a black man at the turn of the century, some thirty years after emancipation.
    Following the harvest, when the cold weather came and there was no work in the fields, the family—there were also a mother and four younger children—sat in front of a fire in the former slave cabin where they lived and listened to the grandpappy, an old, twisted, muscled man, tell about the bitterness of slavery days. “They’d treat you like you was no more than mules,” he said. “They’d whip you, break your jawbone, and they’d’ve cut off your head for a soup bowl, only you was worth money to ’em. You think you have it poorly, Joe, but you don’t know what hard times is.” He’d sink into his memories, then say, “Freedom cried out to us. We thought if we was just free…” And then he’d shake his head and add, “I wish I had went before I had so much to grieve over.”
    “We thought if we just had education,” Joe’s mother would say, letting the thought drop. Then she would add, “Well, trust in God and hoe your row, and better times will come.”
    Joe liked it better when his grandpappy told him stories about Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox and would laugh and say, “White man’s took everything else away from us, but we keeps our humor.” The stories were about how the weaker animals always got the better of the stronger ones. Joe knew without having to be told that the weaker animals were the colored people, and he gloried in their cunning and trickery. As he weeded under the hot sun, the sweat pouring off his back, he pretended he was Br’er Rabbit, getting a white boy to wield the hoe in his place. And when he watched his mother plod off to work, a laundry basket in her arms, he thought of what it would be like if the old white lady washed their clothes.
    But at the same time that he dreamed of revenge for the schoolteacher’s death and the daily acts of humiliation that he and other colored people faced, Joe learned to survive, and that meant acting the way the white people expected him to—good-natured, stupid, lazy. He let the white men make fun of him just as his father did, seething inside but not showing it. Only rarely did he flare up, and then it was in such a way that the white man did not fully understand that he had been bested. When the man who owned the land Joe and his father worked complained about the responsibilities of being a landowner and remarked, “You have an easier time of it than I do,” Joe replied, “Yessir, and so do your hogs.”
    Joe turned into a handsome young man, certainly by white standards—broad-shouldered, well muscled, light-skinned, with a straight nose and hair that curled instead of kinked. That was not altogether a blessing, because white women glanced at him with approval, which infuriated their men. Joe knew he should never be alone with a white woman, never look her in the eye when he passed one on the street, never brush against her, or he’d fare no better than the schoolteacher. So he shuffled off the sidewalk into the street if he saw one coming. And if she called to him, “Boy, do you want to earn a nickel to chop my wood?” he’d look foolish and shake his head, and she would make a remark on the shiftlessness of colored people.
    Not all white folks