Whiter Than Snow by Sandra Dallas Page B

were like that, Joe learned. Some were kind, and a few even respected the Negroes. The white minister at the Friendship Church buried Negroes at the colored cemetery, asking God to make their lives easier in heaven. One of the teachers at the white school helped the colored teacher plan lessons. And several white women in town put together food baskets, which they took to the shacks where colored people were stove up. Sometimes they brought medicine, too, and sat awhile with the sick person to let the family rest. And they weren’t uppity about it, but were kind instead. “You mustn’t believe we’re all like the sheriff and the mayor, Joe,” one of them told him. Joe knew that, but the trick was you didn’t know which ones you could trust, so you didn’t trust any of them.
    When he was sixteen, Joe was arrested for fighting a white boy, and he was sentenced to prison. The fight wasn’t his fault. Joe had been carrying the laundry basket for his mother when the white boy ordered him to put it down. Joe did as he was told, hoping that would be the end of it. But the boy upended the basket, kicking the clothes into the dirt and stomping on them.
    Joe’s mother begged the white boy to stop, for she would have to wash the clothes again, and her fingers were so crippled from rheumatism that she could barely rub the cloth on the scrub board. Joe tried to stop the boy by pushing him away, but the fellow turned and slugged Joe, hit him twice—left, right—causing a hurting in Joe’s stomach. Joe let the anger that had built up in his young life take over then, and he kicked the boy. Joe might have gone to prison for five years, maybe ten, because white people would not abide a black boy who hurt a white one. But as it turned out, Joe’s mother’s employer was the wife of the mill owner, who had just fired the boy for stealing. So Joe was sentenced to only two years in prison. Of course, the white boy was not punished. It was Negro law.
    Instead of going to prison, however, Joe and half a dozen other convicts were “sold” to a turpentine operator, the rights to their labor traded by prison officials for a few dollars. They were shipped off to a camp deep in the piney woods. Because he was sizable, Joe was assigned a job as a woodcutter, and he was worked like a mule, because what did the operator care if one black convict was broken? It wasn’t like slavery days, when a black man had some worth. If Joe was worked to death, he’d be easy enough to replace.
    The men were roused before sunup and taken to the field in chains, where they worked until it was too dark for the guards to see to shoot them. Slackers were beaten. Joe was cautious, not only at work but in the camp, a dark and dangerous place where the prisoners mixed with the regular turpentine workers. The first month he was there, Joe glanced at a black woman who was swaying near a fire, a sweet singer whose voice was smooth and silky and ripped through his heart, making him so lonely, he wanted to hug himself like a baby. He took a step toward the fire and found a knife at his throat. “You look at my woman again, and you don’t know what you will come to before you die,” said a voice that was low and ragged in his ear.
    Joe put out his hands and said, “Easy,” and the man drew back the knife, but not before he scratched it across Joe’s throat, drawing a line of blood as fine as a thread. “I just got here. I mean no trouble,” Joe told him.
    “Stay away from the women,” the man warned. Joe recognized him as one of the regular turpentine workers. “There’s girls enough from the juke house for you.”
    “I got no money. I came from the prison.”
    The man relaxed a little. “Then you got to stay out of trouble.” He stepped back and looked at Joe. “You work hard, and you keep away from Sykes over there, and when you can’t, you mind your back. He is treacherous.” He pointed with his knife at a fat white man with eyes like a pig.