Free Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley Page A

that I should learn to read. Maybe it was because I was so
weak but I felt about ready to cry.
    ‘Reading
is one of the few things that separates us from the animals, Ezekiel.
You’d know all about the man they named you for if you could
read.’
    ‘Yes,
ma’am.’
    ‘And
all you have to do is to keep on reading those sounds and asking
Domaque and others about how you read. Maybe you can have someone
read to you. Then you read it to yourself…’ she said and then
she drifted off into a daydream.
    We
finished eating and she told me to go find a couch in the parlour to
sleep on and that she’d come out there later to see how I was.
But first she put a brown powder in some tea and gave it to me.
    ‘Josephine
Marker makes this out to the swamps. She’s a real wonder at flu
powders and the like.’
    I was
nervous about drinking any tea that Jo had a hand in making, but I
took it to be polite.
    After that
all I remember is laying down on the yellow couch. When I opened my
eyes again it was night.
    Miss Dixon
was standing at the open door in a long white dress, and the moon was
shining in on her. There were so many chairs and tables around that
it was like being in an auditorium after a big function when all the
chairs and whatnot are stacked for storage.
    ‘You
still got a fever, Ezekiel,’ she said out of the open door.
‘But I’ll get some more tea and all you got to do is to
go back to sleep and you’ll be fine.’
    ‘Thank
you, ma’am, I mean fo’ the sleep, I mean.’ I was
very uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to spending much time with
white people and I knew that colored people are always in danger of
doing the wrong thing when they have to deal with whites. It was fine
in Fifth Ward down in Houston, or in little colored towns like
Pariah, usually, because there weren’t any white people around
for the most part. The only time I had ever spent around white people
was when I was working, and then how I was to act was clear because
whites were always the boss. That was easy because all I ever said
was ‘yes’ and ‘no;’ but mainly Yes.’
    ‘That’s
all right, Ezekiel.’ She turned from the door and came back to
the brown chair, about three pieces of furniture away from me. The
room was dark except for the moonlight. ‘You know I’m a
good woman if they let me be.’
    ‘I’m
sure you are, ma’am. You sure been good t’me.’
    ‘You
think so because you’re not from around here, but if you lived
here you’d be like all the rest of them.’
    ‘Dom
speaks mighty well on you, ma’am.’ I was wishing that I
could be away from there. Why did she have to talk to me? One wrong
word and I could be in jail or worse.
    ‘Domaque
and his momma live in the swamp, so they’re different,’
she said.
    ‘They
sure are diffrent but they still like you.’
    Miss Dixon
laughed. It was a nice laugh and she almost seemed like a normal
person to me.
    She said,
‘You don’t see, Ezekiel. What I mean is that Domaque and
Josephine don’t mind me because I don’t own the bayou
lands.’
    ‘Ma’am?’
    ‘I
own just about everything else. My family owned it at first. The
Dixons, the MacDoughs, and the Lambert family owned all of this way
back. But they married each other and they died or they moved away
and I’m the only one left. Our families had sharecropping and
plantations down this way for more’n a hundred years… Now
it’s all back to the tenants. I don’t even collect rent
but they know that the land is mine.’ She looked over at the
window as if all the people of Pariah were there, looking in. ‘They
know that one day I’m going to die and some strangers are going
to come down and reclaim my property.’
    ‘Why
cain’t they just buy the land from you?’ I really wanted
to know.
    ‘The
country people are poor, Ezekiel, they couldn’t get the cash to
buy. But even if they could — this is my land,’ her voice
became hard, ‘for me and mine. I can’t just hand it over
to