Free Travelers Rest by Ann Tatlock Page B

each knee. He took a deep breath. “I’d like to tell you a story, if I may.”
    “Sure,” Jane said quietly. “Go ahead.”
    Truman rubbed his knees a moment and frowned in thought. Then he said, “It might explain . . . well . . . my behavior yesterday in the canteen.”
    “All right. I’m listening.”
    He cleared his throat. “It was 1946,” he began. “I was fifteen years old and the eldest of seven children. At that time my father was a bale breaker at one of the textile mills there in the Upcountry, and my mother was a maid in the house of the mill owner, a Mr. Evans. Now, my mother and father were both intelligent people, but being black in the South . . . well, they simply had no opportunity. Jim Crow was in full swing back then. Jim Crow was the law, designed to keep us Negro folk in our place.
    “Our place was one of poverty, of course. We didn’t have much, other than each other, and my mother’s books. The little house we lived in just outside of Travelers Rest—it had no running water, no electricity, no heat other than the woodstove. But we had books. Plenty of those. See, Mrs. Evans—she saw my mother had an interest in reading and in learning. Since Mrs. Evans had been a teacher at one time, she knew the importance of a good education. For whatever reason, she decided she was going to see to it that Mamma’s children had a chance at learning. She was pretty forward thinking for a white woman, as most white folks thought blacks weren’t capable of learning much. But Mrs. Evans—she gave Mamma all kinds of books, told her to bring them home and read them to us, everything from literature to philosophy to science.”
    “Truman,” Jane interrupted, “didn’t you go to school?”
    “Oh yes.” Truman nodded. “We went to the school for Negro children. But tell you the truth, we learned more at home from those books Mrs. Evans sent us. Not that the teachers at the school weren’t good. They were. They were fine teachers and fine people. But we just didn’t have the resources that the white school had.
    “So as I say, my family—we had each other, and we had a pile of books. I guess that’s about my best memory of those days, sitting around in the evenings, listening to Mamma and Daddy read to us by the light of the kerosene lamp. We’d memorize passages of Shakespeare and all kinds of poems and even chapters of the Bible. We’d make a contest out of it, see who could memorize the most and recite it without making any mistakes.” Truman paused and laughed lightly. “Being the oldest, I always thought I had to be the best, but my brothers and sisters, they gave me a run for my money. I had to work hard to outdo any of them. I spent hours by myself, reading and memorizing and reciting and—”
    He stopped himself and looked up. “I’m getting sidetracked, Jane. This isn’t what I meant to tell you.”
    Jane offered him an encouraging smile. “That’s all right. I like the picture of all of you gathered together like that. I don’t imagine that kind of thing happens very much today.”
    “No, I suppose not. Times have changed since then, some ways for the better, some ways not. But here’s what I wanted to tell you,” Truman said. “That autumn of 1946, the youngest of us, my brother Daniel, was two years old. He was a little fellow. He’d been born somewhat prematurely, but otherwise he was all right. And he was a happy boy. He had a way of lighting up the room when he smiled, and he smiled a lot.
    “Well, one night when we were eating supper, something hit him. One minute he was fine and the next he was shaking with fever and complaining of an ache in his jaw. We didn’t have any real medicines at home back then, just some herbs my grandmother collected and made teas out of. She had a tea for whatever ailed you, whether it was toothache or migraine or a sprained ankle. That’s how it was for us, and it was the old women mostly who kept the traditions alive,