Free The Dream Bearer by Walter Dean Myers

hurts so much, we want to burythe pain deep inside of us,” the old man said.
    â€œI don’t want to talk to you,” I said again. “Why don’t you just go somewhere?” All I wanted to do was to sit on the park bench and be by myself. I didn’t want to talk to Mr. Moses, or even to Loren.
    â€œYou just tell me why you can’t stand to hear me talking, so I can take that away with me,” Mr. Moses said.
    â€œI’m tired of people talking to me. Talking doesn’t do any good anyway. It’s just about people laying their stuff on you, trying to make you agree with them.”
    â€œYeah, well, that’s true. That’s true. But we only got one way of seeing the world, and we all running around trying to get everybody to see what we see,” he said. “You can’t blame a man for that.”
    â€œYes, you can,” I said.
    â€œI guess you don’t want to hear another of my dreams?” he said. “It’s a good one, nothing bad happens in it.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt’s about me working in the field down in South Carolina, about two hundred and fifteen years ago. You ain’t never seen a field this big. Well, in this dream it was a hot day, so hot you could reach out and grab the heat in your hand. I had done got into a beef with one of the other fellows in the field. I don’t know what it was about, some little thing.” Mr. Moses put his fingertips together in front of him. “Anyway, I seen him in the field a little ahead of me two rows down. He seen me,too, and started picking faster and moving on down his row. Then I started picking faster to keep up with him. Before long we was snatching cotton like two fools under that hot sun.
    â€œThe old overseer seen us, and he knew we needed to be picking all day and wasn’t going to do it like that. He snapped his whip to let us know he was watching us. I heard that whip snap but I just dropped my head and kept on picking as fast as I could.
    â€œI walked and walked and picked and picked. And the spot on my shoulder, the spot where that bag went across my body, got so hot, I thought I could feel it burning through my body. I looked up at the other fellow and he was doing the same and we was both suffering for it. Lord knows we was both suffering, but we had got caught up in it and couldn’t do nothing about it. Now ain’t that a sorry dream? Two men couldn’t find no way out the pain. Ain’t that a sorry dream?”
    â€œThat don’t sound like much of a dream to me,” I said.
    â€œI didn’t say it was going to be a fancy dream,” he said. “I just said it was going to be a dream.”
    â€œDreams don’t mean anything anyway,” I said. “They’re just thoughts that run through your head. Your dreams aren’t even interesting. Anyway, I think you read them in a book about slavery or something. You talking about picking cotton and whips and all that stuff, it probably came straight from a book.”
    â€œI don’t know, maybe you’re right,” Mr. Moses said. He had got to the bench and, putting one hand on the back of it, had eased himself down to a sitting position. “On the other hand, dreams might be the only things we got that’s real. After the wind has lifted up what’s left of the body and sent it swirling into the distance, and all the memories that seemed to be our lives have yellowed and faded away, then all that’s left of a life is the footprints the dreams left behind.”
    â€œI don’t want to be rude or nothing, but…why don’t you just leave or something?” I said.
    â€œYes, I see it’s time to leave you to yourself,” Mr. Moses said. “But let me remind you of something you need to know. It is not only the wicked that travel with pain. Sometimes it is the innocent as well.”
    He stood up and started picking up his things. He turned