Free The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines Page A

Nashville—Nashville a straight shoot into Ohio. But in Nashville something else happens. Somebody there cracks the boy in the head. Since y’all been friends all these years you feel you ought to stay near his grave a year or two out of respect. But you finally got in Kentucky. In Kentucky you cook for white folks, you feed and nurse white children till you get enough money saved or till you fool another nigger to take you to Ohio. You know how to pick a man now and you pick a stupid one. Soon as you get there you drop him—you don’t want nothing more to do with men ever in your life. Well, you land in Cincinnati and you start asking for Brown. But you got a hundred Browns in Cincinnati. Some white Browns, some black Browns, even some brown Browns. You go from Brown to Brown, but you never find the right Brown. It takes you another couple years before you realize Brown ain’t here, so you head out for Cleveland. Cleveland got twice as many Browns. And the only white Brown people can remember that even went to Luzana to fight in the war died of whiskey ten years ago. They don’t think he was the same person you was looking for because this Brown wasn’t kind to nobody. He was coarse and vulgar; he cussed man, God, and nature every day of his life.”
    “All right, now how long it’s go’n take us to get there?” I asked him.
    “I see, you still going,” he said.
    “That’s where we started for.”
    The old man looked at me and shook his head. “The boy’ll never make it,” he said. “You? I figure it’ll take you about thirty years. Give or take a couple.”
    “Well, we better head out,” I said. “Thank you very much. I wonder if I couldn’t bother you for a bottle of water?”
    Ned was sound asleep, so I had to shake him to wake him up. I told him to get the flint and iron together. The old man gived me a jug of water and we left him standing out on the gallery.
    I can tell you all the things we went through that week, but they don’t matter. Because they wasn’t no different from the things we went through them first three or four days. We stuck to the bushes most of the time. If we saw people, we hid till they had passed us. One day we had to run a dog back that was trying to follow us because we was scared the people might come looking for him. Another time I watched a house about an hour before I went and asked them for water. The people cussed us out first, then they broke down and gived us the water.
    One day, with the sun straight up, we saw a man on a wagon. I went out in the road and waved him down and asked him where we was. He told me the parish. I asked him if that meant I was still in Luzana. He said close as he could speculate I was right in the middle of Luzana. I asked him could we ride with him. He said we could—if we was going the same way he was. But since it didn’t look like we was, then he had to say no.
    I had already throwed my bundle in the wagon; now I was helping Ned up on the wheel.
    “Y’all look beat,” the man said to me.
    His name was Job; the people told us later.
    “We was going to Ohio,” I said. “My little friend here got tired.”
    “He look it,” Job said.

Rednecks and Scalawags
    Job took us to his house. Soon as his wife saw us in that wagon she started fussing. Tall and skinny—nothing but a sack of bones. Looked like she ought to been too weak to even open her mouth; but that woman started fussing when we drove in that yard and didn’t stop till we left there the next day.
    “What you doing with them niggers?” she asked Job. “You ain’t had no money to go and buy no niggers, and you sure ain’t got nerve enough to steal none. If you brought them here to feed them you can turn around and take them right straight on back. Ain’t got enough food here for me to eat.”
    “Let them stay here tonight,” Job said.
    “In my house?” the woman said. “Stink up my place?”
    It was a cabin, not a house. Old—leaning to one side. Job had