Free Whiter Than Snow by Sandra Dallas Page A

“Take these,” she said, putting them down his shirtfront. Then she watched as her son ran off across the field, the small girl on his shoulders. When she could no longer see him, Ada sank down on her knees and blessed God and said a prayer to keep her kinfolks safe.
    Joe did not know that the doctor never told another white person what the black man had done to him. He blamed a screen door for slamming against his face, and because townsfolk knew that the doctor’s wife was a big chunk of a woman who was handy with a frying pan, they didn’t believe the story, and they snickered behind his back. Nobody even considered that the doctor might have been hit by a colored man.
    A week later, the doctor went out to Hogpen Lane, to the cabin where Joe’s mother was clearing out the few things that her son had left behind. She looked up with alarm, but with confusion, too, because she did not understand why white men had not come there earlier, hunting Joe.
    “Joe’s gone. Don’t ask me where, for I’m not knowing. He’ll nevermore be back,” she said.
    The doctor nodded, for that was the way when a black man broke Negro law. Only whites got justice. Blacks got lynched. He took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he sat down on the dirty bench by the door and twirled the hat in his hands. “When I started my practice, I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath. I don’t expect you know what that is, do you, auntie?”
    “No, sir.”
    “It means I swore to treat people who needed me, no matter who they were or whether they could pay. Somewhere over the road I’ve traveled, I forgot about that, and I let this woman, this Orange, die.”
    The old woman waited while the doctor looked out across the fields. The cotton was up and the white just beginning to show. The work would be harder for the family without Joe.
    “I guess I’m saying Joe doesn’t have to worry on my account. I told it about that I walked into that fool screen door and broke my nose.” He stood and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat, then stepped down off the porch and climbed into his buggy. “Good day to you, auntie.”
     
    Jane squalled and squalled as Joe ran through the cold night, and at last he set the girl down. “Baby, your mammy is dead, and we are running away and won’t ever come back home,” he said, rubbing her bare feet, for the child had never had a pair of shoes in her life, and her feet were cold. “If the white men catch us, we’ll get a killing. If you squawk like that, they’ll hear us. So you have to be still. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    And Jane did, because while she was only five, she was a black girl, and she’d already known meanness. She nodded, and Joe relaxed a little, thinking it would be good to eat something and then realizing that he’d held the flapjacks in his shirt for hours and hadn’t even known it. He shared them with the girl, and they ate the cold dinner and drank water from a stream. Joe fashioned his overalls into a sling and tied the child to his back, and while she slept, he ran on. In the night, he passed one town and then another, and when he crossed the railroad track of a third, he waited just beyond it for a westbound train. He didn’t know where he was headed, only that it would be far away. The white men would look for him going north, so he figured he’d head west, and he and Jane could cover more miles in a train than by foot. Besides, he couldn’t tote the girl forever. Although Jane was a little spare-made child, Joe’s back hurt from the carrying of her.
    He sat in the grass as the sky turned gray in the east, hoping a train would come through before the light was up. Jane was awake now, and as they sat in the weeds beside the track, they ate the corn bread Joe had snatched up, although he did not build a fire to fry up the fatback. Just before the sun broke the horizon, they heard a long whistle and felt a rumbling along