Free Whiter Than Snow by Sandra Dallas Page B

the rails. They ducked their heads as the engine passed, although an engineer wouldn’t think much about a Negro man and child sitting beside the track watching the train. Joe scanned the boxcars of the slow-moving freight train until he saw one with its doors open. Carrying the child, he ran along the train, letting the open car come up beside him. Then he pushed Jane into the boxcar and pulled himself up.
    In the dark of the car, Joe thought the two of them were alone. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw two men in the corner of the freight car, one of them holding a bottle, and both of them looking at Jane. They were colored, although Joe knew a black man could be as treacherous as a white one. Jane, frightened, curled up beside her father, and Joe put his left arm around her. Then he reached into his pocket with his right hand and removed the knife with its long, narrow blade, which caught the morning light.
    The two men looked at the knife and then at Joe, and Joe could sense their fear. “You can put it away,” one said. “We don’t mean no harm.”
    “Glad of it.” Joe scratched his face with the blade, scratched it where the men would see the ugly scar on his cheek. Then he flexed his muscles and put down the knife. At least if the men attacked him, they’d know they were in for a fight.
    One of the men offered Joe the bottle, which he’d corked and was ready to roll across the car, but Joe shook his head. In a while, the two men finished the whiskey and tossed the bottle out the car door; then they lay down and began to snore.
    “Pappy, I’m not sleepy,” Jane whispered. So Joe slept, too, while Jane kept watch.
    Later, when they were all awake and Jane slept, the two men told Joe they were running off because they’d robbed a white store. “What’d you do?” one asked.
    Joe didn’t trust them, so he said, “I’ve done nothing. My wife let me go, said I wasn’t ever going to see my girl again. So I fooled her and snatched up the baby, and now it’s my wife that can’t see her.”
    One of the men chuckled and asked, “Where you headed to?”
    Joe scratched his head. “Can’t say. Maybe New York City.”
    “Well, you ain’t going to get there on this train. It’s going all the way to Kansas City.”

    So that was where Joe ended up for a time. He found a job there, working in a warehouse, leaving Jane to care for herself in the room in which they lived. But he was restless. He saved up a little money, and after a time, he and Jane caught another freight, letting themselves off at Topeka for a while and then at Hugo, in eastern Colorado, and finally in Denver. Joe liked Denver, was surprised to discover that black people lived in houses there as nice as the ones white people owned back where he came from. But more than that, he was intrigued with the mountains that rose up to the west. He’d never seen mountains before, and the blue range drew him. So one day, he and Jane climbed aboard a train whose last stop was a town on the Swan River—Swandyke.
    As soon as his feet touched the ground, Joe knew Swandyke was where he would stay. He couldn’t say why, and later it seemed odd to him that he liked it so much, because Swandyke was different from home, and there weren’t any farming jobs, just mining. It might have been the town’s bustle, compared to the laziness of the South, or the dry air and cold nights, instead of the everlasting heat and damp he was used to. Or perhaps it was the white man on the platform at the depot who had accidentally shoved Jane up against the wall when he turned around with his suitcase. He’d stopped and taken off his hat and said, “I’m sorry, young lady. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
    Joe stared at the man in astonishment, because he had never heard a white person apologize to a black one. Then he said, “Naw, boss, she’s tough.”
    The man fished in his pocket for a nickel and handed it to Jane and said, “You buy yourself a treat now.”
    Joe asked