Free All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten

daddy didn’t get enough out of that crop to wrap his fingers around. But he got away from Mr. Clay and saved himself for the years to come by makin baskets for the man to gather his crop—the crop that my daddy helped to make but didn’t get a bit of it.
    Still and all we didn’t go hungry because my daddy was a marksman: killed squirrels, possums, wild turkeys, catch fish and all. That was his job. I seed the day come and pass that he’d feed us just on his game. He wouldn’t go out in the woods once a week without comin back with all the game he could tote.
    N EXT cleanin up—Mr. Albee done come to the house and taken everything my daddy had in the way of stock and farm tools; taken my daddy’s cows, his mule, harnesses, while my daddy was waitin in Beaufort jail for Mr. Jasper Clay to get him out. Moved away from Mr. Clay back down to Mr. Todd’s place and scuffled around. Mr. Todd took my daddy up, furnished him land to work and helpedhim out, gived him the cost of a plow and money to buy a horse; my daddy worked that horse two years. And my daddy went—old man Clem Todd agreed for my daddy to get somebody else to furnish him but stay on his place. So my daddy went down there and got in with the Akers in Apafalya. And about the first or second year, Akers cleaned him up.
    Ruel Akers’ daddy was Dudley Akers. And Dudley Akers and his daddy, which was Ruel Akers’ granddaddy, old Hy Akers—used to be a doctor accordin to the name they give him, Dr. Hy Akers—I know they didn’t give my daddy a chance to redeem himself. They claimed they had a note against him and they took all he had. In those days, it was out of the knowledge of the colored man to understand that if you gived a man a note on everything you had, exactly how you was subject to the laws. Because the colored man wasn’t educated to the laws for his use; they was a great, dark secret to him.
    Akers took everything he had except goin in the house and gettin the house furnitures—they’d a got that if my stepmother had signed my daddy’s note. Some of em ordered when they gived notes for furnishin, some of em wanted to go in the house and get that woman and have her sign it, too. Well, what was that for? I quickly learnt this: if you furnishes me any amount of money and I give you a note on what you want a note on as a security for the money you furnishin me, that aint enough to satisfy you, you want my wife to sign this note, too. And she come out and sign it—been that way ever since I was a little boy; have a Negro to sign a note, they goin to try to get that woman to stick her mark on that paper. That gets household, kitchen plunder and all. If I wanted supplies in the days I come along after I married my first wife, if I wanted to do any business with a white man for any part of furnishin, I didn’t let her go on no notes; she stayed out of it because that would give em a chance to go in the house and get her stuff. O Lord, I have been through tribulations and trials in this world but nobody never has went in my house and got no house furnitures out of there.
    The year them Akers cleaned up my daddy I begin to come in the knowledge of a crop. And I was plowin a little old gray horse—at that time it was the only horse or mule or anything my daddy had to plow. Mr. Clem Todd gived my daddy the money to buy that horse. And at the end of plowin, weren’t plowin no more, themAkers took that horse. They come out there—my daddy’d bought a new one-horse wagon, little iron-axle wagon, good wagon; bought it brand new from them Akers. They come out there and took that horse and wagon and even went in the pen and got the fattenin hog.
    I watched em take it and I learnt right quick what it was all about. Got all the cotton he made. But there was no corn for em to get. That spring my daddy had as pretty a prospect for corn as I ever seed. Corn was way up there, pretty,