Free All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten Page A

tall; I done the plowin too. So that corn growed up there—and dry weather hit it. And when it got to shootin, still stayed dry on that corn until the time it oughta been made and the ears just standin off. Bless your soul, it just continued dry and that corn come right on up there and when it hit the key note that it oughta made a good crop of corn—still dry, just stayed dry like a drought. There that corn stood with nice shoots, done tasseled out—and didn’t make enough corn to pull. My daddy lost all his corn in the field—Akers lost it, them Akers woulda got it all when they cleaned him out.
    They could have, if they’d a done it, squared along with my daddy and help him, if they wouldn’t a helped him just a little bit. Why, the next year was all right and he could have squared through maybe and paid em. But they didn’t give him no chance; they grabbed what he had when he failed to come up with cotton enough to pay em—dry weather parched that cotton crop to a great extent. They took what cotton he made but there weren’t no corn to take. Took his horse and wagon, went in the pen and took his fattenin hog, what meat my daddy was raisin for his family. I was big enough and old enough to stretch my eyes at conditions and abominate what I seed.
    So I seed that twice: my daddy stripped of everything he had. He moved off the Todd place, then just a little piece up the road on the Wheeler place, and he never did prosper none after that.
    H E wasn’t a slave but he lived like one. Because he had to take what the white people gived to get along. That much of slavery ways was still hangin on. Accordin to slave days you wasn’t allowed the privilege to seek knowledge without the white man, master man, allowin you. And that was the rule durin of my daddy’s lifetime and up through my life, to be sure.
    Of course, years ago I heard that President Lincoln freed the colored people; but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. And me, for myself, I was born in 1885, a very long time ago, and I know more about the happenins under this way of life than I can tell.
    W HEN I was a little boy I watched em disfranchise the Negro from votin. I was old enough to look at folks and hear the talk. I didn’t like it but nothin I could do. Over yonder in the settlement where my daddy lived at that time, they’d always go up here in Tukabahchee County to the Chapel Ridge beat, white and colored, to vote. What did I see and hear? Votin time come and I seen my daddy and plenty of other colored people from our settlement go on up to Chapel Ridge and vote. My daddy was a man that voted. The white man would let him vote, wanted him to vote. Some of em would travel around, workin for who they wanted and get the nigger’s decision about who they was goin to vote for and they’d pay him in some way to vote for their pet man. I knowed and I thought at all times, it was only fair for a man, if he goin to vote to vote for who he wanted. But it never come to that; nigger didn’t know the difference in one from the other. He was kept out of the knowledge of knowin so that he would
want
to sell his vote because that was the only advantage he could get from votin. White men traveled around, “Well, who you goin to vote for?” Sometimes, nigger would tell em he didn’t know, he hadn’t decided. How could he decide? They’d have the man for him to vote for. Give the nigger a middlin of meat, give him a barrel of flour—if they was able to give him that much, give him that to vote for who they wanted. Nigger would go ahead and vote. I
seed
that—whites buyin niggers’ votes; give em a middlin of meat, shoulder of meat, sack of flour—flour was cheap them days; give em barrels of flour to vote their way. Nigger let himself be handicapped. If I’d a been a voter in them days they would have handicapped me because I wouldn’t have knowed as much as I do