"Run," Fred said. "Run away from here you stupid niggers. Run."
15.
"I've come to see Tobias," John said.
"Tell this soft-headed fool to run from here," Fred said to me.
I grabbed John's arm but his feet were planted like tree roots. There was no moving him.
"Bring Tobias Turner to me," John said in a stern tone.
Fred fell back a step and then a voice came from somewhere in the house.
"Who is that you're talkin' to, Fred Chocolate?" It was Master Tobias.
My guts turned to water and my knees were no sturdier than blades of grass. Tobias came to the door, pushing the butler aside.
"What's this?" he cried. "The runaways. Call Mr. Stewart, Fred. I will have these boys whipped in front of all the slaves out here. Whipped until their backs is bloody and their heads hang down dead."
"No!" Big Mama Flore cried.
I saw her run into the big sitting room behind our enraged Master.
"They just boys, Master Tobias," Fred said.
And even though I was afraid for my life I was amazed that the snooty house Negro would have stood up for two pieces of field trash like us.
"Mr. Stewart!" Tobias cried.
"You can kill us, Tobias Turner," John said in a voice that could not be ignored. "But will you allow us save your daughter's life before you do?"
The russet-hued lad held up his napkin-sack of medicine.
"What are you sayin', Number Twelve?" the Master asked.
"You sent us to find medicine," my friend said proudly. "We've done that. We had to go far away and we got stuck in the rain. I couldn't let the herbs we carried get wet and so we had to hide until the rain stopped."
"The rain quit late last night, nigger!" Mr. Stewart said from behind us.
He had just gained the porch in answer to Tobias's call. I could feel the stamping of his hard boots on the wood beneath our feet. Every time his shod feet hit the planks I imagined him trampling on my bones.
"We fell asleep," John said to Tobias. "We were tired from searching for the medicines your girl needed."
"You can break her fever?" Tobias asked. His voice was lower now. I could hear the sorrow and exhaustion in his words.
"Yes, sir," John said, as serious as a hangman.
"Then come on upstairs before it's too late," Tobias said.
"Number Forty-seven has to come with me," John told Tobias, and I really wished he hadn't. All I wanted to do was to get back out in the cotton fields; back to where I was just a slave and nobody white talked to me or worried about my whereabouts.
"I can't let two filthy niggers in my little girl's room."
"You'd rather let her die?" John asked.
He was no longer acting like a downtrodden slave. Tall
John was talking to Tobias in just the same way he spoke to me. As a matter of fact I believed that everything John was doing and saying was for my benefit. He wasn't worried about the Master or the plantation boss or stuffy Fred Chocolate. He was showing me something. And maybe I would have understood his lesson if I wasn't scared down to the wood beneath my bare feet.
Tobias was shivering with rage at the impudent slave and also in fear for his daughter's life. If John would have listened to me I could have told him that the slave master held a grudge longer than he'd remember any good deed. I could have told John that talking like a white man to a white man was the quickest way for a slave to meet the Lord.
"Come on!" Tobias shouted.
He ran back into the mansion and John followed. I fell back, hoping that I could get away, back to the cotton fields, but Mr. Stewart pushed against my shoulder and I was thrown into the doorway of the big house.
We ran along through the sitting room, with its posh couches and chairs. My dirty bare feet scuttled over the soft carpeting. And even though I was soothed by the feel of the fabric beneath my feet I thought that it was not nearly so elegant as the bed of leaves beneath that great tree where I slept the night before.
We ran up the stairs: Mr. Stewart, Master Tobias, Tall John, Flore, Fred Chocolate, and I. There we came to a big double door that was open. The walls of that room were
lined with large windows and everything was covered with yellow lace. The curtains were lace and also the canopy over the bed, even the walls were painted like the creamy material.
Under the canopy, in the center of the room, in the oversized bed, lay the girl-child Eloise. She looked frail and pale with her eyes closed and sounds of distress coming from her lips.
"The fever is taking her brain," John said in an offhanded manner. "She will not live out the morning unless she is treated."
Next to the bed was Eloise's light-skinned maid, Nola. Nola was hardly older than I. She had freckles and greenish eyes and crinkly reddish-brown hair. It was general knowledge among the slaves that Nola was Tobias's daughter by a slave named Patrice who had died some years before.
Nola was crying over her white half-sister's agony. It was plain to see that she loved Eloise as much as I did.
Many slaves loved their masters. Looking back on it now it seems odd loving someone that keeps you in chains and runs roughshod over your life. But back then the only rule we knew was the white Masters' rule, and so if the Master were ever kind many of us felt grateful because we didn't know any better. And if somebody like Eloise, who never said a harsh word, was somewhere for us to catch a glimpse of now and again, we felt a swelling in our hearts, hoping that such a kind soul would somehow ease our sufferings. That's because the human heart is always filled with hope and the need to love.
So Nola loved Eloise. She would have happily died in her stead.
"Shall I save your daughter, Tobias?" John asked arrogantly.
"Out of the way, Nola," the defeated slave master said.
"No!" Nola shouted.
Mama Flore took the unwilling girl by the shoulders and pulled her away from the dying white girl's bed.
"Come, Forty-seven," John said as he moved toward the girl's side.
Grabbing me by the arm, Tobias said, "Wait a minute. You ain't said what you need this nigger for. He's been on my plantation since he was baby. He don't have no healin' in 'im."
"Where I am from," John replied, rather impatiently, "we cannot heal without teaching. Forty-seven is my student. If I didn't have him I could not save your daughter."
Tobias released me and John unfolded his napkin on the bed.
Even now, over a hundred and seventy years later, in the twenty-first century, I remember the feelings I had in that white girl's bedroom. I was afraid for Eloise because she looked so drawn and deathlike. I was afraid for myself because John had made me part of his haughty procedure. And even while all that fear was in me I was aware that the
Master had lost all of his high-minded ways. He was giving in to a mere slave because that slave might be able to do what they could not. This was possibly the most important lesson John ever taught me; that our so-called masters were not all-powerful, that they were also weak and vulnerable at times. But at the moment I was too frightened to understand the significance of that knowledge.
Upon his open napkin there were various leaves, mushrooms, and twigs. There were also two smaller versions of the soft-glass tubes that he had used to heal my hands and brand. These tubes were so small that they might have been seeds.
John put his hand on Eloise's brow. Nola screamed at him to stop touching her mistress. Flore then dragged the child from the room. John was busy crumbling up the vegetation and mixing it with oil from the capsules he'd gotten from the yellow bag. Then he rubbed the paste up under her upper lip.
"What are you doin' there, Twelve?" Tobias said in a threatening tone.
"Saving your girl if you let me be," he replied.
John crushed another tube and then ran his fingers under the unconscious girl's tongue.
This intimacy was too much for the white man. He grabbed Tall John by the shoulder and threw him nearly across the room. The youth hit the floor with a loud grunt and reached back to rub his head.