Sarny, page 1
Praise for
Sarny
A Life Remembered
An NCSS-CBC Notable Children’s Trade Book in
the Field of Social Studies
An American Library Association Quick Pick
“A great read, with characters both to hate and to cherish, and a rich sense of what it really was like then.”
—Booklist, Starred
“It’s a moving tale, made more so by Sarny’s clipped, matter-of-fact voice—utterly distinct, with strength and determination shining through every line.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Sarny is a noble character who carries Paulsen’s message of the power of literacy.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Sarny is a wonderful, believable character. Her story makes absorbing reading.”
—School Library Journal
I never looked back.
Left that place, left the buildings and the field, left Waller dying in the dirt and the white women in the house and never once looked back. The other slaves—no, free people—would have to take care of themselves now. Bluecoats coming, bringing freedom to everyone, sweeping clean all the dirt there was, but I didn’t look back.
Had to find my children.
ALSO AVAILABLE IN LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:
NIGHTJOHN, Gary Paulsen
BRIAN’S WINTER, Gary Paulsen
THE WINTER ROOM, Gary Paulsen
THE CROSSING, Gary Paulsen
THE RIVER, Gary Paulsen
SUNSHINE RIDER, Ric Lynden Hardman
THE HOUSE YOU PASS ON THE WAY, Jacqueline Woodson
I HADN’T MEANT TO TELL YOU THIS, Jacqueline Woodson
SHARK BAIT, Graham Salisbury
THE UNPROTECTED WITNESS, James Stevenson
Published by
Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers
a division of
Random House, Inc.
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New York, New York 10036
Copyright © 1997 by Gary Paulsen
Frontispiece © 1997 by Jerry Pinkney
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eISBN: 978-0-307-80423-5
RL: 4.3
v3.1
also for Sally Hemings
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Plantation Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
New Orleans Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Afterword
About the Author
Beginning words, 1930
It’s quiet now, so quiet sometimes it seems like everything is covered with layers of soft dust so thick the sound can’t come through. Must have been fifteen, no, sixteen years since I could hear much more than a hum. Back when I was my Biblical age limit. Eighty years old.
I am ninety now, ninety and just exactly four. I’ve been in this home must be fourteen years waiting for something. I’m not sure what it is I’m waiting for. Maybe to die and to go see Delie and Nightjohn again because I get to missing them more now that I’m getting on. Not old, now—just getting on. I learned that when I was twenty and eight—how not to say old when speaking of a lady. Just getting on. Woman taught me that had the name of Miss Laura and she lived in a fancy house in New Orleans where men came and went. I cleaned the house and helped her when I was there after my children. Before she passed on she told me so many things I’m still digging them out of my thoughts like parsnips left in the ground all winter and dug up fresh in the spring.
Once a week a doctor he comes into my room and he looks and he smiles and he pokes here and pokes there and says something to me. I smile at him and nod and he nods back and leaves me for another week and I don’t have a single idea of what he says but it don’t matter. He’s young and he means to help and what he says don’t count as much as how he gets to saying it. I know he cares and that’s all that signifies.
I like that word. Signifies. I’ve used it a lot, what with living and all. When I married the first time I said to him, “Martin, this marriage signifies that we’re bound for life.” And he agreed, though I’m certain as day that he didn’t know what the word meant until later when I told him. And he meant it because even though we were still slaves he married me with a minister with our heads in the big bowl and he was my only until they worked him to death. My first husband. Died when he was twenty and seven. Worked down and broke and died just two years before Lincoln’s war it made us free.
Sometimes I miss Martin too. Big hands, deep laugh. Once I saw him laugh so hard he slammed his hand down on a cast-iron stove lid and broke it. But gentle. Oh my, so gentle. He could pull a splinter out of my finger and I didn’t even feel it and there were other times when he would pick me up just like I was a feather and … well, no mind to that. Not in somebody ninety and four years old. Been sixty years, well, forty truth be told, since I thought of any man lifting me like a feather. Shame on me for thinking about it now. Well, not too much shame. The brain don’t know it gets old. That Miss Laura she told me about that—said a grandmother’s body has the same brain as a young girl. Body gets old but the brain won’t admit it and there you be groaning and bending and making old sounds when you get up and you look in the mirror and your brain won’t let you see you’re old. Just be a young thing looking back at you and you put a little on this wrinkle and a little on that and forget you’re sixty and three. Try to be twenty and seven in your mind.
Don’t get me started on that, getting old. I’ve seen too much, done too much to feel old. Old is for them that sits and I never could be one to sit.
I tried to explain things to the nice young girl that wheels me out into the sun of an afternoon. She couldn’t be a day over forty and three. But she smiles like the doctor smiles and cares and nods and we just stay in our own worlds.
She’s the same girl that changes the flowers of a week. I think she picks them out on the grounds because I’ve seen holes in the flower beds but Lord, they smell so sweet I don’t care are they stolen. Just about everything else on me is worn and broke down but my nose still works and what the smell of flowers can do for the little girl in my brain would make you dance to see it.
It’s not bad here. You have to wait somewhere when you’re looking to go visit old friends and it’s warm here outside Dallas, especially when the sun comes in the white windows on the east side over my bed. ’Course I’m working all the time, working on my memories and of a time my grandson Carlisle who was from Tyler comes by. He’s fifty and four though it don’t seem possible that a person still drawing breath can have a grandson fifty and four and I don’t think I’ve seen him in over a year, maybe a year and a month.
It was him to tell me to write some of this down. “Write it all down,” he said. “Much as you can know. Someday people will want to read it, read it all.” Sounded like Nightjohn, all over again, and so I do. The girl who does the flowers brings me notebooks and a pencil and I’ve been writing all this year when my fingers ain’t stiff and lazy. Got me a pile of pages, must be thicker than two fists. I was always one to talk a lot and I guess it just comes into the writing the same as speaking.
Ain’t that something? That a sprite everybody looked right over, clean over the top when they were busy to see something, would be the one to live and live and write it all down.
Ain’t that something?
The
Plantation
ONE
The reading didn’t spread so fast at first.
Took on to be slow, like watching spilled molasses smearing across a table. Nightjohn he was gone but I got to where the letters meant more all the time and pretty soon I was working words with two and even three parts in them, writing whole sentences helping others and before too long some were doing the same.
Women at first, because they had the time and some kind of toughness so they could learn at night even after working in the day. Men a little slower. They worked until they dropped, busted and sore and didn’t have much left for learning, but they did just the same, only slower.
Came a day maybe a year after Nightjohn he was gone, came a day when it changed. One day it seemed people were having trouble with the words and some would stammer at them and make them slow and with thick sounds and the next day it was different. Seemed everybody was reading and then it spread, oh my yes, it spread like a fire in dry grass.
One would help two and two would help four and nearly everybody came to know reading and writing and then it went to other plantations and they tried to stop it.
The men with whips and dogs they tried to stop it because they knew, they knew what it meant. Meant we were learning, coming to know how it was other places, other times.
Places and times where there weren’t slaves, where one didn’t own another, couldn’t own another by law. And then, some who read and some who didn’t, but just listened to the ones who read, some started to run. Run north.
Running was the same as reading. It started slow, like molasses at first. They’d run and get caught, get whipped, get cut, get hung sometimes, get killed sometimes.
But they kept running, trying it, because they knew from reading could they stay with it, follow the drinking gourd, the Big Dipper, and get north, get away, they could be free. Free to read what they wanted to read, know what they wanted to know, free to be more.
I would have run. As sure as I took a breath I would have run and there wasn’t a thing in the world that could have kept me from running except being a woman caught me from the side.
One day I was a girl, doing girl things, and then another year had gone and another. Must have been three years since Nightjohn he left, and I wasn’t a girl anymore.
Was a woman.
With woman’s thoughts and woman’s doings. ’Course others noticed it. Waller he noticed it and wanted me to be with men but Nightjohn he took it out of Waller some way. Oh, Waller he was still mean, mean as snakes, and he used the whip and his hands in bad ways but there was something gone from the center of him, some of the hardness. Got to where it was easy to get around him and when he would tell me to do something with men I would nod and then talk to the men and we would just let on there was doings but there wasn’t. Wasn’t any doings at all.
But I was changed now and part of me was all turned around. Of an afternoon I was sitting shucking dry corn for the crib, a late summer afternoon and Martin he walked by and he filled my eyes like I was seeing him for the first time.
I knew him when I was a baby, saw him all along and didn’t notice him and now it was like an ox hit with the hammer.
Martin I thought—my, my, look at Martin. Look at all of Martin. And I did, looked right at him and smiled with my chin down and my eyes open so shameless old Delie she saw it and called me a little hussy. Didn’t matter because Martin he looked right back at me and smiled and from then on we didn’t need words except I wouldn’t do women’s doings until we married.
So we put our heads in the big kettle to make it right and married with a Bible under our hands, a Bible I could read some of, most of, and we took a blanket together and he was my husband and I was his wife and so I couldn’t run.
We talked on it some. On the blanket after a month and two and three we talked at nights alone of running because others had run and some made it.
But before long I was going to mother and Delie she held the string and needle up and said it would be a boy, a strong boy, but that I’d have a hard birthing the first time.
First time, I thought. Like there was going to be more but I didn’t say anything. I was showing some and Waller he let me to slow down a bit because he had heard about the needle test and knew Delie was ’most always right and a boy would make a man and a man would make him money.
The house people found a piece of paper wrapped around hard sugar once that was a bill of sale for selling a man slave. He fetched twelve hundred and fifty dollars at the auction—that’s more money than a free man made in four years working a good job. More money than a slave made in four lifetimes. That’s what Waller saw. He saw me showing and it meant money to him. Martin he talked more about running. But I couldn’t.
I would have lost the baby, did we run, and so we stayed, me because I had to and Martin because he was good to the core of him and wouldn’t leave me and it was a shame because it killed him, staying on to work. Waller he worked him to death in three more years. Martin he was some older than me and Waller started him to working heavy, lifting and pushing heavy things, trying to move cotton bales bigger than ten men, and it finally killed him. Something broke inside and he bled and died in one night.
But not at first. At first we got to have some living.
The baby came and Delie she was right. It was a hard birth but a strong boy and we named him Tyler because I saw the name on a bill of lading and thought it was pretty and sounded like a good name for a strong boy and Martin he agreed.
We talked of running again but it was hard to run with a baby and by the time Tyler was old enough to understand being quiet and hiding at night I was with child again and so we couldn’t run.
Delie she said this time it would be a girl with an easy birth. Martin he only lived another year. Saw the baby come—we named her Delie—and then came a dark time, so dark even remembering it hurts.
Martin he died one day. Was a sunny day and I wanted it to be gray, raining, wanted the sky to cry because Martin died. I couldn’t stand it. Breath didn’t come, couldn’t see, even forgot the children. Just sat in a corner of the slave quarters and hated. Hated Waller, hated cotton, hated God for taking him, for making Waller, for making cotton, hated everything while Martin he died broke inside.
Delie she sat with me, held me, cried with me and patted me on the side of my head and wiped my cheeks.
“It will be all right,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”
“No,” I said. “It won’t. Nothing’s all right with Martin gone.”
And it wasn’t, not then, not ever.
Worse came then. I didn’t think there could be anything worse than Martin dying but worse came. Delie she died from being old. I was with her when it happened. We were working on leather, softening mulehide to be made into harness traces, and Delie she said to me, “I believe I’d better sit a spell,” and she went over by the side of the quarters and sat and closed her eyes. I brought her water in the metal dipper and said her name.
“Delie?”
But she was gone, dead and gone just as quiet as going to sleep and we buried her in the slave ground up by the hill and I didn’t seem to be able to see over it. First Martin and then Delie. Was like a wall around me and hadn’t it been for little Delie and Tyler I think I would have passed from a broken heart. But it wasn’t over. The dark times.
Waller he took to drinking and gambling.
It started slow. Some of the house slaves saw it first, that he was playing cards in town and coming home late after we were asleep in the quarters and sitting with whiskey until he passed out. Time was Waller he had power over people, even other white people, and he grew on the power, fed on it, but all that left him now. Old woman said to me, “Man takes a drink, drink takes a drink, drink takes a man.” Didn’t take Waller long to go through it all. Everything in him that had power in it left him. He was still mean, but it didn’t work out of him like it did once and some of the slaves would point at him when he was drunk and smile behind their hands. I would have felt bad for the white women in the house didn’t I hate them so. But in their own little ways they were as mean as he was and inside my heart I was glad Waller was falling apart. It was stupid because I didn’t see what this would mean for us. We belonged to Waller, just like mules or cotton. Just property. All of us, even little Delie and Tyler.
And soon enough Waller he couldn’t do anything but lose.
Time passed, and more time until both the babies were weaned and running in shirtwaists. Been others to see me, other men, but the memory of Martin was too sharp, cut like a knife, and I didn’t see the other men. Would I try to look at them I’d just see Martin, Martin’s smile, the way he moved, his strong hands, and I’d turn away.
It was then the year eighteen hundred and sixty-one. I was a full woman aged twenty and four with my two children growing up my legs, both starting to work, and we started in to hearing things.
Was a rumble up north, we heard, a rumble that there would be a war, and then there was a war. We found some newspapers and we could read now, most of us, read as fast as our eyes could move, and there were stories in the paper about the war and how the North was going to come down and free the slaves.
