Gloryland (2 page)

And that’s all I remember of the time before I was born.

 

My name’s Elijah Yancy, and I was born on the first day of January 1863 in a cabin outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina. You might recall that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on the very same day. That’s right, the day freedom came, or at least news of it. Mostly it was just rumor, cause slaves round here were only free if there were Union soldiers nearby. Union soldiers wore blue uniforms. On the day I was born there weren’t no one round wearing such a thing, which meant that white folks in Spartanburg County didn’t get the word that we were free.

My daddy’s name was Daniel Yancy, but I never called him that cause I had a nice smile, and I was sure to lose it if I started calling my daddy “Daniel,” so I didn’t. I just called him “Sir,” and after a while I thought that was his name. And my mama’s name’s Lucinda, but I thought her name was “Ma’am,” cause that’s what I had to call her. Anyway, Daddy called the emancipation “paper freedom” cause the only place you could find freedom was on that piece of paper. You sure couldn’t find it in Spartanburg. My daddy’d been all over the county, and if he’d ever run into freedom I know he would’ve come home and told us about it.

As I got older, I noticed colored people were having parties on my birthday, and that was interesting cause they never invited me to
those parties. And yet I’d be walking along those red country roads and I’d pass by the Joneses’ place, and they’d be fiddling and laughing and having a good time, and I’d say to myself, How they know it’s my birthday? And then I’d hear the same sort of commotion coming from the Washingtons’, who I didn’t really know that well, so I couldn’t figure out why they’d be cheering for my birthday. It took a while for me to realize that they were excited about freedom, about the Emancipation Proclamation, which had nothing to do with my birthday!

I was taken down a bit when I realized that, but the damage had already been done. By the time I was seven or eight I had an attitude that was bound for trouble. That’s what my mama told me. She talked a lot about my attitude, in a way that made it seem like it was something separate from me. I can clearly remember her saying, “Elijah, you can stay here as long as you want, boy, but that attitude of yours got to go!”

Like my attitude could rise in the morning, get dressed, put on shoes, open the door, and walk up the road. Sometimes I felt like my parents only saw me in pieces. There were pieces they liked and pieces they didn’t like. What they didn’t care for was always encouraged to “find a home elsewhere.”

All of this came about cause I was born on the day freedom came, or was supposed to come. I came into the world on
that day
, and like it or not, freedom came with me. I’ve thought a lot about freedom, particularly when I was walking behind a plow, and the plow was peeling back dirt behind a mule, and the mule was leading the way across a field at sunup. I’d be thinking about freedom, but all I could see was the butt and the stiff-legged gait of that animal working so hard and going nowhere. From time to time its tail would go up just to get my attention, and the mule would drop a reminder to not think of freedom too much, or I might regret it.

My father used to say about the Emancipation Proclamation, “Elijah, the only difference between the day before emancipation and the day after is about forty-eight hours.”

Before emancipation we were slaves, and after we were sharecroppers. If there’s someone reading this who knows the difference between a slave and a sharecropper, please send a message to the colored folks in Spartanburg, cause I’m sure they’d be interested, but good news is a lame mule walking toward South Carolina, while bad news is the fastest thoroughbred in the county. Maybe that’s why those parties got quieter and quieter. Colored people began to realize that freedom hadn’t come, so there was nothing to celebrate.

F
reedom. It stays in your head and won’t bust out or slip away like tears. I’ve had enough of freedom and I ain’t ever had it. When I sleep, there’s freedom. I can be whatever I want to be and no one tells me anything different. I ain’t no sharecropper when I’m asleep. I don’t know what I am, but it’s got nothing to do with rice or sorghum or indigo or anything but the light of the sun rising over a place that never heard the word
nigger
.

Maybe it’s cause I was born on Emancipation Day, maybe that’s why I am what I am. Born the day freedom was supposed to come. That’d change anybody. Maybe it’s cause my Grandma Sara is Seminole. Daddy told me the Seminoles were a runaway band of Creek Indians who went down into Florida. That’s why the Spanish called them
cimarron
, which means runaway. There were also slaves and free Africans who ran off from South Carolina and Georgia round the same time, down into Florida. They were runaways too. The English called them
maroons
, which is another word hiding in the word
cimarron
, like
cimarron
was giving it shelter. I like that. Africans and Indians, trying to find something better, found each other, found some shelter, and began calling themselves Seminoles. Together they found something they couldn’t get on their own.

Somewhere along the way they stopped running from something and began running to something: freedom. They found it in Spanish Florida, for a while. Then the English offered the Seminoles freedom if they’d fight America in the Revolutionary War. Good trade.

Maybe that’s where I got such a bad attitude, from those runaway
ancestors. My attitude is spoilt like a pail of milk stuck out too long in the sun and gone bad.

I remember Daddy saying to me, “Boy, be easy round Grandma Sara, you know she’s Seminole. She’s a proud woman, and too much pride is as bad as too little. She’s all bunched up inside with it, who she is and what’s been done to her and how she come through it, you understand me, boy?”

And I said, “Yessir.” I didn’t understand, but it was always safer to say “yessir” and not “nossir” when I was talking to Daddy, so that’s what I said all the time even if I didn’t know what he was saying.

He looked at me then, with the sun shining on the left side of his face from the hole in the wall, which would have been a window someplace else, and he tried again. He said, “Elijah, your grandma is Seminole, and they a proud people, and the government don’t like all that pride in colored folks, so they sent the army down into Florida to get at the Seminole on account of they so full of themselves. They kept sendin more soldiers down into those hot swamps that’d suck the boots right off your feet, and it didn’t end there, no, they sent even more white boys into that misery.

“After a bit the government noticed that no soldiers ever come out of those swamps, not a single one. It took some time for them to notice, but they did, and somebody decided it might be better to just leave all those Indians alone, cause the government had no use for a swamp. So the Seminole figure they beat the army, they beat America. It kinda got into they heads that they won, and victory, well, it’s like drinkin too much whiskey. You get drunk on it, it blurs your vision, and that’s Grandma Sara, she sees the U.S. Army beaten and America beaten, and she’s proud. Proud of who she is and who her people are or were. Now you understand what I’m sayin, boy?”

“Yessir, yessir, I understand. You sayin Grandma Sara’s mean cause she Seminole, is that right?” I asked.

Daddy looked up to heaven, cuffed me upside my head, and then rubbed my scalp like he was sorry. Through the light of the busted sun I was seeing, he said, “No, boy, you ain’t listenin at all. Grandma
Sara’s just mean, you hear me? She’s mean entirely through, and it ain’t got nothin to do with her bein Seminole. It’s got to do with what’s been done to her on account of her bein Indian.”

Well, I was confused, cause folks said I took after my grandmother, and I thought that’s where my attitude came from, knowing that Grandma Sara’s people held off the army. But here’s Daddy saying meanness don’t come from being Seminole but from being treated like you’re Seminole, being treated poorly, that it’s got nothing to do with who you are on the inside and more with what you look like on the outside. I’m part Seminole and can feel it on the inside, but I look more African than Indian.

Feeling something on the inside that you can’t find anywhere on the outside can’t be good for a person. Feeling something on the outside that you can’t find anywhere inside will make you just as sick. Someone takes a whip to you, you can explain why you’re raw and bleeding, but what if they beat you up on the inside? Who’s gonna know that you’re hurting? How do you dress a wound you can’t see?

Born the day freedom came. Grandchild of some people who wouldn’t let freedom be taken away. No wonder I got attitude. I got so much I could sell most of it off and no one would notice. You need attitude if you’re colored in Spartanburg. You need it to get up in the morning, just to open your eyes, but too much attitude in the South will put you down by nightfall. It’ll close your eyes for sure.

My dreaming began round this time, when Daddy tried to tell me how Grandma Sara got the way she was. It wasn’t so much dreams in my sleep, I just started thinking I could be whatever I wanted to be. I could be an engineer or a doctor cause I liked the idea of fixing what’s broken, whether it’s a plow or something alive. Yeah, a doctor, that’d be better than sharecropping. I thought this at night in a warm wind like God breathing on me, in bed where I felt the most safe. And the thinking turned to dreaming, and it got scary to be dreaming about who I could be.

That’s when I began to get sick. Dreaming about becoming
someone I could never be made me sick, but not on the outside. On the outside I was strong and young and could last all day out in the sun, in the field, but inside something was breaking, going dark even under the sun. When it happened I got cold inside like it was winter even when I was working in the fields. I’d be sweating on the outside but all ice inside, like chills and then fever, from dreaming things that could never be, would never be cause I was a nigger
,
and niggers ain’t supposed to dream.

The sickness got real bad after Mama and I had a run-in with some white man in Spartanburg. We had gone into town for supplies and were walking in the road that morning with the sun glaring down, so I could barely make out the people walking close by, up on a wooden sidewalk. I remember Mama was gripping my hand hard like she was worried someone would steal me, and with me being small my hand was higher than my head, which made my arm and shoulder ache. It was hot and my eyes stung with sweat. I felt like a sack of corn being pulled along.

Suddenly a shadow came across the sun and a white man stepped off the sidewalk and down into the road, right down onto my foot.

“Damn!” I yelled in pain.

“Elijah!” Mama hissed. “You better watch your mouth!”

“Nigger!” the man spat. “Why don’t you watch where you’re goin, boy?”

I thought the pain in my arm and shoulder was bad, but it was nothing compared to what I felt in my gut. I spent most of my time at home, where nobody ever used that word, and this was the first time I remembered hearing it. But the way he said it cut like a knife, deep inside so you couldn’t see the hurt. I felt hot tears on my cheeks, and everything got blurry.

Mama’s grip got even tighter. She spun me around and we walked back the way we’d come. When we got to the wagon and got in, Mama reached down, and with a hard flick of her wrists and the snap of the reins the mules woke up. She turned us round and got us out of town, never saying a word along the way, but there was a
stiffness to her body like she used too much starch in her dress and it had gone into her bones.