Read Online All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten - Free Book Online

education. And my dear mother, she died before I was nine years old; she didn’t have no say. And my stepmother, she never did talk against my daddy and he asked her nothin about it. My daddy, what he took a notion to do, I had to fall in there and they had to fall in and do what he said do. And he never did look out for nothin that was good for the future; couldn’t see ahead. The man just wasn’t able that way.
    M Y daddy was a free man but in his acts he was a slave. Didn’t look ahead to profit hisself in nothin that he done. Is it or not a old slave act? Anything a man do in a slum way and don’t care way,I just lap it right back on slavery time days. It’s that old back yonder “ism.” Slavery just taught the colored man to take what come and live for today. And the colored man held his children back as he held hisself.
    And I have heard my daddy describe how the colored people hurt themselves. I’ve heard my daddy say
hisself
—he seed the time he could have bought land around here in the piney woods for fifty cents a acre. For fifty cents a acre! And some few ones here and yonder about got em places, too. But my daddy didn’t get nothin. The colored man lost—he dropped his candy right there. My daddy used to tell me when he was a young man he traveled all about the country after surrender; never did put hisself on a farm and settle down and go to work. Travelin around when he was a young man, before he married, through different parts of the southern states, makin good money. He’d come home—I heard him tell it and I heard my grandmother, his mother, tell it—come in many a time, walk in home to his mother—didn’t have no daddy then—and turn first one pocket to her then another and just rake out money in her lap. Made it public workin, diggin ditches all around, clearin woods and swamps, every whichaway. Just rake out money from one pocket then the other into his mother’s lap. Well, then he ought to been buyin some land when he could have got some cheap. But he was blindfolded; didn’t look to the future. Just throwin his money in a dead hog’s ass and takin shit. No forethought about it. He had got them old slavery thoughts in him, couldn’t learn nothin from his experience. He had money but—whenever the colored man prospered too fast in this country under the old rulins, they worked every figure to cut you down, cut your britches off you. So, it might have been to his way of thinkin that it weren’t no use in climbin too fast; weren’t no use in climbin slow, neither, if they was goin to take everything you worked for when you got too high.
    True, I seed my daddy cleaned up twice; everything he had they took away from him. Lloyd Albee done it once and after he took all my daddy had and put him in jail for selling mortgaged property, my daddy had to go up with Mr. Jasper Clay and lose a year’s work. He moved right back down here after that and Mr. Clem Todd, the man whose place he was livin on before he traded with Mr. Albee, he took my daddy up and helped him to make anothercrop. And then my daddy decided he’d go to dealin with Mr. Akers in Apafalya, and that’s twice he was cleaned up.
    First time the white man stripped my daddy we was livin on Mr. Clem Todd’s place and Mr. Lloyd Albee from Newcastle was furnishin him. And it was about ten or eleven miles my daddy had to travel to Mr. Albee to get what the man was furnishin. And my daddy had—when my mother died he had five or six head of cattle and he kept them cattle but Mr. Albee had a mortgage on all of em. Well, Mr. Albee wanted my daddy to move on his place. And in that, he was already controllin my daddy, had a mortgage on everything he had. Told my daddy—and I’ll tell you what a trick that was; I was big enough to understand it thoroughly.
    Old white gentleman by the name of Walker, lived way back down in the country, he