The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Read Online Free Page B

he jerked the stick out my hand and swung it away. I tried to get the stick, but I fell, and when I looked up, there he was right over me. He didn’t look like a man now, he didn’t even look like a loon, he looked more like a wild animal. Animal-like greed in his face. He grabbed me and started with me in the bushes. But we hadn’t gone more than three, four steps when I started hearing this noise.
Whup, whup, whup
. I didn’t know what the noise was. I was too busy trying to get away from that loon to think this noise had anything to do with me or him. I heard the noise again:
whup, whup, whup
. Every time it hit now I saw the hurt in the slow-wit’s face. He was still heading with me in the bushes, but every time the noise hit I could see the hurt in his face. Then I saw the stick come down on his shoulder, and this time he swung around. Big Laura had the stick cocked back to hit him again.
    “Drop her, you stud-dog,” she said. “Drop her or I’ll break your neck.”
    He let me slide out of his arms, just standing there looking at Big Laura like he was wondering why she had hit him. I tried to get the stick away from Big Laura so I could get another crack at him, but she pushed him to the side.
    “Go back to that plantation,” she said. “Go back there. “That’s where you do your stud-ing.”
    “No,” he said.
    “I say get out of here,” she said, ready to hit him.
    “No,” he said. (Because he was a slow-wit, and he wouldn’t know where to go by himself.)
    Big Laura hit him in the side with the stick. She hit him twice in the side, but all he did was covered his head and cried. He was a slow-wit and couldn’t look after himself. All he could do was do what you told him to do.
    “You got just one more time to try your stud-ing round me,” Big Laura told him. “Just one more time, and I’ll kill you.” She looked at everybody there. “That go for the rest of y’all,” she said. “You free, then you go’n act like free men. If you want act like you did on that plantation, turn around now and go on back to that plantation.”
    Nobody said a thing. Most of them looked down at the ground. Big Laura went back to her children, and I went back and sat down on the log. The slow-wit stood over there crying and slobbering on himself.
    The sun went down and we found the North Star. Big Laura put her bundle on her head, then she took that little girl in her arms and Ned by the hand and we started walking again. We walked and walked and walked and walked. Lord, we walked. I got so tired I wanted to drop. Some of the people started grumbling and hanging back, but they didn’t know where else to turn and they soon caught up. Big Laura never stopped and never looked around to see who was following. That little girl clutched in her arms, Ned by the hand, she moved through them trees like she knowed exactly where she was going and wasn’t go’n let nothing in the world get in her way.
    We went on till way up in the night before we stopped to sleep. Big Laura dropped her bundle on the ground and sat the children side it. She took everything out the bundle and spread the dress out so the children could have a pallet to lay down on. Then she dug a hole in the ground and filled it with leaves and dry moss. She stuck a little piece of lint cotton under the moss and leaves and started scraping a piece offlint and iron together near the cotton. Soon she had made fire, and she covered the fire with green moss to get smoke. She sat down by the pallet and waved her hand over the children in case mosquitoes broke through the screen. The rest of the people closed in but stayed quiet. And you heard nothing but the swamps. Crickets, frogs, an owl in a tree somewhere.
    “You can go to sleep,” I told Big Laura. “I’ll keep mosquitoes off the children.”
    “Sleep yourself,” she said. “You go’n need all the strength you have to reach Ohio.”
    That was all I needed to hear. The next minute I was