Freedom Train Read online

  I sat up, still a little woozy. “I live in the village, you know, Cabbagetown. Where am I?” I said. What was I doing with a colored man?

  The man pushed me back, not hard. “My son came and got me. It seems some boys jumped you. My son—come over here, son,” the man said, waving. “My son ran them off. He’s a champion with a slingshot. Got a three-wheely he made himself. But you were bleeding a little so I brought you here and patched you up.”

  “I had to help you out,” his son said. “Three against one isn’t fair.” He held up his slingshot and smiled at me, proud like.

  I ain’t never seen a slingshot for three rocks at one time before. I bet Phillip was smarting about now. Served him right, too.

  The boy said, “I’m twelve. How old are you?”

  “I’m twelve,” I said, touching my head. I could feel a bandage on it. It was throbbing. “Thanks for helping. But I gotta get home. It’s late, and my ma and pa’ll be looking for me.”

  “No problem, son,” the colored man said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “No,” I said, almost like I was shouting. “I’ll walk myself home.” I didn’t know what Pa would do if I come home in a car with a colored man. I never even really talked to a colored person before. Ain’t no colored people in the mill village.

  “It’s no bother, son. I’m Dr. William Dobbs Jr., and this is my son, William Dobbs the Third.”

  “Good to meet you. And I thank y’all, but I gotta get home,” I said, sitting up. Things was swimming around in front of me.

  “You might feel a little dizzy for a while,” Dr. Dobbs said. “Son, I think you best let your doctor check you out tomorrow.”

  “My ma and pa ain’t much for doctors. But I reckon I can go to the mill clinic. The cotton mill’s got its own clinic and a place for you to get your teeth worked on. But I ain’t been there before, not unless it was when I was real little,” I said.

  “Are you sure I can’t take you home?” Dr. Dobbs said.

  “I’m sure,” I said. I gotta be honest—a part of me wanted him to drive me home. ’Cept a taxi once or twice, I ain’t really been in no car. I stood up, kind of wobbly, like a newborn puppy. Now at least I could see better.

  It was light over my head. I stared up. I ain’t never seen a light on a porch in the ceiling before. It was even a fan up there. I could see inside the living room of the house. It was awful fancy. I said, “Where do y’all live?”

  Dr. Dobbs smiled and put his arm around his son. “We live here. We moved here this month.”

  I didn’t want to seem dumb, but I ain’t know no coloreds lived in this part of Reynoldstown. I knew where we was. I could see that we was in the white part of Reynoldstown, where the biggest and best houses were. I almost asked, “Are you sure you live here?” but I didn’t say nothing. I just tried to steady myself so I could go on home.

  And that’s when I saw it. Through the window. Inside on a table. I near ’bout passed out again.

  Dr. Dobbs said, “What’s the matter, son? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Is—is—is that a . . . a . . .” I couldn’t even get it out of my mouth. I was pointing.

  His son said, “An American Flyer?”

  I nodded.

  “Yep. It’s an old one, though. I’m receiving a new one for Christmas. Right, Dad?”

  “Yes, Santa Claus thinks you’ve been a pretty good boy this year.”

  I said, “Me too, I’m getting one,” but I wasn’t even truly listening no more. I heard him, and a part of my brain wondered, if his son was my age, how come his pa was still talking about Santa Claus, but I didn’t or couldn’t say nothing. I just stood there, holding on to the chair back, staring into the living room at the American Flyer. He even had the entire set, with a whole town all around it, with little men, women, children, and even a dog.

  “You want to come in and see it?” the Third William asked me.

  That’s how I’d started thinking ’bout him—as the Third William. I ain’t never know no one personal that’s counted their name as one, two, and three in one family.

  “Come on,” the Third William said. “I’ll even let you play with it if you are up to it.”

  I ain’t gonna lie. I wanted to go in there something bad and play with that train. I could’ve tasted it. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in a colored person’s house. Ain’t nobody never told me not to, it ain’t come up. But deep down I knew my pa wouldn’t have liked it.

  So I just said, “Naw, that’s all right. I best be getting on home.”

  Dr. Dobbs helped me off the porch. “I’ll walk you to the edge of Cabbagetown. How about that?”

  I still wasn’t sure I wasn’t gonna fall over dead, so I said, “Okay.” I felt my shirt to see if Chester was still there. But he was gone. I said, “Shoot.”

  “What’s the matter?” Dr. Dobbs asked.

  “I done lost my frog.”

  The Third William said, “I saw those boys take something from your pocket.”

  “That’s where I had him. His name’s Chester,” I said, still patting my pocket.

  “I’ll look for it tomorrow,” the Third William said. “Where do you go to school?”

  “Grant Park,” I said.

  Dr. Dobbs said, “I’m friends with your principal there, Mr. Little. If William finds Chester, we’ll give him to Mr. Little for safekeeping.”

  I didn’t say nothin’, but I know I musta looked like I’d swallowed a water moccasin. I ain’t know there was white men friends with the coloreds. Not like real friends.

  “Where you go to school at?” I said to the Third William.

  “I attend David T. Howard.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t say nothin’ else, but I knew that was the colored school. That was dumb for me to ask.

  “Bye,” I said. I felt sick. Not only had I been hit in the head, but I’d lost Chester, too. What a stinking bad day.

  Dr. Dobbs walked me across the railroad tracks to the edge of Cabbagetown. I could hear the mill, loud and clear.

  “Good night, son. Take care,” Dr. Dobbs said, and walked back toward Reynoldstown.

  CABBAGETOWN

  Now, I’ve walked that path home a million times, but it sure was different walking it after being whacked in the head and ending up on a colored family’s porch. I thought about all kinds of things on the walk home. Seem like my head was full of scary thoughts. I jumped every time I heard the least little sound. Twice I thought I heard bicycles coming and hid behind a bush. It’s times like these I miss Joseph the most.

  I was proud he was on the Freedom Train, but I missed him something awful. Sometimes I felt funny when folk was bragging on him all the time. Ronnie said it was jealousy. I don’t know about that, ’cause I did love my brother. I was trying not to blame him when nobody paid attention to me. After all, it weren’t his fault. One thing was for sure, if he were home, Phillip Granger wouldn’t have dared hit me with a plank.

  We live just east of downtown Atlanta on the railroad line. Outsiders know where we live as Cabbagetown, but we just call it the mill village. That’s ’cause the houses was all built by the Fulton Cotton Mill, which sits right dab in the middle of where our folks work. Just a few years back even the children worked there, until they changed the laws.

  Our house is what’s called a shotgun house. That’s ’cause if you was to stand at the front door and shoot a shotgun, the bullet would go on out an open back door without passing through any walls.

  The houses is all pretty much the same wood frame, peeling paint, two small windows, one on each side of the door, a tiny covered porch, and if you were lucky, a patch of grass instead of red mud and dust.

  For winter the houses got a fireplace, where we burn coal. Come summer we all just bake up—it get so hot the air you breathing burns your nose.

  The mill’s founder, Jacob Elsas, built the houses in the 1800s for the mill workers. People complain that the houses are too close to the train tracks, are too small, and shake like crazy when the train rolls through. But that’s just Cabbagetown. We’re used to it.

  People say Cabbagetown got its name ’cause a man who was selling cabbages off the back of his truck turned it over and wrecked it, and then some of the folk around here come out and took his cabbages. Then others say it’s ’cause people who had to work in the mills would put cabbage on to cook all day, while they’s at work. I don’t know which is true, but it ain’t like it smells like cabbage, or everybody’s got a bunch of cabbage patches around or nothing.

  Rumor is a lot of the people here were sharecroppers. But I ain’t never met no sharecroppers in Cabbagetown. My ma is from Cartersville, where she says they farmed “on the halves.” That means they worked somebody’s land, and they kept half of what they grew, and the person who owned the land got the other half. She says it wasn’t never as fair as it seemed. My pa is from Barnesville, not too far away. But it don’t matter none, though, ’cause wherever they come from, Cabbagetown folk don’t much cotton to strangers.

  It don’t matter to me that we live close to the tracks. I love trains, wondering where they’re going and what they carrying on ’em. My pa used to work as the switcher at the CSX railroad terminal right up the street, but since the war he works in Atlanta at the big train station. But only half-time now.

  The only thing I do mind about where we live is the racket. The mill runs twenty-four hours a day making cotton bags for packing. There’s loud rumbling and clanking in your head, day and night. Sometimes I feel like we live inside of a motor. The house shakes like somebody with the black lung disease. And since the mill done added a vat machine called a bleacher, it smells like puke two or three times a week. But it’s home, and I reckon there’s folk who have it worse.

  I could see the kerosene lanterns were on in the house. Most of us in Cabbagetown ain’t got no electricity or running water yet. Some did, though, and Ma wanted that more than anything.

  I stood on the porch getting my breath before I went in. I figured they was eating supper by now.

  “What happened to you, boy?” Ma said, jumping up from the table when I walked in. She went right for the bandage on my head.

  “Where you been all this time?” Pa asked, putting down his corn bread. “Who done this?”

  I told ’em what happened—well, not everything. I don’t rightly know why, but I couldn’t tell them that the doctor and his son that helped me was colored folk.

  Pa said, “I told you to leave that Granger boy alone. Good thing folk was there to help you. You hurt bad?”

  I said, “No, sir. I was ready to fight, but he hit me with a plank.”

  “Rotten boy,” Ma said quietly. “Go on and wash up for supper.”

  I sat down to a plate of black-eyed peas, collards, and fatback. I had two helpings of corn bread. Getting hit in the head was hard work.

  “I’m gonna talk to old man Granger ’bout his boy,” Pa said. “Ain’t no call for him being such a devil.”

  “Leave it be,” Ma said. “You know how Granger is. He don’t want no women at the mill nohow. That might just give him cause to let me go.”

  I grabbed my glass and gulped some buttermilk. With Pa working only part-time, I knew we needed the money that Ma brought home. But Pa didn’t like her working.

  “I done told you to quit. It was all right when the war was on and the women worked to help out, but now y’all need to be home to take care of the house and the young ’uns.”

  “I don’t want to hear no such talk. What young ’uns? Ain’t nobody here but Clyde, and he’s near half grown,” Ma said.

  I didn’t want to hear them fussing, so I asked Pa if I could go get some coal from out back. I come back in quiet like, stoked the fireplace, and cleaned off some of the soot, then went to my room.

  That was the good thing about Joseph being gone—I finally had my own room. Well, just me and Chester. But now Chester was gone too. I felt sick. When I was getting ready for bed, I’d do the same thing every night. First I’d put Chester down for bed. He slept in a glass gallon jar that had moss and stuff for him. The jar used to have pickles in it. Ronnie Shumate give it to me from his pa’s store. If I didn’t put Chester in the jar, he hopped around all night. Barking tree frogs are the night owls of frogs.

  Then I’d take out my American Flyer ad, straighten it best I could, and pin it to the wall. But tonight I didn’t have Chester to put down, so I just pinned my ad up.

  I hoped Chester found some place wet and damp just like he liked it. I hoped Phillip didn’t hurt him like he hurt me. Joseph says some folk think frogs ain’t no good as pets ’cause they don’t have feelings like dogs and cats. But Joseph says they don’t really know. I bet Chester missed Joseph. I sure did.

  I lay out on the bed and looked up at the map Joseph sent me. I had colored pins stuck in it for where he had been so far. Since I ain’t never been outside of Atlanta, I couldn’t even imagine some of the things Joseph wrote me about.

  He sent me a picture of this Golden Gate Bridge in a place called San Francisco and a picture of a China town, and it weren’t even in China. I couldn’t really understand how that could’ve been, but Joseph said he saw it with his own eyes, and he ain’t one for lying.

  Joseph’s always been the smart one. After the war he got made sergeant at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Then one day he said a dispatch come in for corporals and sergeants to volunteer for a special duty. They wanted marines who was five feet eleven inches in height to six feet one inch. On the day it was time to pick, about 225 men showed up. An officer told them it was too many, so he went on through and picked twenty-five of ’em. Then it was narrowed down to eight and Joseph was one of ’em. I could almost hear him talking when I read his letters. He sure had learned how to write good.

  First they went to Cameron Station in Alexandria, Virginia, for training. That’s when they found out what their real mission was—to guard the Freedom Train with all its important documents.

  During the training they was taught all kinds of stuff, including how to use the right knife and fork. Turns out they get invited to lots of fancy places to eat on account of them guarding the train.

  I pulled my journal out. Nobody even knows I have a journal except Joseph. He’s the one who give it to me. At first when Joseph told me he kept a journal, I laughed at him. “You mean like a girl?”

  “No. Girls keep diaries,” Joseph said. “Men keep journals. I’m going to be a writer one day.”

  “A writer?” I said. “What does a writer do?”

  “He writes.”

  “That don’t seem like a job.”

  Joseph laughed. He said that writers watch what’s going on in the world, then they write about it. He said writers can change the world. Make folk think about something that’s been there all along but they ain’t paid no attention to it. He asked me, “Who do you think writes the newspaper?”

  I ain’t never even thought about it. All I knew was Ma said God wrote the Bible, and that was all we had to read in our house, besides my schoolbooks.

  The first time Joseph come home from the war, he give me the journal. He told me how if he hadn’t been able to write out stuff while he was fighting, he would’ve gone mad. He said war weren’t what he was expecting, up close. And he swore he didn’t never want me fighting. He said rich people get the poor people to die for ’em since “time memorial,” whatever time that is. Then he give me this journal and said, “Whenever you thinking about something, write it down.”

  I write late at night. ’Bout half the words is spelled wrong. But lately I been trying to do better ’bout that. I wrote a little bit about all the stuff that happened today. But then I heard Ma coming, so I shoved my journal under my pillow.

  “You all right, boy?” Ma said, coming into the room. “You better get to sleep before school tomorrow.” She sat down on my bed. She touched my bandage. “You best stay away from that spoiled Phillip Granger.”

  “I’ll try, Ma,” I said.

  “You say your prayers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, say a prayer for your brother. Where all he been so far again?” Ma said, looking at my map. On my wall with my map was my Flyer ad, Li’l Abner and Joe Palooka comic strips about the Freedom Train, and a picture of Joseph and the other guards in their dress blues.

  Under my pillow was the picture of that movie star, Lana Turner, getting on the Freedom Train that Joseph sent me from a newspaper. It wasn’t on the wall ’cause I didn’t think Ma would want her pinned up there.

  Almost every night Ma wants to hear where Joseph’s been to. I know it by heart now without even looking at the map. “He started in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then he’s been to New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island—”

  Ma said, “Rhode Island, did you say? I just ain’t never even heard of that place.”

  Ma says that every night when I get to Rhode Island. The first time she asked me if it was a island that was just a road. I told her, “No, ma’am, it ain’t spelled like ‘road.’” Ma and Pa only went to the third grade in schooling, so I have to do the reading and writing for ’em.

  “I sure got a lot to learn,” Ma said. “I’m so proud of your brother. He done been all over our country learning. Go on, now,” Ma said. “Where else?”

  “Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.”

  Ma stood up. “Just think, our own Joseph being in all them places on that map.” Ma shook her head. She rubbed my hair down. “You got your pa’s wavy hair,” she said, smiling. “Good night, baby.”

  Sometimes I hate if Ma calls me “baby,” but tonight I didn’t much mind. I said good night back and turned over. I said a prayer for Joseph, Ma, Pa, and Ronnie. Then I added on Chester.

  I was tuckered out. Next thing I knew, I was fallin’ off to sleep. I thought about the Dobbses. I sure hoped Phillip never found out it was a colored boy who rocked ’em. If he did it would be too bad for the Third William—and even worse for me. My last thought was that maybe Ronnie was right, maybe I did need a rabbit’s foot, a left foot that’s done been killed by a left-handed, left-eyed man. I sure was gonna need something to protect me now that the Third William done hit Phillip Granger with them rocks on my account.