This Strange New Feeling Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  This Strange New Feeling

  One

  Two

  Where the Sun Lives

  One

  A Christmas Love Story

  One

  Two

  Notes

  About the Author

  DIAL BOOKS

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  Copyright © 1982 by Julius Lester

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Lester, Julius. This strange new feeling.

  Contents: This strange new feeling.—Where the sun lives.

  —A Christmas love story.

  1. Children’s stories, American. [1. Slavery—Fiction.

  2. Afro-Americans—Fiction. 3. Short stories] 1. Title.

  PZ7.L5629Th [Fic] 81–68782 AACR2

  ISBN : 978-1-101-56371-7

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For

  Elena Milad

  and

  David Julius

  Preface

  Slavery was a horror we can scarcely imagine. However, what was done to those who were slaves should not be equated with the totality of the slave experience. The story of slavery is also one of resistance to the unrelenting attack on the humanity of slaves. We must not devalue all that the slaves did to maintain a sense of self and assert their humanity.

  This Strange New Feeling is comprised of three stories from slavery based on historical incidents. Each story explores an aspect of an experience most of us take for granted—physical freedom.

  What does freedom feel like when it is something about which you’ve only been able to dream? How much are you willing to risk to be free? Are you willing to die?

  Although I have never been a slave, I grew up in the South during a time of racial segregation, a time when blacks had to sit in the backs of buses, in a separate car on trains. It was a time when we were not allowed to eat in restaurants owned by whites, and had to go in separate entrances at white-owned movie theaters (though my parents forbade me to so debase myself). The system of racial segregation placed legal limitations on where we could live, what schools we could attend, and what jobs we could do.

  Throughout my childhood and young adult years in the South, I wondered often what it would be like to live in a place where I could go anywhere I wanted, eat anywhere I had the money to pay for the meal, buy my ticket, go in the front door of a movie theater, and sit where I wanted.

  I left the South in 1961 and moved to New York City. I was not completely free there either. Because of racism, it was difficult to find a place to live and a job. But as frustrating as these experiences were, I did not feel deprived of the exhilaration of living where the laws, at least, said I was free.

  As I write, I recognize that the stories in this book are more personal than I realized when I wrote them in 1981. I am often asked where I get my ideas. My response is always the same, namely that all of my books—fiction, nonfiction, picture books—have their genesis in an emotion. That emotion crystallizes into a question, and it is always the same question: “What would it feel like to . . . ?”

  To answer that question means taking the risk of entering the particular emotion and exploring its many facets and nuances. Sometimes the emotion I am examining is rooted in my own story. And sometimes I don’t realize until afterward, sometimes many years later, that I wrote autobiographically though the circumstances of the story bore no resemblance to my life. So it seems with these stories.

  But one does not have to be the descendent of slaves, or to have grown up under racial segregation, to desire freedom. Slavery and freedom have myriad faces. I suspect many of us have confronted and do confront something in ourselves, something in our lives of which we would like to be free. Slavery is not only physical.

  In imagining myself into the past, I also write about we who live in the present. “This strange new feeling” is an emotion many of us yearn to experience almost as much as those people did whom we refer to as slaves.We are not as different from them as we might want to believe.

  It saddens me when I hear white people say, “I know I can never understand what it is like to be black.” I know that they say this from a desire to respect something called “the black experience,” and that they have been told this by well-meaning blacks.

  There is a small truth in the assertion, but no more than that. I am a writer, and it is the task of writers to use words in the sacred effort to bring people into the lives of others. The writer asks readers to make the sacred effort to bring these lives into their own, but not so that they can understand. Those blacks who tell whites they can’t understand are correct, but what makes those blacks think they understand whites?

  We do not need to understand to feel the pain of another. We do not need to understand to share the joy of another. There is nothing we need to understand to be compassionate with each other.

  These stories are part of who we are as people who live in history. One day our stories will be part of who others are. May we one day see that all of our stories are intertwined.

  Julius Lester

  2007

  This Strange New Feeling

  One

  I

  Jakes Brown didn’t know what to think that July morning when he saw the young black man waiting for him by the toolshed. He was big, with muscles like ropes bulging from his torn and dirty cotton shirt. He was Jakes’s height, five feet nine inches, and weighed one hundred eighty pounds at least. Yet his shoulders were rounded and his back had a slight stoop to it, as if he were an old man. In the torn pants that barely covered his knees and the sleeveless shirt, he looked like a stuffed and weathered scarecrow. But he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.

  “My name’s Jakes Brown,” the young white man introduced himself, holding out his hand and smiling.

  “Yes, sir,” the black man responded in a monotone, staring at the ground.

  Jakes felt foolish with his hand extended, and after a moment let it drop. “What do I call you?” he asked, determined to be friendly.

  “Ras.”

  “Ras what?”

  “Ras, sir,” he said, still staring at the ground.

  Jakes wondered if he had been given the dumbest slave on the plantation for a helper. Ras? What kind of name was that? A man had to have two names, or at least one that made sense. Ras!

  Jakes took a key from his pocket and unlocked the shed. Well, what did it matter to him? All he wanted to do was finish the
job, collect his pay, and get back home to Maine. “You know where the tobacco shed is, Ras?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you’re going to help me build another one right beside it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me Jakes. Everybody does.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Didn’t you understand me?” Jakes flared, irritated with the dull response.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Aw, forget it!” he exploded. “Bring them tools and sawhorses over to the shed. When you finish that, you can start carrying that lumber stacked behind the toolshed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jakes walked away angrily, sorry now that he had decided to come South for the summer. But he’d heard that work was plentiful during the summer and that the wages were good. He was young and strong, and had thought it would be fun to do something different. It would give him some good stories to tell through the long, cold winter. But nobody would believe there was a creature as dumb as Ras. And after you said he was dumb, there was nothing more to tell.

  All morning Ras carried tools and lumber, understanding now why Master Lindsay had had them clear new ground last fall and plant more tobacco this spring than they ever had.

  Ras’s shoulders still ached thinking about the chilly mornings, fog lying over the ground like scraps of cotton, as he and Uncle Isaac cleared the woods on the other side of the field. He smiled, remembering how he had made that double-headed axe ring against the trees until they trembled, swayed, and then fell as slowly as a large hawk alighting on a branch. Ras supposed he and Uncle Isaac had cleared fifteen acres by themselves.

  His shoulders ached, too, remembering how he and the other slaves had worked through the winter to prepare the newly cleared ground for planting. He hated that most—burning the cut trees and how he smelled of smoke and ashes for weeks afterward. Then he and the other slaves spread the ashes over the field, raking and pounding the ashes into the soil. Now he was going to help build the new barn where the tobacco would hang until it was cured.

  Ras wondered sometimes if he would have rather been a mule. Coming in from the fields at evening, he would stop at the corral and look at the mules inside. He supposed there were some differences between him and them. But the differences seemed to be to the mules’ advantage. They had four legs to his two. When it rained or was chilly, they stayed in the barn. They had as much to eat as they wanted. Ras couldn’t remember Master Lindsay ever selling a mule, either.

  He didn’t know how old he was when Master Lindsay sold his mother. Aunt Jessie told him how he had cried and cried when he came in from the field to find his mother gone.

  “You was a little fella then,” Aunt Jessie said. “It was your first summer in the fields. You had to pick the worms off the tobacco leaves.”

  Ras remembered. He remembered, too, that Aunt Jessie and Uncle Isaac had taken him to their cabin and spread straw in a corner for him to sleep on. Time passed, and one day he cried because he couldn’t remember what his mother looked like. More time passed, and one day he tried to remember her voice and it was gone, too, and Aunt Jessie had died and couldn’t put her arms around him and tell him, “It’s all right, child,” though she didn’t know what was wrong. Finally the day came when nothing remained except a name—Mother—and he didn’t know what that was.

  A mule didn’t need to remember its mother. A mule didn’t know it had ever had one. Once Ras imagined himself asking one of the mules to exchange places with him. He knew that the mule hadn’t answered, but he swore he heard a voice say, “A mule has got more sense than to want to be a slave.”

  II

  In the evenings Ras sat on the steps of the cabin he shared with Uncle Isaac in the slave quarters. The twenty cabins were lined in two rows facing each other, a dusty clearing stretching between. They were built with cheap lumber or logs and had no windows. But the cracks between the boards and logs allowed in light, and in the winter the cold. Each cabin was a small, dark room with a fireplace for cooking. Those who knew how built chairs and tables. They were few. No one had beds; they slept on boards and covered themselves with the thin blankets Master Lindsay gave each slave at Christmas. A blanket never lasted the winter.

  Ras watched the slaves as they returned from the fields, talking quietly as they went wearily to their cabins. He had already eaten his supper of cornmeal cakes and a strip of bacon. If he had worked in the fields that day, however, he might have gone to sleep without troubling to build a fire, grind the corn into meal, mix it with water, and put the dough on the hot coals to cook.

  The sight of Sally walking toward him stopped his remembering. He wanted to get up and go into the cabin, but couldn’t because she had seen him. So he remained on the step, enduring the strange discomfort that overcame him whenever he saw her. At least, working with the carpenter, he didn’t have to be around her all day anymore, afraid to speak to her and more afraid when she spoke to him.

  “Evening, Ras.”

  “E-e-evening, Sally,” he managed to say before looking away quickly. Her voice was soft, reminding him of the warm breezes of early spring. Sometimes he wanted to curl up and go to sleep with her voice wrapped around him. There were times when he wanted to touch her black skin with the tips of his fingers as if he were stroking the high, deep night sky. But Sally wouldn’t want him to do something like that. He knew that.

  “Been missing you in the field, Ras.”

  “Master put me to working with the white carpenter.”

  “Ain’t you the lucky one!” she exclaimed.

  He shrugged. “It’s all the same.”

  “I reckon,” she agreed.

  The door of the cabin opened and a tall dark man, his face covered by a full white beard, stepped out. “Thought I heard you, Sally,” he said in a loud, strong voice.

  “Evening, Uncle Isaac.” The girl smiled. “How’re you this evening?”

  “Doing all right for an old man.” He chuckled, sitting down beside Ras.

  “Don’t say that too loud,” she responded. “Master Lindsay will put you back out in the field.”

  Uncle Isaac chuckled. “Don’t I know it? He came down here last week talking about he could use another hand in the field. Told him I was too old to be working in that hot sun all day. Told him that he put me in the field, I might not be in any shape to haul his tobacco into town for the auction come fall.” He chuckled again. “Well, he backed off then. He knows that there ain’t nobody in the state of Maryland who can grade and bale tobacco as good as me. He’d be lost without me. He told me to rest up and take it easy.” Uncle Isaac laughed loudly.

  Uncle Isaac’s laugh was one that enjoyed laughing. When others heard it, they found themselves smiling and laughing to themselves, though they didn’t know what had been said. It didn’t matter. When Uncle Isaac laughed, it was as if you were being tickled on the bottoms of your feet by invisible fingers.

  “Uncle Isaac,” Sally began, when she had managed to stop her laughter, “if you were younger, I’d marry you.”

  The old man snorted. “Huh! What age got to do with it? Sit down here, girl! Let an old man show you what these young ones can’t.” And he laughed even louder.

  Ras laughed with them. He wished he could think of funny things to say as easily as Uncle Isaac, wished that his laugh made other people happy just to hear it. But after he said “Good evening,” he never knew what was supposed to come next.

  Maybe he was afraid to tell Sally that when he saw her, he felt like a tiny bird hopping from limb to limb in a tree on an April day. But he didn’t want to come in from the field one day and feel like a tree chopped down by a double-headed axe when he learned that she had been sold away. So he said “Good evening” and fell into a silence as deep and still as a well.

  III

  Scarcely a week passed before Ras knew the names of all the tools, could saw as straight as any man Jakes had known, and could put a nail through a two-by-four so quick, you had to loo
k twice to be sure he hadn’t used a sledge. If Ras had known how to read, write, and do figures, Jakes could’ve made him into a first-rate carpenter. But something gave Jakes the feeling that Ras could build the next tobacco barn without anybody’s help.

  Some people were like that. Learned by doing, but couldn’t read their name if it was written in letters ten feet high. Nonetheless Jakes was enjoying teaching Ras what to do and the various ways of doing it. To Jakes’s surprise, he never had to explain anything to Ras more than once, and sometimes Ras seemed to know before Jakes finished talking.

  Jakes liked to talk, and though Ras never responded, Jakes talked all day, remembering all the good times he had had up in Calais, Maine (which he pronounced Callus). And on one of those afternoons, while talking about how beautiful and peaceful it was in Calais, and how he wished Ras could go there, he had an idea.

  He thought about it for several days, and the more he thought, the more he liked it. Now that would sure give him something to talk about when he got back. When he got to be an old man, he could tell his grandchildren about how he had helped a pitiful colored boy escape from slavery. Even better would be to take Ras back when he went. That way Jakes could teach him to read and write, show him how to walk into a store and buy a suit of clothes and how to hold his head up and look a man in the eye.

  “You ever think about being free?” Jakes asked Ras eagerly the next morning.

  “No, sir.”

  “What?” he exclaimed, shocked. That wasn’t what he had expected Ras to say. “What’s wrong with you people? You mean to tell me that you’re happy spending your life as a slave?”

  “Yes, sir” came the dull reply.

  Jakes started to tell Ras just how dumb he was but stopped, wondering suddenly if Ras was dumb. After all, what would he have said to such a question if he’d been Ras and Ras him? Would he have trusted a white man who just opened his mouth and started gabbing about being free? He knew he wouldn’t have.