The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Gaines Ernest J

Author:Gaines, Ernest J. [Gaines, Ernest J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Classics
ISBN: 9780307830258
Goodreads: 16054614
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1971-04-01T08:00:00+00:00

BOOK III

THE PLANTATION

Samson

I knowed Aunt Hattie Jordan a long time before I came to Samson. She was the cook here then. Had been cooking for the Samsons even before the war between Secesh and North. When she got old—I’m sure she was already in her seventies when I met her—they gived her a horse and buggy to travel round in. Once or twice a week she passed by my house when I was living on the river. When Albert Cluveau died I told her I was ready to move off the river. She asked me why didn’t I come to Samson. I told her that wasn’t too much of a move, seven or eight miles. I told her I wanted to go farther than that, so I wouldn’t be reminded of these memories. She told me even if I moved a hundred miles I would still be near memories, because memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind. And she told me she knowed, too, that I wanted to be close to Ned’s grave so I could always put flowers there. After thinking about it I told her she was right—and that’s how I came to Samson. I came here one night and asked Paul Samson for the house. Paul Samson was the daddy of Robert Samson who’s running the place now. “You kinda spare, ain’t you?” he said. “How do I know you can carry your load?” I told him I had been doing it for more than fifty years now. “And you can be a little tired,” he said. “I think I’ll be around fifty more,” I said. “You can have that room side Unc Gilly and Aunt Sara,” he said. “But you go’n have to get here by yourself.” “I’ll get here,” I said.

I borrowed a wagon from off the river and moved here by myself. It took me two trips, but I did it all by myself. It was spring, because the people was plowing and hoeing in the field. Buzz Johnson was the water boy; Diamond was his mule. Used to carry the water in a great big barrel with a hyphen stuck at one end. One day he lost the hyphen and wasted all the water, and the people in the field almost wanted to kill him coming back there with nothing in that barrel. He made three trips to the field every day. He came in the morning round nine-thirty, he came at dinner time, and he came again in the evening. On the twelve o’clock run, the middle run, he brought your dinner buckets. Most of the people had the little dime buckets, and Buzz Johnson looked like a junk man coming back there with them shiny little buckets all over the cart. When he was running late he would have Diamond loping, and you could hear them dime buckets hitting against that water cart from way cross the field. Thirty or forty dime buckets on that cart. Had so many of them he had to put some of them in a crocker sack and hang the sack on Diamond’s back.

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