Trouble Don't Last by Shelley Pearsall

Author:Shelley Pearsall [Pearsall, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54830-6
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2002-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Laid to Rest

Mr. Keepheart's back was plucked-chicken white, and you could count just about every one of his ribs. His face also turned red as beets.

“There's nothing there,” Mr. Keepheart said as he slowly took off his old coat and lifted his shirt. “I've never been beaten like, like, like”—he reddened—”well, I'm sorry, like some of our, well, colored brethren are. It's a terrible thing what they do where you come from, yes, well, it is …” he stuttered and stumbled.

“You never been beaten same as a cow or a horse or dog?” Harrison said, his eyes snapping like fire. “Never been cowhided for fishin at night ‘cause you was hungry? Or lashed thirty-nine times for runnin off from your master?”

“No, well, no.” Mr. Keepheart sat down and stared at the table.

“Well, then.” Harrison leaned forward and jabbed his finger at the paper. “Say you write on that fancy paper of yours how my back was all cut up by scars and say you tell your congregation people about them, they won't know what them lashes on my back feels like, ‘less they got them themselves, now will they?”

Mr. Keepheart said he supposed that was true. He stuck his pen in the middle of the inkwell and said he wouldn't try to write anymore that night.

I felt bad seeing how Harrison had made Mr. Keepheart, who seemed like a good-natured fellow, turn red as beets. Lilly always said that no matter what whitefolks did to me, I was to talk polite. So I told Mr. Keepheart that I wanted to hear what he had written down on his paper.

But Harrison was stubborn as an old stump.

“Don't need to hear what Mr. Keepheart wrote,” he said sharply. “I knows what I look like, I knows where I come from, and I knows what I been through. I got it all in my head, and I don't need no whitefolks to tell me what they got written down in words I can't read atall. You just leave it be, Samuel. He ain't writin no more about us.”

Harrison cast his eyes around the room. “Where's me and Samuel s'posed to sleep ‘round here?” he asked Mr. Keepheart.

“Of course,” Mr. Keepheart said, standing up so quickly he had to catch hold of his chair. “It's getting late. I'll show you.”

I could hardly believe my eyes when he took us through the door into the whitefolks’ church room itself. It was as big as Master Hackler's barn inside. Mr. Keepheart lifted up the oil lamp so we could admire all the white-painted benches for the congregation and the fancy red-green-and-yellow-striped carpets.

“Look up,” Mr. Keepheart said, pointing.

Above our heads, a big iron lamp hung from the ceiling. Made me think of a black spider turned over on its back, holding white candles with each of its legs.

“Under that chandelier,” Mr. Keepheart said in a solemn voice, “is where one poor, little runaway child was laid to rest.”

I felt my heart leap into my throat.

“She came to Reverend Pry in the arms of her mother.

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