He didn’t dwell on that. He did realize he had to get out of the Terry, and right away. If he didn’t, the whites would nab him in a cleanout before long. Off he’d go to a camp. People didn’t come out of those places.
He waited till after midnight that night. He had two weapons when he headed for the wire-a pair of tin snips and the biggest, stoutest knife from his mother’s kitchen. If anyone spotted him, he aimed to fight. If he could kill somebody with a gun, then he’d have one. He didn’t think about dying himself. He was too young to take the idea seriously.
All the heroics he imagined ahead of time evaporated. The tin snips cut through the wire well enough. Come morning, people would have no trouble figuring out where he’d got away, but he didn’t care. He’d be long gone by then.
And he was, heading west. He couldn’t very well stay inside Augusta. It wouldn’t be thirty seconds till he heard, Let’s see your papers, boy! Nothing in his passbook said he had any business being out and about. Again, they’d ship him off to a camp-or maybe they’d just kill him on the spot.
Out in the country…There’d be more Negroes there. Maybe he’d fit in better. And then he could start paying the Freedom Party goons back for everything they were doing.
He’d had connections with the resistance in the city-had them and lost them as people kept dying or getting seized. Now he had to rely on his wits and on the kindness of strangers: black strangers, of course. He’d long since given up on expecting anything from whites. His father always said he got on well with Jerry Dover. He even said Dover had kept their whole family safe more than once. Maybe so-but Dover was in the Army now, and the rest of Cassius’ family was in a camp.
When the sun came up, Cassius was walking along a road heading west. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that he’d made it out of Augusta alive, and that he was getting hungry and getting thirsty. All the money that had been in the apartment was in his pocket. How long could he make $27.59 (he’d counted it to the last penny-counted it twice, in fact, hoping it would be more the second time around and absurdly disappointed when it wasn’t) last? Well, he’d find out.
Maybe he’d find out. On the other hand, maybe he’d get killed before he came close to going through his meager funds. Every time he saw a motorcar, he ran for the pine woods through which the road ran most of the time. Nobody stopped to go after him. None of the vehicles that went by was an armored car, so nobody sprayed the woods with machine-gun fire.
That was good luck, as good luck for Negroes in the CSA ran these days.
Cassius didn’t see it so. Aside from being hungry and thirsty, he had sore feet. He couldn’t remember when he’d done so much walking. He didn’t think he ever had. He wondered if he ought to throw his shoes away. For a while, he didn’t. He didn’t want to look like a shiftless country nigger. He might have argued with his father, but his attitudes faithfully respected the way he was raised.
He did a little thinking. Why didn’t he want to look like a shiftless country nigger? Wasn’t that his best bet for survival? Away went the shoes, and his socks, too.
Don’t go barefoot. You get chiggers, an’ hookworm, too. His old man’s voice still rang in his ears, or rather, between them. Ignoring it wasn’t easy, but Cassius managed. The blisters on his heels sighed with relief. Before long, though, his soles started to complain.
And his luck ran out with the pine woods. For miles ahead, the road ran through fields: cotton, peanuts, tobacco, even rice. He couldn’t stay where he was. Living on what he could grub out of the ground-mushrooms and maybe berries-and on the squirrels and rabbits he killed with rocks wasn’t living. It was just starving a little more slowly. For better or for worse, he’d grown up in the city. No doubt there were tricks to living out here. Only one trouble: he didn’t know them.
He took a deep breath and set out down the road through the fields. A few years earlier, they would have been full of colored sharecroppers. Tractors and harvesters and combines drove Negroes off the land in swarms, though. Like so many towns in the CSA, Augusta had filled with farm workers who couldn’t find work. Having them in the cities made it easier for the Freedom Party to scoop them up, too.
Here came a motorcar. It was fairly new and in good repair-not noisy, not belching smoke. That made it a good bet to belong to a white man. Cassius straightened up, squared his shoulders, and kept walking along as if he had every right to be there. Every Negro learned that trick: if you pretended you belonged somewhere, the ofays would believe you really did.
And it worked, damned if it didn’t. The driver here wasn’t a white man but a white woman, her blond hair blowing in the breeze that came in through the open windows. Her head didn’t even turn toward Cassius. As far as she was concerned, he was part of the scenery, like a cow or a dog or a turkey vulture sitting on a telegraph pole.
In a way, that was good. She didn’t notice him, and he couldn’t afford to be noticed. In another way…He thought he deserved to be more important than a cow or a dog or a turkey vulture. Whites in the CSA didn’t see things like that. They never had. Odds were they never would.
We have to make ’em see, Cassius thought fiercely.
Then a white did notice him, and it made his heart leap into his throat. He was walking past a farmhouse when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Yeah, you, boy!” The farmer wore bib overalls and a big straw hat. He carried a shotgun, at the moment pointed down at the ground.
“What you want, uh, suh?” Cassius tried not to show how scared he was.
“You chop wood? Got me a pile of wood needs chopping,” the farmer said. “Pay you a dollar for it when you get done.”
Part of Cassius wanted to leap at that. The rest…The rest was naturally leery of trusting any white man. “Half a dollar now, half when I get through,” he said.
“Reckon I’d stiff you?” the farmer said. Cassius just spread his hands, as if to say you never could tell. The farmer shrugged. “All right. But if you take off halfway through, I’ll send the sheriff after you, hell with me if I don’t.”
“That’s fair,” Cassius allowed. “Reckon I could get me a ham sandwich an’ maybe a Dr. Hopper at noontime ’long with my other four bits?” If he was going to bargain, he’d go all out.
The farmer took the request in stride. “Don’t see why not. Good Book says something about not binding up the mouths of the kine that tread the grain. Reckon that goes for people, too.”
How could he quote the Bible and go along with what was happening to Negroes in the CSA? Maybe he didn’t go along, or not all the way, anyhow. He didn’t ask to see Cassius’ passbook, and he didn’t ask any inconvenient questions about what a young black man in city clothes was doing here.
As soon as Cassius saw the mountain of wood he was supposed to chop, he understood at once why the man didn’t ask questions. If he chopped all that, he’d earn his dollar three or four times over. He was tempted to light out with the farmer’s two quarters in his pocket. One thing held him back: fear. County sheriffs were supposed to use bloodhounds to track people, just the way their grandfathers did back in slavery days. If this one caught him…He didn’t want to think about that.
With a sigh, he set to work. Before long, sweat ran down his face even though the weather wasn’t too warm. He got blisters on his palms bigger than the ones on his heels. The farmer came to check on him, took a look at those, and gave him strips of cloth to wrap around his hands. They helped.
At least an hour before noon, the man brought him an enormous sandwich, a big slice of sweet-potato pie, and a cool Dr. Hopper. The bottle was dripping; maybe it had been in the well. “Much obliged, suh,” Cassius said.