Orphan of Creation Read Free Page A

from the porch, looked to see what it was, and smiled. The wind was starting to blow the cards about, and the bridge players were retreating inside, just as the women were finally coming out to join the men. It was the cue to wrestle the card tables into the parlor and form up into new foursomes. She walked back to see if she could get into a game.

Chapter Two
    It was close on midnight before the last rubber of bridge was done and folks started thinking about turning in. Barbara returned to her tiny bedroom and changed for bed.
    There was just room inside the little corner room’s flocked wallpaper walls for a small dresser, a night table, and one narrow bed, but that suited Barbara just fine—with so many visitors in the house, she was one of the very few who wasn’t sharing a room that night. She realized how used to sleeping alone she had become. Even before the recent split, for most of the last few months, Michael had been on the overnight shift at the hospital.
    Back in Washington, Barbara usually wore something along the lines of an old T-shirt to bed, but somehow that seemed too frivolous and undignified to wear in Zebulon Jones’s house. She always wore a full-length nightgown to bed when she was at Gowrie, and now, as always, she was careful to cover even that with a ladylike robe as she went back and forth from the bathroom.
    A few minutes later, she maneuvered herself into the narrow bed, her face scrubbed, her teeth well-brushed, and her hair combed out. Settling into the too-small bed in the doll-sized room, with the thunder rattling the windows and the rain suddenly coming down, with Zebulon’s journal in her hand and the room lit by the cozy yellow light of the lamp on the nightstand, Barbara felt as if she were a child again, secretly reading her Nancy Drew books under the covers with a flashlight after Mama had tucked her in.
    And Zebulon’s journal was as fine a secret as she had ever found. At last alone with no chance of being disturbed, she opened the book and began to read as the rain splattered down on the windowpanes.
    The handwriting was fine, proud, and precise, clearly an old man’s hand, but the hand of an old man still sure and confident, the phrases couched in the formalized dignity of the 19th-century educated man.
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I was born a Slave, [it began] and spent the first twenty-five years of my life in that monstrous condition. A quarter-century of such an imprisoned existence left its plain mark on the rest of my life, which I have spent in a search for all the things denied a slave—freedom, dignity, education, prosperity, property, control over one’s own destiny, the chance to provide for one’s family and people, the leisure to treasure the beauties of God’s world.
In these endeavors, I believe I have in some small way succeeded. I am now approaching the end of a useful life, and I feel that I have made myself ready to meet my Maker. I will not dying willingly, for life is a precious gift none of us dare deny while it is offered. But I strive to be an obedient servant of the Lord, and will go when He at last calls me home.
If my life has not been Faultless, neither has it been so Blameful that a just and merciful God should deny me entrance to His kingdom. After lifelong battles with His enemies—the Slavemaster, the Lynch Mob, the Klansman, and all the other agents of Hate—I am at peace with God. I have done my duty to him, and to myself. It only remains for me to recount, as best I can, the events of my life, not as a Monument to myself, but as an Instruction to those not yet born as to what it is possible for one Man to do.
In that connexion, and with the same admonition that what follows is not a Boast, but an Example, I must commence by relating the difficulties ranged against me.
For a man to say he was a Slave, to say that he was denied a right or that he was treated inhumanely because he was a Negro, is to report so much in so few words that nothing at all is said.
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