The Emancipation of Robert Sadler Read Free Page B

family who wasn’t at the funeral was Ella. She was still sick. A friend of Mama’s sat with her during the service giving her catnip tea on a spoon. The little church was crowded with Mama’s friends and some of our relatives. My older brothers were there, brothers I had hardly even seen. I stared at them, wondering what life off the farm could be like. Did they know how to read and write? There were many things I wanted to ask them, but as it was I didn’t get a chance to speak with them at all because they left right after the service. I don’t think they were even aware that I was their little brother. They didn’t even wait for the lemonade and sugar cookies that came later.
    â€œYoll eat aplenty, Robert,” my sister Margie told me. “It’ll be a long time before we see cookies agin!” I took two cookies and some lemonade and brought them home to Ella.
    â€œElla, how long you gonna lay up in that bed?”
    â€œI dunno.”
    â€œWell, Mama’s daid now.”
    â€œI know it. What’re you fixin to do?”
    I looked at her face and was startled to see how thin it had become. She was small for her age to begin with, but now she looked so tiny and so helpless. I felt panic rise within me.
    â€œElla!” I shouted.
    â€œWhat you shoutin on, Robert?”
    â€œAre you gonna die, Ella? Are you gonna die?”
    Ella’s condition didn’t get any better. Margie gave her what was left of Mama’s cabbage juice tonic; she made a paste of hot clay and cabbage leaves and spread it on her, but she didn’t get well. Soon she couldn’t eat anything, and it was only one month after my mother died that Ella was dead, too.
    All I had in the whole world was gone—Mama, the light of our life, and now my only friend, Ella.
    Father worked extra jobs as a basket maker and a blacksmith, but every cent he made he spent on liquor, and there were days when there was not a crumb of food in the house. One day Margie and I were coming back from the mill with the sack of cornmeal in the back of the buggy, and we saw an old apple core on the side of the road. I held the reins and Margie made a dive for the apple core, and we ate it right there. The rest of the way home we looked hungrily for more apple cores.
    Margie and Pearl were good to me. They played with me, talked to me, put me to sleep in the bed with them, and tried to show me love. Margie brought singing back into the cabin, and at night we would sing around the fire; or else, lying in the bed, we’d sing to the moon peeking through the boards of the roof.
    Father was home less and less. Whenever we did see him he would be drunk. Then one day he came home and announced that he was fixing to take himself a new wife, so that spring Father, Pearl, Margie, and I left our little cabin and moved to the north side of Anderson to live in our new mama’s home. It was a little nicer than our cabin, but it, too, was unpainted and had no finished ceiling, floor coverings, window glass, or screens, and the yard was grey dirt. Standing beside the porch were two boys, younger than us. The thing that interested me the most was that both children were fat. If they were fat, then maybe we would get some good food to eat.
    â€œThem’s Rosie’s chillren,” Father told us. “Yor new brothers.”
    Our life in Rosie’s shanty with her two children was not what we expected. Rosie hated us. She pulled Margie’s hair, screamed at Pearl, and would hit us at any time. While she ate at the one table in the house with her own children, we had to eat our food on our laps in the corner. She said there wasn’t room for us.
    The hopes of getting good food or enough to eat were quickly squelched. We got only what they didn’t want. Some days we would get just one bowl of grits. We were hungrier at our stepmother’s house than we had been before.
    One night when Rosie had cooked up some