A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [22]
I was trembling inside as I said it. I wasn’t trying to be a white person. I just wanted to know that I could do the same thing a white person could do. I was scared to hear my own timid voice talking back to a white man. But what business did he have to talk that way to me if I was free? I wasn’t his slave. I wasn’t anybody’s slave.
So I got my courage up, then reached out and touched the hanky again.
“How much does this one cost?” I asked.
Gruffly he came over to where I was standing.
“Nine cents,” he said after looking at it and then scowling at me like he was mad I’d asked.
“Please, sir, could you tell me how much I have?”
I opened my hand and held the coins toward him.
“What kind of a question is that?” he said in the same voice. “You have eleven cents—a nickel and six pennies.”
“I want to buy it, then.”
He looked at me as if to say, what could someone like me want with a pretty handkerchief? Then he took it and walked back to his counter. I followed him.
“How much is that pretty red ribbon hanging up there behind you?” I asked.
“Half a cent a foot,” he answered, “or two feet for a penny.”
“Then I would have enough for two feet of that too, right?” I asked.
“Of course you would. You must be a simpleton, which is exactly what you look like! You would have one penny left over.”
“Then please give me that too,” I said.
He sighed, then cut off a piece of ribbon and put it with the handkerchief, wrapped them up in brown paper, and handed the little packet across the counter to me. I handed him all the coins except one of the pennies. I reckoned all storekeepers must be like him and Mrs. Hammond. Maybe people who didn’t know how to smile ran general stores. He didn’t say anything else to me, and he didn’t seem none too pleased about making a sale.
But I didn’t care. I turned and walked out of the store, beaming with pride.
I’d actually bought something … just for myself!
I sat down on the ledge of the boardwalk with my feet in the street next to the horse. There was a bench next to the store, but it didn’t even occur to me to sit down there. Slaves might have been set free by some man named Lincoln, but coloreds were still coloreds, and I knew my place. It was a white man’s world, whatever the man called Mr. Lincoln had done. I’d just gone into a white man’s store ’cause I had money to spend. But I knew he’d more’n likely chase me off if I sat down on his bench.
I opened the packet and unfolded the handkerchief on my lap, then took the last penny Josepha had given me and set it in the middle of it. I folded the lace handkerchief around the penny and tied it together with the red ribbon, and tried to make a little bow out of the ends that were left over. I had to do it several times till the end of the ribbon came out even. Then I held the pretty little package for a long time just looking at it.
A pretty little white lace handkerchief tied with red ribbon.
I reckon it was kind of a silly thing to buy. But it was mine. Only mine. I had bought it with my own money all by myself.
I just sat and held my little bundle with the penny in it for a long time, looking at it and thinking more about being free.
I can’t even remember exactly what I was thinking. At first I felt like yelling and jumping and screaming. Now I was quiet inside. I don’t know if I was exactly thankful. I don’t even know if I’d say I was happy. It was more like a place was opening up inside me that had never been there before. I don’t know how to say it other than that.
There ain’t no way to describe the feeling of having that word slave lifted from your shoulders, like a great big chain that had been around your neck all your life. And as I sat there staring at it, I knew that this little white handkerchief with the penny inside would always be my reminder of this day. A reminder of something special that had happened to me, a reminder that I was a new person from this day on … a reminder of freedom, and the freedom to do something just for myself.
I would never forget this moment for all the rest of my life. I would always