Day of Tears by Julius Lester 1 The Kitchen mattie It's been three days since we've seen the sun. Yesterday it started raining and it hasn't stopped since. The rain is coming down as hard as regret. Will said the rain started up just when the selling began. I ain't never seen a rain like this. Will said, "This ain't rain. This is God's tears." will Soon as the slave-seller called the name of the first slave he was going to put up for sale, the gray clouds turned black as a burned log. Lightning so bright flashed across the face of heaven, my eyes trembled in their sockets. Thunder rolled from one side of the sky to the other, back and forth, back and forth. My heart was jumping like it wanted to run out of my body and find some place to hide. Then down came the rain, hard as sorrow. mattie Every morning since I can remember, I done stood here in this kitchen. When I was a girl it was my mama what stood at this stove fixing breakfast for the master and his family. That was back in the time of Master Butler's father, Ransome. He would rise up out of his grave if he knew Master Pierce had lost so much money playing cards that he's selling off practically all his slaves to pay what he owe. will White folks have come from all over. Yesterday they was buying up slaves as quick as the slave-seller could get 'em up on the block. Some of the slaves cried worse than a baby what's sick. Most of 'em, however, did their crying on the inside, 'cause if you looked real close you could see the sorrow in their eyes. A few, however, looked like they was dead, but their hearts hadn't got the message yet. Us Butler plantation slaves used to be the envy of all the slaves in these parts because Master Butler -- the first one and then this one -- treated their slaves almost like they was family. There's just a few years between me and Master Butler. We was boys together and I taught him to fish and hunt possum. He used to look up to me like I was his big brother. I even saved his life one time. We were down at the river. He was just a little boy and he waded out too far and went under. If I hadn't gone in and gotten him, he would have drowned. I never dreamed the day would come when he would do something like he's doing. But when the master and the mistress divorced, Mattie said it was going to be bad for us. Didn't think it would get to be this bad. In a little while the mule wagons will come out of the barn. They'll be moving real slow, like they know they're carrying slaves to be sold like bales of cotton. A little while after the last of the wagons has left for town, I'll go to the barn and get the coach ready and drive Master into town. I overheard him tell somebody at the auction that by the end of today, four hundred and twenty-nine of us slaves will have been sold. Don't seem right that us is the ones have to pay the price for another man's weakness. (Emma, Mattie and Will's daughter, enters.) mattie: (To Emma.) Have you gotten Miss Sarah and Miss Frances dressed that quick? emma: Master say to let them stay in their nightclothes and robes for now and to get 'em dressed after breakfast. mattie: Why he want to wait until then? emma: He say he don't want them spilling food on their good clothes. He's taking them to town to the slave-selling. mattie: He gon' do what? Why he want to take them girls to something like that? He wouldn't do that if the mistress was still here. emma I think I miss Mistress Fanny almost as much as Miss Sarah and Miss Frances do. Miss Frances tries to pretend like she don't miss her mama. But I know she does. She's just trying to hide from her feelings. Miss Sarah's not like that. Her feelings know where she is and they find her every night when she goes to bed. It's been almost a year since her mama been gone, but she still cries herself to sleep. The rain comes down hard as stones. Last night me, Mama, and Papa got soaking wet running back to the quarters. But I was glad for the rain and how loud it was, because I mostly couldn't hear folks crying over the ones what got sold yesterday and the crying of them what's going to be sold today. Seem like there was crying coming from every cabin in the quarters 'cepting ours. emma: (To Will.) Papa? What was it like at the slave-selling yesterday? will: Like watching people die. I knew practically every one of them what got sold, knew 'em by face, if not by name. The slave-seller would call 'em up, sometimes a husband and wife together, sometimes a whole family, and sometimes just one. The slave-seller talked so fast, you couldn't understand what he was saying. I guess white folks can listen faster than colored, because the slave-seller be talking fast, and different white folks would raise their hands and the slave-seller would point at first one and shout, "One hundred!" And then another white man would raise his hand and the slave-seller would shout, "Two hundred!" And it would keep on that way until all of a sudden the slave-seller would point to a white man and yell, "Sold!" and all the other white folks would come over and pat that one on the back and he'd grin and smile like he'd just bought himself a fine racehorse. Master say he wasn't going to separate husbands from wives and parents from their children. He must've forgot, 'cause he sold my sister and her husband to a master from Tennessee, and their daughter was bought by a lady from Mississippi. The one what bought my sister didn't even let her come and say good-bye to me. I watched as her new master took her away, and when the door closed behind 'em, I realized that I ain't never going to see her again. That was like lightning leaping out of a black cloud and striking me in the chest. The only way I'll ever know she was alive is by this pain in my heart. (Outside, thunder rolls back and forth across the sky, like the cannon explosions of opposing armies. Will, Mattie, and Emma look up as if they are afraid something is going to come through the ceiling. Then they exchange looks that say they know why Nature is making her presence felt so strongly.) emma (After the thunder has passed and there is only the sound of the hard rain.) When Papa told us last night that Aunt Selma, Uncle Bob, and Charlotte had been sold away, I didn't want to believe it. Me and Charlotte was born around the same time. Since neither one of us had a sister, we was sisters to each other. I feel so bad for her. I wonder where she is this morning. Is she in Mississippi already? Is the lady who bought her nice? Charlotte must be so scared. I know I would be. mattie (Steps away from the hot stove and goes to stand in the open kitchen door. She looks through the rain toward the barn. Though it is raining hard she can make out Jenkins, the overseer, bringing slaves from the quarters. The wrists and ankles of the slaves are shackled with iron cuffs and chains that link them to each other.) At mealtimes I stand in the corner of the dining room closest to the kitchen in case Master, one of the girls, or a guest should need me to get something for them. I am as still as the sideboard. Master forgets I'm there, or maybe he don't care. Maybe he think I don't hear and understand what him and the slave-seller say. But I hear. I understood when the slave-seller say: "This is going to be the biggest slave auction ever held in America." He laughed. Master laughed. When I went back to the quarters that night I told as many as I could that Master was planning to sell most of us. Some folks laughed at me, said Master wouldn't do that. They say he not like other masters. "He's a good master," Cato said. I say, "Ain't no such thing! If he was good, he wouldn't be a master." But George and Rebecca knowed I was telling the truth and that very same night they ran away. Them two been in love since before they was born. Ain't nothing or nobody can separate them. Next morning when Master found out they was gone, he sent Jenkins over to Master Phillips's place to borrow his slave-hunting dogs. All day you could hear them dogs barking and baying through the woods, going this way and that way, trying to sniff out George and Sarah. But that evening them dogs come back with their tongues dragging in the dust. All of us was glad they didn't get caught. But every night since then, Master has had men riding around the plantation all night to make sure nobody else runs away. Won't need no patrollers tonight 'cause won't be many of us left, just the old people and enough slaves to grow vegetables for food and take care of the animals. But won't be enough to work the cotton and rice. It's going to be mighty empty in the slave quarters from now on. And mighty quiet. I'm going to miss Junius and the stories he would tell about High John and Brer Rabbit and all the creatures. Wasn't nobody could make me laugh harder than Junius when he got to telling stories. Junius was our preacher, too, and he told us stories from the Good Book, stories that Mistress Kemble had told him, stories about God parting the Red Sea so Moses could lead the slaves away from the Egyptians. Junius going to be telling his stories to different folks from now on and won't nobody be telling us stories. Won't nobody be making music around here either, 'cause Master is gon' sell Ezekiel today. Folks lying in the boneyard want to get up and dance when ol' Ezekiel starts playing that fiddle of his. Ain't gon' be much laughing and dancing around here ever again. Will comes and stands next to me. He don't look at me and I don't look at him. We just stare into the rain. I can feel him wanting to say something and I want to say something to him but neither one of us knows what it is. Or maybe we know but don't know how to say it. So we just stand here next to each other. The rain comes down like fiery sorrow. Interlude I emma as an old woman I remember that morning like it was yesterday. I don't know how old I was. I reckon I was around twelve, but nobody kept track of things like that back in slavery. What good would it have done us to know how many years we'd been slaves? I can still hear the rain. It was so loud we had to almost shout when we had something to say to each other. But wasn't much to say that morning. Or maybe there was a lot to say, but we didn't know the words. Or maybe we was afraid that if we spoke our feelings, nothing but screams would come from our mouths. The rain was so hard and so loud it was like it was doing the grieving for us. I ain't never seen a rain like that in all the years since, and that's been a lot of years. I remember my mama telling me that Granny Wilma say she'd never seen rain like that in all her years. She was the oldest slave on the Butler plantation and had known Master's granddaddy, who was the one that started the plantation. If you put all the years of Granny Wilma's remembering together with all my years of remembering, that's a lot of years. My granddaughter, Jessie Mae, can read, write, and do numbers, and she say that would probably be close to two hundred years. That was some rain! All my children and grandchildren got their education. I would've turned 'em out of the house if they hadn't. Every day when they came home from school I had them tell me different things out of their books. I remember one time when Sarah, my oldest girl, told me that in one of her books it said a picture is worth a thousand words. I told her whoever wrote that didn't know very much. When I think back on slavery and all what happened that day when God cried, couldn't no picture make you feel what it was like. Maybe a picture could show you the rain, but that picture couldn't make you feel how thick and heavy the air was and how hard it was to breathe. That picture couldn't make you feel how our skin was covered with a sweat that was like grease that had been used too many times to fry chicken in. If you had a picture of the dining room that morning you would see a long table covered with a white cloth, the china place settings and silverware and Master, the slave-seller, and Master's two daughters seated around the table. You'd see me and Mama going back and forth bringing in the breakfast of grits, fried apples, pancakes, syrup, sausage, and coffee. But you wouldn't smell the odors from everyone's bodies. That picture wouldn't let you smell the mold coming from the walls. You'd see me and Mama in that picture and we would look like we wasn't feeling a thing. That picture would be a lie.