Sometimes one remark will make you a friend, and it generally ain’t planned to do so, for I have found that you can seldom intentionally make up a successful compliment. I don’t mean I was enemies with Lavender before saying that; it was rather that we took each other for granted as kid and servant. I reckon he had come to visit me out of curiosity.
He says: “I snuck up here while everbody but Lucy’s not to home, and Lucy don’t know I did or she’d be riled.”
I had a room all my own on the second floor, with a big soft bed that took me a while to get onto sleeping in without taking down seasick.
“Ain’t you never been here before?”
“I carried up furniture,” Lavender says, “and washed the windows, but never come for socializing. I suppose if it be known I was here now, you might say you ast me.”
“Sure,” I told him, and then you know how a person will feel self-pity when he’s sick: “I reckon you’re the only one who cares whether I live or die. You’re the only one who come.”
“You just don’t recall,” he says. “The Lady was here all the time, and the Reverend made his prayers and I reckon had he not you’d be stone-cold and they’d have dug a hole in the ground and drapped you in and shoveled the earth back on and stomped it down.”
“Well,” I says, “so long as it didn’t happen I wish you wouldn’t go on about it in such detail. Do you figure it was God who saved me when asked by the Reverend?”
Lavender gets a sly look. “That doctor ain’t likely to have done it when he run Lucy off from giving you any of her tonic what is made from roots and suchlike and will cure any ailment. I tell you, there was a time when everything I et turned to poison and my stomach felt like a fishnet. Lucy give me her tonic and inside a week I could chew up and swally a bone like a dog and never tell the difference from a bowl of mush.”
I said: “Why don’t you set upon the chair there?”
“I wouldn’t mind it a-tall,” says he and does as much, a little stiff at first and then gradually taking his ease. “Say now, that was a funny thing, you taking me for an Indian. I never knowed they was black.”
I just realized I had a mustard plaster on my chest, because it started to itch, and so I was scratching while we talked.
I says: “I saw a Cheyenne dark as you down on the Solomon’s Fork. They called him Mohkstavihi, which is the same name they give to any colored person like yourself.”
“Black Man?”
“No, Black White Man.”
He laughed out loud at that, then stopped short and nodded serious. “I got to burn leaves now,” he says and goes out. I wonder if I had hurt his feelings, but it was the truth, which is supposed to make you free.
However, back he come the following day, when Mrs. Pendrake had gone out shopping again and the Reverend was in his study, and this time Lavender never feared Lucy on account of he got bold enough to ask Pendrake’s permission to see me, which was granted.
He also took the chair without being asked, which was O.K. by me, for owing to my upbringing I never had no views on how fresh you should let a darky get, though that was a worrisome thing to plenty of whites in Missouri.
It turned out that Lavender was fascinated by Indians. I have said Mrs. P. listened that first day to my experiences, but that was the end of it, so I suppose she did then just to be mannerly. And anybody else I run into would have rather died than asked me about that subject, I reckon.
But Lavender couldn’t get enough of it. I would have thought he was going to write a book had he not been illiterate.
After a time he says: “That dark Indian you told me about seeing on the Solomon River, I been thinking on him, and I figure he might be kin.” Lavender was a smart fellow; he couldn’t read nor write and never had a day of schooling, but he knowed a great deal of things. He started talking now about Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, who we hadn’t yet got around to in the school, for their names was new to me.
“Why,” he says, “them white men went up the river until it got so skinny they could stand with one foot on the right bank and one on the left, and then found the tiny hole it trickled out of, and could have stuck a finger in it and stopped it off, and you wouldn’t have had no more Missouri River but just a big ditch of mud two thousand miles long, dryin’ and crackin’ in the sun.”
I didn’t believe him, but later I heard it was true—I mean about Lewis and Clark being real people; whether they could have stopped off the Missouri with one finger was another thing.
“Captain Lewis and Captain Clark took along a colored man named York, and the Indians had never seen a colored man before and thought York was painted black, so would spit on their hands and try to rub York’s color off, and when they couldn’t, they’d tell all the other redskins for miles around and they would all come and try to rub the paint off him too.
