Daniel prays that Rose and his sister will be safe. He wishes he had given Queen his coat before they parted. He prays for her and for the other members of his family and hopes they’re safe and warm wherever they are. He prays for his grandmother and his uncle, and then he cries for a while, silent tears that hurt his chest as he struggles to be quiet. He cries for himself and for his sister and his cousins and he cries from fear and he cries in grief for his grandmother and his uncle. Tears of anger mix with tears of sorrow, and once he laughs until he cries again when he realizes that the one hundred dollars he had hidden under the floorboards of his room, one hundred dollars of hard work and sweat and saving for over five years, has probably burned up in the fire that destroyed his home. Uncle Syl would laugh so hard if I told him, he thought.
Daniel tries to warm his feet but the damp and cold have made them numb and he can hardly feel them any more. If I could get dry I’d be all right, he thinks. But soon he has to move and stretch his cramped muscles, nerve ends screaming from the cold and the cramped space, and his feet get wet again.
At least the babies are safe, Auntie’s safe. A flash of anger washes through him and he thinks, if only I wasn’t so big. Mrs. Wright, she was always so afraid of me, had to say “My! You’re so big!” every time I was in the store. Afraid I’m going to hurt her or go crazy or something. No matter how soft I walked around her or how quiet I spoke, her eyes would be rolling and her voice stammered whenever I was around. She says this morning, “He can’t stay, he can’t stay here,” and even though Aunt Emma and Aunt Gussie both argued, Mr. Wright told him he had to go. No men, he said, they’re looking for two men together, we can’t hide any.
If only he didn’t take my gun. I wish I never put it down. He just picked it up from where I leaned it and wouldn’t return it. Should have taken it from him.
“They’ll shoot you dead, they see you with a gun,” Mr. Wright explained. Daniel begged him, at least he could hunt if he had a gun, but Mr. Wright refused to give him his weapon.
“You go on down to the sawmill, get Mr. Pillsbury to put you up with the other men. It’s barely light, ground’s covered in fog, you can walk over to the mill and he’ll let you in. Or you can head down to Gulf Hammock, take A.T. and his sisters to their folks.
“It’s better this way,” Mr. Wright explained, but to Daniel the sound of the door closing behind him as he stepped off the Wright’s porch was like a death knell. Seeing the lights of the approaching mob he realized he had only one moment to disappear and only one place close enough to hide. And so he went, scurrying like a rabbit for cover.
Daniel is startled by every sound and when he nods off to sleep he still thinks he hears things. He thinks he hears his Grandmama call him. He thinks he hears Rose whisper in his ear. He wakes with a start and is lucky he makes no sound because he hears a group of men standing close by above him, talking and laughing about the fires and the murders and the destruction. They tell each other about burning down the church and the school and the Masonic Hall, burning down Daddy Hall’s store. One man laughs about how at one house they burned down, a woman came scurrying out from under the house as it burned, she’d been hiding underneath but they burned her out and with her nightgown on fire they shot her down before she could rise to her feet. Just like a possum up a tree, or a raccoon running from the hounds, he laughed.
“It’s a hell of a coon hunt we got here, boys!” one of them shouts and the others all laugh.
Rage burns like a fire in Daniel’s brain and he silently curses them and wishes again for his rifle. If he had his rifle he would rise up out of the ground in vengeance and shoot them all dead, shoot them while their stupid mouths hung open in surprise and he’d keep shooting, for once he would forget his upbringing and his God and his family, forget to turn the other cheek and forget about his obligations and trust and integrity and forgiveness and he would kill every single one he could kill before they could shoot him down or take him to be humiliated and tortured like Mr. Carter or his Uncle Aaron, like he was a dumb animal. For once he’d act like an animal, a fearsome vicious animal and he’d kill them all.
The men move off and Daniel spends the time trying to guess the time by the movement of a thin line of light leaking into his hiding place. The line moved across the cement walls and Daniel dozed and woke, slipping from his narrow seat to try again to wake his deadened toes.
He thought about his uncle’s notebook, a slim journal he kept in his breast pocket. Sylvester loved to tell jokes and wrote down new ones he heard in the small notebook where he also kept sums and lists. Some of the jokes were just funny; "What do you call a man with two wives? Tired!" But some were serious, and Daniel thought of all the times his uncle warned him.
“What do you call a colored man with a hundred acres and money in the bank?” Sylvester would ask.
“Worried,” Daniel remembered his Grandfather Haywood grimly replying, uncle and grandfather shaking their heads.
“What do you call a colored man on a back road, alone, late at night?” Sylvester would warn Daniel and Roy. “Target practice.”
All the boys in the family knew all the jokes and stories and warnings. Daniel and Roy and the others had been raised to be polite and to work hard and to stay out of harm’s way, but now Daniel knew that money and manners and hard work couldn’t protect you if you were colored and the white world went crazy. What do you call a colored man who stands up for his family? he asked himself.
Dead, he answered himself, dead.
The line of light was high on the wall and dim by the time Daniel climbed the ladder, nerves burning with pain as the rungs pressed into his icy feet. He slowly lifted the heavy wooden lid and peered out into the twilight. Seeing no one he slid out of the well where he had been hiding for nine hours and limped into the shadows behind the train depot. He moved into the trees, hoping that his cousins and his sister were waiting for him and that his damaged feet would support him and he would be able to find his way through six miles of dark woods under a waning moon. He stood for a moment, looking at the smoke rising through the trees from the still smoldering buildings. He swallowed back the angry tears that were forming in his throat and moved off away from the town and towards the south.
What do you call a colored man, hiding in a well, he thought.
Safe, he answered himself. Safe.