Not that there is any comparing Bert to Christ or Lenin. But after he returned to the Big House Plantation that summer, life was never the same. From Bert’s very first day on the place something was broken, something went dizzy. The world began to spin, to ferment, and move into a new action.

Not to be a white folks’ nigger—Bert had come home with that idea in his head.

The Colonel sensed it in his out-stretched hand and his tall young body—and had turned his back and walked into the house. Cora with her hands in the cool water where the plums were, suddenly knew in her innermost soul a period of time had closed for her. That first night she prayed, cried in her room, asked the Lord why she had ever let her son come home. In his cabin Willie prayed, too, humble, Lord, humble. The Colonel rocked alone on his front porch sucking a black cigar and cussing bitterly at he knew not what. The hum and laughter of the Negro voices went on as usual on the vast plantation down to the last share-cropper’s cabin, but not quite, not quite the same as they had been in the morning. And never to be the same again.

“Is you heard about Bert?”

Not to be a white folks’ nigger!

Bow down and pray in fear and trembling, go way back in the dark afraid; or work harder and harder; or stumble and learn; or raise up your fist and strike—but once the idea comes into your head you’ll never be the same again. Oh, test tube of life! Crucible of the South, find the right powder and you’ll never be the same again—the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will be broken and men, all of a sudden, will shake hands, black men and white men, like steel meeting steel!

“The bastard,” Bert said. “Why couldn’t he shake hands with me? I’m a Norwood, too.”

“Hush, son,” said Cora with the cool water from the plums on her hands.

And the hum of the black voices that afternoon spread to the cabins, to the cotton fields, to the dark streets of the Junction, what Bert had said—Bert with the ivory-yellow skin and the tall proud young body, Bert come home not to be a white folks’ nigger.

“Lawd, chile, Bert’s come home…”

“Lawd, chile, and he said…”

“Lawd, chile, he said…”

“Lawd, chile…”

“Lawd…”

VI

July passed, and August. The hot summer sun marched across the skies. The Colonel ordered Bert to work in the fields. Bert had not done so. Talbot, the white foreman, washed his hands of it, saying that if he had his way, “that nigger would be run off the place.”

For the Colonel, the summer was hectic enough, what with cotton prices dropping on the market; share-croppers restless and moving; one black field-hand beaten half to death by Talbot and the storekeeper because he “talked high” to a neighboring white planter; news of the Scottsboro trials and the Camp Hill shootings exciting black labor.