The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,46
pot’a gold. That him and his fathers before him had put away a gold coin for every week since thirty years before the Civil War. I did my numbers and figgered he had to have nearly five thousand coins. Now, that’s some money right there. You know I been thinkin’ on them coins for years. And finally, just a few hours before I got to you I went in his house and lugged ’em out to his wagon. I brung ’em up here, heaved ’em under that rock I showed ya.”
“How come he didn’t wake up when you went in his house?” the child asked.
“’Cause when I came by earlier to give him your daddy’s rent I poured some laudanum in his gin when he wasn’t lookin’. You know he drink that gin ev’ry night. An’ when I was sure that he was paralyzed, I come on in an’ searched the house until I fount the treasure chest under a trapdo’ under his bed.”
“An’ he was sleep?” Ptolemy asked.
“Yeah.”
“So he don’t know you took it.”
“That don’t mattah to the white man. He don’t have to know. All he got to do is remembah that I was the last niggah he saw. I was the last he saw and so I’ma be the first he go to.”
“So you gonna run?”
“Damn right I’ma run. I’ma run all the way to New York City with the twenty coins I took for myself. I’ma go up there an’ I won’t see another cotton plant ever again in my life.”
At these words Li’l Pea Grey started to cry. Coy was his closest friend.
“Sometimes we got to make a sacrifice, Pity,” the old man said. “Now, come go wit’ me to my house so I could get my things and make it outta the county before sunup.”
They moved on back-road paths through the night headed for the lean-to shelter that Coy McCann had called home since the barber took over his room for his new wife and child. Ptolemy didn’t think anymore about his feet or the cold. He didn’t worry about the white people that might be after him or his uncle. He felt as if he were a soldier now, fighting on enemy ground, like in the stories he and Coy read down by the Tickle when the fish weren’t biting.
“Stay here,” Coy told Ptolemy at a stand of live oaks on a rise that looked down on the old man’s shelter.
“How come?”
“I wanna see you every minute I can before I’m gone forever,” Coy replied, “but this is my most dangerous moment. I got all my things in a bag in the house. I couldn’t take it with me because of how heavy the gold was gonna be. And I had to get you and show you where the gold was before I left. So now I just got to hope that old Jersey drunk enough drug to keep him sleepin’ through the night. But if it don’t, I don’t want him to find you down there wit’ me.”
Ptolemy slipped behind a tree as his uncle spoke, feeling both afraid and ashamed of his fear. He watched as Coydog McCann loped down the hill to his home. Just when he was at the tarp entrance, someone yelled and white men jumped out from all over the place.
The first white man cuffed Ptolemy’s friend, and the boy shouted, unable to keep the pain out of his mouth. But no one heard him because they were all shouting and hollering and beating Coy mercilessly, throwing him from man to man.
The sun was a red strip above the farthest hill.
Shouting loudly, Jersey Manheim asked Coy again and again where he had hidden his money. And for a long time Coy was silent. He was surrounded by thirteen men who meant to kill him, but Coy took the blows. Finally he shouted out something; the only words Ptolemy could make out were “... bottom of the well . . .”
Mercifully the vision of the lynching passed by the fevered dreamer’s eyes quickly. He only caught a glimpse of the hanging man dancing on fire while the white men laughed and raised their firebrands in the half darkness of dawn.
Twenty-six-year-old Sensia Howard was married to Ezra Bindle when Ptolemy, a man of forty-five years, met them at a barbecue in Griffith Park. Her yellow dress made its own party, and Ezra’s powerful arm held her so tightly about the waist that they might have been grafted like that.