Men Come and Go in a Sea of Death...Then on to the Plantation

Ahh where to start.. well this last week I have read books two and three of the four in the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which are titled Reconstruction and The Plantation. In the second book. Jane's basically adoptive son, really the son of Big Laura, Ned is all grown up now, at around the age of seventeen, he is ready to leave home. Jane is very uneasy about his decision because there is basically an exodus of african Americans leaving the South and the Ku Klux Klan is everywhere an African American does not want to be. Now that Mr. Bone the plantation owner tells his slaves that he does not own the plantation or the slaves anymore, and that the Yankee Soldiers have left, the Blacks were trying to start their own lives alone. Ned like many young black men was highly influenced by the speakings and teachings of Frederick Douglass. However Frederick advised that African Americans stayed in the South, because now without former Yankee controll, Louisiana was basically as hectic and as racially dangerous as it was before the Civil War. Ned disregards this advise and wants to help other blacks and he has changed his name to Edward Stephen Douglass from Ned Brown and Ned Douglass. He becomes active in a committee that helps blacks flee the plantations. One day, Colonel Dye tells Jane that Ned needs to stop what he is doing, but when Jane tells Ned, Ned refuses. Some time later a group of Ku Klux Klan members, wearing hoods, appear at Jane's cabin. They strike her several times, but Ned is not there. When he returns later that night and sees her face, he tells her that they are leaving. Jane does not want to leave because she does not feel it is her time. Ned, who treats Jane as his surrogate mother and calls her mama, is very upset and wants her to come. She insists on staying though, and they both weep when he leaves later than night. Ned then leaves for Kansas to live a free life and help change the life of African Americans in the South. Jane later meets a widower named Joe Pittman and they soon fall in love and get married. Even though Jane is barren it is not an issue in their marriage because Joe has two daughters from his previous marriage. As a living, Joe breaks horses and Jane starts seeing visions with a black stallion as an omen and she gets very frightened. She then goes to see a Creole voodoo woman and she is told that this horse will kill Joe and she tries to do everything to save him from this horse, however Joe goes by a man's way and he is killed by the black "devil" horse Jane also receives letters from Ned and she is informed that after he finishes school he will be joining the army to fight in Cuba. When Ned comes home, he brings back a wife and children and he is a preacher bringing the words of Frederick Douglass to the Blacks of the bayou. Sadly for Jane, death strikes again and her neighbor a Cajun man Albert Cluveau shot and killed Ned at one of his preachings. SAD TIMES. He then became crazy because of the guilt and his daughters thought Miss Jane put a hex on him. Jane explained it was the power of God.
Damn I hope you love this blog because my hands are starting to hurt. In book three Jane moves to her final "stomping grounds' in her life...The Plantation. Here she works outside in the field picking cotton and it was quite a competition....One woman was mentally challenged and she was by far the fastest picker and new women would always try and compete with her and they would never win... and all she would do is laugh all day, oh god I wish I could do that at times too... The plantation owner also had secret sexual relations with a worker leaving him with two young sons, one white, and one mulatto. However Timmy would never be treated nearly as well as Tee Bob. Miss Jane worked on the Plantation until she started to age and was unable to do outdoor work, so she was switched to a house mother because the plantation owner's wife Miss Lillie liked her so much. These books were very intense and I liked the second book significantly more than the third book. I feel very bad for Jane because jeeze, losing a husband and a son, it must be hard. I could never imagine living a life like Jane, she never got anything easy in life. But atleast her life is starting to settle down a little bit since she has started working on the plantation.