Lewis Johnson

By Arwa Kaso

Lewis Johnson is the episodic biography of an elderly African American looking back over his life as it nears its end. Born in 1932 to a poor family in rural Texas, Lewis thinks of himself and his family as slaves of the Baker family, despite the legal ending of slavery in the United States decades before.

His childhood is spent in backbreaking work from dawn to dusk in the fields. At night he sleeps in a stable he shares with the horses and poisonous snakes. Despite his hardships, Lewis casts an observant eye on his family, his masters, his community, and Nature around him. His philosophical bent finds expression through the eagles he watches in the sky, and they inspire thoughts of freedom within him.

Lewis is especially fond of his grandmother Lola, who tells him stories of the past and the brutality of their masters toward his father and grandfather.

After a few years of schooling, Lewis runs away from slavery and spends his adult life between Houston and Austin. He experiences racism and exploitation and finds it difficult to hold down a job even though he longs to work. Much of his life is spent as a bum on the streets.

Lewis returns a dropped purse to its owner, Annette, and she becomes a key figure in his life and bears him four children. It is because of a TV at the bar where Annette works that Lewis gets to see Martin Luther King, who has a profound influence on him.

Unable to maintain a stable home, Lewis is also taken care of by another woman whom he helps to get home when she is drunk.

Chance encounters bring Lewis back into contact with Joanna and Michael Baker, the children of his former masters, and some resolution to the past is achieved because of Lewis’s stoic forgiveness and decency

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662468148

Book preview

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Lewis Johnson

Arwa Kaso

Copyright © 2022 Arwa Kaso

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-6813-1 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-6814-8 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 1

Snapshots from the Distant Childhood of Lewis Johnson

Isn’t life wonderful! Have I really lived all these years to witness this unimaginable miracle? A black man like me becoming President of the United States!

Those were the words of LJ, an African American, as he neared his time to die after seventy years of hardship, suffering, and drifting as a tenth-class citizen. He, as an American, joined the fight for freedom and struggled to build himself a decent life through hard work. With many others, he built railroads and reclaimed agricultural lands. From childhood, he helped lay the foundation stones for the mighty edifice that has become the most powerful and advanced nation in the world: America the superpower. This American man experienced happiness at the end of his life, but he also looked forward to a future with prospects open to all and saw one harmonious world to come. He acquired this skill of insight primarily from the birds, but also from the other animals that walked the Earth. He had a spirit that soared high in the sky, not like the innocent dove that nests in the eaves, but like the fierce eagle that dwells in its aerie on a mountain peak. Yet his true roots as a human being grew from the greater solidity and depth of the land.

If only I was fully a Negro. I mean Black without any flaw of whiteness.

The skinny legs of a six-year-old boy swung from the edge of a rickety wooden wagon drawn by a decrepit horse that resembled nothing more than the old wooden boards of the wagon. The horse’s ribs protruded visibly, and his thin legs were so stiff it seemed they were about to collapse or snap. The wagon moved slowly along, wobbling its way towards the poor shacks under the western side of the hill, a half mile from the house of the lordly Mr. Baker.

The boy, as if sleeping, swayed as he sat, exhausted from the day’s work in the fields of their master, their cruel and grasping owner, the hard-as-flint and hot-tempered John Baker. The little boy, slight and desiccated like an old tree branch, had been working in the fields from five o’clock in the morning till sundown. Now, returning to the shack, which was essentially a barn not even fit for swine, the child did not take in the giant disc of the sun setting over the tall trees atop the distant hill. Around sundown, the sun’s disc fused with the sky, which was tinged with pinkish reds and purples and seemed to lower towards the black earth in a scene of magical beauty. But the exhausted and hungry boy was unable to perceive the beauty painted by Nature in that divinely wonderful scene. All he could think of at the end of the day was falling asleep in the stable on his pile of dry straw as soon as he got back. Even at his young age, perhaps he wished for an eternal sleep from which he could wake under the weight of the pure sky of Heaven, far from the vast expanse of cotton and peanut fields. Sometimes he wondered whether God let poor Blacks into Heaven, as the Black reverend at their church, Father Robert Washington, said He did.

All that could be seen of the man in his forties driving the run-down wooden wagon was a tatty straw hat, whose many holes meant it only covered a small part of the man’s large black head. The man had his back to the sun, while the boy faced it directly. As usual, the two of them did not perceive the same things at the same time. The wagon slowly made its way downhill. The doddery, old horse was in no hurry and so well practiced at descending the path—at times rocky, at others soft with earth—that he had mastered it. He had spent the best part of his long servitude walking that path, and so familiar was it to him that he could negotiate it in his sleep. In the past, he had taken it at a trot, and no one could distinguish his speed going up from coming down. But that was many years ago.

The skinny boy, Lewis Johnson, thought to himself, Why do my cousins laugh at me because my eyes are blue? How I wish I knew where these blue eyes come from. Is it from the color of the sky that I stare at so long, as Mom tells me