It seemed from the beginning that Bob was marked for a fearless life of tremendous adventure. As he rigged him yellow brown body into existence the smoking oil lamp fell from the table in the dining room upon the leg of his tiny sleeping brother John. His mother holding back the life that was fighting through her loins until the arrival of the doctor, dragged her self from the bed to pull her wounded young 'un from the burning oil. Then she dropped exhausted by his side, writhing in agony ..... it was there that the doctor found her with her half born child. It was a boy child, yellow with a reddish tinge. He was Robert Jefferson.

Tampa in those days offered little for the molding of a colored child's life. On the other hand the city offered much for the shaping of the checkered fearlessness that was to be Bob's life. His father was a hard man ; his mother was a hard woman. It is small wonder that even as a little boy he could look a boy older and stronger than himself into the eye with eyes of steel and sock him in the jaw and then take the sound heating that the older boy gave him without so much as a whimper. His way was laid out for him by some unseen destiny and so each step of his tiny feet led him along its path.

He went to the colored school taught by a bigotted old minister. The colored school lay in what was almost country land, far on the edge of the colored section. To and from school he went through the short four month turn and with a youthful bravado learned his letters and his figures. He was never liked by his teacher. The old minister liked tiny boys to howl and kick when they were beaten and then become penitent and afraid as a result. None of this with Bob. The first day he entered school at the age of seven tugging reluctantly to his ten year old brother's hand he had fell in the teacher's poor graces. The bible had been read, the Lord's Prayer chanted in

quavering, inharmonious child voices and the teacher had given a long boring talk on the privilege of colored children's going to school interpolated with examples from his own meager childhood when his Mammy had been a slave and the white minister had taught him to spell his own name and learn his letters. He had ravened to the heights of being a teacher through prayer and suffering... It was the same old story the children had heard each term for years. Fact is they heard it every Sunday between naps at the church. Some of the new children listened with awe, half understanding what he said. Bob simply stared about him and watched the dirt-dauber buzzing about the school-room ceiling. Then his mischief loving mind bespoke him to pinch Lizzie May on the buttucks. She in turn set up a howl that threw the teachers hour of devotions into pandamonium.

"Who is that naughty boy?" he thundered.

This was enough to make the other children quake in their boots. Not so with Bob. He rose fearlessly to his tiny legs and bellowed back in mirth provoking exactitude.

"BOB JEFF-ER-SON : "

His brother John had attempted to pull him back into his seat but with no success.

"Oh, It's John's brother Robert."

"Yes, sir". . . answered John with a certain quavering dignity.

"Come here, young man," the teacher roared turning to Bob. And so Bob received his first beating in school. But now of your howling and stamping. Only once did he wriggle aside so that the teacher smote his own shin with his palmetto rod. This so infuriated him that he turned to and beat Bob with little mercy for his diminutiveness. When he had finished Bob faced him with white heat in his eyes from which no tear had fallen and in answer to the teacher's query as to whether he would pinch a little girl again he turned

silently on his heel walked back to his seat but before he sat down
he turned to Lizzie May and slapped her soundly on the cheek. That
of course called for the whipping to be given again. In the midst
of this second trouncing John rose hurriedly from his seat and tak*
ing one step toward the frontof the room thought better of it,
grabbed tensely at the back of his seat for a moment and then with
dignity turned and walked from the room. The teacher was too much
concerned with the grapple for mastery over Bob's spirit to give
much heed to John's departure. Good thing if he did go get his
mother. She'd teach this young scally-wag a thing or two. The boy
was sent to school to learn not to pester the life out of him.

John tore into the kitchen of their home and bellowed out,

"Teacher's killing Bob, Ma."

His mother turned from the stove and said,

"Well, what you crying for - why didn't you bring Bob home."

"Aw couldn't - teacher was beating him again."

They made an interesting pair that mother and son as they hurried a
cross the palmetto stumps and sand-spurs to the school house. She
small and tense looking like a white woman who had stayed out in
the sunlight for many hard days, he small and brown trying to keep
up with her wide, masculine steps. The elas had resuned its quiet,
although the teacher was mulling over in his mind the anger that had
sprouted into an intense hatred for this small boy who had defied
him so fearlessly. He thought too of the relish the children would
have in John's appearance with his mother. He then almost smiled at
the thought of how smoothly the classes would run after Mary Jeff-
erson had given her brat the sound beating for which she was famed
and then said in her hard voise that the teachwr was right. That
would fix him this young tyrant - he was just like his old stubborn
pa. While these thoughts were chasing themselves around in the
teacher's head he was pointing to the alphabet on the blackboard

and the children were droning out each letter. The teacher had made Bob sit on a stool in the front of the room - he would not risk sending him back to his seat again. Bob was making no effort to pronounce the letters behind the teacher. He sat with silent stoicism resisting the temptation to rub the welts on his legs. His tearless eyes stared uninteresting ly at the black board and the cool hatred in his eyes made even the jubilant teacher feel uncomfortable. There was an unsettled score between them and for some reason the teacher felt that the child would be the ultimate victor.

It was upon this scene that the mother and her breathless son entered. The teacher's back was turned at the moment. Mary and her son in the doorway for a moment. Could the teacher have seen them at that moment his smile would have frozen in his heart. They looked for all the world like a wolf and its young, cruel, calculating, relentless. In hard strained accents Mary said clearly and distinctly,

"Bob you come here to me."

There was a general hubub in the room as the children turned in their seats to look at Miss Jefferson. They thought with the proverted glee of childhood that Bob was going to get another beating - one of those famous Jefferson beatings - guess he'd try now. The teacher hearing the voice refrained from turning around immediately as he licked his mental chops over the same thoughts that the children had. Then quietly he turned around. What he saw made a shiver run down his spine. Bob had come up to Mary and she had cast her arm protectingly around his shoulder, John clung to her hand unafraid. All three gave a striking picture of vengeance as they filled to doorway. Mary's small stature was drawn up with a rigid dignity as she said,

"Reverend Turner, this here is a school not a slaughter block. You see Bob's legs - there aint nothin' he coulda done that bad. These here boys of mine wont be back to this school so long as you is teaching it."

The teacher had no time to recover himself and give the proper answer to pour oil on these troubled waters before Mary with her children had left the door and could be seen striding across the stubble toward the road. The children too were silent. They liked to see a fight between the teacher and some irate parent in which the mother or father roared forth what he or she was going to do to the teacher and in which the mother parent was finally mollified by the oily talk of the teach. But their was something about this last fight that they could not understand. Their parents had so little dignity in their anger. There seemed no fitness in the teacher's not having triumphed. After interminable seconds of amazed silence the schoolroom burst into an excited buzz. The teacher seized his palmetto rod and rapped sharply on the desk for order. That was a hard day from then on. Several children had to be beaten before the room was finally cowered before the tottering idol of the teacher's authority.

That night when old John Jefferson came home for his supper he found Robert piled up in the bed with his legs bandaged up with oily-looking rags, his face flushed with fever but his eyes dry and glittering. He asked no questions. He sat down at the kitchen table heavily and bowed his head on his hand and said in a gruff voice

"Old man millers barn shore is going to be a big one - ,ost
near through with it already."

Mary put a steaming dish of black-eyed peas and rice on the table
and a great mound of heavy corn-bread beside it. Then she went to
the back door and yelled,

"You Johnnieeeee - Come on in here to ye supper."

The three of them sat down to their supper and all ate heartily,
silently. As Mary cleared off the table she said," John, my children
aint going to that there school no more. Ole Reverend Turner near

beat the life out'n Bob today fo pinchin' a little gal. Go in yonder
and look at his legs and feel the fever he's got. I don give him
some vinegar water but it seems wuss. Reckon we'll have to call the
doctor".

John Jefferson's hand clinched tightly over the handle of the
knife with which he was shaving & match-stick with which to pick his
teeth and then he rose lubering heavily into the side of the child's
bed. After a few minutes there he turned around and said over his
shoulder in the same hard voice Mary had used in the school-room,

"Aint no nigger goin' to do dat to no young'un of mine
and git away with it, makes no difference what he done."

The die had been cast. Bob could go his erring way but his
family would stand solidly back of him,

John Jefferson's father had been a half breed Indian. Little more than that was known of him. He had died when John was about eight years old and left his only child an immense stretch of land that at that time was a mere wilderness. Great stretches of palmetto and seraggly southern pines covered acre after acre. It was far to the outside of the town of Umadora that nestled by the side of Lake Eusin. For that reason the few inhabitants of Umadora paid little attention to the land..... it was just a wilderness acquired by that old half-breed during the time when Florida was almost as a whole a wilderness and it was quite natural for the Indians to lay claim to a stretch of land this large. It was here that John Madison and his wife and two sons came to live when they left Tampa.

John was thirteen years old by this time, tall and heavily built with the same quite dignity he had shown as a child. Bob was ten years old, a pretty child with round amber colored cheeks and cold steady eyes that were as unafraid as they were on that far distant day when Reverend Turner had whipped him at school. Neither of the boys had been to school since that day. John who had been quick at his lessons in the three years he had been in school had easily learned to read well and write intelligibly and say his multiplication tables with accuracy and apply their principles to simple problems of Arithmetic. Mary Jefferson had seen to it that John taught Bob his letters and figures and that he had learned to read some. Beyond that Bob was entirely untutored. He had, however, a quick aptitude in the doing of things and an uncanny penchant for picking up odd bits of information from this person and that. Both boys had been apprenticed to their father who was a carpenter. Bob toddled to and fro fetching nails and small tools and carrying messages to his mother back at home. John by this time could weild a saw and hammer with exactness. They were builders born.

When they came from Tampa Mary and her three children ( for
there was a little brown baby sister who at two years of age was
just beginning to toddle about had gone to stay at the Dorseys
home until Old John had the land cleared and at least a lean-to
thrown up to cover their heads. The Dorseys were Old John Jefferson's
kin folks. They lived in a great ramblin' two-storied house about
a mile and a half from John's plot of ground. There the family stay-
ed through a brief summer. The Dorsey house was full of children,
great rough boys and little Donald who was a little cream colored
child of three years old. It did not trouble Mary to live in the
house with Old John's sister Maria. Mary bothered no one and in turn
would brook no one's bothering her. There was always an amoured silence
between the two branches of the family when they ate their meals
together. At other times both women were concerned with their chil-
dren and their men were at work. All during this summer John and
Bob worked with their father clearing a small space on his great
stretch of land and throwing up the house that was to be the beginning
of Jefferson's Quarters.

There small bungalow house sat fronting the narrow path that was
to some day be Gulf street. There was a large front room that served
as a bedroom for the mother and father an enormous kitchen that serv-
ed as both dinning room and sitting-room and a room for the boys.
Sarah slept in a rudely built cradle at the foot of her mother and f
father's bed. John said when he had finished these three rooms that
if they had any more children they could build on more rooms. And so
their life began.

There was much to do to keep parents and children busy in the
days to come. Old John Jefferson was a carpenter but there wasn't
much building being done in Lake county at this time. This left much
time for the clearing of his own land, for the drawing of sap from
some of the trees that stood near the house and for the sawing of
others into timber to be sold to M

Mr. Danville, a lumber merchant in the town of Unadora. As for the
other acres and acres of land that stretched round about the Jefferson
cabin......John did not worry about them. He scarecely looked forward
to the time when Umadora would take in so much territory. He little
thought of his house being the sentre of the future colored section
that was to spring up on this very land of his. Certainly Mary would
not have so many children and they in turn so many grandchildren that
the land would be used for their farms and dwellings. The land was
so dry and sandy that he thought nothing of turning it into farm land.
Maybe some day some of the white folks would buy it and turn it into
a turpentine farm. Oh well, at present he need not worry his head
about it. He simply looked over it with a childlike pride of possession.
He could not use it but he took pride in it all the same. Indeed the
property was of such large expanse that he had never been to its actual
limits. He only knew that his ole paapy had given him all the papers
showing his undeniable possession of the land on his death bed. You
see Old Jefferson had been half Indian and half white and so had had
the business sense to see that his claim of the land was correctly re-
gistered. His white blood had made this easy..... how could the town
officials that ole Jefferson would marry a nigger. It was really too
much land for one nigger to own, but now that John Madison owned it
what did it matter since he was a darky that minded his business and
wasn't lazy. Fact is he was the best carpenter in Lake conuty. At the
time the abstracts and deeds to the Jefferson land were given and
registered the town officials could not forsee that the old half-bred
would marry a brown girl - he might have chosen one of the poor whites
living near by his farm. And so the Jefferson family set to to make
their land livable, unmolested by the white people of the town.

Three mobths had scarcely passed on the Jefferson. One day a truck
load of Georgia crackers rumbled over the half discernible road past
the Jefferson cabin. Mary had heard them coming and pulled her arms
unwillingly from the tub of suds over which she was bending, thinking

that it was someone coming to John. Wagons passed that way seldom.
She leaning against the doorway to rest. The wagon kept coming but
strangely enough did not stop when it reached the house - just kept
going. There was only a moment for Mary's steely eyes to settle them-
selves into those of the red-necked man who was driving the team.

As she turned back to her washing she said half audibly:

"Humph that's funny."

As the men drove on one of them said:

"That gal shore don't look like no nigger."

The driver answered:

"Pappy musta been white. She shore did look at us like she knew
something was up."

The fact is something was up. They had driven into town the day
before looking for land. It was not unusual for people to come from
Georgia to Florida in search of cheap land upon which to set up saw
mills or turpentine stills. The boom wasn't even a nebulous dream so
that Florida wilderness was considered unimportant and the orange trade
had not blossomed forth to its present estate so that unused land was
never thought of as he possiblity for groves. These men from Georgia
had sought out the mayor of the town.

"Say, who owns that stretch of land back behind that new cabin
over Tavares way?"

"John Jefferson".

"Where does he live at?"

"Why, he lives in that cabin you're talking about."

"I saw a couple of nigger boys around there this morning when
we was out lookin' round."

"Yeah..... John Jefferson is a nigger."

"Well, I'll declare we was thinking of buying a piece of that
ground but if a nigger owns it we'll just take us a piece."

"Well, that's up to you stranger.... the law aint goin' to have no

thing to do with it. We aint tellin' you not to use the land but
we aint goin' to take no hand in it if anything happens to you.
 Them Jefferson's is hard niggers and they dont bother nobody less
somebody bothers them. He's a good nigger - the best carpenter
round these parts. He growed up her and that land is rightfully his.

So you dont have us to blame if anything happens."

"What you mean 'anything happens' ?"

"Wall, I aint sayin'......maybe nothing."

"Schucks man, you aint figgerin on no nigger tell'n us to move off
his lan' are you? "

"I aint figger'n on nothing. I'm just saying that we aint going
to have nothing to do with it."

"Well, we'll be moving on but there sure is some funny white folks
down this way....act like you're scared of niggers. We folks from
Georgia aint."

With a long spurt of tobacco juice the men from Georgia were off
after a none too friendly exchange of farewells. It was from this
conversation that Mary had seen them driving across their land.

It was about a week later that John Jefferson washing his face
in a basin outside the kitchen door drew up suddenly with a frown
in his forehead. He stood tensely listening for a while then he
bellowed forth:

"MARY"

Mary appeared at the door with a pot of grits in her hand just as
though his loud call had suspended all other thought for her.

"What you want, John, holler'n like that."

"Woman hush ye mouth an listen to that."

"Lissen' to what."

"Hush and listen."

Mary obeyed but with little grace. It was something of a mute agree-
ment between them that the hardness they showed to outsiders should

not be used among themselves. At first his admonition to "hush up" had arroused her indignation but then again on second thought she reasoned that there must be something very important afoot for him to so far forget himself. So she listened intently for a moment. The lazy Florida air had become one with a dull sound as of giant bees with now and again a screeching sound as of some unfamiliar bird calling.

"Sounds like a saw mill to me."

"That's what it sounds like to me, too. Where you think it is."

"There aint no saw mill nowheres closer than over to Miller's and you cant hear that less the wind is blowing this way....an' there aint no wind this mornin." She seemed loath to answer his question directly.

"Then where is it."

"Sounds like over Tavares way."

"That's what I thought but there aint no saw mill for about nine miles over that way."

"No-o-o there aint". She drew the words out with a deliberation that showed she understood what he was thinking.

"How long fore breakfast be ready."

"It's ready now."

There was no talking during breakfast that morning. Both little boys sat stonily at their eating. They too understood that this was no time for talking. They had seen their father stop every once in a while to listen to the sound that had so ominously come between them and the soft Florida air outside the house. Each of them seemed relieved when breakfast was over. The father rose from the table and went into the front room. The three left in the kitchen could hear the sharp sound of his shot gun being examined in the other room. Even baby Sarah seemed to prick her bars at the sound. Presently John returned to the kitchen with two guns in his hands.