She wanted very much to hug Rossel. But how could she hug somebody so cold, so indifferent, so unfeelingly beautiful, such a grim girl? Instead Ruth burst into tears, and it was Rossel who hugged her.
"Don't cry over it," Rossel said, her voice strange and thin and bleak. "Maybe someday we'll both understand why marrying him is supposed to be so much better." For a moment they clung together and then Rossel was gone, her face calm, set, resolute; the face, Ruth thought, of a doll. A face without anything but confidence in its own empty perfection.
It was a long time before she saw Rossel again, a whole year. It was at the funeral of Rossel s father, who had frozen to death in the cemetery on top of his wife's grave slab. Rossel was richly robed in black and looked like a stricken queen. She had grown older in that year, and, apparently, more devoted to her husband, for she leaned within the protection of his arms with the abandoned dependency of a child. And Walt, through his perpetually dull and military exterior, seemed to beam with pride and accomplishment.
43
ONE DAY THE question of what her future was to be loomed very large. It was the day her body decided it was ready for a future and she knew she was not. She felt tightened and compressed by panic. Grange had bought her napkins, a belt, and a lovely talc that smelled like a warm rose. He was excited and troubled over what he would say to her about such an unplanned for, though not unexpected, development. However, she was too well read to make him struggle with her enlightenment. What scared her was that she felt her woman's body made her defenseless. She felt it could now be had and made to conceive something she didn't want, against her will, and her mind could do nothing to stop it. She was deathly afraid of being, as she put it, "had," as young girls were every day, and trapped in a condition that could only worsen. She was not yet at a stage where the prospect of a man and marriage could be contemplated with equanimity.
"What am I going to do when I get grown?" she asked her grandfather with some alarm.
"What you mean? We got this farm. We can stay here till kingdom come."
She looked at Grange's patch of cotton that was so lovely under the moon. There was a garden and chickens and pigs. The life would be perfect for a recluse.
"I'm not going to be a hermit," she said. "I want to get away from here someday. Meaning no offense to your farm, of course. You know, I think maybe I'll go North, like you did; I want to see New York, 125th Street, all those nightclubs and people standing around cussin' in public."
"I won't let you," said Grange sternly.
"I wouldn't try to go while you were here," she said, as if he should be ashamed to imagine such a thing.
"I still don't want you to go up there, it's cold as a witch's titty, and nasty, and the people speak to you funny."
"You told me all that. But what would I do down here? I could take over Sister Madelaine's job, except she's still on it, old as she is. As a matter of fact, I suspect that's what you'd want me to do, turn myself into a fortuneteller and scare the hell out of unbelieving white ladies. But I don't think I'm cut out for digging up roots and nailing feces into trees! Ugh! Maybe I could teach down the road with Mrs. Grayson; two dumdums together. But I wouldn't have the nerve to stand in front of those children knowing they can't hear a word I'm saying. Besides, I despise Mrs. Grayson too much to subject her to the pleasure of my company."
"You smarter than her," said Grange. "You read enough stuff to know what to teach anybody."
"Being smarter than Mrs. Grayson would be my greatest liability. She'd come up behind me one day and push me in the well. Mean old bitch!"
"You don't need to get excited. She got her orders from me not to get rough with you no more. I told her I'd wring her neck till her eyes wall. Her husband's too."
Ruth sighed. "What is left!" She ran into her room and brought out the newspaper. Turning to the want ads she read: " 'Wanted: Beautiful Southern Belle type with charming, winning manner for job as receptionist in law firm.'" There was only one law firm in town and it was white. "My charm probably wouldn't be up to it anyway," muttered Ruth, continuing to read: " 'Wanted: WHITE LADIES--to fill vacancies in sewing plant. New plant recently revitalized and under new management needs seamstresses to make overalls. Will train.' Blah," she said. In the colored section of the want ads there was only one opening for "middle-aged colored woman to do light domestic work evenings with some light ironing and cooking. $6.00 per week." Ruth put down the paper and looked at Grange.
"You know I ain't going to be nobody's cook, don't you?"
"You ain't," he agreed.
"Well, what do you suggest I do when I'm grown? There wasn't but one Walt Terrell," she added bitterly, "and Rossel got him!"
"You won't sell yourself; don't even get that thought in your head. Maybe something'll turn up. Things change," he said, without much conviction. "Presidents change--we get some that help us sometime. Roosevelt, you don't remember him, but he once had Booker T. Washington to lunch in the White House. The rest of us was starving, but it seemed to help us some then. And today there's Eisenhower, as wishy-washy a lookin' rattler as ever was, but the court been tellin' everybody that the black schools ain't up to the white 'n they say he's back of it."
"Meantime our school is hanging together by sheer inadequacy."
"Don't interrup' me. What I know, and I reckon the most I know is that people change. That is the main reason not to give up on them. Why, if you had knowed me when I was a young blade, drinking and fighting and beating your grandma, you'd a give up on me. Sure, you would. You ain't long on patience. But, now, you didn't give up (mainly because you wa'n't born or thought of then) and here you see me tamed and fairly civilized, taking my drinks for stomach's sake, like a gentleman, toiling in the fields for just one gal, and bringing home all my money. And don't you forget, there have always been black folks fighting for better. Maybe their ranks will swell till they include everybody. I don't know how it can be done--I never seen such a sorry passel of niggers as in your daddy's generation--but with the right change and some kind of leader it can be.
"There was a time I didn't own my life and then there was a time I didn't care if I lost it when I had it, long as I took a dozen or so white folks with me. I'm still inclined to believe that that was my finest hour. But then I came back here, sick of feeling that way and seeing all the rest of our folks standing around praying. And the Lord or something dropped you in my lap. A voice said to me you stop that cuttin' up, Nig, here is a reason to get yourself together and hold on.
"When I die this farm ain't going to be nobody's but yours. I done paid for it with every trick I had. The fence we put up around it will enclose freedom you can be sure of, long as you ain't scared of holding the gun. The gun is important. For I don't know that love works on everybody. A little love, a little buckshot, that's how I'd say handle yourself.
"Anyway, you might as well know I don't care much for nobody except you. I 'member when I was a churchgoer proper, I tried to feel something real big, something that would make me love the whole world. But I just couldn't come at that feeling no kind of way. Your grandma and me was fighting a heap then over one thing and another; and I think we scrappled so much because she could love all sorts of folks she didn't have no business.
"The white folks hated me and I hated myself until I started hating them in return and loving myself. Then I tried just loving me, and then you, and ignoring them much as I could. You're special to me because you're a part of me; a part of me I didn't even used to want. I want you to go on a long time, have a heap of children. Let them know what you made me see, that it ain't no use in seeing at all, if you don't see straight!."
"And all from behind a fence?" Ruth looked doubtful. "I'd be bored stiff waiting for black folks to rise up so I could join them. Since I'm already ready to rise up and they ain't, it seems to me I should rise up first and let them follow me."
"What that takes I'm afraid you ain't ready yet to give. How many black folks would you say you really know-
-I mean that would rise without squawking?" he asked. "And how many white?"
She counted the black ones on three fingers, only one an old warrior, the white ones not at all.
44
AFTER JOSIE LEFT, the house gradually took on the charm of the cabin, the charm of peace, of quiet and of the pursuit of interesting contentment thoroughly enjoyed. Together Grange and Ruth experimented with the beautiful in rugs, curtains, pictures and pillow covers. Ruth's room was a veritable sun of brightness and yellow and white. For her bed she made a quilt of yellow-and-white cotton and her curtains were white-dotted Swiss which she could just see through. Her desk, facing the woods, was littered with books. She liked mythology, the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy, any romantic writer. If she had been shipwrecked on a deserted island she would have taken Jane Eyre, a pocket thesaurus she had, all her books about Africa. She would have taken her maps of the continents, everything she owned by Charles Dickens, plenty of paper and a stock of pencils. She would have left on her desk her red-covered Bible, which Grange had lifted from a cart that stood outside a motel room, her big dictionary, which he got for her she knew not how, and which would have been too heavy, and her copy of Miss Vanderbilt's Etiquette, which she ignored as much as she could without making her grandfather feel like a fool for getting it for her. Of her clothes she would have taken her two pairs of dungarees and plaid shirts, her winter boots, her red woolen jacket and probably one dress. She would have taken her locket picture of Mem, which had been a present from Grange on her fourteenth birthday. In the picture Mem was a harried hopeful young wife with one child. She looked out of the little locket with calm, disbelieving eyes.
Grange's room was all in brown and red and blue and black. His room was a part of him and was filled with his smell, of tobacco and hay and, lightly, orange wine. When he was seated by the fire, his brown brogans rested against the brown stones of his fireplace, and his red flannel underwear, as it hung over his rocker, complemented the red among the blue in the quilt on his bed. During three-fourths of the year there were flowers in every room of the house, in the two bedrooms as well as the kitchen, and of course in the "front" room, where their few visitors were allowed to sit themselves down and partake of a sip of iris root or sassafras tea.
"What is this stuff?" the boldest of their guests would ask, recalling perhaps some uncharitable comment made by himself or others regarding the oddness of his hosts.
"This is the tea of survival," Ruth would say, with a wink at her grandfather, who sat silently smoking, ignoring the guest except to comment, "She give it to you, you better drink it," and seeming entirely comfortable before ill-at-ease company who invariably visited out of curiosity.
"How you know?" they sometimes asked defensively.
"I told her," would come the indifferent assertion from
Grange, with whom no one ever gathered up the nerve to argue.
The older Grange got the more serene and flatly sure of his mission he became. His one duty in the world was to prepare Ruth for some great and herculean task, some magnificent and deadly struggle, some harsh and foreboding reality. Nothing moved him to repent of his independent method of raising her. In vain did deacons of the church admonish him for teaching Ruth to avoid the caresses of pious sisters and to shun the embraces of baptizing brothers. In vain did preachers and missionaries warn him of the heathenism of her young soul. It was commonly supposed that Ruth was even taught to bite the hand that would spiritually feed her, and this supposition was correct.
"Before you let 'em baptize you in they muddy creeks an' waterholes, after I'm gone, you kick the legs out from under 'em and leave 'em drown." To that purpose he hired a poor white lad to teach her to swim.
"The shackles of the slave have one end tied to every rock and bush," he said to her. "Before you let some angel-distracted deacon put his mitts on you, you git you a good grip on his evangelical ear and you stretch it till his nose slides."
And if the various congregations believed the spirit of the devil had already entered young Ruth Copeland, her ready adoption of Grange's teachings more than proved their point. They noted with shock that her greatest delight, along with her grandfather, when they came to church, was to giggle in serious places.
Part X
45
SEVERAL TIMES AFTER Josie began living with Brownfield, Ruth saw them loitering in the woods behind the school. Her classmates ran from her father, some of them jeered. Josie, whitely powdered and haphazardly wigged, would stand beside him supporting his drunken weight with a patient, long-suffering look that totally mystified Ruth. It was Grange's custom, particularly on overcast days, to pick her up at the school well, and if not there at the small wooden powerhouse on the edge of the playground. One day they faced a confrontation with Brownfield and Josie. On that day they had indeed strolled along the edge of the school grounds like lovers, Grange carefully tucking her scarf around her neck every few steps. They were murmuring and giggling about the black janitor at the white library in town, whom Grange managed to get drunk each time he went to the library to steal books for her. They did not see Brownfield and Josie until they almost bumped into them.
"Well, if it ain't the Gold Dust Twins," said Josie, insolently, eying their closely knit fingers. For the first time Ruth was chilled by the naked jealousy she read in her stepgrandmother's eyes.
"Yeah," said Brownfield, who kept a proprietary hand on his stepmother's shoulder, "goddam Gold Dust Twins. Out just taking the goddam air!" He rubbed the palm of one hand boldly down the front of his pants.
Ruth was startled and became hysterically baffled, pressing herself into her grandfather's side and trying to walk past without seeing them. For although she had glimpsed her father's profile from her classroom window she had been able to convince herself that he was not real, that he was at most a shadow from a very painful past and a shadow that could never gain flesh and speak to her. The drunken tones of his voice brought back a terror she had tried hard to forget.
"Well, well," said Grange. "My wife and my son." His eyes when Ruth looked up at him were a kind of flinty brown, almost black, and his skin seemed to have aged and become ashen and papery. It was one of the few times she thought of him as being old, one of the few times she thought it might be possible after all for him to declare he'd had enough of everything and die. That day he was wearing his overalls and brogans but with his old Sunday gabardine overcoat. It was very soft against her face, and it surprised her that her face reached all the way to his shoulder. "What do you want?" he asked the leering pair, a slight quaver in his voice.
"I want my goddam daughter!" said Brownfield. "She don't belong to you. She belong to me and I want her."
"Yes," said Josie, pushing out her still incredible bosom, "she's his child and he wants her. It ain't decent for just a old man like you to try to take care of a little girl." She turned to Brownfield for support, but he, while staring at Ruth, seemed to lapse into a trance. His daughter shivered under his dull incredulous stare. She had never considered that as a big girl she might look more than a little like her mother.
"I don't know why they give you only seven years," her grandfather said in a firm voice, drawing himself up. "They ought to have kept you in the pen."
"But she are his child!" said Josie, trying to laugh but seeming frantically close to tears.
"Shet up," Grange said, without looking at her. "I guess you intend to be a good mother to her?"
"Well, no," said Josie, nervously reaching out to touch her husband and then succumbing to coyness. "If she go back to her daddy I'll come back to you." This jerked Brownfield out of his trance and he gave her a dangerous smirk. Ruth thought she saw Josie wince as if preparing to move away from a blow. That tremor was too much for her and Ruth began to cry. She threw herself into her grandfather's arms, trembling uncontrollably.
"I don't want you back, you distant strumpet, let the evil that men do go before them, which is what happened in your case. I wish I never had l
aid eyes on you." Then he turned fiery eyes on his son.
"I took this child when you had made her an orphan. You killed her ma. Where was you all these years when she needed a daddy? Nowhere to be found! You wasn't to be found even when you lived under the same roof with her, except in a whiskey bottle. And then you was in the pen for killing the only decent thing you ever had. I don't know how you prevailed on the white folks to let you out so quick, for you ain't repented; although we know they don't give a damn nohow as long as all we kill is another nigger! You made a bargain," he said, turning to Josie, who had begun to weep, streaking her face powder, "you stick to it. If you thought you could humble me by running off with my son you was wrong. You're two of a kind; wallow in the mud together!"
"Don't be so hard, Grange," wept Josie. "Don't be so hard!"
"He thinks I ought not have run out on him a long time ago," said Grange, ignoring Josie, "and he's right. But I tried to make up and he wouldn't let me. And he run out on this child. Now he won't get her back, I don't care what he do. He won t!
"Grange, I tried--" Josie began, but Brownfield cut her off.
"Don't beg for nothing from him, he so damn righteous he ain't going to hear you. But you was no daddy to me!" he said to Grange, "and I ain't going to let you keep my child to make up for it!"
"You no-good rascal!" said Grange, pushing Ruth away from him, lifting his fists. "You say one more word--"
"You wasn't no daddy to me!" Brownfield shouted, but made no move to get nearer his father's fists.
"Grange," said Josie, "your son love you. He done told me all about how it was. You walked out on him and then look like everywhere he turn the white folks was just pushing him down in the mud. You know how it is," she pleaded. "They just made him do things when he didn't mean them."
For a moment Grange was too choked with disgust to speak. When he did, he turned to Ruth. "Your daddy's done taught me something I didn't know about blame and guilt," he said. "You see, I figured he could blame a good part of his life on me; I didn't offer him no directions and, he thought, no love. But when he became a man himself, with his own opportunity to righten the wrong I done him by being good to his own children, he had a chance to become a real man, a daddy in his own right. That was the time he should of just forgot about what I done to him--and to his ma. But he messed up with his children, his wife and his home, and never yet blamed hisself. And never blaming hisself done made him weak. He no longer have to think beyond me and the white folks to get to the root of all his problems. Damn, if thinking like that ain't made noodles out of his brains."