by Alice Walker
“Yassur,” he said finally, hypnotized by the old man standing in the sun.
Captain Davis shrugged his gaunt white shoulders and walked away toward his white house with the bright red chimneys.
Pity how you got to look after ’em, he thought, as he wrapped his good hand round his stub.
21
HE WAS LATE and had not told her he would be; still they had not dared to begin supper without him. Daphne was looking at a page full of bathroom fixtures, staring nearly cross-eyed in the light of the kerosene lamp that hung from a cord over the table.
“Is this the kinder toilet we going to have, Ma?” Ornette asked, looking dazzled over Daphne’s sharp elbow at all the sparkling fixtures.
“Look at them shiny toilets!” she whispered urgently, her spread fingers touching four commodes, excitement making her voice rough and burpy. Daphne nudged her playfully with the elbow she kept between the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and her sister.
“Why don’t you get on out the way, girl!” she said, and tried to hog the book, but Ornette clamped a grubby fist on a corner of the book, covering, except for a bright corner, a deep white bathtub filled with greenish blue water like that in the white swimming pool in town.
Mem, her knees spread under the table and her battered hungry face cracking every once in a while in a grin, supervised the turning of the pages.
“Wait a minute, Daphne, I ain’t through looking at these sinks and dishracks!” she said sharply, when Daphne wanted to race on ahead to the warming glowing pictures of multicolored light bulbs and fancy lamps.
“Is us going to have ’lectric lights in our new house?” Ornette asked breathlessly, caressing the slick pages of the catalogue. The yellow glow of the lamp encircled Mem and her homely children in soft kindly light, making them look good to one another. The baby, Ruth, too small to be interested in home furnishings, gurgled and cooed in her box by the stove. In vain did she compete for her mother’s attention.
“I ain’t promising nothing,” Mem said, laughing at Ornette’s big serious eyes and running one rough hand over her head. “I ain’t saying what’s going to be,” she continued, “but the Lord wills we going to have ’em!” She said the last flatly, almost to herself, hearing the back door open and shut and feeling the draft caused by Brownfield s entry and seeing the lamp flicker and almost go out.
“Why ain’t supper on the table?” Brownfield demanded as soon as he walked in.
“We didn’t know when you was coming, Brownfield,” Mem said softly, pulling herself out of her chair so fast she scraped her bony knees. Meekly she hovered over the stove stirring and taking up peas and ham hocks. She placed a heaping plate in front of Brownfield and backed into the stove, getting food for herself and the children. Brownfield saw she had burned herself turning around clumsily, and he smiled as he plowed into his peas, sending them scattering across the table, down his shirt front, and down his throat.
Ornette sat dazed, watching her father pick up his meat with his hands and tear at it, sending the juice flying over the tablecloth Mem was proud to make white. When her father was eating Ornette could not think of him as anything but a hog. She blinked her eyes as he said to her over a mouthful of peas and bread, “What you looking at me for?”
Her eyes quickly riveted to her own plate and she began slowly to eat, trying very hard not to hear the whistling noise her father made as he sucked at the meat and gobbled the peas.
Mem ate with her head down, passing the food up to her husband the moment she thought he might like some more. Daphne sat completely squelched, nervously chewing and beading her dress under the table, as close to her mother’s side as possible. She hallucinated vividly that Brownfield ate so many peas he swoll up and burst. She saw herself helping gleefully to bury him and then watched in horror as the huge twisting and congested pea vines began to come up. Aloud, she began a strange blank-eyed whimper.
“What’s the matter with you, stupid?” Her father’s eyes were on her, intense and hard, like the eyes of a big rat.
I wish he’d get swoll up and die! she thought behind her alerted but sad and empty face. I wish he’d just do that for us so we could bury him!
“What’s this I hear about some new house?” Brownfield asked, finally, chewing noisily and sweating from eating so vigorously. He grunted slyly as if choking back a laugh. “We going to move over on Mr. J. L.’s place.”
He was pleased to feel the weight of their tense and silent response.
“I ain’t,” Mem said. “I ain’t, and these children ain’t.” She stiffened her thin tough neck for his blow. But he only laughed and kept eating, stabbing at stray peas with round wads of cornbread.
“Get me some water,” he grunted to Ornette, who pretended she was fetching slop for a hog.
“Yassur,” she mumbled with her head down, going to the icebox.
“You should have got some ice from the iceman yesterday,” Mem said, smelling the reek from the box.
“You ought to have stayed at home yesterday instead of traipsing off all over creation looking for a mansion to live in. If you acted like a woman with some sense we’d a had ice.” He rolled his eyes to indicate her foolishness and coughed in her face without turning his head.
A shiver of revulsion ran through his wife. “He’s just like a old dog,” she thought, guiltily urging her nervous children to eat their fill.
He had once been a handsome man, slender and tall with narrow, beautiful hands. From trying to see in kerosene lamplight his once clear eyes were now red-veined and yellowed, with a permanent squint. From running after white folks’ cows, he never tended much to his own, when he had any, and he’d developed severe athlete’s foot that caused him to limp when the weather was hot or wet. From working in fields and with cows in all kinds of weather he developed a serious bronchitis aggravated by rashes and allergies.
He was not a healthy man. When he first started working with cows his hands broke out and the skin itched so that he almost scratched it off. It was only after years of working every day milking cows that the itch gave up, and by then his hands were like gray leather on the outside, the inside scaly and softly cracked, too deformed for any work except that done to and for animals. The harder and more unfeeling the elephant-hide skin on his hands became the more often he planted his fists against his wife’s head.
I ain’t never going to marry nobody like him, Daphne swore to herself, watching the big ugly hands that smelled always of cows and sour milk.
“It’s all settled,” said Brownfield, belching loudly and digging under the table between his legs. “We going to move over to Mr. J. L.’s come next Monday and,” he spoke menacingly to Mem, “I don’t want any lip from you!”
“I already told you,” she said, “you ain’t dragging me and these children through no more pigpens. We have put up with mud long enough. I want Daphne to be a young lady where there is other decent folks around, not out here in the sticks on some white man’s property like in slavery times. I want Ornette to have a chance at a decent school. And little baby Ruth,” she said wistfully, “I don’t even want her to know there’s such a thing as outdoor toilets.”
“You better git all that foolishness out your head before I knock it out!”
“I ain’t scared of you,” his wife lied.
“When the time comes, you’ll see what you do, Miss Ugly,” he said, and pinched her tense worn cheek. Even as he did it he knew dull impossible visions of a time when that cheek was warm and smoothly rounded, highlighted and sleek. It was rare now when it curved itself in a smile.
“Me and these children got a right to live in a house where it don’t rain and there’s no holes in the floor,” she said, snatching her cheek away. From long wrestles in the night he knew she despised his hands. He held one gigantic hand in front of her eyes so she could see it and smell it, then rammed it clawingly down her dress front.
If I was a man, she thought, frowning later, scrubbing the dishes, if I was a man
I’d give every man in sight and that I ever met up with a beating, maybe even chop up a few with my knife, they so pig-headed and mean.
22
“’EVENING, BROWN,” she said solemnly the following afternoon, Wednesday.
“’Evening, Ugly,” Brownfield said, crossing the porch and eying her with suspicion. He detected a sad meager smile beginning to work itself across her broad lips. The sun across her hair made him notice how nearly gray it was. She was hanging there in the doorway, her ugly face straining between deep solemnity and sudden merriment. It had been years since he’d seen her look anything near this excited.
“What you turning that idiot look on me for?” he asked, facing her, his hand on the screen door. He had never despised her as much. Was she looking like she was going to be this ugly when I married her? he asked himself, as the face in front of him spread itself out in a funny-shaped pie and Mem laughed soft and deep, as she used to laugh when they were first married and not one day passed without some word of deepest love.
“We got us a new house,” she said, as if she were dropping something precious that would send up delightful bright explosions. “We got us a new house in town!” she whispered joyously.
He looked around to see the children also with wide spreading mouths, looking just like their mother.
“I know we got a new house,” he said patiently, “but it’s going to be over on Mr. J. L.’s place, and nowhere else!”
“Oh, nooo,” she said gaily, still laughing in her rough, unused-to-laughing way. “This house has got sinks and a toilet inside the house and it’s got ’lectric lights and even garden space for flowers and greens. You told me yourself,” she said, laughing harder than ever, “that old man J. L.’s place done fell down on one side and is anyhow all full of hay.” Talking about the house seemed to make her dizzy. She fell into a chair, placing her hands to her eyes as if to clear her head. “Besides,” she said, suddenly sobered, “it don’t cost but twenty dollars a month to rent and you can make enough at a factory in town to pay that much: factory work’ll keep you out of the rain. A school is close by for the children and the neighbors look like nice people. And on top of that …” She started to list assets of the house again. Her eyes lit up, then went dull and tired. She had spent all day looking for the house. “Besides all them things,” she said tonelessly, and resigned as she stood up, “I told the man we’d be there to start living in that house Monday morning. I signed the lease.”
“You signed the lease?” He was furious. He could not, even after she’d tried to teach him, read or write. It had gone in with the courting and out with the marriage. “I ought to chop your goddam fingers off!”
“I’m real sorry about it, Brownfield,” said Mem, whose decision to let him be man of the house for nine years had cost her and him nine years of unrelenting misery. He had never admitted to her that he couldn’t read well enough to sign a lease and she had been content to let him keep that small grain of pride. But now he was old and sick beyond his years and she had grown old and evil, wishing every day he’d just fall down and die. Her generosity had shackled them both.
“Somebody had to sign the lease, Brownfield,” she said gently, looking up into his angry eyes. “I just done got sick and tired of being dragged around from dump to dump, traded off by white folks like I’m a piece of machinery.” She straightened her shoulders and drew her children to her side, the baby, Ruth, in her arms. “You just tell that old white bastard—Stop up Your Ears, Children!—that we can make our own arrangements. We might be poor and black, but we ain’t dumb.” There was a pause. “At least I ain’t,” she said cruelly, burying her face in her baby’s hair.
“I guess you know that up there in town you wouldn’t be able to just go out in the field when you’re hungry and full up a sack with stuff to eat. I hope you know what you doing too, going out there pulling up all the greens and things just when we leaving the place.”
“They sell food in the grocery stores there in town,” said Mem, not slackening her work. “And I planted these greens myself and worked them myself, and I be damn if I’m going to let some sad-headed old cracker that don’t care if I starve scare me out of taking them!”
“If you had any sense you’d know it don’t look right,” said Brownfield, raising himself up on an elbow. “Here we is moving off to Mr. J. L.’s place next Monday and you goes out and strips the fields on Thursday.” He turned his gaze on her callused feet. “My ma always told me not to git myself mixed up with no ugly colored woman that ain’t got no sense of propridy.”
“I reckon if your ma was black, Brownfield,” Mem said, putting a hand on her hip, “she found out a long time ago that you can’t eat none of that.”
“You don’t surely think that I intends to move to town,” Brownfield said slowly, turning his back as if he were about to fall off to sleep. He smiled at the wall. “I’m a man, and I don’t intend working in nobody’s damn factory.”
Daphne and Ornette looked at their parents through a sudden darkening blur. They came and stood in the kitchen door behind their mother, silently watching.
“You hear that, Woman!” Brownfield swung up and placed his feet with a stamp on the floor. “We moving exactly when and where I say we moving. Long as I’m supporting this fucking family we go where I says go.” He bullied his thin wife murderously with his muddy eyes. “I may not be able to read and write but I’m still the man that wears the pants in this outfit!” He towered over her in a rage, his spittle spraying her forehead.
I don’t have to stand here and let this nigger spit in my face, she thought more or less calmly, and for the first time very seriously. Who the hell he think he is, the President or somethin’.
“You do what you want to, Brownfield,” she said, swiftly stepping out of range of his fist. “You do exactly what you want and go precisely where you please. But me and these children going to live in that house I leased. We ain’t living in no more dog patches; we going to have toilets and baths and ’lectric lights like other people!”
“I reckon you think you ain’t going to need somebody to pay for all them toilets and baths and ’lectric lights, you chewed-up-looking bitch!” Brownfield broke past his defensive children and grabbed Mem by the shoulder, spinning her round.
“Let me tell you something, man,” Mem said evenly, though breathing hard, “I have worked hard all my life, first trying to be something and then just trying to be. It’s over for me now, but if you think I won’t work harder than ever before to support these children you ain’t only mean and evil and lazy as the devil, but you’re a fool!”
“Who the hell you think’d hire a snaggle-toothed old plow mule like you?” He was sweating and felt his hands beginning to itch. “You ought to look in the glass sometime,” he said, clenching his fists. “You ain’t just ugly and beat-up looking, you’s old!”
I ain’t thirty, she wanted to say, but instead she said, “I know what I look like and I know how old I am.” It seemed impossible that she could face him and not weep. “And neither one of them knowledges is going to keep me from getting me a job so we can move on in that house Monday morning.”
“I’d like to see you try, Bitch,” he cried on his way out, shoving her and pushing against his daughters. Ruth woke from her nap with a yowl from the noise. Mem dried her and lifted her high along her shoulder.
“And this one is going to grow up in ’lectricity and gas heat!” she said tremblingly, giving her baby small tearful kisses all around her fuzzy head.
23
“HOW’S MEM?” Captain Davis asked pleasantly Friday noon when Brownfield was on his way home for lunch. “How she feel about moving over to Mr. J. L.’s? I told J. L.’s wife about her shortbread. Ummm Um,” he said magnanimously, “she sure can cook!”
“Oh, she fine!” Brownfield said with enthusiasm. “She fine, and she all ready for the big move over to Mr. J. L.’s.” He could not breathe normally and felt black and greasy under the man’s cool gaze.
Ought to pick up a rock and beat it into his old bald head that hell naw me and Mem don’t want to go work for his crazy motherfucking son! What the hell he think, we both of us crazy or somethin’! He smiled broadly at Captain Davis and clasped his hands together behind his back. His knees under his overalls leaned shakily against each other.
“We both right sure it going to work out fine,” he said hopelessly, making his face as pleasant as possible and bland, “just fine.”
“See you do your work good,” the old man said sharply, clearing his throat and turning in the direction of his house. “You and Mem ain’t bad hands,” he said almost as an afterthought. “Glad to be keeping you in the family!”
But this is 1944! Brownfield wanted to scream; instead he said “Yassur,” and waited until Captain Davis was three yards away before he moved. “I ought to stick my feed knife up in him to the gizzard!” he whispered, nervous sweat running down his sides. He walked home slowly, kicking rocks and bushes.
24
“BROWNFIELD, I GOT me a job in town,” Mem said, sitting herself down on the porch railing and dangling her hard skinny legs. Brownfield sat in silence; behind his head he could feel the two children standing there hiding big grins behind their eager apish faces.
“I got me a job in town that pays twelve dollars a week!” Mem spoke softly but with excitement in her voice. She said it like a bird might talk about first flying.
He continued to say nothing, but his hands gripped the bottom of his chair so hard his fingers ached.
“Twelve dollars a week is more than you makes, ain’t it, Brownfield?” asked Mem, who had never been told her husband’s wages. Her ugly mouth crinkled happily at the corners. Slowly she let the crinkling go and watched him silently for a while. Her children came to stand beside her, all of them looking at Brownfield.
“You coming with us or no?” she asked, without much caring in her voice. “If you is,” she went on, “you got to get a job and pull your weight. If you ain’t, we going on ahead anyhow.”