by Alice Walker
Ruth’s mind, reluctantly becoming alert, was unwilling to set her straight about where she was, but it finally came to her in a prickly little rush that she was at her grandfather’s house and that it was his wife, Josie, who slept beside her. She tried to remember having gone to bed here the night before but could not.
From the front of the room she heard the swift flare of flame as her grandfather put kerosene on the fire, and the sound of her stepgrandmother’s snores was an abandoned droning in her ears. Without rustling the covers or making any sounds of being awake, she began to remember.
The night before had been Christmas Eve. Ruth had been going to get a tricycle for Christmas, or she had thought she was. But her mother had kept saying that this whole year had been a very hard one for Mr. Santa Claus, mainly because Mrs. Santa Claus had died (or run away) and Mr. Santa Claus didn’t feel much like making anything, especially not toys; for it would hurt him to see everybody else making merry while he sat in a corner at the North Pole just crying his eyes out. The most it was best to look for, she had said to Ruth and Ornette and Daphne, was oranges and maybe some peppermint sticks.
Brownfield had come in from town that night very drunk. He was raving so badly that Daphne had taken Ruth and Ornette and they had hidden in the chicken house. Ruth remembered how all the chickens began to squawk and how they all smelled so fresh, not good-fresh, but fresh in the way raw meat smells. They had got dodo all over their hands and faces crawling around in the chicken house, but Daphne made them sit down in a rotten-smelling corner while she peeked out at the house through a crack. Once they had begun to giggle loudly because Ornette, who was in the fifth grade, said that a boy at school was always trying to pull her bloomers down during recess. But Daphne slapped them both hard across the face. She was trembling violently. She never cut up like they did because she had some kind of fits once in a while and was always serious. Until she slapped them they had thought the whole thing something of a joke. A rough one, but with some fun in it. It seemed to them that Brownfield was nearly always mean and unruly and drunk.
Usually, though, he didn’t come home but would spend the night fighting in the juke joints in town. Most of the time he would get beaten up by whomever he picked a fight with and then they would take pity on him and force him to let them drive him home, with him shouting, slurring, “I got my goddam pride, I is!” then falling asleep on the way. They would dump him lifeless and foul-smelling or sometimes singing onto the porch. Thump! He would land on the porch, and if it woke them up Ruth and Ornette would laugh at him under the covers.
Daphne felt strongly tensions in the house to which Ruth and Ornette were oblivious. She was always having to look out for them, because Brownfield, even when sober, would beat and kick them. They hated him while he was doing it, but not between times, and spent whole days playing contentedly under the trees behind the house where not even the vaguest consideration of him followed.
Mem tried hard to control him when he beat them. She always said, “Brownfield, you ought not to carry on this a-way. You know you won’t be able to look yourself in the face when you gets old and the children done gone.” To which he would answer with a lick against her head or a kick against her legs.
Only Mem was working. He had been fired from his job with J. L. They rented the house. The rent money came from Mem’s salary. She made seventeen dollars a week, which seemed like a fortune to them, in its lump sum. What she made from six days of work was far more than Brownfield had made as J. L.’s dairyman and cotton farmer. Brownfield hinted to his drinking buddies that he made Mem go out and work for him, but she never left the house in the morning without him trying to pull her back. Sometimes he would be lying in bed watching her get ready for work, and just as it was time for her to step out of the house he would reach out and grab her arm and try to get her to lie down with him.
“Aw, come on, honey,” he would say, “how about laying down here with your pore ol’ man?” His mattering yellowed eyes would be still and deadly.
And Mem would say, furrowing her brow and looking around at the children, who immediately stopped whatever they were doing whenever he put his hands on her (“Why he want her to git in the bed,” they’d ask themselves suspiciously, “can’t he tell it daytime?”), “You ought to turn loose my arm, Brownfield, you know I got to get to work.” She would be looking down at her shoes, which were white, like nurses’ shoes. Then she would pull herself loose and disappear almost running down the road.
And Brownfield would say, “Shit. All these rucking womens can think about is they goddam jobs. One of these days I’m going on over to Jay-pan, where the womens know what they real job is!’ And he would spit at the cold fireplace or throw a shoe at one of them, usually knocking over a jar of leaves or a picture from a magazine which Mem had put up against the bare cracked walls.
The three of them would dress hurriedly, grab the pieces of bread that were in the warmer on the stove, biscuits from last night’s supper, and run out the door to the school.
“You ain’t going to learn nothing useful,” he would say, lounging on the bed with his hands behind his head, “not unless they teaching plowing!” His words had hurt Ruth at first, unbearably hurt her. But one day she surprised him trying to mouth some of the simpler words in her speller. When Brownfield saw her looking at him he threw the book at her. She dodged it and, though feeling somehow sad, she ran laughing out the door. In the first grade she knew envy when she saw it.
The dustiness of the hen house made them sneeze, and their father staggered onto the porch and looked out at the bushes around the house. He cursed, holding his shotgun in the air, and hobbled back into the house.
It became apparent to Ruth and Ornette, finally, that they were not engaged in a game. Fear at last hit them and, seeing the gun in his hand and knowing without being told that he was waiting for their mother, they began to cry.
Daphne, always brooding and nervous so that if you walked into a room behind her and said “Hey!” she was likely to go into convulsions, was holding her stomach. She did this whenever she was upset or confused. She had bad sickness once a month and would cry and cry, and one time, when she was holding her stomach and crying, with sweat popping out like grease bubbles on her face, Brownfield had kicked her right where her hands were. He was trying to sleep, and couldn’t because of the noise, he said.
Mem had taken Daphne to the clinic, but the nurse said she didn’t see anything wrong with her, except that she was nervous. Mem had said that she knew the child was nervous and wanted the nurse to tell her what to do about it, but the nurse was busy talking to another nurse about changing her hair color, and both nurses ignored Mem, who was standing there exasperated, holding a quivering Daphne by the hand. Daphne was particularly frightened of white people; she did not fear them because she found them to be particularly cruel, she had very limited dealings with them; she was afraid, childishly enough, of their ghostliness, the shadowless lightness of their faces, the twinkling vacuity of their marble eyes. She could believe they were pure, free of passion, odor or blood, and that they belonged, as she did not, to a horrible God. Her fear encompassed the world and included darkness, buildings, ancient trees and flowers with animal names. She was afraid of the world; but it was she who protected her sisters; she who stood trembling and barely able to stand underneath her father’s fist, while Ornette and Ruth ran yelling and crying from Brownfield, out through the back yard and into the woods.
Now she told them, with her voice shaking, that she was going to walk to town to try to head Mem off. She said maybe she could keep her from coming home while Brownfield was drunk. They wanted to go with her but she said she could go faster if they stayed behind. They watched her sneak out, ashy and dark, without a sweater. It was hailing lightly. She skittered out and down the highway like a lean brown rabbit. The black night, grayed down with white hailstones, soaked her in against the wet highway.
Left in the hen house Ornette cried silently a
nd Ruth sat shivering with cold, looking out through a crack at the yard. The hen house was to the front of the front yard, a leaning musty building made of slabs and pieced out with scraps of rusty tin. In summer sparse patches of green grass grew in front of the door, but now in winter the whole area was slushy and wet and slippery with ice. The house sat back from the highway about thirty yards; a narrow road filled with sharp gravel turned off the highway, ran risingly up, and stopped abruptly in front of the door. The outside of the house had changed little since they moved in. There was an old weather-beaten bush with purple flowers in summer and nothing but thorns in winter that stood misshapen by the wind on the far side of the yard. The porch sank heavily at one end and rose off its foundation on the other. Around the porch on the end next to the hen house there were bits of old rusty screen with great jagged holes punched in. The steps were two logs that Mem had cut from a stout tree, then halved and pushed into the dirt. The house was made of thin gray boards with no reinforcement on the inside. Mem had lined the inside with cardboard boxes, and when the wind rose and came through the cracks outside it caused the cardboard to strain and throb as if it were alive.
Ruth could see a light on in the room where her parents slept, the room that was also the living room. The house had three rooms altogether, one of these a kitchen. They were better off than some people, for they did not have to share a bedroom with their parents, and though their room was small it was private. That is, you could hear through the walls, but at least you couldn’t see through them. Sometimes the shadow of her father loomed against the window as he looked out into the night. Ruth shrank down in the dust. She and Ornette were not completely knowledgeable about why they were sitting there nearly frozen in the hen house, but they knew they were afraid and too afraid to trust being anywhere else.
Occasionally Mem walked or hitchhiked to and from town, but sometimes the husband of the woman she worked for would drive her in his long blue Chrysler. He was a strange sort of man, according to Mem, for he insisted on paying her seventeen dollars a week, which was five dollars more than the usual rate of pay for domestics. He was from the North and was dying, it was said, from cancer of the mouth. Some said he was a Jew, but they did not know quite what it was that made him different—his eyes didn’t make you look at your feet like the eyes of other men—and they did not very much care. Mem was fond of him because he let her take home magazines and sent books to Daphne and Ornette. She did not like his wife, however, who was a Southern belle and whose father owned a big plantation outside of town. She was all the time mentioning how “cute” colored children were and giving them pennies. Ruth hated her because she called Mem, “Mem, my colored girl.”
Ruth was startled to hear the sound of a car stopping down by the highway. She heard the low murmuring of her mother’s voice—she would be thanking him for the ride— and then she heard her heavy footsteps trudging up the drive. She looked out the crack to see if Daphne was with her but did not hear her mother talking to anyone as she came up, and she thought that in the car her mother and the white man had not seen her on the road. Soon Ruth was able to see the outline of Mem’s figure.
Mem did not quit work until six o’clock and then it was dark. She was carrying several packages, which she held in the crook of both arms, looking down at the ground to secure her footing. Ruth wanted to dash out of the chicken house to her, but she and Ornette sat frozen in their seats. They stared at her as she passed, hardly breathing as the light on the porch clicked on and the long shadow of Brownfield lurched out onto the porch waving his shotgun. Mem looked up at the porch and called a greeting. It was a cheerful greeting, although she sounded very tired, tired and out of breath. Brownfield began to curse and came and stood on the steps until Mem got within the circle of the light. Then he aimed the gun with drunken accuracy right into her face and fired. What Ruth remembered now with nausea and a feeling of cold dying, was Mem lying faceless among a scattering of gravel in a pool of blood, in which were scattered around her head like a halo, a dozen bright yellow oranges that glistened on one side from the light. She and Ornette were there beside her in an instant, not minding their father, who had already turned away, still cursing, into the house. They were there looking at the oranges and at the peppermint sticks and at everything. It occurred to Ruth sadly that there really was no Santa Claus. She was Santa Claus. Mem. And she noticed for the first time, that even though it was the middle of winter, there were large frayed holes in the bottom of her mother’s shoes. On Mem’s right foot the shoe lay almost off and a flat packet of newspaper stuck halfway out. Daphne ran up screaming and threw herself across her mother’s legs. She began to rub Mem’s feet to make them warm.
What happened after that Ruth did not know, and now she did not want to know. She buried her face in the pillow and began to whimper. Why had her mother walked on after she saw the gun? That’s what she couldn’t understand. Could she have run away or not? But Mem had not even slowed her steps as she approached her husband. After her first cheerful, tired greeting she had not even said a word, and her bloody repose had struck them instantly as a grotesque attitude of profound, inevitable rest.
“She sleeping, Ruth, ain’t she?” Ornette had asked, trying to see closed eyes where there were none at all.
“Hyar, hyar,” her grandfather said, coming to her and sitting beside her on the bed, “we don’t want to wake up the old lady, now does us?” She shook her head, sobbing softly with her arms around his neck. He had been drinking already and smelled of corn liquor, but his strong tobacco-and-corn-smell was soothing, and he patted her thoughtfully on the back.
“I might could tell you a right interestin’ story ‘bout old Br’er Fox. But you wouldn’t listen… .” He looked sadly down at her. “Naw, I knows you wouldn’t listen, and ain’t no need of me saying nothing nohow. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Shit, baby gal, we just got troubles on top of troubles, and there ain’t no trouble like losing your ma.” He shook his head. “Lawd, and that’s the truth, and”—looking at his wife—“say, I shore do wish my wife would shet her goddam mouth, her snores about to drive me crazy.”
Ruth looked at him carefully and long. His eyes were moist and his cheeks quivered.
“Don’t look at me,” he said sourly. “I don’t know no more about any of it”—throwing his arm up indicating everything in the world—“then you!” And she was never to hear him seriously claim, even in a boast, that he did.
32
GRANGE WAS A tall, gaunt man with a thick forest of iron-gray hair that whitened shade by shade over the next few years until it was completely white, completely pure, like snow. His mouth was unusually clean-looking, although he chewed tobacco, smoked, used snuff, drank anything strong, and rarely brushed his teeth. Sometimes he would go after them with the end of his nightshirt, but Ruth could never see how that could keep them so sound and white. For the longest time after she saw them grinning at her from a jar on the back porch, bubbling, she thought he just took them all out once in a while for a boiling. She knew her own cavity-weakened baby teeth only came out one at a time.
He was immensely sick at times. There were days of depression when he spoke of doing away with himself. There were times when she could tell he needed her to tell him to pull himself together. He would lie immobile on the floor, dead, and she would be drawn to him to try the magic of her hugs and kisses. She soon learned to overlook the differences between them. They got along well for grandfather and child and trivial complications in their relationship did not develop. Grange never spanked her and would probably have beaten up anyone who tried to do so. Even Josie was not allowed to touch her. Poor Josie, she was never even allowed to scold.
“You don’t know nothing about raising no child,” Grange said when Josie tried to make her do anything. “Look what a mess you did on your own young ’un!” Josie would sulk, but Grange’s was the final word.
At the beginning Ruth was jealous of Josie, for she thought maybe Grange
found her pretty. But Grange also thought his wife was not very nice, and he said so, often and loudly. He said she lived like a cat, stayed away from home too much. Josie was one of those fat yellow women with freckles and light-colored eyes, and most people would have said she was good-looking, handsome, without even looking closely. But Ruth looked closely indeed, and what she saw was a fat yellow woman with sour breath, too much purple lipstick, and a voice that was wheedling and complaining; the voice of a spoiled little fat girl who always wanted to pee after the car got moving.
Ruth sensed that Josie was none too happy to have her with them. “What do I know about plaiting hair on a eight-year-old kid?” Josie had asked Grange one day when Grange wanted her to wash and braid Ruth’s hair. “I notice you cut Lorene’s hair rather than take up time over it,” Grange had replied, “but this my grand girl, you do hers up or I pulls yours off.” Ruth had snickered that day while Josie, fuming, braided her hair. She and Josie were not to be friends, it seemed.
Before she moved in with them, Grange had spent his days fishing, sunning, whittling. After she came he began to grow cotton. Ruth could play in the fields beside him all day during the summer, though she was not allowed to pick the cotton. She wanted to, because it was so soft and light and looked so pretty early in the morning with the dew glistening on it. Why Grange forbade her she could not understand. Josie, who was asked to pick, said she would not if Ruth did not. “You may have talked me into helping you buy this damn farm,” Josie sneered, “but if I ever picks another boll of cotton I hope somebody rush up and have me committed.” With one long sack and his own two hands Grange was left to manage his cotton. Ruth was allowed to ride on the back of the truck when the cotton was taken to the gin. That is, she was allowed to ride on the back of the truck while they were on the dirt road which led to the highway. Each time, as they approached the highway, Grange stopped the truck and either sent her back home or put her inside on the seat next to him.