by Alice Walker
“Bye, Baby! Bye, Honey! Bye, Sweetess!” Brownfield said merrily as they left, switching their cheaply dressed rumps down the road, hoping he’d be interested. He knew women! A swine of a man was more interesting to them and far more intriguing than a gentleman and a prince. Pigs, he thought, liars and hypocrites!
“Say, Josie, you ever sleep with Judge Harry?”
“Naw,” said Josie, with the unquestioning honesty of a woman whose self-respect has ceased to be a matter of moment to anyone, including herself.
“I thought you might have, when you was young. When me and Judge Harry was boys—actually when I were at the lounge with you and Lorene—I used to get him a little bit of pussy now and then. Guess I never ask you. ’Course I don’t mean if he’d slept with you lately. Ain’t nobody that hard up no more. When I was up before him and he give me ten years I spent four of the seven I did as his gardener. I didn’t know nothing ’bout no damn garden, and I told him so, but he just sort of winked at me and said, ‘Boy, you always did know more about gardening than anybody I ever met!’ The old son of a gun, he hadn’t changed a bit! And you would have thought he would, him being the judge and all. But he used to say all the time when folks came to the house and ask him why he have a prisoner hanging round, ‘Brownfield and me grew up together, we understands one ’nother.’ He, he, he.”
Josie said nothing. Her face was puffy and sad. Her dress was ripped along the seams under the arms and her yellow flesh poked out wet and slack. She was very fat and tired.
“You know, I bet Judge Harry’d make Grange give me back my child!” said Brownfield, still chuckling.
Josie laid down her washing and looked at him. “I really would do anything to keep you from doing this dirt to my husband,” she said grimly. Her smallish eyes were red-rimmed and bleak, inexpressibly hopeless and dull. All the impudence of self-determination was gone. She washed clothes for white and black to buy their bread.
“Would you kill me?” asked Brownfield recklessly, as his old lumpy woman began to cry.
Brownfield took out his pocket knife and picked up a branch and began to cut small twigs from it. He began to chuckle.
“Josie, Josie,” he said, “what the matter is with you is that you so easy to take in, you so easy to feel sorry for folks; no matter if they deserves it or no. Just like, supposing you could sneak back into Grange’s house and git back on the good side of him. And suppose he started to plot somethin’ against me.” Brownfield’s chuckle was becoming a laugh. “Do you know what you’d do?” he asked. “You’d feel sorry for me, an’ you’d probably hightail it over here to warn me that somethin’ was afoot! You never growed up, Josie, you never learned to pick one side an’ stay on it. You’re a fat, stupid whore, Josie, and never learned to think with your head instead of your tail.”
“What you going to do?” she asked. “You don’t want Ruth back! I know you don’t!”
Brownfield looked at her with a subtle half-smile. “I don’t know quite yet what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll just keep the waters stirred. You told me once that the ol’ man had a bad heart … well, maybe we ought to sorta worry him now ’n then, a little bit. I bet we could even bring the old sinner to God,” said Brownfield, and doubled over laughing.
Josie leaned over her washing and closed her eyes. She felt she was of no use to anyone. She was reminded of a night several years before when a young sailor had come into the Dew Drop Inn and she had taken him upstairs to her room. She had been especially good to him, and when he spoke of paying she had told him to forget it; she knew he was almost broke and that he was on his way home to a wife and small children. To express his gratitude, the young sailor had wanted to take her again but she refused because she had other customers waiting. When she refused he beat her black and blue and the people downstairs had to come up and pull him off her. Thinking of the incident now, after over twenty years, Josie began to cry afresh for all the love she’d never had. She felt she was somehow the biggest curse of her life and that it was her fate to be an everlasting blunderer into misery.
“If I do take her back,” said Brownfield, “it’ll be just to make Grange sweat. But right now I like having him right where he is. We got him scared, Josie!”
“You can kill him, Brownfield,” said Josie. “You can worry him to a heart attack and he still going to come out on top.”
“How you figure that?” Brownfield asked, scowling.
“’Cause he know which side he on. And it ain’t your side and it ain’t even just his own. He bigger than us, Brownfield. We going to die and go to hell and ain’t nobody going to give a damn one way or the other, ’cause we ain’t made no kind of plan for what happens after we gone. But Grange thinks about the world, and Ruth’s place in it. And when he dies Ruth’s going to know he gone. I got grandchildren too, somewhere,” she said forlornly, “but I don’t know where.”
That night he became furious with Josie when she mumbled what had become for her, the answer to everything: “the white folks is the cause of everything.” Brownfield did not know why, but suddenly this thought repelled him, just as before he had found support for the failure of his life in it. He felt an indescribable worthlessness, a certain ineffectual smallness, a pygmy’s frustration in a world of giants.
“Ah, what do you know?” he sneered. “Nothing. You don’t know the half of what you think you know.” He chuckled with his usual omnipotent disdain. Josie was so dumb. “Did you know, f’instance, that one of my wife’s children was white? That’s right, one of Mem’s children was white. The one that come after Ruth. The last one.” He laughed at the expression on Josie’s face. “Naw,” he said, “don’t go looking sick like that and green around the gills. He wasn’t a real white baby. She never did fool around with white men, though they tried to fool around with her and I accused her of it often enough. She was stupid enough to be faithful to me if it meant fighting her goddam head off. Naw, I mean it was one of them babies without color, any color, with the light eyes without color and the whitish hair without color, and everything without color. Soon’s I seen it, for all that it looked jest like my daddy, I hated it. It were a white Grange though, jest the same as my daddy is a black one.”
“Was it what they calls an albino?” asked Josie, beginning to tremble. “Is that what you mean by without any color?”
“Yeah, I reckon that’s what you’d like to call it. Curious looking, just all over white. Well, you know what I did to my wife when that baby was born? I beat the hell out of her a minute after I seen that baby’s peculiar-looking eyes. She was just a-laying up there moaning, she were too weak to holler, and I beat her so she fell right out the bed. I ’cused her of all kinds of conniving with white mens round and about, and she jest kept saying she didn’t do nothing with no white mens. ‘I swears to God I didn’t!’ she says. And I axed her, ‘How come this baby ain’t got no brown color on him?’ and she says, ‘Lawd knows I don’t know, Brownfield, but he yours!’ and 1 said, ‘Don’t you go lying to me, woman … if he ain’t black he ain’t mine!’ Well, I told her that if that child didn’t darken up real soon she’d better git prepared to get long without him. And she cried and begged and cried and begged, and she started leaving him close to the fire and in the sun when it come out, but that baby stayed like he was, not a ounce of color nowhere on him. An’ one night when that baby was ’bout three months old, and it was in January and there was ice on the ground, I takes ’im up by the arm when he was sleeping, and like putting out the cat I jest set ’im outdoors on the do’steps. Then I turned in and went to sleep. ’Fore I dropped off, Mem set up and said she thought she heard the baby but I told her I had done looked at him and for her to go back to sleep. I kept her so wore out them days that she couldn’t even argue; she was so tired she didn’t fall asleep like folks—she just fell into a coma.
“I never slept so soundly before in my life—and when I woke up it was because of her moaning and carrying on in front of the fire. She was jest rubbing that baby w
hat wasn’t no more then than a block of ice. Dark as he’d ever been though, sorta blue looking.
“Now, ’cording to you I done that ’cause I thought that baby was by a white man. But I knowed the whole time that he wasn’t. For one thing, although it were white, it looked jest like me—or rather like my daddy, as it had a right to since it was a grandson. It looked like the two of us. Ugly. For another thing, I had talked to old Dr. Taylor in town about it, and he said these things happen. Then, when the baby’s hair begin to grow it was stone nappy. I knowed he was my child all right. Mem knowed I would have broke her neck if she so much as let a white man look at her. If some white man had knocked her in the head and raped her she still would have caught hell from me! She knowed the score. You should have seen her when she was young and pretty and turning heads, putting on veils and acting like a cripple or something when white mens was around. They used to ax me how come I was to marry something so ugly, but they jest didn’t know what all your sister’s child had under all them veils!”
Oddly, it was the first time Josie felt genuine pity for Mem. She stared at Brownfield with horror, seeing for the first time that he was, as a human being, completely destroyed. She was shocked that what he was telling her went beyond the meanness to which, by now, she was thoroughly accustomed, into insanity, the merest hint of which always unnerved her.
“I know what you think,” he said to Josie. “You sitting there saying to yourself, he crazy! That’s why all this is. But I ain’t crazy, no more’n anybody else. All it was was that I jest didn’t feel like trying to like nobody else. I jest didn’t feel like going on over my own baby, who didn’t have a chance in the world whether I went on over him or no. It too much to ask a man to lie and say he love what he don’t want. I had got sick of keeping up the strain.”
“If you had kept up the strain,” said Josie, with a rare combination of logic and courage, “you’d a had a son now.”
“Little white bastard!” said Brownfield, waving her away.
Oh, no. He wouldn’t repent. None of what he had done mattered any more. It was over. What had to happen happened: the beautiful faded, the pretty became ugly, the sweetness soured. He had never believed it could turn out any other way. But what had she thought, his quiet wife, when he proved to be more cruel to her than any white man, or twenty? She was not a fighter, and rage had horrified her. Her one act of violence against him, which she must have considered an act of survival, brought her lower than before. Instead of rage she had had an inner sovereignty, a core of self, a rock, which, alas, her husband had not had. She had possessed an embedded strength that Brownfield could not match. He had been, at the best times, scornful of it, and at the worst, jealous.
“It’s done, doner he muttered to himself as he drifted near sleep. But now Ruth’s face floated before him and her eyes glared accusingly at him. Ruth, with her thin legs and startled eyes, always running from him, her mind behind the eyes always in flight. She still ran toward something. This annoyed Brownfield. What did she see in the world that made her even wish to grow up? he wondered. He had to make her see that there was nothing, nothing, no matter what Grange promised her. He had seen the nothingness himself. And if she hated him more than ever, what did it matter? That was what the real world was all about.
But what about love? he asked himself, and a great hollow emptiness answered.
“It’s a lie!” he cried into the dark, causing Josie to jump in her sleep. For Brownfield felt he had loved. But, as he lay thrashing about, knowing the rigidity of his belief in misery, knowing he could never renew or change himself, for this changelessness was now all he had, he could not clarify what was the duty of love; whether to prepare for the best of life, or for the worst. Instinctively, with his own life as example, he had denied the possibility of a better life for his children. He had enslaved his own family, given them weakness when they needed strength, made them powerless before any enemy that stood beyond him. Now when they thought of “the enemy,” their own father would straddle their vision.
Brownfield ground his teeth under the pressure of his error, though too much thought about it would make it impossible to sleep. It occurred to him, as an irrelevancy, that Ruth might never believe “conditions” caused his indifference to her. He wished, momentarily, that he could call out to someone, perhaps to Mem, and say he was sorry. But what could he give as proof of his regret? He must continue hard, as he had begun. He would take his daughter from her grandfather, not because he wanted her, but because he didn’t want Grange to have her. He gave no thought whatsoever of how he might attempt, once he had Ruth under his roof, to treat her kindly.
Part XI
47
THE MONTHS THEY waited to see what Brownfield planned to do, the world moved in on Ruth. She found it not nearly so lovely as she had occasionally dreamed, nor quite as unbearable as she had been prepared to accept. She found it a deeply fascinating study, a subject for enthusiasm, a moving school. It all happened with the news and the Huntley-Brinkley Report. It was her last year in school and each afternoon she hurried home to watch the news on television. She became almost fond of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, especially David Brinkley, who was younger than Chet and whose mouth curved up in a pleasingly sardonic way. The only black faces she saw on TV were those in the news. Every day Chet and David discussed the Civil Rights movement and talked of integration in schools, restaurants and picture shows. Integration appealed to Ruth in a shivery, fearful kind of way. Her grandfather thought it negligible. Ruth often wondered if she would have liked the newscasters as much were they not discussing black people. She thought not; for though she had listened to them before, only now did they become real to her; she could look at David’s smirk-smile and often cheer the bit of news that caused it. Each day there were pictures of students marching, singing, praying, led by each other and by Dr. Martin Luther King. She accepted the students and the doctor as her heroes, and each night she and Grange discussed them.
“Do you think he’s got something going?” she asked Grange one night, pointing to Dr. King’s haggard, oriental eyes which looked out impassively and without depth from the TV screen.
“I’d feel better about ’im if I thought he could be the President some day,” Grange said. “Knowing he ain’t never going to be somehow take the sweet out of watching him. He a man, though,” he said. “’Course,” he had continued, “I believe I would handle myself different, if I was him. Then again, I ain’t handling myself at all, setting here on my dusty, so I ain’t the one to talk. The thing about him that stands in my mind is that even with them crackers spitting all over him, he gentle with his wife and childrens.”
“Why do they have to sing like that?” she asked one night, moved to tears without realizing it.
“For the same reason folks whistle in a graveyard,” Grange answered.
“They don’t believe what you do,” she said another evening, seeing black hands clasp white hands, marching solemnly down an Atlanta street. “They think they can change those crackers’ hearts.”
“I’m glad,” said Grange. “On the other hand, they might be trying to learn in two weeks what it took me twenty years; that singing and praying won’t do it. If that is the case I’m still glad. No need for them to stay all murked up in fog the way I was an’ the way your daddy is yit.” He leaned closer to the TV, his face contorted. “Look at them ugly cracker faces,” he said. “What kind of ‘heart’ is anybody going to rouse from behind them faces? The thing done gone on too long; them folks you see right there before you now, chasing that nigger down the street, they is wearing what heart they got on they sleeves. Naw, better than that. They is wearing they tiny hearts on they faces. Which is why they faces is so ugly. If any amount of singing and praying can git the meanness out of them eyes you let me know ‘bout it. Crackers been singing and praying for years, they been hearing darkies singing and praying for years, an’ it ain’t helped ’em. They set round grinning at theyselves, floodin’ the
market with electric can openers! Ugh!”
“I think I believe like the students,” Ruth declared. “Ain’t nothing wrong with trying to change crackers.”
“What I want is somebody to change folks like your daddy, and somebody to thaw the numbness in me.” He looked at his granddaughter and smiled. “Course,” he said, “you done thawed me some.”
One evening, as she was watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report, Grange came home looking sick.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ruth asked, looking up. She thought their time had come, that Brownfield had done his worst.
Grange didn’t answer. He turned his chair from the TV and toward the fireplace. He took out his pipe and knife and scraped out the pipe bowl. Then he filled the pipe with fresh tobacco. Ruth turned off the television and sat beside him. Soon the two of them were engulfed in thick, aromatic smoke.