by Alice Walker
“You ’member my old gambling buddy, Fred Hill?” Grange spat into the fireplace. “They found ’im yestiddy face down in a ditch.”
“Too drunk to move?” asked Ruth.
“Naw, not no more drunk, he wasn’t. Half his head was blowed off.”
“What?”
“From here to here,” said Grange, running his finger from ear to chin.
“Well, who done it?”
“Them as has the last word say he done it hisself.”
Ruth was stunned.
“Course, wasn’t no gun nowhere near the ditch,” said Grange.
“How did he manage to shoot half his head off without a gun?” she asked.
“A neat nigger trick,” said Grange.
He stared into the fireplace for ten minutes without speaking. “I once seed a woman,” he said, “had been strung up, slit open and burned just about up.” He thought for five more minutes, Ruth waiting impatiently for him to speak. “They said she was one of them people bent on suicide. Kill herself three ways.” He smoked, pulling on his pipe as if to jerk it from between his teeth. “Do you know, they writ it up in the paper just that way. Said she was one nigger with determination!”
Ruth sat thinking about Fred Hill. She’d heard about the “suicide” case before. Fred Hill was a short, pudgy, tan-skinned man with boyish bowlegs; when he walked he seemed to be swinging. His head was very round and he had had no neck. She had watched him play poker with Grange around the kitchen table. He had taught her how to shoot marbles when she was nine. Now he was dead.
“What was you watching on TV?” asked Grange.
“News.”
“Fred Hill’s grandson is making news. Tried to get into one of them cracker schools.”
“And did he make it?”
Grange leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling, his chair tilted back on two legs. “Naw,” he said, “he didn’t make it. How you going to study in a cracker school with half your granddaddy’s head missin’?”
“Well,” said Ruth, attempting to see a bright side, “you don’t need your granddaddy’s head to study. You just need your own.”
“Everything going to prove you wrong, girl,” he said, getting up and walking heavily out into the dark.
And then it was spring and school was over and the student marchers were in Baker County. Ruth saw a long line of them parading up and down the streets when she went into town. Their signs were strange and striking, I AM AN AMERICAN TOO! said one. THIS IS MY COUNTRY TOO! said another. I WANT FREEDOM TOO! said still another. Although she had seen marchers before on television she was amazed to see real blacks and whites marching together in her home town! There were trim white girls in jeans and sneakers with clean flowered blouses marching next to intense black girls in high heels and somber Sunday dresses. There were dozens of young black and white male marchers; it looked peculiar to Ruth to see them whispering confidences to one another, curious that she could detect no sign of mutual disgust. “Are they for real?” she wondered. She watched wide-eyed, her glances moving from the marchers to the residents of Baker County. Baker County had been so surprised by the students’ arrival it had not done anything yet. Even the sheriff stood on a street corner and stared with his mouth slightly open. His deputies hung around him, so closely it looked as if they needed protection, or at best, minute instructions on how to handle the demonstrators. Local blacks and whites stood under the trees on the courthouse lawn and gawked at the white girls. Some of the men sneered and called them dirty names. Of all the people marching the white girls got the most abuse. One of them carried a sign that said BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER and each time she passed a group of whites they spat at her and hissed “I’ll bet!” One of them added, aiming a Coke bottle at her, “You nigger-fuckin’ whore!” Ruth passed close beside this girl and noticed her right ear, the one next to the bystanders, was bleeding, and that she marched with stiff wooden steps as if to a chilling inner music. Tears slipped quietly and endlessly down her pale cheeks and the sign in her hand had begun to waver.
As Ruth was leaving town someone pushed a piece of paper into her hands. At the top of the page she saw a white man and woman chained to a rock. The rock was called “racism”; underneath was written “You Will Not Be Free Until We Are Free.” She looked back to see who had given it to her and saw a tall, thin young man in overalls like her grandfather’s. He was trying to hand the leaflet to whites who passed, but none took it. She looked back a couple of times and one of the times he was watching her. She felt her heart give a kind of bump against her ribs, such as she’d never felt before. The young man continued handing out leaflets, though only black people took them. The sun on his skin made him all aglow in different shadings of brown, like autumn leaves late falling from the tree.
On her way home she drove the car with her left hand and with her right she touched the paper, then her face and hair, then the paper again, and its message meant less to her than the young man who’d given it to her. Drawing close to their white neighbor’s mailbox, she stuffed the leaflet in, then drove pensively onto her grandfather’s farm.
Three days later Ruth and Grange were sitting on the front porch. They had just learned that Brownfield, in order to get Ruth, had decided to take them to court. To calm their rather severe case of jitters, Ruth was eating watermelon compulsively and reading Bulfinch’s Mythology, and Grange was just as compulsively polishing shoes. When they saw the dust in the distance Grange went inside and got his shotgun and leaned it against the banister in front of him, then sat down and continued polishing shoes. The car turned into the yard, made a half-circle around the trees and came to a stop. It was a dark blue car, covered with layers of red dust, as if it had traveled hundreds of miles over Georgia’s back roads. The thin young man from town got out on the driver’s side. A white girl and boy were in the back seat and a black girl got out of the front seat on the side of the car near the porch. Ruth looked the black girl up and down almost hostilely. It surprised her that she felt a small tug of jealousy. After all, she knew nothing about the young man who’d given her the leaflet and who now stood before her—not even his name.
“So this is where you live!” the young man said, looking up at her from the yard. He was beginning to grow a beard and it made his shapely lips very rosy and well-defined.
Grange looked over at Ruth. She was standing at the edge of the porch with one arm around a roof support. Her eyes were shining! He could almost feel the hot current that flowed through her, making her soft young body taut and electric with waiting. He would not have admitted that he was slightly shocked, but he was.
“This is where I live,” Ruth answered the young man “Anybody could have told you!” She was laughing a shy but bubbly delighted laugh; forgotten completely was the fact that nobody ever visited the farm without her grandfather’s permission.
“Where you know him from?” asked Grange, who at that moment decided he didn’t like young men with beards.
The young man made long strides up the steps and across the porch to Grange. “How do you do, Mr. Copeland,” he said, smiling. He was thinking how much Grange reminded him of Bayard Rustin, except Grange was more leggy and stuck his thumb in his belt like a cowboy. He held out his hand for Grange to shake. Grange scowled up at his smile and looked at his granddaughter, whose eyes had never left the young man, and whose eyes also roamed up and down the young man’s body. She was a Copeland, he thought. Sighing and putting down his polishing cloth he shook hands with the young man. His handshake was warm and firm and he was taller than Grange. Grange felt old and gray and as if his hand couldn’t squeeze hard.
“How you?” he mumbled. Something about the young man seemed familiar to him. He looked up at him quickly. “Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?” he asked, cocking his head to one side. The young man’s smile turned into a chuckle.
“I was the little joker used to trail along behind Sister Madelaine,” he said. He had spent much of his childhood as
hamed that his mother was a fortuneteller, but by the time he left Morehouse and joined the Movement he was as proud of how she earned her living as his best friend was that his father was a surgeon. His mother had faced life with a certain inventiveness, he thought, and for this he greatly respected her.
“Yass …” said Grange, thawing, “I can see the resemblance.” He had no remembrance of the young man as a child, but he had known and admired his mother for years. He hadn’t ever believed in her magic powers much though.
The black girl had come and stood beside the young man. The two whites had not come closer than the steps.
“My name is Quincy,” the young man said, “and this is my wife, Helen.”
Grange shook the young woman’s hand, then looked over her head at Ruth. Ruth’s arms had dropped to her sides and the corners of her mouth sagged. Not only was Helen the young man’s wife, but she was pregnant. Ruth saw her grandfather’s look and shrugged her shoulders. She pushed a chair behind Helen and mumbled for her to sit down. Quincy had settled himself on the banister.
“Who them?” asked Grange, pointing with his chin. “Is they white, or do they just look white?” His whisper could be heard for yards.
“This is Bill and this is Carol,” said Helen. “They’re working with us.” Bill and Carol nodded, but made no move to climb the steps. Bill was dark and muscular with brown eyes. Carol was small with freckles like a second skin.
“They’ve heard, as have we all, about how you feel about white folks. We had planned to leave them outside the gate near the highway, but we were being followed,” said Helen. She sat solidly in the chair, her hands on top of her rounded stomach. She laughed suddenly, looking down at Bill. “He’s already been shot at once.”
Grange looked down at the young man who looked back at him with nothing in particular in his eyes. Bill took Carol’s arm and they walked slowly back to the car. Grange wanted to invite them up to the porch but the urge lasted only a moment. He could not bring himself to admit a white woman under his roof. He said nothing, however, to Ruth, who traipsed out to them with cool water, and he watched her chatting with them for a minute or two.
“Mr. Copeland,” said Quincy, “do you vote?” Ruth had given him water too and he sipped it, looking very relaxed on the banister, with one leg dangling over the side.
“Vote for what?” asked Grange.
“For sheriff and governor and police chief and county commissioner.”
“Nope,” said Grange.
“Why not?” asked Helen. She had finished half her glass of water and now rubbed the bottom of the glass over the top of her belly as if to cool it.
“ ’Cause every one of ’em is crackers,” said Grange, “an’ there ain’t a teaspoon of difference between one cracker and another.”
Quincy laughed. Helen laughed too, but then said firmly, “That’s not what we found out in Green County.”
Grange snorted. “I used to live there,” he said with authority, “an’ I don’t know what you found, but it wasn’t that crackers’d let niggers vote. Last hanging they had was some nigger trying to cast his vote for the cracker of his choice.”
“Well,” said Quincy, “they voting for the cracker of they choice now.”
“They voting now?” asked Grange.
“Yep!” said Quincy. “We worked there last summer. They’re voting in droves.”
“Ain’t a cracker in Green County worth the bother,” said Grange.
“What about black folks?” asked Helen.
“The black folks wasn’t shit neither when I was there,” said Grange. “Everyone that wanted to try somethin’ to help his people got knifed in the back by ’em.” He took out his pipe and began pulling on it, chewing the stem. “You don’t mean to tell me that some fool of ours is trying to run for office in Green County, do you?” he asked.
“Not this year,” said Helen.
“Where you from, girl?” Grange asked sharply.
“Green County,” she answered sweetly, laughing at him.
“Well, I be damned,” said Grange. He felt he had been caught sleeping, and that his nap had lasted twenty or forty years.
“Who your peoples?” he asked, thinking that perhaps she was lying.
“My mother’s name is Katie Brown. My father’s name was Henry. They lived on old man Thomas’s place.”
Grange remembered the Thomases, but not the Browns. “You say your pa’s name was Henry?” he asked.
“He was killed in ’55,” she said. “Shot down right in front of the voting booth.”
“Where’s your ma at?” he asked.
“She couldn’t be dragged away from Green County.”
“She ain’t still on the white man’s place?”
Helen laughed. She laughed a lot. She seemed as carefree as a bird. “She was until we got there last summer,” she said. “We moved in with her. All of us. Me and Quincy and Bill and Carol. But that was too much for the Thomases. They had said how sorry they were that old Henry was shot down thataway and had helped me when I went away to college, but when they saw me with Bill and Carol they kicked Ma off the place.”
“And then?” asked Grange, leaning forward in his chair. He wanted to reach out and touch Helen, she was so calm. He felt her calmness meant something, and he wanted desperately to know what.
“And den,” Helen said, chuckling, “den, Ma hauled off and cussed old man Thomas out and his ancestors back through the Civil War and spit on his wife and they had her locked up.”
“She got out,” said Quincy. “We had some smart lawyers come down from New York. When she got out she moved to a little house just down the road from the Thomases. She browbeat the preacher who owned it into letting her set up a center for us. It was full of all kinds of people all summer long. She’s there still.”
“That woman’s plainly done lost her mind,” said Grange. “You all ought to go get her.”
“She loves it there,” said Helen, shrugging her shoulders. “If anything she wants us to come ‘home’ and settle down beside her.”
“And one day we might,” said Quincy.
“Quincy’s going to run for Mayor,” said Helen. “I’m going to be first lady of Green County.”
“You’re all crazy,” said Grange. “You best be spending your energy in getting yourselves out of here. How long you think you going to be able to laugh like you do?” he asked Helen.
“I ain’t going to let them make me stop!” she said.
And Grange thought, You may keep being able to laugh when other peoples is around, but when you and your husband and the baby is all alone dodging bullets and jumping out of your skin at every noise, will you be able to laugh then? He imagined Helen in ten years, her young husband maybe buried in some swampy unmarked grave, her child hounded by grownups and children who hated niggers. He saw her at the mercy of some white town whose every gesture would mean she was worthless, an intruder, an American on good behavior. Suppose she couldn’t ever become “first lady” of anything. Then where would her laughter be?
“We want you to register,” said Quincy. “I even got my mother to register, though she swears she’s been hexing the bad crackers all along!”
“I can’t promise you,” said Grange. He felt a deep tenderness for the young couple. He felt about them as he felt about Dr. King; that if they’d just stay with him on his farm he’d shoot the first cracker that tried to bother them. He wanted to protect them, from themselves and from their dreams, as much as from the crackers. He would not let anybody hurt them, but at the same time he didn’t believe in what they were doing. Not because it wasn’t worthy and noble and inspiring and good, but because it was impossible.
“What I’m scared of, children, is the bitterness; the taste of bile thrown up by the liver when you finds out the fight can’t be won.”
Quincy put his arm around his wife, his hand moving up and down her side. He held her loosely yet completely, as if she meant everything to him, and the glow in he
r eyes was pure worship when she looked up at him. Grange was touched almost to tears by the simplicity and directness of their love and he shuddered with fear for them.
“If you fight,” she said, placing soft black fingers on Grange’s arm, “if you fight with all you got, you don’t have to be bitter.”
Grange walked out to the car with them and opened the door for Helen. “Wait a minute,” he said. He turned and went into the house and pulled a watermelon from under the bed. It was cool and green and heavy. He took it out to the car and handed it into the back seat. Helen was laughing again and all of them thanked him profusely. Grange still couldn’t quite look at the white girl but he gave a short nod to the boy. And when he waved good-bye he waved to all of them.
He turned, smiling, and saw Ruth sitting dejectedly on the steps.
“I bet all the good ones have got taken!” she moaned, frowning at him.
“You really got a kick out of him, didn’t you, girl?” asked Grange. “One day another one’ll come and he won’t have a wife and you can grab him before he starts looking for one.”
“I don’t expect a whole stream of ’em to come passing by here,” she said with dismay. “I think I’m going to have to go out an’ find the one I want.”
“What about this farm?” Grange asked.
“Oh, good grief!” she said, and stormed into her room, slamming the door and throwing herself across her bed.
48
ON THE MORNING they were to confront Brownfield in court, Grange helped Ruth tidy up the house with a reserved concentration. Both found it difficult to speak. Grange’s hair, as white as any snow but more silvery and of course crinkled and bristly electric, was combed in the fashion Ruth so loved, brushed straight back on the top and sides, neat but bold. Combed back this way, flatly, his hair would rise again slowly, crinkle by crinkle, so that soon, with the sun making it shine, he would look like Ruth’s idea of God. He was wearing his best and only dark suit with vest to match and his coat flared over his hips, emphasizing the leanness of his long legs and the tense long strides that somehow reminded Ruth of Randolph Scott.