Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  She would shake her head and call back, “Naw. Naw. Not a thing. Nobody don’t hear from ’em. Too busy, they be.”

  Aunt Munsie’s skin was the color of a faded tow sack. She was hardly four feet tall. She was generally believed to be totally bald, and on her head she always wore a white dust cap with an elastic band. She wore an apron, too, while making her rounds with her slop wagon. Even when the weather got bad and she tied a wool scarf about her head and wore an overcoat, she put on an apron over the coat. Her hands and feet were delicately small, which made the old-timers sure she was of Guinea stock that had come to Tennessee out of South Carolina. What most touched the hearts of old ladies on Jackson and Jefferson Streets were her little feet. The sight of her feet “took them back to the old days,” they said, because Aunt Munsie still wore flat-heeled, high button shoes. Where ever did Munsie find such shoes any more?

  She walked down the street, down the very center of the street, with a spry step, and she was continually turning her head from side to side, as though looking at the old houses and trees for the first time. If her sight was as bad as she sometimes let on it was, she probably recognized the houses only by their roof lines against the Thornton sky. Since this was nearly thirty years ago, most of the big Victorian and ante-bellum houses were still standing, though with their lovely gingerbread work beginning to go. (It went first from houses where there was someone, like Dr. Tolliver, with a special eye for style and for keeping up with the times.) The streets hadn’t yet been broadened—or only Nashville Street had—and the maples and elms met above the streets. In the autumn, their leaves covered the high banks and filled the deep ditches on either side. The dark macadam surfacing itself was barely wide enough for two automobiles to pass. Aunt Munsie, pulling her slop wagon, which was a long, low, four-wheeled vehicle about the size and shape of a coffin, paraded down the center of the street without any regard for, if with any awareness of, the traffic problems she sometimes made. Seizing the wagon’s heavy, sawed-off-looking tongue, she hauled it after her with a series of impatient jerks, just as though that tongue were the arm of some very stubborn, overgrown white child she had to nurse in her old age. Strangers in town or trifling high-school boys would blow their horns at her, but she was never known to so much as glance over her shoulder at the sound of a horn. Now and then a pedestrian on the sidewalk would call out to the driver of an automobile, “She’s so deaf she can’t hear it thunder.”

  It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in Thornton—not in those days—that something ought to be done about Aunt Munsie and her wagon for the sake of the public good. In those days, everyone had equal rights on the streets of Thornton. A vehicle was a vehicle, and a person was a person, each with the right to move as slowly as he pleased and to stop where and as often as he pleased. In the Thornton mind, there was no imaginary line down the middle of the street, and, indeed, no one there at that time had heard of drawing a real line on any street. It was merely out of politeness that you made room for others to pass. Nobody would have blown a horn at an old colored woman with her slop wagon—nobody but some Yankee stranger or a trifling high-school boy or maybe old Mr. Ralph Hadley in a special fit of temper. When citizens of Thornton were in a particular hurry and got caught behind Aunt Munsie, they leaned out their car windows and shouted: “Aunt Munsie, can you make a little room?” And Aunt Munsie didn’t fail to hear them. She would holler, “Hai-ee, now! Whee! Look-a-here!” and jerk her wagon to one side. As they passed her, she would wave her little hand and grin a toothless, pink-gummed grin.

  Yet, without any concern for the public good, Aunt Munsie’s friends and connections among the white women began to worry more and more about the danger of her being run down by an automobile. They talked among themselves and they talked to her about it. They wanted her to give up collecting slop, now she had got so blind and deaf. “Pshaw,” said Aunt Munsie, closing her eyes contemptuously. “Not me.” She meant by that that no one would dare run into her or her wagon. Sometimes when she crossed the square on a busy Saturday morning or on a first Monday, she would hold up one hand with the palm turned outward and stop all traffic until she was safely across and in the alley beside the hotel.

  Thornton wasn’t even then what it had been before the Great World War. In every other house there was a stranger or a mill hand who had moved up from Factory Town. Some of the biggest old places stood empty, the way Dr. Tolliver’s had until it burned. They stood empty not because nobody wanted to rent them or buy them but because the heirs who had gone off somewhere making money could never be got to part with “the home place.” The story was that Thad Tolliver nearly went crazy when he heard their old house had burned, and wanted to sue the town, and even said he was going to help get the Republicans into office. Yet Thad had hardly put foot in the house since the day his daddy died. It was said the Tolliver house had caught fire from the Major Pettigru house, which had burned two nights before. And no doubt it had. Sparks could have smoldered in that roof of rotten shingles for a long time before bursting into flame. Some even said the Pettigru house might have caught from the Johnston house, which had burned earlier that same fall. But Thad knew and Will knew and everybody knew the town wasn’t to blame, and knew there was no firebug. Why, those old houses stood there empty year after year, and in the fall the leaves fell from the trees and settled around the porches and stoops, and who was there to rake the leaves? Maybe it was a good thing those houses burned, and maybe it would have been as well if some of the houses that still had people in them burned, too. There were houses in Thornton the heirs had never left that looked far worse than the Tolliver or the Pettigru or the Johnston house ever had. The people who lived in them were the ones who gave Aunt Munsie the biggest fool answers to her question, the people whom she soon quit asking her question of or even passing the time of day with, except when she couldn’t help it, out of politeness. For, truly, to Aunt Munsie there were things under the sun worse than going off and getting rich in Nashville or in Memphis or even in Washington, D.C. It was a subject she and her daughter Lucrecie sometimes mouthed at each other about across their back fence. Lucrecie was shiftless, and she liked shiftless white people like the ones who didn’t have the ambition to leave Thornton. She thought their shiftlessness showed they were quality. “Quality?” Aunt Munsie would echo, her voice full of sarcasm. “Whee! Hai-ee! You talk like you was my mammy, Crecie. Well, if there be quality, there be quality and quality. There’s quality and there’s has-been quality, Crecie.” There was no end to that argument Aunt Munsie had with Crecie, and it wasn’t at all important to Aunt Munsie. The people who still lived in those houses—the ones she called has-been quality—meant little more to her than the mill hands, or the strangers from up North who ran the Piggly Wiggly, the five-and-ten-cent store, and the roller-skating rink.

  There was this to be said, though, for the has-been quality: they knew who Aunt Munsie was, and in a limited, literal way they understood what she said. But those others—why, they thought Aunt Munsie a beggar, and she knew they did. They spoke of her as Old What You Have for Mom, because that’s what they thought she was saying when she called out, “What you hear from ’em?” Their ears were not attuned to that soft “r” she put in “from” or the elision that made “from ’em” sound to them like “for Mom.” Many’s the time Aunt Munsie had seen or sensed the presence of one of those other people, watching from next door, when Miss Leonora Lovell, say, came down her front walk and handed her a little parcel of scraps across the ditch. Aunt Munsie knew what they thought of her—how they laughed at her and felt sorry for her and despised her all at once. But, like the has-been quality, they didn’t matter, never had, never would. Not ever.

  Oh, they mattered in a way to Lucrecie. Lucrecie thought about them and talked about them a lot. She called them “white trash” and even “radical Republicans.” It made Aunt Munsie grin to hear Crecie go on, because she knew Crecie got all her notions from her own has-been-quality people. And so it didn
’t matter, except that Aunt Munsie knew that Crecie truly had all sorts of good sense and had only been carried away and spoiled by such folks as she had worked for, such folks as had really raised Crecie from the time she was big enough to run errands for them, fifty years back. In her heart, Aunt Munsie knew that even Lucrecie didn’t matter to her the way a daughter might. It was because while Aunt Munsie had been raising a family of white children, a different sort of white people from hers had been raising her own child, Crecie. Sometimes, if Aunt Munsie was in her chicken yard or out in her little patch of cotton when Mr. Thad or Mr. Will arrived, Crecie would come out to the fence and say, “Mama, some of your chillun’s out front.”

  Miss Leonora Lovell and Miss Patty Bean, and especially Miss Lucille Satterfield, were all the time after Aunt Munsie to give up collecting slop. “You’re going to get run over by one of those crazy drivers, Munsie,” they said. Miss Lucille was the widow of old Judge Satterfield. “If the Judge were alive, Munsie,” she said, “I’d make him find a way to stop you. But the men down at the courthouse don’t listen to the women in this town any more. Not since we got the vote. And I think they’d be most too scared of you to do what I want them to do.” Aunt Munsie wouldn’t listen to any of that. She knew that if Miss Lucille had come out there to her gate, she must have something she was going to say about Mr. Thad or Mr. Will. Miss Lucille had two brothers and a son of her own who were lawyers in Memphis, and who lived in style down there and kept Miss Lucille in style here in Thornton. Memphis was where Thad Tolliver had his Ford and Lincoln agency, and so Miss Lucille always had news about Thad, and indirectly about Will, too.

  “Is they doin’ any good? What you hear from ’em?” Aunt Munsie asked Miss Lucille one afternoon in early spring. She had come along just when Miss Lucille was out picking some of the jonquils that grew in profusion on the steep bank between the sidewalk and the ditch in front of her house.

  “Mr. Thad and his folks will be up one day in April, Munsie,” Miss Lucille said in her pleasantly hoarse voice. “I understand Mr. Will and his crowd may come for Easter Sunday.”

  “One day, and gone again!” said Aunt Munsie.

  “We always try to get them to stay at least one night, but they’re busy folks, Munsie.”

  “When they comin’ back sure enough, Miss Lucille?”

  “Goodness knows, Munsie. Goodness knows. Goodness knows when any of them are coming back to stay.” Miss Lucille took three quick little steps down the bank and hopped lightly across the ditch. “They’re prospering so, Munsie,” she said, throwing her chin up and smiling proudly. This fragile lady, this daughter, wife, sister, mother of lawyers (and, of course, the darling of all their hearts), stood there in the street with her pretty little feet and shapely ankles close together, and holding a handful of jonquils before her as if it were her bridal bouquet. “They’re all prospering so, Munsie. Mine and yours. You ought to go down to Memphis to see them now and then, the way I do. Or go up to Nashville to see Mr. Will. I understand he’s got an even finer establishment than Thad. They’ve done well, Munsie—yours and mine—and we can be proud of them. You owe it to yourself to go and see how well they’re fixed. They’re rich men by our standards in Thornton, and they’re going farther—all of them.”

  Aunt Munsie dropped the tongue of her wagon noisily on the pavement. “What I want to go see ’em for?” she said angrily and with a lowering brow. Then she stooped and, picking up the wagon tongue again, she wheeled her vehicle toward the middle of the street, to get by Miss Lucille, and started off toward the square. As she turned out into the street, the brakes of a car, as so often, screeched behind her. Presently everyone in the neighborhood could hear Mr. Ralph Hadley tooting the insignificant little horn on his mama’s coupé and shouting at Aunt Munsie in his own tooty voice, above the sound of the horn. Aunt Munsie pulled over, making just enough room to let poor old Mr. Ralph get by but without once looking back at him. Then, before Mr. Ralph could get his car started again, Miss Lucille was running along beside Aunt Munsie, saying, “Munsie, you be careful! You’re going to meet your death on the streets of Thornton, Tennessee!”

  “Let ’em,” said Aunt Munsie.

  Miss Lucille didn’t know whether Munsie meant “Let ’em run over me; I don’t care” or meant “Let ’em just dare!” Miss Lucille soon turned back, without Aunt Munsie’s ever looking at her. And when Mr. Ralph Hadley did get his motor started, and sailed past in his mama’s coupé, Aunt Munsie didn’t give him a look, either. Nor did Mr. Ralph bother to turn his face to look at Aunt Munsie. He was on his way to the drugstore, to pick up his mama’s prescriptions, and he was too entirely put out, peeved, and upset to endure even the briefest exchange with that ugly, uppity old Munsie of the Tollivers.

  Aunt Munsie continued to tug her slop wagon on toward the square. There was a more animated expression on her face than usual, and every so often her lips would move rapidly and emphatically over a phrase or sentence. Why should she go to Memphis and Nashville and see how rich they were? No matter how rich they were, what difference did it make; they didn’t own any land, did they? Or at least none in Cameron County. She had heard the old Doctor tell them—tell his boys and tell his girls, and tell the old lady, too, in her day—that nobody was rich who didn’t own land, and nobody stayed rich who didn’t see after his land firsthand. But of course Aunt Munsie had herself mocked the old Doctor to his face for going on about land so much. She knew it was only something he had heard his own daddy go on about. She would say right to his face that she hadn’t ever seen him behind a plow. And was there ever anybody more scared of a mule than Dr. Tolliver was? Mules or horses, either? Aunt Munsie had heard him say that the happiest day of his life was the day he first learned that the horseless carriage was a reality.

  No, it was not really to own land that Thad and Will ought to come back to Thornton. It was more that if they were going to be rich, they ought to come home, where their granddaddy had owned land and where their money counted for something. How could they ever be rich anywhere else? They could have a lot of money in the bank and a fine house, that was all—like that mill manager from Chi. The mill manager could have a yard full of big cars and a stucco house as big as you like, but who would ever take him for rich? Aunt Munsie would sometimes say all these things to Crecie, or something as nearly like them as she could find words for. Crecie might nod her head in agreement or she might be in a mood to say being rich wasn’t any good for anybody and didn’t matter, and that you could live on just being quality better than on being rich in Thornton. “Quality’s better than land or better than money in the bank here,” Crecie would say.

  Aunt Munsie would sneer at her and say, “It never were.”

  Lucrecie could talk all she wanted about the old times! Aunt Munsie knew too much about what they were like, for both the richest white folks and the blackest field hands. Nothing about the old times was as good as these days, and there were going to be better times yet when Mr. Thad and Mr. Will Tolliver came back. Everybody lived easier now than they used to, and were better off. She could never be got to reminisce about her childhood in slavery, or her life with her husband, or even about those halcyon days after the old Mizziz had died and Aunt Munsie’s word had become law in the Tolliver household. Without being able to book read or even to make numbers, she had finished raising the whole pack of towheaded Tollivers just as the Mizziz would have wanted it done. The Doctor told her she had to—he didn’t ever once think about getting another wife, or taking in some cousin, not after his “Molly darling”—and Aunt Munsie did. But, as Crecie said, when a time was past in her mama’s life, it seemed to be gone and done with in her head, too.

  Lucrecie would say frankly she thought her mama was “hard about people and things in the world.” She talked about her mama not only to the Blalocks, for whom she had worked all her life, but to anybody else who gave her an opening. It wasn’t just about her mama, though, that she would talk to anybody. She liked to talk, and she t
alked about Aunt Munsie not in any ugly, resentful way but as she would about when the sheep-rains would begin or where the fire was last night. (Crecie was twice the size of her mama, and black the way her old daddy had been, and loud and good-natured the way he was—or at least the way Aunt Munsie wasn’t. You wouldn’t have known they were mother and daughter, and not many of the young people in town did realize it. Only by accident did they live next door to each other; Mr. Thad and Mr. Will had bought Munsie her house, and Crecie had heired hers from her second husband.) That was how she talked about her mama—as she would have about any lonely, eccentric, harmless neighbor. “I may be dead wrong, but I think Mama’s kind of hardhearted,” she would say. “Mama’s a good old soul, I reckon, but when something’s past, it’s gone and done with for Mama. She don’t think about day before yestiddy—yestiddy, either. I don’t know, maybe that’s the way to be. Maybe that’s why the old soul’s gonna outlive us all.” Then, obviously thinking about what a picture of health she herself was at sixty, Crecie would toss her head about and laugh so loud you might hear her all the way out to the fair grounds.