got about fifteen years on me. She got over being shy about the third day and time has amply padded her once- lanky frame till she’s an imposing figure, but she won’t sit if there’s work to be done and her hands are never empty and idle.
I rinsed the glass and stood it in the drain rack and this time it passed her inspection.
Daddy’d asked me to drive him home from court and once Reid heard that Maidie was making stuffed peppers, he’d wangled an invitation to come for early supper, too.
It was a summer supper right out of the garden that Daddy tends with Maidie’s husband Cletus: sweet bell peppers stuffed with a moist hamburger and sausage mixture, tender new butter beans sprinkled with diced onions, fried okra, meaty tomatoes that really had ripened on the vines, and thin wedges of crispy hot cornbread.
Reid ate as if it was the first home-cooked meal he’d had since he and Karen got divorced. (Since he can’t cook and most of his girlfriends don’t, he’s become shameless about scrounging meals.) He was appreciative enough to answer Daddy’s every question about A.K.’s situation, but his appreciation didn’t extend to helping with the dishes. Shortly after we rose from the table and Daddy went out to the porch for a cigarette, he took off.
Except for the principle of it, I didn’t really mind. Washing dishes with Maidie is always a comfortable task, one conducive to gossip and confidences about all the big and small things going on around, the farm. It’s one of the ways I keep up with the changing community. As a child, I used to stand on a little stool with Mother’s apron tied around my neck to help them wash dishes, scrape carrots or make biscuits. In those years, I had no trouble bouncing back and forth between the rough and tumble of my big brothers outdoors and the soft voices of women working together in a kitchen.
Maidie’s also one of my windows on the black community, just as my family is one of hers to the white community.
Desegregation’s been a real mixed bag down here. Took away some of the old sore spots, brought in a bunch of new ones. No more separate drinking fountains as when my brothers were little. No more separate entrances to movie theaters or separate seating at bus and train stations, no more “No Coloreds” signs on restaurant doors. We go to school together, we swim at the same public pools and beaches, we work side by side on assembly lines or in offices now as frequently as we have always worked side by side in the fields.
For the most part, the law is followed pretty strictly these days.
The letter of the law, anyhow.
But the spirit of the law? In the back rooms? Under the table or in one’s cups? At private pools and clubs? Forget it. There’s still plenty to keep us apart, plenty of cautious mistrust and wary stiffness on both sides.
“We may got to treat ’em all equal,” says my own brother Haywood, who would never dream of sassing Maidie or doing down any of the black tenants who farm with him, “but that don’t mean we got to like ’em all equal.”
My brother Ben is convinced that his tenants quit working the minute he turns his back, yet he can come dragging in from the fields, all tired and sweaty, and declare that he’s been “working like a nigger,” without seeing the irony of his words. Till the day they die, he and Robert and Haywood will always notice a stranger’s skin color first.
God knows life would be a lot simpler if we could all wake up one morning color-blind, but we’re nowhere close to it on either side. Not by a long shot. We continue to lead separate, parallel personal lives, seldom connecting without self-consciousness, at genuine ease only at points of old familiarity such as Maidie and me here in my mother’s kitchen.
“You and Miss Zell still coming to the fellowship meeting Sunday, ain’t you?” she asked as she hung coffee mugs from hooks in a nearby cupboard.
“I never miss a chance to press the flesh or eat your chicken pastry,” I said. “And while I’m thinking of it, remind me again where Balm of Gilead Church is?”
She hesitated, then finished hanging the last mug and closed the cupboard door. “Why you asking ’bout that place? You gonna politick there, too?”
“It’s not the one next to Mrs. Avery, is it? Oh, wait, of course not. That’s Burning Heart of God. And besides, their preacher’s that mean old woman, isn’t she? Sister Wilson?”
“Sister Williams. Miz Byantha Renfrow Williams and you don’t need to be bad-mouthing her just because she’s so Holiness.”
“Why not?” I argued. “She bad-mouths everybody else and their religion. But Balm of Gilead. How come I can’t remember it?”
“Maybe ’cause they used to call it just plain Gilead,” she said. “Remember Starling’s Crossroads? Used to be a gas station when I was real little?”
That connected. Starling’s Crossroads is one of those insignificant backcountry crossings that got dead-ended when I-40 went through a few years back. It’d been dead before that though. That wood-framed store with its two lone gas pumps sat empty for several years until one of the black churches in Makely split wide open over something or other, and part of the congregation came up here and turned the little store into a chapel.
“Starling’s Crossroads?” I handed Maidie another glass. “As in Charles Starling, the boy that was with A.K. when they messed up the Crocker graveyard?”
“He might be some of that same bunch. But they ain’t owned nothing over there in fifteen, twenty years. How come you’re asking about Balm of Gilead?”
“No real reason,” I said. “Their new preacher was in court today to speak up for a member’s grandson. I believe his name was Freeman? Seems real sharp.”
Maidie made a humphing sound.
“What?” I asked. When Maidie humphs, there’s usually a reason.
“Preacher Ralph Freeman’s a sheep-stealer.”
“Now who’s bad-mouthing?”
“You asked me, didn’t you?”
