“That isn’t somethin’ I’d know about, Harry.”
“Grandma, Daddy says you’ve always been good to colored. He says that ain’t like most folks. Why do you feel that way?”
“First off, I don’t know what good to colored is. I try to treat people right, but I’d be a liar I said I treated them just the same. I don’t spend that much time with them, and I ain’t got any real colored friends. I don’t know that much about the lives of the ones I do know. So all I can say is I don’t hate colored. That’s somethin’ worth sayin’, though. Let me ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“Do you hate colored?”
“No ma’am.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know… I guess Daddy and Mama.”
“It was the same for me. Someone somewhere figured some truth out and passed it along. I got it. Your Mama got it, and now you got it. And Jacob, well, he once told me how he come by his thinkin’.”
“He told me the story,” I said.
“Did he tell you that we all, no matter what we think, slide a little backward now and then? Did he tell you somethin’ comes up missin’, and there’s a white man and a colored man standin’ nearby, most of us are gonna think it’s the colored that did it? That he’s the one shiftless? Ain’t none of us that damn good, Harry. We all got a lot of learnin’ to do.”
“But a colored man could have stole it, couldn’t he?”
“He sure could have. But it ain’t the thing to expect of him just because he is colored. You get what I’m sayin’, Harry?”
“Yes ma’am.”
We fished for a time, then Tom woke, shook off the blanket of leaves, and we moved to another place.
I was sort of worried Grandma would try to take us off to where Mose was. I could tell she was curious about what was going on there, but she fooled me. We stayed pretty close to the house, even though we changed spots two or three times, and by nightfall we had caught a dozen fish or so and Grandma had shot the head off another moccasin.
We got back to the house about supper time. I cleaned the fish, which were mostly hand-sized perch, and Grandma fried them up with hush puppies. She also made a pie with fig preserves, Mama not believing it could be done and taste right.
We ate the fish, all the while being told to watch for bones by Grandma and Mama, then we sucked down the pie, which turned out delicious. Afterward, we went out on the sleeping porch to sit or swing or lie on the floor until we had digested enough to move again.
14
Next day the fun was over and we were back to regular. We did chores, and after lunch Grandma brought out one of her cardboard suitcases. Inside were six books. The Bible, Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Last of the Mohicans, The Red Badge of Courage, and Call of the Wild. She had me read aloud to her from Ivanhoe.
She kept saying how she just loved bein’ read to.
When I finished a chapter, it was Tom’s turn. Tom had a lot of trouble with the words, and I wanted to just go on and read it because the story was so good, but Grandma insisted Tom do it. Tom got about halfway through the chapter and gave up.
Grandma said, “That was real good, Tom. You just need more time for the big words.”
She gave the book back to me, and I caught on to what was happening. We were being schooled. I didn’t say anything. I just read. I liked reading. I liked the book. Grandma made the whole thing fun. By the afternoon, she asked if Mama, Tom, and me would like to drive into town and visit Daddy at the barbershop.
Mama declined the trip, having wash she wanted to hang, and though Grandma volunteered us to help her, Mama insisted we drive on into town and visit without her.
We drove along at a fast clip with the windows down. The wind picked up the scent of the woods and the earth and filled the car with them.
Grandma said, “I just love the smell of dirt. I like it best when it starts to smell right before a rain. There’s somethin’ about an oncomin’ rain gives the earth a real fine smell. That’s another thing about North Texas. Dirt, wet or dry, didn’t smell right.”
We weren’t long at the barbershop before Grandma got bored. She was willing to argue with the customers on nearly anything that came up. Religion. Politics. Farming. The Depression. She even got on Cecil’s nerves, and he generally liked to talk about most anything. She thought he cut hair a little too close, and even suggested a superior form of wrist movement for stropping his razor.
When she finally tuckered out arguing, she took to reading one of the pulp magazines, and pretty soon she was criticizing the writing. I could tell Daddy, Cecil, and the customers were glad when she made up her mind to go over to the general store and take us with her.
I was nervous about going over to Groon’s store, but when we got there, he greeted us like family. He didn’t bring up our recent encounter with him except to talk about Mama’s chocolate cake.
“She bakes a good’n,” Grandma said, pursing her lips, “but she always put a little too much sugar in it, and not enough egg to make the icing.”
“Oh,” Mr. Groon said.
“I’ll fix some sometime and bring you a slice,” Grandma said.
“That would be right nice of you, ma’am,” Mr. Groon said. “Since my wife died, I don’t do much cooking that matters. Just a little to get by, and it ain’t worth much.”
Grandma bought a few small items. Staples for Mama: flour, coffee, cornmeal, and finally a couple of peppermint sticks for me and Tom. We went out to the car and placed our boxed items inside, except for the peppermints, which me and Tom took to sucking right away.
“Ain’t there anything else to do around here?” Grandma asked.
“No ma’am. Not really. ’Cept go see Miss Maggie. You was sayin’ you knew her.”
“I know who she is, but I don’t believe we’ve ever exchanged words
… Well, hell, let’s go see her. She might be up better for conversation than these men folks. They can’t stand to be disagreed with. There ain’t a thing they don’t know. They ain’t even half the cussers they think they are neither.”
Since I hadn’t heard anyone cuss around Grandma, I wasn’t certain how she had drawn those conclusions, but thought it was a pretty good bet she could cuss with the best of them. As for them not knowing as much as they thought, well, they hadn’t had all that much time to express themselves. Grandma was always talking.
We left her sacks in the car; unlike now, you could do that. It was rare then, even in hard times, that anyone would steal from you, unless it was a banker. There were, of course, the Pretty Boy Floyds of the world, but it wasn’t like now where everything has to be under lock and key. A thief was usually from somewhere else other than where you were.
We came up on Miss Maggie hanging out her wash. She had on her big black hat. She heard us coming, looked over her shoulder.
“Howdy there, Missuh Harry. And who that you got with you?”
“This is my Grandma,” I said.
“My name’s June. I hear yours is Maggie.”
“Yes’m, that’s right.”
“Don’t ma’am me,” Grandma said. “Makes me feel a hundred years old.”
Miss Maggie cackled. “I am a hundert years old.”
“Naw you ain’t.”
“Yes’m. I am too. I might be a hundert and two, but I done lost me some track on it.”
“You don’t look a day over seventy,” Grandma said. “I see you’re hangin’ out your drawers.”
