“Great Gawd, Si May-e, you sho is outdanced evybody dis night!”
“Gal, you pure outdanced yousef, and dat’s de Gawd’s truth.”
“Lawd, child, you is light on you feet as a duck’s breast feather.”
“Brer Dee is gwine to mark you name off de church book befo daylight, gal.”
But Mary answered up cheerfully, “Shucks! If July is gwine to Hell, I may as well go long wid em, enty?” Then the air hummed with laughter and July came forward and took her by the arm and smiled down into her eyes. What a splendid fellow he was. So tall. So well-made. His teeth were as white as a hound’s.
Two pans full of rice and pork were handed them, but Mary could not eat. Her heart was too full, the rice stuck in her throat, but July swallowed the victuals down by great spoonfuls, smacking his lips with enjoyment. Everybody talked, nobody listened, pans and cups were emptied and filled over and over again. The great black iron rice pot began a hoarse clanging as its bottom was scraped to get the last white grain. The couple’s health and happiness were drunk over and over until July complained that his head was swimming round and round. He was ready to go home. Then the crowd seized Mary and held her fast, but July fought for her bravely until he had her tight in his arms, and gathering her up off her feet, cleared a way through the jam of people and hurried down the street through the darkness. He soon had her home with the door shut and barred behind them.
VI
The mild autumn days streamed swiftly past, some warm, some cool, most of them fair. All of them were busy for Mary, who went to the cotton-field almost every day and picked a fair weight of cotton, besides keeping house and making a cozy comfortable home for July. Every morning she got up at first fowl crow, cooked his breakfast and fixed his dinner in a bucket for him to take, before she woke him to get up and dress and eat. The early mornings were chilly, but the shining stars made them beautiful, and the cold dew made the earth smell damp and sweet.
When July had eaten and gone she milked the cow and staked her out to graze, fed the chickens and the fattening shoat in the pen and straightened up the house before she went to the field to join the cotton pickers.
Bright-turbaned women, deep-chested, ample-hipped and strong, bent women with withered skin and trembling uncertain fingers, little gay chocolate-colored children who played as they worked, moved in a group up and down the long rows, laughing, talking, picking the white locks of cotton and putting them in the crocus sacks swung from neck or shoulder.
The picking is easy. Nimble fingers move quickly. Every boll is left clean. Eyes glance up to meet other eyes. Musical voices flow into one another. Cotton-picking time is the best of the year. Every workday is a holiday.
Maum Hannah is old and bending over long makes her painful, but as she works she tells wonderful stories.
She knows all about Africa, that far country over the water. Old Paupa July, her grandfather, and Mudder Charity, her grandmother, were children of chiefs there. They talked a different talk from the people here and they were very wise. They knew signs and how to cast spells and how to take off spells which doctors put on people.
The days ran swiftly and happily. When the afternoon turned, and the sun began to drop, Mary hurried home to fetch water from the spring and get wood for a rousing fire so the cabin would be bright and supper done by the time July came at first dark. July’s coming home was the best time of the whole day even when he came in weary and dirty with river mud and sweat. As soon as his feet were washed clean and cocked up on a chair to rest and Mary had put a pan full of good victuals in his lap, she sat on the floor beside him, happy to watch every spoonful he put in his mouth.
Just outside their closed door, the Quarter street might ring with merriment, as the people went to dances or prayer-meetings or hot suppers, but Mary had no interest in any of them so long as July would sit by the fire with her, talking, or silent, or nodding with sleepiness. Just to have him in reach, to know he was hers, was enough.
They spent many a happy evening together in front of the fire whose pleasant gleam was bright enough to let them see each other. Mary had been turned out of the church, but when July praised her housekeeping she could hardly have been happier, for July’s smiles meant more to her than God or Jesus or any hope of Heaven. The year had been a good one, the crop abundant; they had a barrel of peas picked and dried in the shed room, waiting to be eaten this winter; strings of onions and red peppers hung on the wall; a big bank of sweet potatoes sat in a corner of the vegetable garden where no hog could root into it; the small barn held a nice pile of corn in the shucks, to make meal and food for the cow and pig. She had earned some money picking cotton, and she had carefully buried every extra coin in a secret place under the house to stay until hard times came. She had every reason on earth to rejoice. Blessings were on every side. Her
