He lashed out against their pretenses. Sometimes they were right, but not always. Nobody is always right. Nobody always knows what right is. The wisest people in the world are ignorant about many things. The most freehanded have to be stingy sometimes and the kindest, mean. If he could only hold out to live his own life without flinching, that would be enough to ask of himself.
With all Budda Ben’s bitterness and sadness he was never humble. He said whatever came into his head without caring what anybody thought. He was an unforgiving enemy and a faithful friend. When he loved or hated, he let the world know it.
He was wretched over being out of the church now, not because it cut him off from his neighbors, but because he had respect for God and Satan. Every man with sense must fear his Maker, no matter how bold he may be. He had joined the church over and over, but he could not stay a member. Every time he joined he got turned out again. His short patience and hot words would more than likely send him to Hell along with Mary. For to save Mary’s life she could not keep her mind fixed on the joys of Heaven, but sought her pleasure right here in this world, where pleasures are in such easy reach. She believed in God and Satan and Heaven and Hell too, and she had no doubt that sinners fed Hell’s fires, but the rules of Heaven’s Gate Church made the Christian life very difficult for a young, strong, healthy woman. She and Budda Ben would probably spend eternity in torment together and that bound them to each other here on earth.
She was straight and strong and able, and he was weighed down by powerless sinews and a painful misery that clogged his joints. She was supple and lithe, and her body seldom knew weariness, while Ben stayed weary all the time. Her feet stepped lightly through the years and Budda’s legs had to walk, half-squatting, slowly, following the long stout stick his hands used to guide them. But both of them resented many of the ways and customs of the plantation people who never stopped to think about things, and accepted ideas and beliefs which were handed down to them, the same as they accepted the old houses where they were born and worked in the same old fields which their parents and grandparents had salted with sweat.
When Mary first began sinning openly, Budda Ben tried his best to stop her, then when he found that nothing he said made her change her ways, he began defending her and holding that whatever people crave to do is good for them to do. If Mary fed her children and clothed them and trained them to be brave-hearted, to work, and to have manners, that was enough to expect of her. She was not a member of any lodge or society or church, and she had a right to live her own life as she liked. He defended everything she did. He declared that except for his own mother, Mary was the best woman on the plantation. She understood folks. She had sympathy for them. She knew their needs and sufferings and forgave their mistakes because she knew that blunders are easy to make. Budda said she was like a garden where flowers blossom the whole year through, and, although she had little money now, one so rich in kindness could never be poor. Her children were not full kin, but they grew up together in peace as brothers and sisters of one family, working, pleasuring, growing up strong and more able than any lawful children in the Quarters.
Mary was different from the other women. She had been so all her life. In her childhood among her playmates, or working in the field with her blood-kin thick around her, she always seemed different. She had married July and he left her to fend for herself, but if she wanted a house full of children that was nobody’s business but her own.
The Quarter women muttered dark things about Mary and prophesied dark things, for her. They feared the power she had over their men, so they had no faith in her kindness.
The passing years made no difference to the spirit of her youth. The Quarter women could dream their bad dreams and talk of good and evil as much as they liked: they made no difference to Mary. Hard work had kept her lean and hard-muscled. She was still keen-eyed and erect while they were paunchy in the middle and saggy in the cheeks. Their faces were lined and their hair streaked with white, and fear of Mary’s charm made their tongues bitter. They had more pleasure in her misery than in her happiness. Her sorrow pleased them more than her joy.
So Mary valued Budda Ben’s smiles and dreaded his frown. Nobody could say before her that he was only a cripple who walked half squatting with a stick; nobody could hint at his debasement. She loved him and she was as kind to him as if he stood tall and perfect in grace and bearing. Perhaps she clung closer to him because he was not whole. Maybe if he had been a strong man, she would have treated him as she did the others, whom she lured boldly and without shame, using the love-charm Daddy Cudjoe gave her to get July back.
That charm, old and worn as it was now, still stood by her faithfully. It had never failed her. She prized it and cherished it as if it were God’s best gift instead of something that would send her to the bottomless pits of perdition.
When she first tried it,
