by Alice Walker
Brownfield blamed his father for his mother’s change. For it was Grange she followed at first. It was Grange who led her to the rituals of song and dance and drink, which he had always rushed to at the end of the week, every Saturday night. It was Grange who had first turned to someone else. On some Saturday nights Grange and Margaret left home excitedly together, looking for Brownfield knew not what, except that it must be something strong and powerful and something they had thought lost. For they grew frenzied in pursuit of whatever it was. Often they came home together, still bright, flushed from fighting or from good times, but with the glow gradually dying out of their eyes as they faced the creaking floorboards of their unpainted house. Depression always gave way to fighting, as if fighting preserved some part of the feeling of being alive. It was confusing to realize but not hard to know that they loved each other. And even when Margaret found relief from her cares in the arms of her fellow bait-pullers and church members, or with the man who drove the truck and who turned her husband to stone, there was a deference in her eyes that spoke of her love for Grange. On weekdays when, sober and wifely, she struggled to make food out of plants that grew wild and game caught solely in traps, she was submissive still. It was on weekends only that she became a huntress of soft touches, gentle voices and sex without the arguments over the constant and compelling pressures of everyday life. She had sincerely regretted the baby. And now, humbly respecting her husband’s feelings, she ignored it.
What Brownfield could not forgive was that in the drama of their lives his father and mother forgot they were not alone.
When Brownfield woke in the night his mother was gone. From his bed in the kitchen he could see his father sitting on the bed, cradling something in his arms. It was long and dark, like a steel rod, and glinted in the light from the kerosene lamp. Grange’s face was impassive, its lines brooding. Placing the rifle on the bed he picked up his dusty black-green hat. He stood looking at the floor, his shoulders slumped, motionless. He looked very old. Ploddingly he moved about the room. He waited indecisively for his wife to return. He gazed at the baby asleep in its makeshift crib, a crate that had once been filled with oranges. He shrugged. Then he lifted his eyes toward where Brownfield s bed was, at one side of the kitchen, between the table and the stove. Slowly he walked into the kitchen, which was chilly and smelled of old biscuits, and which changed to a new rhythm of night with his entrance into it. The air was gently agitated by his movements. The sounds of the floor shifted with each step he took.
Brownfield pretended to be asleep, though his heart was pounding so loudly he was sure his father would hear it. He saw Grange bend over him to inspect his head and face. He saw him reach down to touch him. He saw his hand stop, just before it reached his cheek. Brownfield was crying silently and wanted his father to touch the tears. He moved toward his father’s hand, as if moving unconsciously in his sleep. He saw his father’s hand draw back, without touching him. He saw him turn sharply and leave the room. He heard him leave the house. And he knew, even before he realized his father would never be back, that he hated him for everything and always would. And he most hated him because even in private and in the dark and with Brownfield presumably asleep, Grange could not bear to touch his son with his hand.
“Well. He’s gone,” his mother said without anger at the end of the third week. But the following week she and her poisoned baby went out into the dark of the clearing and in the morning Brownfield found them there. She was curled up in a lonely sort of way, away from her child, as if she had spent the last moments on her knees.
3
“YOU CAN GET yourself a wife,” said Shipley confidentially, “and settle down here in the same house. It might need a little fixing up, but I could lend you enough for that, and with a few licks here and there it ought to be good as new.”
Shipley’s hair was still like that of a sleek greasy animal, but now it was dingy white and thin. He looked at Brownfield from under brows that had faded from blond to yellowish-gray. His pale blue eyes struggled to convey kindness and largesse. Brownfield slid down from the truck knowing his face was the mask his father’s had been. Because this frightened him and because he did not know why he should have inherited this fear, he studiedly brushed imaginary dust from the shoulders of a worn black suit Shipley had given him.
He had been shocked to see Shipley at the funeral, but soon guessed he had come hoping to catch Grange. Shipley did not take kindly to people running off owing him money, no matter that they had paid off whatever debts they might have owed many times over. Nobody had whispered a word against him while he stood looking down on the bloatedly sleeping mother and child. To most of the people at the funeral Shipley’s presence was a status symbol and an insult, though they were not used to thinking in those terms and would not have expressed such a mixed feeling. Shipley squeezed out a tear for the benefit of the other mourners, and Brownfield had chuckled bitterly to himself. The tear wasn’t necessary: pity was scarce at his mother’s funeral; most of the people there thought she had got what she deserved. Shipley’s crocodile tear was the only one shed.
Brownfield himself had sat, limp and clammy, wishing he were a million miles away. His mother as she was in the last years got none of his love, none of his sympathy and hardly any of his thoughts. The idea that he might continue to live in her house aroused nothing but revulsion. He knew too that the minute he accepted money from Shipley he was done for. If he borrowed from Shipley, Shipley would make sure he never finished paying it back.
“Don’t know but what we might can build you a new house,” said Shipley, thinking that with Brownfield’s muscles he could do a grown man’s work. Shipley believed with a mixture of awe and contempt that blacks developed earlier than whites, especially in the biceps. He thought too that as long as he had Brownfield there was a chance of getting Grange. Believing that Brownfield was choked up from grief and from his generous offer Shipley continued speaking to him on an encouraging plane.
“After all, if you marry one of these little fillies on my place she’s going to want to smell some new wood. Why, I can’t stop by a house on the place without the womenfolks waylayin’ me; talking about me fixing up the house they already got or wanting me to build ’em a new one.”
He fished about for sympathy, while Brownfield stood looking at the ground.
“But the main thing is”—Shipley smiled kindly—“we want you to stay here with us. And we don’t hold it against you what your daddy done. We’ll just wipe that off the books.” He continued to smile but eyed Brownfield shrewdly from under his brows. “Of course, I believe you said you didn’t know which way he was headed?”
“No, sir,” said Brownfield, from a great hollow distance.
“Well,” said Shipley sadly, as if a great wrong were being done him but one which he would not allow to dissuade him from future acts of kindness, “you think about all we discussed. And take the day off and get yourself straightened out. I tell you this much, I think we going to work out fine; and I know my boys will be glad to have somebody they already know to work with them when they take over Shipley’s Farm and Bait.” He leaned out of the truck, the hand dangling from the end of his coat sleeve like a papery autumn leaf. “You and me will start out fresh,” he said, “and remember, the North ain’t all people say it is. Just remember that.”
When Brownfield looked up, Shipley and his truck were gone. He was left in the familiar clearing. Scornfully, shaking the ice from his gut, he spat on Shipley’s ground. His mind raced headlong into the realm of his dream. The fear of Shipley that had tied his tongue disappeared as the urge to sample his new freedom grew. He would be his own boss. From the forlorn and empty house he took only his box. As he left the clearing a thousand birds began wildly singing good luck.
Part II
4
HE WALKED IN the direction the sun was going. He walked all day without stopping, except to throw a rock into a stream and to watch squirrels play across the tops of trees
, twisting and flying among the branches as if they had wings. Under his feet the earth, being moist with spring, became sunken; he stopped to watch as the print of his foot sprang back to smoothness on the moss along the streams. Rivers and creeks crisscrossed his route, and everything he saw in the woods delighted him. When it became dark he made himself a bed in a shed in a big field, a shed used for storing cotton to keep it dry after picking. The shed was empty now, but he found a few discarded croker sacks outside. On these he lay down and went to sleep.
After walking a few miles next morning he was very hungry. He walked past farmhouses that were big and painted white, with shrubs and flowering trees around them. When he saw a baked gray two-room shack he quickened his pace and walked for its flat dry yard.
There was a woman standing in the back yard over a rusty black pot. Her fire was kept going with rubber tires and refuse. The air around her was smelly and smoky. She was stirring her boiling clothes with a long lye-eaten stick. She took the stick out of the water and shook it as Brownfield came up to her. She looked about quickly to locate three small children, who were playing with car tires all over the yard, and didn’t say a word or even seem to notice him until he spoke.
“’Morning,” he said.
“All right … how’re you?” she answered in a low, singsong voice.
“Nice bright morning, ain’t it?”
“Shore is,” she said and stopped.
“My name Brownfield—Brownfield Copeland—and what might yourn be?”
“My name Mizes Mamie Lou Banks glad to know you.” She stuck out a bleached and puckered white palm and they shook hands.
“I wonder if a starving man might ax a lady for a little somethin’ to eat?” said Brownfield, looking sideways at her as if she were not the lady he meant.
“Why,” she said, putting down the stick, placing it across the pot, “you is just a boy, ain’t you?”
“Yessem, I reckon,” he said, unconsciously hanging his head.
“You runnin’ from any white peoples? If you is,” she continued, not looking at him but down at her pot, “you best to go on in the house where can’t none of them see you if they’s a mind to pass. They’s some grits on the stove ’n some eggs if you knows how to cook. I got my washin’ to do, ’n if you is runnin’ from the white folks I ain’t seen nothing but potash ’n lye this morning, ’n that’s the truth.” She smiled very slightly, at least her mouth quivered about the corners. There was a chunky bulge in her bottom lip.
“Thank you kindly, ma’am, I ain’t runnin’ but I shore is hongry. Fact of the matter is, I’m kinda lookin’ for my daddy.”
“Was the white folks after him too?” she asked. “Or did he just run off?”
“It was both.”
“Well, I can’t picture nobody runnin’ back this way.”
Brownfield nodded and walked to the door she shook her fingers at and went in. While he was cooking the eggs she came through the house to get more dirty clothes. He thought she must be a washerwoman, she was washing so many clothes.
“Hep yourself now,” she said. There was something stern in her kindness. He thought that if she had ever been good-looking it must have been when she was no more than eleven or twelve.
“Oh, I got plenty.”
“I tell you, a growin’ boy can eat it up like a brand-new stove.”
“You got children bigger’n them outdoors?”
“Oh, five more, but they all be gone up Norse.” She said it proudly, as if she were saying she sent them off to Harvard. “They says they couldn’t just hang round here and hang round here.” She paused a minute, going to the china closet for butter and putting it down next to his plate. “Don’t know if I blames them neither.” She was a very thin woman with knobby cheekbones and dark circles under her eyes. She had no more figure than a stick, and wore a man’s pair of overalls and a tight checkered headrag. “For all I know somebody just might be feeding my old hongry younguns up there in Chicago. I swear, they could eat up yere ’bout a whole hog at one dinner.” She sighed and walked outside with the clothes.
Brownfield thought perhaps he would go to Chicago, or maybe even New York City. Maybe he would just keep walking and walking and then hop a freight and wake up in the morning in a place where people were nice and had manners. He wouldn’t even care if they didn’t have manners, if they didn’t try to lure him into debt and then cause him to turn into stone whenever they came around. He stopped chewing a moment to think about what his mother had said about up Norse; and he remembered that his cousins said that up Norse was cold and people never spoke to one another on the street or anything. His father had once said that being up Norse ruined Uncle Silas and Aunt Marilyn, being so cold and unfeeling and full of concrete, but even while Grange said this his eyes had shown a fascination with the idea of going there himself.
“Say, you know. I done heard some things about up Norse,” Brownfield said, after he had eaten and come outdoors again. “They say it ain’t as good as folks make it out to be.”
“Maybe not, maybe ’tis,” she said, stirring her pot, spitting snuff juice into the fire. “I wouldn’t be saying I knows. But I declare it so out of fashion round here you’d think most any other place would be better.”
“Yessem,” he said, thinking what was so confounded bad about people not speaking to you if there was no Shipley around to see that you never made any money of your own. “Yessem.” He looked about the bleak yard and at the house that seemed about to cave in. “You just might have somethin’ there.”
She continued to stir the pot, stoke up the fire and bustle about the yard.
“They daddy work round here?” he asked, pointing to the three small children, who were busy rolling car tires.
“Well, I tell you,” she said, standing up from putting more rubber around the pot and resting her back by swaying it, “one of they daddies is dead from being in the war, although he only got as far as Fort Bennet. The other one of they daddies is now married to the woman what lives in the next house down the road. If you stands up on your tippy toes you can jest about see her roof, sort of green colored. I thought she was helpin’ me get another husband and all the time she was lookin’ out for herself. But I am still her friend. The other one of they daddies was my last husband, by common law, but he dead too now, shot by the old man he was working for for taking the chitlins out of a hog they kill.” She looked at the children and frowned. “But they is so much alike, just to look at; they git along right well together.”
“Reckon they going to grow up and go on up Norse too?” he asked, looking at the children. They had bad colds and snot ran down their lips like glue.
“I don’t know,” she said, stirring her pot. “The Lawd knows I loves them, but when they does grow up I hope they has sense enough to git away from round here.”
“Well, I thank you kindly for that good breakfast.”
“Aw, don’t mention it. ’N if you gets hongry runnin’ back the other way drop in again.” She gave him a grave, boastful, wry and conspiratorial smile. “I also hope you finds your daddy.”
“Bye, you all,” he said, waving to the children, who stopped playing to stare at him.
“Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” they piped like birds, running after him to the edge of the highway, and yelling “Bye-bye!” long after he had turned the curve and was out of sight. He heard their mother call “Y’all come back here before you hit by a car!” and the voices stopped abruptly; then the only sound was his footsteps against the grainy damp shoulder of the road.
5
AFTER WEEKS OF indecisive wandering, of worrying that Shipley might be following him, of breakfasting with dozens of secluded families in hollows and clearings deep in trees, Brownfield abandoned all hope, for the present, of reaching Chicago or New York. He had spent several days looking for a slow freight to hop but had not even found railroad tracks. He had no idea which direction he should follow to go North; unlike thousands of his ancestors he had never heard o
f the North Star. Often at night he gazed at the sky, searching for an omen. To gaze hopefully at the sky was in his blood, but nothing came of it.
On the last morning of wandering he breakfasted with a family of women, whose various husbands and boy friends were off hunting. With their own men away the women lavished attention on Brownfield. They drew water for his bath, pressed his new shirt and yellow satin tie, and gave him a shoe box for his things, which they said would be easier to carry than the trunklike box he had. Brownfield watched as the youngest girls tore the old box to bits. Then he felt truly that it was time to quit, that he had come far enough, and that where he was by nightfall he would stay. At least for a while. As he told the women shyly, he “needed a little chance to catch his breath.”
Resplendent in his new Indian-bird-and-animal-decorated shirt, daring in the yellow satin necktie, awkward in stiffly starched denims and highly lustered shoes, Brownfield set out in the new direction the women showed him. He mumbled, almost inaudibly, that he was “kinda” looking for his daddy. That made parting gayer somehow, his walking away less bleak. He liked the women, all temporarily menless, without cares; he liked commanding their uninhibited attention.
When he described Grange to them they looked at one another and smiled and smiled; but they would not say if they had seen him. They only insisted that Brownfield take a certain road, and no other, which ran a certain way, and which would bring him by dusk to a certain peaceful town.
6
HE REACHED THE TOWN when the sun was setting. There were two streets, lightly graveled, which formed the upper corner of a square. To Brownfield’s right, within the square, off the main street, rose the solid brick dimensions of the county courthouse. Directly ahead of him, in a circle of grass in the middle of the street, stood a stone soldier, his bayoneted rifle lifted, his intrepid but motionless foot raised to advance northward. On both sides of the street there were stores. Brownfield met buggies and two cars and a few storekeepers on foot. Raucous boys from the blacksmith’s shop rushed past in leather aprons; one of them looked with fleeting envy at Brownfield’s tie. Except for this glance Brownfield entered the town unnoticed.
