by Alice Walker
“Do you ever think how selfish and spoiled you is?” Josie asked her one day, her face oddly contorted.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ruth. Grange had promised to take her to the picture show, and she was in a hurry to get dressed. She honestly did not realize that she never thought of Josie as her grandmother, and never, never thought of her as Grange’s wife.
“You didn’t want to go to the show with me and Grange?” asked Ruth, flying out the door. “Did you?” she called, as they were driving off.
35
SUMMER AND FALL found Ruth and Grange dedicated to the earthy, good-smelling task of making wine. They could name a long list of wines they knew how to make with maximum success. There was a short list of others that always soured. During the peach season peach stones and peels were gathered and dropped into the brown churn with water and allowed to set. This would make strong peach wine by September. Or, nearing the end of summer, big Alberta clings were halved and pushed into the churn and left in water, treated occasionally, and peeked into at least once a week. Grange did the “treating”—he drank some—and at Christmas time they had brandy, with shreds of peach sticking to the sides of the glass. In summer too they made corncob wine, white and sweet and cold when they left the jars outside in the spring; and blackberry wine and muscadine and scuppernong wine and sometimes plum wine. Ruth liked wine almost as much as Grange, and once in company she got sick and threw up, and it became quite apparent to everyone that Grange wasn’t the only one drunk at the gathering. By the time she was nine, even Grange was astounded by her capacity to drink wine. She would try to pretend she was unaffected by it because she liked the taste of it so much she wanted to drink it by the glassful, like milk. But he knew how, momentarily, to keep her from starting. He would move the jar from where they hid it last, and hide it somewhere else. But this precaution worked badly for him, because then he would forget where he hid it, and would have to ask her to help him find it.
He was an unembarrassed drinker, a regular heathen. Throughout the day he nursed at a half-gallon jug, wine or corn liquor, he did not seem to care which. On weekends he doubled his usual intake and would sometimes find himself unable to come home. Twice he was lying beside the highway where their own road began, unable to make it any farther. These times when they found him he went into long exhaustive monologues on the merits of freedom.
“Just leave me hyar to die like a goddam dog!” he bluffed. “A black man is better off dead and in hell!” They took him, Josie supporting him on one shoulder, and Ruth walking behind him with a switch, and carried him home. Each time he threatened to sink onto the road Ruth cut him across the back of his legs with her switch. She always felt older than Grange when he was feeling bad. When he sobered up she lectured him, wouldn’t acknowledge his headache, made him get his tobacco for himself and in general ignored him so that by Monday night he was not only sober and ashamed but also a wreck, and scared stiff that he had at last pushed her too far. (After all, she was only a little thing, and didn’t understand, and might get the wrong idea!) He thought she might at last be turned against him. He would curse himself for being the father of his son and in danger of being thought just like him by his son’s daughter.
Ruth was reminded of Brownfield when Grange got drunk; it was as if the closed parts of her mind were painfully forced open, and again she saw the demon of hate and destruction in someone close to her. But she believed Grange drank because of his murderous son and because of Josie. Grange and his wife now rarely spoke to each other; the house was often miserable because of their coldness. There was always in the air something of Josie’s feeling of Ruth’s intrusion. Ruth also knew that Grange had had another wife, Margaret, whom he had never got over. He cried whenever he talked about her (only when he was drunk) and Ruth hated her (dead though she was and had been for many years) with all her heart.
But Grange’s crimes, she believed, were never aimed at anyone but himself, and his total triumph over his life’s failures was the joy in him that drew her to him. He was a sinner, which he readily admitted, but he gave of himself. (She did not then notice that what he had to give he gave only to her.) The passion he lavished on living she could never quite condemn.
When he was sober and feeling guilty and ashamed, and when Josie lambasted him prior to dressing up and “visiting” somebody else (usually Brownfield), and they were in the house alone, there was a pall hanging over the house, thickest around Grange’s bowed gray head, which only lifted when she stationed herself close to him, or raised his head by shoving her own pigtails sharply, abruptly, sometimes even painfully, under his lowered chin. Then they embraced.
And of that other life of father and son, between the old man she loved and the younger one she feared, what could she know? And how could she judge? And what of Josie and the life of marital intimacy that was not there for Ruth to see, to understand? For all she knew her grandfather might never have been a father, her own father notwithstanding. Brownfield and Grange cursed each other, neither respecting the other’s age or youth. Maybe Grange’s love contained a gap. Like his life. Or where and when had the violence started? And what secrets did Josie know? How could one so young comprehend the crops of fraternity blighted, and hatred like stone, the ground between hearts scorched, and vengeance a cry in the souls of those concerned?
36
THE BEGINNING OF her life with Grange was the beginning of her initiation into a world of perplexity, and a knowledge of impersonal cruelty beyond what she had known in her own home. After her long depression and sadness had passed, except for fleeting moments when she felt tears on her cheeks for no easily discernible reason, there were casual but emphatic talks about Indians, and yellow people who lived in houses with roofs like upside-down umbrellas. Ruth learned for the first time that there was a sea and that its waters were larger than the whole of Baker County. She listened to sketches of places with foreign names, Paris, London, New York. In addition to the full and joyous days of wine-making and dancing, there were days devoted to talk about big bombs, the forced slavery of her ancestors, the rapid demise of the red man; and the natural predatory tendencies of the whites, the people who had caused many horrors.
There were days of detailed description of black history. Grange recited from memory speeches he’d heard, newscasts, lectures from street corners when he was in the North, every- thing he had ever heard. There was impassioned rhetoric against a vague country of wealthy mobsters called America. And, when she was old enough to carry a gun, she was taught to shoot birds and rabbits. She would rather have done almost anything else. But rabbit was good cooked with potatoes, and birds were like chicken. Still, her heart was scarcely in it.
Ruth could not understand Grange’s aversion to white people. Mem had let her play with white children, and now, at her grandfather’s, there were wonderful ones, she thought, down the road. Playing with them, however, was strictly forbidden. Apparently they were not, at six and seven, as completely wholesome as they looked.
“Why?” she asked, rebelling and beginning nervously to chew her nails.
“One,” Grange said, “they stole you from Africa.”
“Me?” she asked.
“Be quiet,” he said. “Two. They brought you here in chains.”
“Hummm?” she murmured. Looking at her slightly rusty but otherwise unmarked ankles.
“Three. They beat you every day in slavery and didn’t feed you nothing but weeds….”
“Like we give Dilsey?” she interrupted.
“Collards,” he said. “And guts.”
“Chitlins? I like them. I like collards too.”
They did nasty things to women. (She was only nine then.)
“What, what!” she asked, excited.
They are evil.
They are blue-eyed devils.
They are your natural enemy.
“Stay away from them hypocrites or they will destroy you.”
“They didn’t do nothing
to me, I think you making a mistake,” she said, fingering her buttons.
“They killed your father and mother,” he said.
As far as she was concerned her father still lived, although at times she wished he wouldn’t.
“No, they didn’t,” she said, for she just couldn’t see it.
37
TO GRANGE HIS son was as dead as his son’s murdered wife. If he had stopped long enough to consider that his son still lived, his opinion would not have been much different: he would have said he was a member of the living dead, one of the many who had lost their souls in the American wilderness. The cesspool of Brownfield s life was an approximation of nothingness. In prison now for the murder of his wife, Brownfield continued to plot evil. He spent every moment he could in the presence of vileness. His only confidante was his father’s wife. Grange considered the possibility of Josie, aided by Brownfield, turning against him, trying to make him suffer for his neglect of her in favor of his granddaughter. But he did not concern himself long with such wonderings; Ruth needed him to teach her the realities of life. What plotters might do to him, his wife and son, or otherwise, was something he could confront when the time came. In the meantime, he watched Josie coming and going, he heard Brownfield’s name often on her lips. He was not unmoved, but as Josie was one day to learn, he was by nature the most unjealous of men.
It disturbed Grange that Ruth appeared drawn to Brownfield at times, attracted to the same qualities that he knew repulsed and frightened her. It seemed to him that Ruth turned her father’s image over and over in her mind as if he were a great conundrum. When she was thinking about him her look was confounded, as if she knew a door very well but found it lacked a key. He did not like to recall the night he had rushed to Mem’s house to find Mem and her children piled in a heap in the middle of the yard. The other girls, Daphne and Ornette, were whisked away by a smooth-talking Northern preacher (Mem’s father), and his wife, who were all quivering chins and amazement. The old guy was sadder than his wife, so moved by the tragedy that he wanted to take all the children, though he had not, so long ago, wanted their mother. Ruth alone could not be pried loose from her grandfather’s arms. And he had wanted her so much he could not believe himself capable of such strong emotion. Not after everything. Josie had at first found his attachment to the small frightened child amusing. He’d never wanted her like that, she said. And it was true. His motives for marrying Josie in the first place were suspect, and she rightfully suspected them. Her weakness was that she cared for him and had waited for him a long time. She foolishly believed that having her he could do no wrong. When he had come back from the North, knowing that even if she had not remained faithful to him she would be waiting, there was no way for her to understand the changes he felt. When he had gone through Baker County on his way North he was a baby in his knowledge of the world. Although he knew the world was hard. He had not even comprehended what he was running to. He was simply moving on to where people said it was better. Josie had had no way of knowing how revulsed he was by what he found in that world, how much he needed to bury himself out of sight of everything. She could not understand, as so many people like her (small, untraveled, thoughtless), how he loathed the thought of being dependent on a white person or persons again, how he would almost rather be blind than have to see, even occasionally, a white face. He had found that wherever he went whites were in control; they ruled New York as they did Georgia; Harlem as they did Poontang Street. If he had taken Josie with him as they had planned, perhaps she would have understood. Two things and two only he wanted when he came back to Baker County. Independence from the whites, complete and unrestricted, and obscurity from those parts of the world he chose. For this security he needed Josie’s money. Josie had thought it was love for her that made him such a seeker of privacy. She thought he needed to own a secluded farm so as to enjoy her charms the better. Her vanity at all times was both provincial and great.
He had tried countless times to initiate her into the hatreds of the world, the irrepressible hatreds he contained, barely, in himself. Once he had told her of a murder (or suicide) which he had caused, and she had been horrified. As horrified that the victim was white as she would have been if she had been black. He could not make her understand there was a difference.
“One life is worth any other,” she said religiously, his fat whorish wife who was raped at sixteen and never avenged.
“What about what they have done to us?”
“How could you do such a thing?”
“An eye for an eye—anyway, you knowed I walked out on my wife and child. They could have starved. You never made no complaints about that!”
Josie ducked her head. “That were a little different,” she said.
“Why?” he asked. “Because by leaving them it meant you would end up with both of us?”
She began to cry. “The Lord help you,” she blurted, her chins shaking.
“’Bout time he did,” he said to her, “just about time he did!”
Now, as he sought to teach the ways of the world to his granddaughter and she resisted him, he was reminded of his own education in foreign parts of the world. For though he hated it as much as any place else, where he was born would always be home. Georgia would be home for him, every other place foreign.
“If you don’t like ’em, Grange,” said his Ruth, “if you don’t like ’em, seems like to me you’d a shot five or six of ’em in the head!” Her imagination beyond her warped reality was fixed by TV westerns. According to them, if you didn’t like the guys on the white horse you challenged them to a draw. You always won, of course, and a child of ten is very strict at applying the rules.
“There are more of them than me.”
“How many more?”
“Billions.”
“Wyatt Earp one time shot five men that were gunning for him. One was on the roof over the saloon, one was in the saloon door, one was in the middle of the street behind a wagon, and the other one was behind him hiding behind his wife. How many is that?”
“Too many in real life.”
“But you’re a good man, Grange, all things considered, and you’d be all right.”
Beside such faith his acts against injustice seemed not just puny and ineffectual and selfish but cowardly as well.
“I wonder if He don’t like them too?” She looked perplexed. Always she spoke of her father as He with a capital H, as if she were speaking of God. At times like now she both hated and respected him.
“Did you know I run away from your grandmother once a long time ago?” he asked her another time.
“Was she funny acting, like Josie?”
“What you mean?” He was surprised to know a child so young could be so blind.
“Aw, you know. I would have run away from her too. She was trashy!”
“She wasn’t trashy,” he said gently. “She was a pretty woman and wanted nice things like any pretty woman and when she couldn’t get them, well, she wanted something exciting to keep happening to her to take her mind off them. I wanted them things too, so after a long spell of not getting no pretty things nor no excitement neither we couldn’t seem to get no thrills from nothing but fighting each other.” Grange looked off over his granddaughter’s head.
“I worked for a old white man that would have stole the skin right off my back, if black hides’d bring a good price.”
“Ah!” she said, taking a step away from him.
He knew what was wrong. “Wait ’til you’re grown. You’ll see. They can be hated to the very bottom of your guts, can the white folks!”
“You put it all on them!” she said, starting up. “You just as bad as Him! He killed … !” She could not go on; furious tears filled her eyes.
“Let us go look at our traps,” he said, pretending not to see. He reached for his gun.
“The white folks didn’t kill my mother,” she said at last. “He did!”
“I won’t say you’re entirely wrong,” said Gr
ange, putting an arm around her shoulder. “If there’s one snake that’d kill my theory it’s your pa.”
“Tell me something real mean that you did.” Ruth was soothed somewhat by their slow walking through the woods looking at the traps.
He was afraid all their arguments would end this way, and as he could not risk losing her he could never tell her. If he could never back up his words of fighting with actual deeds done and battles won, how could he teach her the necessary hate? The hate that would mean her survival. He was ashamed of himself. It was his weakness, this certainty that she thought him good. She honestly thought him incapable of real evil, of murder, which to her would always be the unthinkable crime. She would have no sympathy for anyone who took the life of another human being. And yet, he was not innocent, he had, once he had learned it, lived his code. The resistance of his choosing was all around her. Even she was part of it. He had lost his innocence, his naïveté, all the better qualities of himself. He had discovered, as Ruth must, that innocence and naïveté are worthless assets in a wilderness, as strong teeth and claws are not.
“Well … ?” she began.
“There was a time—” he said, and stopped. Slowly he shook his head. All his years of violence and hardness swirled through his mind, like bits of dirty paper with dates and pictures. Alone, from the vast sea of criminal debris, there arose the memory of a night many years ago.
