by Alice Walker
“I felt just like these words here in the newspaper must feel, all printed up. The line already decided. No moving to the left or the right, like a mule wearing blinders. These words just run one word right behind the other to the end of the page.” Brownfield looked at his friend with some small exhilaration in his eyes as he continued, stabbing at the paper with his finger. “Just think how this word here’d feel if it could move right out of this line and set itself down over here!” The two men pondered the power of the mobile, self-determined word. The hatchet murderer nodded.
“I often felt more like a shoe,” he said; “a pair of farted-over brogans, just for feets to stand on. I used to put my shoes up on a shelf in the wardrobe to show how I felt. Wouldn’t let my wife or her crabby snot-picking ma move ’em down on the floor.”
“Yeah,” said Brownfield, “you’d think more peoples would think about how they ain’t got no more say about what goes on with ’em than a pair of shoes or a little black piece of writing in a newspaper that can’t move no matter what it stands for. How come we the only ones that knowed we was men?”
Leaning heavily on his pencil Brownfield wrote m-e-n, then waited glumly for the word to rise and beat its chest.
“Well, that was us,” he said. He looked at the hatchet murderer and smiled.
40
IT WAS NOT difficult for Brownfield to take advantage of Josie’s pain. He had been surprised the first time she visited him at the jail, but had soon become able to read her like a book. Josie had given up taking her burdens to the Lord; she no longer sought to confess her sins in church; she no longer said prayers or told her troubles to fortunetellers. But all of this she could do at the jail.
She would come on Sunday afternoons when the prisoners were allowed out under the trees. She would sit on one side of a small table, Brownfield on the other. Over the months and years she poured out the anguish of her heart for Brownfield to hear. And he listened sympathetically, craftily, with a priest’s show of concern.
He listened to her complaints of his fathers indifference, Grange’s total infatuation with the idea of preserving innocence, his blind acceptance of Ruth as something of a miracle, something of immense value to him, to his pride, to his will to live, to his soul.
“He don’t even know I’m alive,” said Josie, wringing her hands. “All day long the two of ’em is together. I just set round, praying for a word from him… .”
Brownfield listened with a pitying expression on his face. He took one of her hands in his.
“When I get out of here I’ll take her off your hands,” he promised. But Josie sat up, startled.
“If you took that gal away from him it’d be the same as if you took the air. He wouldn’t live out the week! I tell you he love her!”
“Josie,” he said, “you recognize that you a fool for giving a shit whether he live or die?”
“Don’t you say that!” she said, drawing her hand from his.
“All right, okay,” he said, “don’t git your back up.” But he was thinking of his father’s attachment to Ruth and of how perfect a revenge it would be if he could break it.
Josie was looking at him cautiously. “If you going to talk about your daddy in any mean way, I ain’t coming here no more. He love me, your daddy do, I know he do. This thing with Ruth is something he can’t help. But one day he coming to his senses and when he do I’m going to be right there waiting. It ain’t like it was impossible for him to love us both!”
“’Spose he don’t never come to his senses?” asked Brownfield. “Then where will you be?”
Josie looked bleakly out across the yard. “He got to come to me,” she said. “He got to come.”
The months went by. One day Brownfield asked about her love life. Josie, sixtyish, had always felt there would be no end to it. She began to cry.
“Which mean he don’t come near you no more, even for that?”
Josie nodded.
“You mean to tell me,” said Brownfield, “that after all you have did for him he don’t show no kind of ’preshation?”
He began to smile. A flush came to Josie’s cheeks. Before she rushed out of the room she slapped him.
After that it was easy.
“After all I done for him!” Josie began to fume when she talked with him. “He don’t pay me the mind you’d pay a dog.”
“And you sold everything you owned and worked so hard for to buy him his precious farm! Uh, uh, uh,” said Brownfield. “Some peoples are just not grateful. Now, if I had had a woman like that to do all you done for him, I wouldn’t be here today.” He was elated when Josie, forgetful of everything but her anger, agreed with him. Soon he had brought her back to his original idea.
“When I gets out I can take Ruth off your hands,” he said. “An’ then, just think, you and Grange’ll be alone just like you was before she come. Things’ll be just the same.” Josie nodded eagerly. “I won’t even let them near one ’nother.”
“But how can you ’complish that?” she asked. “Grange’d shoot to kill if you laid a hand on Ruth.”
“Grange may think he above all the rest of the white folks,” said Brownfield, “but he ain’t above the white folks’ law. Maybe the law will be on our side for a change. Anyhow, you let me worry ’bout that.”
“So glad to!” said Josie, smiling happily. Planning as she’d done for years just how to win for good the man she loved.
Part IX
41
“GOOD FENCES DON’T make neighbors,” said Grange. “Which is why we’s putting this here one up.”
Ruth stood beside him holding the hammer. She was barefoot and wearing a pink dress with ruffles at the hem. As Grange stretched the top strand of barbed wire from one post to the next and secured it with a nail, she tiptoed behind him with round watchful eyes befuddled by his activity. She had never seen anyone put up a fence before.
“You finds your stakes—they marks your propity—and going by the deed, you puts your fence square on the line. Then you tightens all your wires,” he said, tightening the top wire, “and you be sure all your bobs is good and sharp.”
She pricked one finger on a small barb of wire, then gazed intently while the blood welled up. Quickly she stuck the drop of blood against her new dress and her eyes sobered to an expression of remembrance, horror and pain. They appeared to darken, much as the sky, which is open enough until a single cloud puts out the sun.
Grange stopped his work abruptly, not noticing the girl, one might have thought, and placed his own callused finger against a barb, pressing the wire until his finger bled.
“I never did git round to tellin’ you ’bout how the Injuns got to be blood brothers with us black peoples,” he said, reaching casually for her finger (at which she stared in panic), and which she gave him after first looking to see if she had wiped all the blood away. It was no longer there on her finger tip, but when her grandfather squeezed her finger the dot of blood came back. He drew her down beside him on the grass and stuck their two bleeding fingers together.
“But, Grange,” she said scornfully for so young a girl, “they didn’t stick fingers together. It was arms, right here”—she pointed—“they stuck this part of the arm.” She placed her tenderer forearm next to his darker, more sinewy one.
“Of course,” said Grange, “that was the way they become blood brothers with the white folks. But see, they didn’t mean that. Next thing them white brothers knowed they was scalped—which give ’em some of they own medicine. Now, take with us, they was more authentic. That’s on account of us all gitting put in such a pass by the white folks. But with one another and with black folks they only press fingers, not arms, and not no lying wrists never!”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Or are you lying to me?”
“Don’t say words like ‘lie’ to me in company,” Grange said pleasantly. “Folks might think you ain’t being raised good.”
“Well, nobody’s here but me and you. Besides, I don’t care
what folks think. Anyhow, I don’t embarrass you nearly as much ‘in company’ as you embarrass me with your drinking and gambling away all our money all the time.”
“Urn, yes,” said Grange. “Like I was saying. The Injuns is ever to be your friend. We has just performed the ceremony… .”
“But we aren’t Injuns, we …”
“No, indeed. No matter what anybody tells you ‘bout the Injuns—I mean I don’t care if it is a Injun hisself—don’t you believe nothing but that they’s friendly Injuns. Even if they don’t act friendly. Them that don’t act friendly just don’t know no better. You can sort of keep your gun trained on them while you explain all this I’m telling you to ‘em.”
“I don’t want to get scalped.” She giggled.
“Just remember neither does they. Besides, this here is serious.” The old man frowned. “The black man must be friends to every other of the downtrod, especially if he’s a man of color.”
“There’s those poor folks down the road and you putting up a fence to keep them away. Ain’t they downtrod? They eat dirt,” she said, grimacing. “They ought to be. I don’t see what their white has to do with it.”
“We has tried with them. They is the onliest group of peoples you can’t be blood brothers to. They don’t want it and we don’t want it either after all these years. They is the reason fences was invented. I mean, take before they come here with all they Bibles, do you think the Injuns had done hogged propity from one another and fenced it all off? No, ma’am. They hadn’t. They didn’t mind letting folks use the grass and the good earth like the Lawd intended it should be used. Those people over there, you give ’em a chance, they try to take our land, never mind it belong to us. They want hit, they take hit. They been that way since hist’ry. They the cause the fence was invented. Now. Far as we concerned they going to have to learn to live with it … and I mean with the sharp bobs turned toward them!”
Grange returned determinedly to his fencing, Ruth watching from under her long grapes. They were bleached brownish by the sun with a yellow lion-colored edge. The rest of her hair had been botchily braided and the grapes had not been worked in and caught up. She thought when she got older she would straighten her hair with combs, if Grange let her. She would convince him that grapes were too nappy to put up with. The finer points of hair care mystified her almost as much as they did her grandfather, whose only advice to her when she mentioned her hair was to wash it and grease it a little. Sometimes she even wished Josie would help her out. But just to fix her hair, not to talk and lie around the house with her titties hanging out.
“You’re a mean ’un, if you ask me,” she said lazily, leaning back on her elbows, turning her face to the sun. “Just a mean, mean old man. Without good home training, or somethin’,” she murmured, closing her eyes.
He did not look at her, he concentrated on the fence, thrusting the post-hole diggers deeper and deeper into the hard red soil, stringing the wire tighter and tighter, raising the fence higher and higher.
Not far from where he stood there existed still, it seemed to him, at least the shadows of his first life. He was on his third or fourth and final. The first life of Grange Copeland. The glow of the sun enclosed him in a gone but never-to-be forgotten landscape with its immediate sealing-off heat. And again, as in a stifling nightmare, he saw the long rows and wide acres of cotton rising before him. He felt the sun beating down on his bent back, exploding, pounding, bursting against the back of his head through the wide straw hat. He saw Margaret (first life, first wife!) as she had been when they married, seductive and gay, a whimsical girl-lady, acting strong and stoical out of love for him. While the love lasted. He saw the change come as it had occurred in Margaret’s face. Gradually the lines had come, the perplexed lines between the eyes, placed as if against and in spite of the young, smooth and carefree brow. Actually she had had a gay but somnolent face then, as if she existed in a dream. Misery had awakened her, and he had not needed to tell her she had married not into ecstasy, but into dread. Not into freedom, but into bondage; not into perpetual love, but into deepening despair. And he had not needed to tell her who was behind their misery—she knew and then he did not—for someone, something did stand behind his cruelty to her (he made himself believe), pushing him on to desert her, and driving her down and to the purgation of suicide for herself and murder for her bastard child.
What could he tell his granddaughter about her sadly loving, bravely raging and revengeful grandmother?
Could he tell her that the sweaty, unkind years plastered themselves across her lovely face like layers of dull paint put on every year? That sometime, in that hopelessness, when cotton production was all that mattered in their world (and not ever their cotton!), even love had stopped and that soon they had not been able even to remember love? Could he tell her of his own degradation, his belief in a manhood devoid of truth and honor; of the way he had kept Josie always tucked away for himself, as men tuck a bottle away against despair or snake bite? Could he tell her that Margaret had thought a marriage finished whoredom for a man; that she had thought Grange’s respect for his marriage would put an end to his visits to Josie, the whore of his lusting youth? Could he tell Ruth of her grandmother’s bewilderment when she learned he still saw Josie once a week, rarely missing a Saturday night? Could he tell her of how Margaret grappled with his explanation that Josie was necessary for his self-respect, necessary for his feeling of manliness? If I can never own nothing, he had told her, I will have women. I love you, he had assured her, because I trust you to bear and raise my sons; I love Josie because she can have no sons.
He could see Margaret sitting alone in the doorway of their cabin. She would watch him leave in the wagon, rolling determinedly, toward the Dew Drop Inn. Her bewilderment had changed to a feeling of inadequacy and she had tried to play her husband’s game. She threw away on other men what she felt her husband did not want. And she had finally bedded down with Shipley, the man who had caused everything. This Grange had not been able to bear. His choice was either kill her or leave her. In the end he had done both.
The strangely calm eyes of the old man looked across the fence to rest on his granddaughter. He marveled that, knowing him so well, she knew nothing of that other life. Or even of the dismal birth of her own father. That gray day of retribution in sorrow when the newly born was sentenced to a familiar death.
“And what’s his name going to be?” he had asked Margaret, feeling no elation at the birth of his son.
In her depression, carelessly she asked him, “What’s the first damn thing you see?”
And he, standing before the door, saw the autumnal shades of Georgia cotton fields. “Sort of brownish colored fields,” he had answered. And he had wondered, without hope, if that was what covered also the rest of the universe.
“Brownish color,” she had said, pushing the sleeping baby from the warm resting at her breast. “Brownish field. Brownfield.” There was not even pity in her for her child. “That’ll do about as well as King Albert,” she said. “It won’t make a bit of difference what we name him.”
Already she was giving him up to what stood ready to take his life. After only two years of marriage she knew that in her plantation world the mother was second in command, the father having no command at all.
“Grange, save me! Grange, help me!” she had cried the first time she had been taken by the first in command. He had plugged his ears with whiskey, telling himself as he ignored her, that he was not to blame for his wife’s unforgivable sin. He had blamed Margaret and he had blamed Shipley, all the Shipleys in the world. In Josie’s arms he had no longer heard Margaret’s cries, no longer considered his wife’s lovers who were black; his hatred of Shipley’s whiteness had absolved Grange of his own guilt, and his blackness protected him from any feelings of shame that threatened within himself.
His wife had died believing what she had done was sinful and required death, and that what he had done required nothing but that she get o
ut of his life. And now Grange thought with tears in his eyes of what a fool he had been. For, he said to himself, suppose I turned my back on that little motherless girl over there and spent my time with somebody else, some other little girl; would she understand that something beyond myself caused it? No, she would not. “And I could parade Shipleys before her from now till doomsday and she’d still want to know what’s done happened to her granddaddy’s love!” Grange mumbled to himself, his eyes moist and his hands trembling over the wires.
“Looks like some old sad story, from the way you standing there frowning. Wake up!” The child stood beside him with her hand over his arm. “You looking sort of sick from all this heat. I think you better sit down.” She pulled him by the suspender strap, like pulling a horse to drink. “Too much sun is not good for old men your age.”
“Shet up. What you know ’bout old age? ‘Too much sunshine ain’t good for ol’ men your age!’“ he mimicked her, but seated himself in the shade by the fence. “By the time you git ol’ enough to have mouthy grandchildren, you know what’s good for you. Only by then it seem like too late to do much about it!” Quickly he rolled up his past and lay back on it, obliterating the keen spots, completely erasing the edges. “I never in my life seen such a womanish gal,” he said, stretching out with his back to a tree and taking out his pipe. She lit a match, held his fingers while he lit the pipe, then blew it out.
“I ain’t any more sassy than you,” she said smartly, pushing him over roughly so she could also prop herself against the tree. He almost fell down.
“You ain’t supposed to say ain’t,” he said, looking at her solemnly. (“Her eddication,” he was known to declare to odd colleagues and peers, “is where I draws the line!”) “And don’t say you say hit because I say hit. I say hit ’cause I don’t know no better. I mean, I know hit ain’t correct, but I can’t always remember what to replace hit with.”
