by Alice Walker
“A perfect score of hits!” Ruth shouted, clapping her hands. “You ain’t—aren’t—supposed to say ‘hit’ for ‘it,’ neither. ‘It’ ain’t got no h in ‘hit.’” She giggled.
“I just wanted to check if you was noticing,” he said, fussing with his pipe. “You know the good part about owning a fence around propity you also owns is that you gits to shoot down any man or beast that sets foot over your boundaries. They is a law what says you can do that.”
“You sure are in a bloodthirsty mood,” she said tolerantly, “you sure you didn’t get too much sun?” She lay drowsily, with her chin against her chest. Idly she thwacked him across the leg with a weed. Her new dress had grass stains on it. She inspected them with concerned attention, then turned humming, blissfully, on her stomach.
“Did I ever thank you properly for this dress?” she asked, looking up into his eyes. Reluctantly, he smiled.
“I winned that dress at the poker game last Saddity. I winned near to twenty dollars, then, dang it, I lost fifteen, and I figured I’d get that dress. I spoke to some of the womens there. I say, what size reckon do my grand girl wear?—and they say, they don’t know sizes too good (they mostly steals clothes of all sizes), but they thought a twelve. So I pick that there which are a twelve, and I figured them frills round the tail made hit—it—grown up enough for you. I told the white woman what sold it to me. (She act like she didn’t want me to say nothing to her, but I did.) I say, you want you one grownup adolescent-acting, spoiled young ’un, you take my granddaughter. She take all my money to deck herself out. I say, she shore is spoiled all right. I say, she see this dress, and the first thing you know she done got grease on it and out setting round in the dirt in it, then she like to wind up tearing it rat down the mittle if the spirit move her to it. Yes, ma’am, I say, she rough stuff! I says to the woman what sold it to me.” Grange laughed. “She must didn’t ’preshate your fine qualities,” he said. “She just stood there looking at me like she thought I’d bite, kind of holding onto her teeth like this.” He clamped his lips together and made them prune up.
“You ought to call me by my name instead of ‘my grand girl.’ No wonder nobody knows what you talking about.” She laughed nonchalantly. “Anyway, I ain’t any more spoiled than you. However, I do thank you for this dress.” She decided to use other words she’d learned at school. Grange was a glutton for them. “It is so pleasant.” She smiled. “It certainly is. You know, you have real excellent taste!” she deliberately spoke from the back of her mouth, so she would sound like an actress on radio. Her grandfather beamed.
Confusedly, he searched around behind some bushes on his hands and knees, and brought out a pint bottle. “I would offer you some …” he began.
“… but, no thank you,” Ruth added. “I’m only ten, and there are some who are concerned about their liver.”
“Don’t you go upsetting yourself ’bout my liver, it’ll keep,” the old man said, drinking his whiskey through a chuckle. When the whiskey spilled down his chin, Ruth, who had been flexing her injured finger, and thinking vaguely about Indians, swiped the droplets for her wound. “Antisepsis.” She smiled loftily, licking her whole hand.
“Ruth ain’t no kind of name for you! Maybe that’s why I don’t like to use it… . You rat out the Bible though, I can guarantee you that much, but it probably one of the parts I ain’t read.”
“God knows I ain’t if you ain’t,” she said, collecting several whiskey droplets on her tongue.
One day they watched the people who lived on the adjoining property. There was a man who had lank, neck-length hair the color of greasy pine bark. There were half a dozen little cracker children around him. They grew in stairsteps, looked hungry and rusty, and kept straws and pine needles in their teeth. Ruth and Grange lay concealed behind some bushes on their side of the fence. It was Grange’s idea that they inspect some “white people” for Ruth’s further education. What Ruth noticed was that they were not exactly white, not like a refrigerator, but rather a combination of gray and yellow and pink, with the youngest ones being the pinkest.
“What they doing?” she wanted to know. The daddy of the bunch and two of the older boys lay under a tree, smoking and chewing.
“They probably plotting how to git our land,” said Grange.
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, what else do you think they’d be doing, laying over there in the weeds, hiding out from they womenfolks?”
“Well, they could just be trying to get shut of the women’s yapping,” said Ruth.
“That’s just what they’d like for you to believe,” said Grange, glowering at the group.
“Do you mean to tell me that that’s all they have to do—all of them, all the time—just lay around and think up ways to take this farm?”
“Yup,” said Grange, momentarily peevish.
“Well, when do they talk about the weather, then, and the price of cotton and all like that?” Ruth sat upright and Grange quickly pulled her down again out of sight of the group. “I mean, what I want to know, is did anybody ever try to find out if they’s real people.”
“Nope,” said Grange. “‘Course the rumor is that they is peoples, but the funny part is why they don’t act human.”
“Well, when I get big I’m going to find out,” Ruth said as they crawled away from the fence. “I want to see and hear them face to face; 1 don’t see no sense in them being looked at like buzzards in a cage.”
“All I seem able to teach you is that you want to know,” said Grange. “I never seen such a gal as you for looking underneath revealed truth.”
Later in the day he asked her, “What would you say if I told you I knows of that family we saw, and that I happens to know the womenfolks don’t ’low no smoking nor chewing in they house an’ parlor?”
“And that’s the reason they sit ganged up in the woods?” Ruth pondered over it a minute. “Well, it makes more sense to me than the other reason did,” she said simply, and her grandfather stood exasperated in his truth.
42
ONE DAY AT SCHOOL something happened that said more about white people than anything Grange had ever told her. Her day had started out, as usual, reluctantly. She hated getting up in the morning, especially when she woke up in the house: “Josie’s house,” she called it, instead of in the cabin, which she considered hers and Grange’s, but mostly hers. She and Grange had their breakfast, oatmeal and wine for him, oatmeal and milk for her. Then they walked along the highway to the school. The school was only about half a mile from their house, even nearer through the woods, and they could walk it in a few minutes. Grange left her at the steps of the school as he always did, with the other children standing around staring, as they always did. It was a bright March day, warm and balmy, and the sun made light shadows on Grange’s blue shirt as he disappeared around the back of the school and into the woods. Both of them loved to walk home through the woods, not only because Grange kept a still between the schoolhouse and his house, but because the woods offered the privacy and quiet they both enjoyed.
The school had three rooms One room on the end near the well was for the first, second and third grades. The middle room was for the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grades, and the one on the other end was for the rest of the grades, including the twelfth. The building was raised off the ground on a foundation of cement blocks and underneath was a cellar of sorts where some of the older boys took some of the older girls. There were tall steps at each end of the building as if the schoolrooms formed a second story. Ruth climbed the steps to the platform-porch which led to the middle room with a mixture of anticipation and dread. She was in the sixth grade and her classroom contained classes four through seven. Her teacher was Mrs. Grayson. Mrs. Grayson would also be her teacher for another year until she passed into the room next door and to a teacher named Mrs. Little. Mrs. Grayson was a handsome, dark brown woman with meticulously manicured nails, and processed hair. She was in the habit of wearing eve
rything gray, and of straightening the seams of her Red Foxx stockings with a spit-daubed finger when she thought no one was looking.
The first subject for the four classes was Health, and Mrs. Grayson walked from one group of desks to another lecturing about the care of “our clean minds and bodies.” The next subject was Citizenship, and Mrs. Grayson lectured back and forth about the importance of having “forthright patriotic minds for use in service to your country.” By ten o’clock, above the bored humming of the other three classes, she was talking about the importance of studying history. History, Mrs. Grayson said loudly and with great precision and straining of her vocal cords, taught you what had gone on in the world. Eli Whitney, the cotton gin, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and the Minutemen. American History was more important than any other kind, she said. And why was that? she asked. Then she answered herself: “Because it is the history of you and I, the proud history of a free people! We have fought to remain free,” she shouted, her shrill voice reverberating off the pasteboard walls. “Our history teaches us what has been done for us, as Negroes, and what we have done for ourselves.” Pearl Harbor, she said, rhetorically, and the Civil War. History, she beamed, struggling to rise above the noise in her room and the noise from the rooms on each side of her, tells us where we are and shows us how we got there and how important history is to the total enlightenment of the world!
She had to leave from in front of their class for a few minutes because someone in the fourth grade raised his hand from the back of the room and said he couldn’t hear what she had said. Ruth heard her, like a recording, ask the small boy personally, “Why is it important to study history?” The boy said sullenly, “I don’t know.” Then Mrs. Grayson said, clapping her hands in time to her words, “Because history lets you know what has gone on in the world!” The boy said, “Oh, yes, ma’am.” And Mrs. Grayson was called across the room to someone in the fifth grade who asked wasn’t it also true that George Washington was the father of our country. When last Ruth listened Mrs. Grayson was congratulating the child for having already read this from his new history book.
To Ruth, Mrs. Grayson never made sense. She mouthed all the words in the textbooks but they did not come out coherently as they appeared on the page. When she interpreted a paragraph to the class you could never tell how any of it fit together. Between the few words you were able to catch over the noise and Mrs. Grayson’s own abstraction there was little that could be gleaned and put to use. However, having had Mrs Grayson the year before, Ruth feared her for her ability to keep track of who was shutting her out. She could pounce on an unsuspecting dreamer the minute his mind strayed. And then it was a beating or you were sent to the principal for discipline. The principal always sent you home for a week, usually without looking up from his desk or without interrupting a pupil’s recitation in his classes.
As she always did when Mrs. Grayson turned her back for a minute, Ruth put on a look of concentration and fiddled intently with the books on her desk. This was her cover while she began to dream. Today she looked at the new world history book the classes had been given that morning. The new book was the main cause of Mrs. Grayson’s history lecture. Before they got it from the white school they hadn’t had a history book. Only a speller, a geography and a reader. Ruth had read these months before and could recite every one of them by heart because she had read them so many times. Now she looked through the new book, at the pictures, some in color but most in black and white, and at the worn brown cover which had a pretty city scene on it with blond round-eyed children crossing a street under a bridge and across from a towered clock. In small lettering to one side was written “London.” But then she opened the cover, not the pages of the book, but the cover, before the pages began. On the right-hand side of the book there was another girl’s name, Jacqueline Paine, and under her name was written, Baker County Elementary School, the name of the white school. All their books came from there so this did not surprise her. But then she looked down at the rest of the page and gasped. For on this page and across the entire front inside covering of the book was a huge spread drawing called at the top in big green letters, “The Tree of the Family of Man.” And on this tree there were all kinds of people. At the top, in pale blue and yellow, there were the white people. Their picture showed them doing something with test tubes, the lettering on one of their jackets said “Scientist.” Behind them were drawings of huge tall buildings and cars and trains and airplanes. Jacqueline Paine had written underneath their picture: Note: Americans, Germans, People who live in the extreme Northern part of Europe. In parentheses she had written (England). Below the “Americans” were people drawn in yellow, and they were wearing funny little straw hats and were driving huge water buffalo. Behind them were a lot of pretty small objects made of jade and bamboo. Under their picture Jacqueline Paine had written in her round script: Note: The Yellow Race. Chinese, Japanese, etc., and people who live far away from us, in the Far East. Beneath them was a drawing in red of American Indians. They were sitting placidly, one old man smoking a long feather-covered pipe. Some women were sitting next to him making beautiful rugs and pottery and baskets. Underneath their picture Jacqueline Paine had written: Note: Our own American Indians. We saved from disease and wild primitive life. Taught them useful activities as pictured above. They have also been known to make beads. But it was the last picture she saw on the page that made her gasp. For at the very bottom of the tree, not actually joined to it but emanating from a kind of rootless branch, there was the drawing of a man, in black, with fuzzy hair, fat grinning lips, and a bone sticking through his nose. He was wearing a grass skirt and standing over a pot of boiling water as if he expected, at any moment, a visiting missionary. Underneath his picture Jacqueline Paine, in her neat note-taking script, had written just one descriptive word. She did not even say whether he had made his own grass skirt. It leaped out at Ruth like a slap in the face. Note: A nigger.
When she could pull herself out of her daze, dreaming no longer, she knew something was wrong. All the children from all the classes around her were looking at her. Looking at her and snickering. Before her eyes they turned into ugly grinning savages and she gave them her most disdainful scowl. But then she looked up just in time to see the strap coming down across her shoulders. It came down again and again and the snickering was quieted by the strap’s thick whistling. They knew what it felt like. Slowly, in a rage, Ruth stood up, flinging the book to the floor. Mrs. Grayson’s voice sounded hysterically in her ears. “You’re just like the rest of them,” she shouted. “You’ll never be anybody because you don’t pay any attention to anything worthwhile!” Ruth walked slowly toward the front of the room. “Where do you think you’re going?” yelled Mrs. Grayson, picking up the history book and dusting it off. “All people like you do is tear up other people’s property! You come right back here and sit down!” But Ruth’s hand was already on the door. She turned to see Mrs. Grayson advancing with the strap; over her shoulder the delicious excitement of her classmates rose so thick it could be tasted. A pure and simple lust for diversion. A pure and simple lust for blood. Her blood. “You goddam mean evil stupid motherfucker!” Ruth hurled at her from her huge stock of Grange-inherited words. Mrs. Grayson and the classes stopped together and took a long indignant breath. “What did you say, young lady?” Mrs. Grayson finally demanded, advancing more menacingly than before. “You heard me,” Ruth said, trembling. “And if you touch me just one more damn time, my granddaddy and me will pull this piece of junk right down on your head and cram planks and bricks down your lying dumb motherfucking throat!” Quickly she pulled open the door and fled down the steps. It was not until she reached the woods that she began to cry, the tears hurting her so much she thought she’d never survive them. “Was this what Grange meant?” she asked herself over and over, wishing she were dead.
The summers offered her shelter. From May until October she was free. Free to play in the cabin they buil
t far back in the woods, free to read comics and books Grange cunningly stole from the white library; and for confusion, she was free to read the Bibles “wherefore, hereat, thereto—lo, lo, lo!” The winters were cold and cruel, and although she loved learning she hated school. When she had lived with Mem it had not been bad at all. It had even been fun. She and Ornette and Daphne had walked to school together, laughing and gossiping, sometimes throwing sand at the white school buses that passed them. But now her mother was dead and her father was in prison. Where exactly “in the North” her sisters were remained a mystery. She could not imagine the North except as an enormous cold place full of buildings and people where birds had no place to move their bowels. This picture she got from Grange who said you could take the North and make the Southerners eat it without sauce for all he cared.
As painful as it was to her to have to admit it, she was considered a curiosity after her mother’s death and though all the children at the school were poor she was considered the poorest because her father was a murderer and she had no mother. Mothers, she learned very soon, were a premium commodity among her classmates, many of whom had never known a father and if they had could no longer even remember him. She got no consideration either for living with her grandfather, who was believed to be a strange, “funny” old man. Good at cards he was, the children admitted, but too quiet to be trusted, they said. Had anybody ever heard Grange Copeland laugh at one of their fathers’ jokes? they asked. Nobody had, except Ruth, and her classmates did not admire her for it. At times she was sorry she giggled in church with Grange, the community being such a pious, scorekeeping one. Snubbed and teased she was from the month she went to live with Grange, and it became almost like a game. Children would be playing “Sally Go Round the Sunshine” or “Hey, Miss Liza Jane” and she had only to show her composed melancholy face for all merriment to cease and a harsh silence to fall. There was a rumor going around the school when she was eleven that if she ever got anybody to walk with her in the woods (she was often seen walking in the woods and talking to bushes and that was certainly odd) he would never be seen alive again. They said she had a gun that she kept hidden in the woods and that she used to shoot people’s heads off so she wouldn’t have to see their eyes. Eyes, they said, reminded her of her mother. Ruth knew, when she overheard this rumor, that whoever started it must have been at Mem’s funeral and seen the botched up job of the undertaker. But what could she say? Her only delightful times were when new children who didn’t know the story came to the school or when she discovered by accident old ones who had either missed the gossip or not been able to attend the funeral. She was not the only one gossiped about. Josie came in for heavy slander too, as did everyone in the family. By the time she was in the fourth grade Ruth had begun to walk with her head down; she brought it up gradually during the fifth grade, and by the time she reached the sixth grade it was said of her that she didn’t even know she had a head, it was stuck so far up in the clouds.
