by Alice Walker
“What is this stuff?” the boldest of their guests would ask, recalling perhaps some uncharitable comment made by himself or others regarding the oddness of his hosts.
“This is the tea of survival,” Ruth would say, with a wink at her grandfather, who sat silently smoking, ignoring the guest except to comment, “She give it to you, you better drink it,” and seeming entirely comfortable before ill-at-ease company who invariably visited out of curiosity.
“How you know?” they sometimes asked defensively.
“I told her,” would come the indifferent assertion from
Grange, with whom no one ever gathered up the nerve to argue.
The older Grange got the more serene and flatly sure of his mission he became. His one duty in the world was to prepare Ruth for some great and herculean task, some magnificent and deadly struggle, some harsh and foreboding reality. Nothing moved him to repent of his independent method of raising her. In vain did deacons of the church admonish him for teaching Ruth to avoid the caresses of pious sisters and to shun the embraces of baptizing brothers. In vain did preachers and missionaries warn him of the heathenism of her young soul. It was commonly supposed that Ruth was even taught to bite the hand that would spiritually feed her, and this supposition was correct.
“Before you let ’em baptize you in they muddy creeks an’ waterholes, after I’m gone, you kick the legs out from under ’em and leave ’em drown.” To that purpose he hired a poor white lad to teach her to swim.
“The shackles of the slave have one end tied to every rock and bush,” he said to her. “Before you let some angel-distracted deacon put his mitts on you, you git you a good grip on his evangelical ear and you stretch it till his nose slides.”
And if the various congregations believed the spirit of the devil had already entered young Ruth Copeland, her ready adoption of Grange’s teachings more than proved their point. They noted with shock that her greatest delight, along with her grandfather, when they came to church, was to giggle in serious places.
Part X
45
SEVERAL TIMES AFTER Josie began living with Brownfield, Ruth saw them loitering in the woods behind the school. Her classmates ran from her father, some of them jeered. Josie, whitely powdered and haphazardly wigged, would stand beside him supporting his drunken weight with a patient, long-suffering look that totally mystified Ruth. It was Grange’s custom, particularly on overcast days, to pick her up at the school well, and if not there at the small wooden powerhouse on the edge of the playground. One day they faced a confrontation with Brownfield and Josie. On that day they had indeed strolled along the edge of the school grounds like lovers, Grange carefully tucking her scarf around her neck every few steps. They were murmuring and giggling about the black janitor at the white library in town, whom Grange managed to get drunk each time he went to the library to steal books for her. They did not see Brownfield and Josie until they almost bumped into them.
“Well, if it ain’t the Gold Dust Twins,” said Josie, insolently, eying their closely knit fingers. For the first time Ruth was chilled by the naked jealousy she read in her stepgrandmother’s eyes.
“Yeah,” said Brownfield, who kept a proprietary hand on his stepmother’s shoulder, “goddam Gold Dust Twins. Out just taking the goddam air!” He rubbed the palm of one hand boldly down the front of his pants.
Ruth was startled and became hysterically baffled, pressing herself into her grandfather’s side and trying to walk past without seeing them. For although she had glimpsed her father’s profile from her classroom window she had been able to convince herself that he was not real, that he was at most a shadow from a very painful past and a shadow that could never gain flesh and speak to her. The drunken tones of his voice brought back a terror she had tried hard to forget.
“Well, well,” said Grange. “My wife and my son.” His eyes when Ruth looked up at him were a kind of flinty brown, almost black, and his skin seemed to have aged and become ashen and papery. It was one of the few times she thought of him as being old, one of the few times she thought it might be possible after all for him to declare he’d had enough of everything and die. That day he was wearing his overalls and brogans but with his old Sunday gabardine overcoat. It was very soft against her face, and it surprised her that her face reached all the way to his shoulder. “What do you want?” he asked the leering pair, a slight quaver in his voice.
“I want my goddam daughter!” said Brownfield. “She don’t belong to you. She belong to me and I want her.”
“Yes,” said Josie, pushing out her still incredible bosom, “she’s his child and he wants her. It ain’t decent for just a old man like you to try to take care of a little girl.” She turned to Brownfield for support, but he, while staring at Ruth, seemed to lapse into a trance. His daughter shivered under his dull incredulous stare. She had never considered that as a big girl she might look more than a little like her mother.
“I don’t know why they give you only seven years,” her grandfather said in a firm voice, drawing himself up. “They ought to have kept you in the pen.”
“But she are his child!” said Josie, trying to laugh but seeming frantically close to tears.
“Shet up,” Grange said, without looking at her. “I guess you intend to be a good mother to her?”
“Well, no,” said Josie, nervously reaching out to touch her husband and then succumbing to coyness. “If she go back to her daddy I’ll come back to you.” This jerked Brownfield out of his trance and he gave her a dangerous smirk. Ruth thought she saw Josie wince as if preparing to move away from a blow. That tremor was too much for her and Ruth began to cry. She threw herself into her grandfather’s arms, trembling uncontrollably.
“I don’t want you back, you distant strumpet, let the evil that men do go before them, which is what happened in your case. I wish I never had laid eyes on you.” Then he turned fiery eyes on his son.
“I took this child when you had made her an orphan. You killed her ma. Where was you all these years when she needed a daddy? Nowhere to be found! You wasn’t to be found even when you lived under the same roof with her, except in a whiskey bottle. And then you was in the pen for killing the only decent thing you ever had. I don’t know how you prevailed on the white folks to let you out so quick, for you ain’t repented; although we know they don’t give a damn nohow as long as all we kill is another nigger! You made a bargain,” he said, turning to Josie, who had begun to weep, streaking her face powder, “you stick to it. If you thought you could humble me by running off with my son you was wrong. You’re two of a kind; wallow in the mud together!”
“Don’t be so hard, Grange,” wept Josie. “Don’t be so hard!”
“He thinks I ought not have run out on him a long time ago,” said Grange, ignoring Josie, “and he’s right. But I tried to make up and he wouldn’t let me. And he run out on this child. Now he won’t get her back, I don’t care what he do. He won t!
“Grange, I tried—” Josie began, but Brownfield cut her off.
“Don’t beg for nothing from him, he so damn righteous he ain’t going to hear you. But you was no daddy to me!” he said to Grange, “and I ain’t going to let you keep my child to make up for it!”
“You no-good rascal!” said Grange, pushing Ruth away from him, lifting his fists. “You say one more word—”
“You wasn’t no daddy to me!” Brownfield shouted, but made no move to get nearer his father’s fists.
“Grange,” said Josie, “your son love you. He done told me all about how it was. You walked out on him and then look like everywhere he turn the white folks was just pushing him down in the mud. You know how it is,” she pleaded. “They just made him do things when he didn’t mean them.”
For a moment Grange was too choked with disgust to speak. When he did, he turned to Ruth. “Your daddy’s done taught me something I didn’t know about blame and guilt,” he said. “You see, I figured he could blame a good part of his life on me; I didn’t o
ffer him no directions and, he thought, no love. But when he became a man himself, with his own opportunity to righten the wrong I done him by being good to his own children, he had a chance to become a real man, a daddy in his own right. That was the time he should of just forgot about what I done to him—and to his ma. But he messed up with his children, his wife and his home, and never yet blamed hisself. And never blaming hisself done made him weak. He no longer have to think beyond me and the white folks to get to the root of all his problems. Damn, if thinking like that ain’t made noodles out of his brains.”
“Why,” said Brownfield, “you old bastard!”
Josie had pulled out a handkerchief too small for her. She soon watered it through with tears. “Grange,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with the small wet ball, “you know you got some blame; which, actually, you always did admit—”
“Shut up,” said Brownfield.
“—and you know you used to blame the white folks too. For they is the cause of all the dirt we have to swallow… .”
“Every bit,” said Brownfield.
Grange continued to speak to Ruth, his shoulder to Brownfield and Josie. He spoke rapidly, breathlessly, his hands doing their jabbing dance.
“By George, I know the danger of putting all the blame on somebody else for the mess you make out of your life. I fell into the trap myself! And I’m bound to believe that that’s the way the white folks can corrupt you even when you done held up before. ’Cause when they got you thinking that they’re to blame for everything they have you thinking they’s some kind of gods! You can’t do nothing wrong without them being behind it. You gits just as weak as water, no feeling of doing nothing yourself. Then you begins to think up evil and begins to destroy everybody around you, and you blames it on the crackers. Shit! Nobody’s as powerful as we make them out to be. We got our own souls, don’t we?”
“For a old man what could eat ten of ’em for breakfast, from what Josie tells me, you sure done turned into a cracker lover!” said Brownfield.
“I don’t love but one somebody, black or white,” said Grange, turning briefly to his son. “An’ what I’m talking about ain’t love but being a man!” He turned once more to Ruth. “I mean,” he said, “the crackers could make me run away from my wife, but where was the man in me that let me sneak off, never telling her nothing about where I was going, never telling her I forgave her, never telling her how wrong I was myself?”
“You never cared nothing for my ma!” said Brownfield.
“And the white folks could have forced me to believe fucking a hundred strumpets was a sign of my manhood,” said Grange, “but where was the man in me that let me take Josie here for such a cheap and low-down ride, when I didn’t never care whether she lived or died, long as she did what I told her and I got me my farm!”
“Ah, Grange, baby,” said Josie, reaching out to him, “it not too late for us now, don’t say that.”
“Will you shut your slutty trap!” said Brownfield, pushing at her hand.
“And with your pa,” Grange continued, “the white folks could have forced him to live in shacks; they might have even forced him to beat his wife and children like they was dogs, so he could keep on feeling something less than shit. But where was the man in him that let Brownfield kill his wife? What cracker pulled the trigger? And if a cracker did cause him to kill his wife, Brownfield should have turned the gun on himself, for he wasn’t no man. He let the cracker hold the gun, because he was too weak to distinguish that crackers will from his! The same was true of me. We both of us jumped our responsibility, and without facing up to at least some of his wrong a man loses his muscle.”
Grange’s eyes were misty now; he turned to face his son. “If I had my life to live over,” he said, “your ma and me would maybe have starved to death in some cracker’s gutter, but she would have died with me holding her hand! For that much I could have done—and I believe she would have seen the man in me.”
Grange was shaking as much as his granddaughter, and this unsteadiness where he had always seen strength, emboldened Brownfield.
“You kinky-haired son of a bitch,” said Brownfield, who was annoyed that his father wore his hair long, “a heap of good it would have done my ma for you to hold her hand when she was dying! When a man’s starving he don’t need none of that hand-holding shit.”
“But my answering for everything had to be to her, don’t you understand yet how it go? Nobody give a damn for me but your ma, and I messed her up trying to be a big man! After two years of never gitting nothing on the plantation I turned my back on what I did have. I just couldn’t face up to never making no progress. All I’m saying, Brownfield,” said Grange, his voice sinking to a whisper, “is that one day I had to look back on my life and see where I went wrong, and when I did look back I found out your ma’d be alive today if I hadn’t just as good as shot her to death, same as you done your wife. We guilty, Brownfield, and neither one of us is going to move a step in the right direction until we admit it.”
“I don’t have to admit a damn thing to you,” said Brownfield, “and I ain’t about to let the crackers off the hook for what they done to my life!”
“I’m talking to you, Brownfield,” said Grange, “and most of what I’m saying is you got to hold tight a place in you where they can’t come. You can’t take this young girl here and make her wish she was dead just to git back at some white folks that you don’t even know. We keep killing ourselves for people that don’t even mean nothing to us!”
“The court say I can have her back. Old man, I’ll fight you on it! I wanted to give you a chance at a fair exchange, your old lady for her.” He reached out to touch Ruth and she shied miserably away. “Too good for me, is you?” he wanted to know, scowling at her. Throughout this ghastly interview she had not been able to say a word. She wanted to tell Brownfield how she despised him for killing Mem and for making her suffer by being shunned and friendless, but nothing came out. She was too terrified that somehow he would make good his threat and she would be forced to leave Grange and go live with him.
“He’ll never have you again,” Grange said, as Josie and Brownfield stalked away. But he was holding his heart as if it hurt him, and the look he gave her was unsure.
In tears they stumbled home through the woods, where they collapsed momentarily together. They sobbed as if they knew already what was to come; and just as Ruth could finally envision a time when Grange would not be with her, she knew Grange was imagining a time when his powers of protection and love would be no more and she would be left again an orphan with a beast for a father—a beast Grange himself had created.
That night Grange pored over Ruth’s Bible for hours before he went to bed. He had great admiration for the Hebrew children who fled from Egypt land. For perhaps the hundredth time he told Ruth the story of the Hebrew exodus. “They done the right thing,” he said.
“Did they?”
“Got out while they still had some sense and cared what happened to they spirit. Also to one ’nother. I may be wrong, but nothing ain’t proved it yet.” He looked thoughtfully over the book at the fire.
“What?” asked Ruth.
“We can’t live here free and easy and at home. We going crazy.”
“Here?”
“I don’t mean this farm; I mean in this country, the U.S. I believe we got to leave this place if we ’spect to survive. All this struggle to keep human where for years nobody knowed what human was but you. It’s killing us. They’s more ways to git rid of people than with guns. We make good songs and asylum cases.”
“Maybe it would be better if something happened to change everything; made everything equal; made us feel at home,” said Ruth.
“They can’t undo what they done and we can’t forget it or forgive.”
“Is it so hard to forgive ’em if they don’t do bad things no more?
“I honestly don’t believe they can stop,” said Grange, “not as a group anyhow.” He lounged back in his c
hair and stuck a hand in his pocket. “Even if they could,” he said slowly, “it’d be too late. I look in my heart for forgiveness and it just ain’t there. The close as I can come to it is a kind of numbness where they concerned. So that I wouldn’t add kindling to a fire that was roasting them, but I wouldn’t hear ’em calling me neither.”
Ruth chuckled.
“That ain’t no feeling to be proud of,” Grange said sternlv, “not if you going to call yourself a human.” He leaned forward, looking sadly into the fire.
“When I was a child,” he said, “I used to cry if somebody killed a ant. As I look back on it now, I liked feeling that way. I don’t want to set here now numb to half the peoples in the world. I feel like something soft and warm an’ delicate an’ sort of shy has just been burned right out of me.”
“Numbness is probably better than hate,” said Ruth gently. She had never seen her grandfather so anguished.
“The trouble with numbness,” said Grange, as if he’d thought over it for a long time, “is that it spreads to all your organs, mainly the heart. Pretty soon after I don’t hear the white folks crying for help I don’t hear the black.” He looked at Ruth. “Maybe I don’t even hear you.”
“You’d hear me all right!” said Ruth.
“Your daddy don’t, do he?” asked Grange, returning to the story of the Hebrew children.
“If the foundations be destroyed,’” he read after a few minutes, “ ‘what can the righteous do?’”
“Rebuild ’em?” asked Ruth.
“Too late to rebuild,” said Grange, “for the righteous was there when they was destroyed.” He turned to another part of the Bible and read: “ ‘Thou hath repaid me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul.’” He looked up at Ruth. “The Lord knowed that you could dump shit on a fellow for just so long before he begin to stink from within. It’s the spoiling of the soul that make forgiveness impossible. It just ain’t in us no more,” he said with a sigh. “How can the young ’uns stay fresh here? That’s what got me bothered.”
