by Alice Walker
“It’ll be okay,” said Ruth, taking the Bible from him and putting it away. “For a man who don’t like church, you sure like to thumb this book.”
“This is serious business, though,” said Grange, looking steadily at her. “You been protected on this farm… . You don’t know how tired you be after years of strugglin’. I want you to fight ’em every step of the way when they tries to abuse you. An’ they will, ’cause you’ll be a nigger to ’em. Damn! I hates they guts already for making you feel bad! But I don’t want you to fight ’em until you gits completely fagged so that you turns into a black cracker yourself! For then they bondage over you is complete. I’d want you to git out before that happened to you!”
“Why didn’t you get out?” asked Ruth.
“The world wasn’t as big then as it is now. I thought the U.S. covered the whole shebang. Besides,” said Grange, grimly, “I wouldn’t give the mothers the satisfaction!”
“Aw,” said Ruth, standing behind him and tugging playfully at his big ears, “you know you caught your soul in the nick of time, before it spoilt completely.”
“I wish I did know that,” said Grange, rising to wind the clock, “but I look at Brownfield and Josie an’ I know I was way too slow.”
In the middle of the night Ruth was awakened by a noise.
“You ’sleep?” her grandfather asked. He was standing over the bed. “I couldn’t git off to sleep. I just kept thinkin’ about what happened today.”
Ruth sat up and turned on the light. Grange was standing in his long nightshirt, with a stocking cap on his head. “What’s the matter?” she asked sleepily.
“I wanted to give you this,” said Grange, handing her a small booklet.
“What is it?”
“A bankbook. I put away a few dollars for you to go to college on. Your daddy’s up to something an’ I don’t know-how long I can keep ’im away from you.”
Ruth rubbed her eyes and opened the bankbook. Her name and Grange’s were on the inside. There were nine hundred dollars.
“That’s just from the bootlegging,” he said. He went back into his room and returned with a battered cigar box that rattled and clinked. He opened it and began to count the bills and quarters, half dollars and dimes, nickels and pennies. He counted out four hundred dollars and then took twenty dollars and some change for himself. “An’ this much I winned at poker.” He’d gambled almost every week since she came to live with him. Ruth took the cigar box and eased it down under her bed.
“You put it in the bank tomorrow,” Grange said.
“Okay,” she promised lightly, though she felt tears rising in her throat.
“I beat all my old gambling partners so bad I made ’em make over they straight life policies to you too,” said Grange, holding his little bit of money in one hand and shyly holding his nightshirt away from his body with the other. “I figure if they starts to die at the rate of one a year after the next few years they money can keep you comfortable. I know a girl in college need things.”
“I couldn’t do that!” said Ruth. “What about their own children? They going to need things too!”
“Well, that’s left up to you. If you needs the money it yours, I winned it.” He was silent for a minute, looking at the floor. “You don’t think I done wrong to do that, do you?” he asked. He looked down at the bills in his hand. “I s’pose it wasn’t too human of me.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said quickly. “I know you did it for me. But I won’t need it with all this you already gave me! Don’t be so worried about anything happening,” she added, reaching out to touch his hand. “Brownfield’s probably so drunk by now he can’t even remember I am his daughter!”
“You go to the bank first thing in the morning,” he said again, turning away. “I’ll git up and drive you.”
“You go to sleep,” she ordered.
“You too,” he said. But for hours the house was tense and awake, and neither of them slept.
The running of the house acquired a certain orderliness it lacked before. Bills were paid in full and Grange’s bookkeeping explained to Ruth. Old acquaintances were hunted and found and made to cough up monies owed. Ruth’s bank account grew in tiny bounds. Two dollars from Fred Hill, five from Manuel Stokes, sixteen from Davis Jones for that pig he ran over three years ago. The fence was inspected with care, rotting posts replaced, the wire restrung to make it more taut. Even the wine crocks were taken out of hiding and reburied under Ruth’s direction. Two stills were closed down, the small remaining one, not very productive, easily destroyed. For her sixteenth birthday, when her fear of Brownfield had abated somewhat, Grange made her sole owner of their old car. He had already taught her to drive, and now it became her duty to drive into town to do the shopping, confronting for the first time, alone, the whites who owned and ran the town. Grange’s plan was to teach her everything he knew. Already, he liked to boast, “Your aim’s a heap better than mine!”
For all that he liked to see her self-sufficient, he was against her acting boyish. He grumbled when she spoke of cutting her hair, an unruly, rebellious cloud that weighted down her head. He insisted she trade her jeans for dresses, at least on weekends, and placed jars of Noxzema and Pond’s hand cream on her dresser. He became softer than Ruth had ever known him, reflectively puffing on his pipe for hours without saying a word. He spent evenings examining maps, wondering about the places in the world he would never see, and gradually what he was groping for became almost tangible. Believing unshakably that his granddaughter’s purity and open-eyedness and humor and compassion were more important than any country, people or place, he must prepare her to protect them. Assured, by his own life, that America would kill her innocence and eventually put out the two big eyes that searched for the seed of truth in everything, he must make her unhesitant to leave it.
And still, in all her living there must be joy, laughter, contentment in being a woman; someday there must be happiness in enjoying a man, and children. Each day must be spent, in a sense, apart from any other; on each day there would be sun and cheerfulness or rain and sorrow or quiet contemplation of life. Each day must be past, present and future, with dancing and wine-making and drinking and as few regrets as possible. Her future must be the day she lived in. These were the thoughts he thought, sitting before the fire, pulling on his pipe, or hunched up on his bed clipping his toenails. Survival was not everything. He had survived. But to survive whole was what he wanted for Ruth.
46
ONE DAY ON her way to school Ruth saw her father alone. He was waiting beside the road, squatting near the asphalt like a hobo over his fire, his face brightened and cleared by the clean softness of the eight-thirty sun. When Ruth saw him her heart jumped, and a nervous habit she had acquired recently, of pressing her hand against her forehead, was repeated several times before she found herself abreast of him. She quickened her pace and averted her head. She imagined herself treading cautiously around a bull in a pasture and would soon have been in a trot, but Brownfield stopped her; not by reaching out to touch her, which she could not have stood, but by simply standing alone and mute there beside the road.
Against the high green shoulder of the road he looked smaller than when she’d last seen him. She felt herself larger, because at sixteen she was no longer a child, but smaller somehow too, because she faced him alone. Brownfield was sober and that surprised her. He wore a clean shirt that fitted him loosely, as if he had lost weight or wore someone else’s, and she noticed for the first time knotted coils of gray-black hair growing up from his chest to the base of his creased and dry-looking neck. As her eyes traveled up and down his face she wondered at this hair on her father’s chest; she latched onto this discovery to save for a moment the shock of looking into his eyes. His eyes, which frightened her, and which she always avoided, were full of a pained sadness, which surprised her, and she felt they were trying to speak to her. Her answer was to shudder and to hug her books to her bosom with both arms. Seeing her
confusion he looked down at his shoes. The air around them was filled with the sweet motey smell of hay and red dust and flowers that is Georgia’s in the spring. There was the timeless sound of birds and the noise of children from the direction of the school.
“What do you want?” she asked, feeling fear and anger and hope all at once. She could not understand the hope. Surely there had never been any reason for it that her father had provided. There is something about my father that makes me pity him today, she thought, and knew a momentary wariness and more surprise. Brownfield wet his lips with his tongue. So wet with whiskey he was usually, so dry he seemed today!
“You—” he began, and faltered, “you looks just like your mama.”
“Yes?” Ruth said sharply, “but what do you want?”
“I wants to see you, if you don’t mind,” he said humbly, and slowly, as if afraid of her.
In the silence, punctuated only by the birds and the distant ringing of the school bell, Brownfield kept his daughter before him and looked and looked at her. It was disconcerting and almost eerie. She felt he had never looked at her before.
“I have to go now,” she said faintly, after a few minutes of his greedy staring, for if she had been an oasis in the desert he could not have gazed more longingly at her. “I’m already late for school,” she murmured further, feeling hot and cold. But he said, “Wait!” and though he did not touch her or stand in her way she could not move. His close scrutiny of her continued. On the ground near his feet was a gaily wrapped package that looked as if it might be candy. She did not allow herself more than a glance at it for she wanted no part of him, but he noticed her glance and said, she thought, slyly, “A present for you. They tells me you pretty big on reading books.”
Slowly Ruth recovered the indignation that came to her whenever she thought of him. After all these years of nothing he had the nerve to think he could get her to like him by offering her one lousy book!
“What is it?” she asked coolly, though a great scathing heat had started behind her eyes.
“Why, er, well, I don’t recall the name, but Josie thought you might like it.”
“Well, you just tell Josie I don’t like it and I wouldn’t like it as long as either of you had anything to do with it!” As she spoke she rudely kicked a film of dust over it. After she did it she became afraid but Brownfield barely noticed it. He continued to stare and almost to marvel at the size of her, the sound of her, the whole reality of her.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered under her breath. What is he looking at? Is he trying to decide whether I’m worth the fuss he wants to make to get me? she wondered. And then she thought, Good God, don’t let him touch me with those hands that still and always will look like weapons! Her strong indignation began to lose its heat, and she started again to tremble and to press her forehead and her cheeks. She felt all red and sweaty, as if the dust of the ground were sticking to her.
“You don’t even remember your mama, do you? Brownfield asked after a while, accusingly, his eyes full of a sudden remembrance and a fiery reclaimed jealousy.
“She … she died before I was very old,” said Ruth. “But—” and she looked him in the eye—“I remember her. You don’t forget your mama, or anybody that you’ve loved.”
“But you forgets your daddy?” he asked in a gruff, argumentative tone. But then, “You don’t act like you remember me. A child what’s got respect for her daddy’d run up and give him a hug!” His voice, a moment ago so charged with scorn, was empty of it now. It was old and lonely and pleading. For a moment Ruth could see how much he resembled Grange. She thought of what Grange had told her about people being capable of changing, although lately he’d changed his views about that. But she did not want to hear about the change Brownfield was undergoing, for she could never believe it.
“You never cared for us,” said Ruth. “You never cared for mama or Daphne or Ornette, or for me.” I don’t want any of your damn changes now, she thought, and hated and liked herself for this lack of charity. She glimpsed for the first time what Grange had known, the nature of unforgiveness and the finality of a misdeed done. She saw herself as one both with her father and with Grange, with Josie thrown in to boot.
Her father turned away from her for some private reflections of his own. His hands plucked nervously at a chipped button on his big shirt.
“Daphne’s in—I wanted to get them back, and be their daddy—but Daphne’s in a crazy house up North. And Ornette”—his mouth, usually so vile and slack with whiskey or foul words, was tight and grieving—“Ornette’s a—a lady of pleasure!” He remembered that phrase from the letter from the old guy, the preacher, Mem’s father. Brownfield had written for word of Daphne and Ornette, planning somewhere in the back of his head to entice them home again. How Josie had cackled with delight to see his sickness at what had become of his daughters! The news of their downfall, especially of Ornette’s, had made her jolly throughout one entire day! Though later he had surprised her weeping into her soapsuds, squeezing his overalls and singing about feeling like a motherless child. It had unnerved him to see her so maudlin, but when he had moved to touch her, thinking they might comfort each other, she had turned away, shutting him out, forcing him back into his role of instrument and tormentor.
Brownfield’s large shoulders sagged and his hands, hands Ruth had felt in fury against her own young ears, fumbled loosely with some bits of straw tugged up from the banks of the road. His mumbled, embarrassed, prudish “lady of pleasure,” almost made her laugh out loud, but she was too near to bursting into tears and perhaps beating her head against the closest tree.
“You were the one who said Ornette would be a woman of pleasure, a tramp! That’s all you used to call her. Just ‘tramp.’ ‘Come here, tramp,’ you used to say. I remember that almost as well as I remember my mama.”
The past rose up between them like a movie on a screen. The last dilapidated, freezing house which he had forced on them, the sickness of Daphne, her strange fits of which Brownfield had taken no notice, the waywardness of Ornette, whose every act was done to make someone notice her. The murder of Mem.
“You think I don’t remember,” said Ruth. “The trouble is I can’t forget!”
“You don’t remember nothing,” he said. “You been fed on all the hatred you have for me since the time you was this high!” He turned one heavy palm down toward the ground. “You don’t know what it like for a man to live down here. You don’t know what I been through!”
A tremor of pity shot through her at his anguish, for it was real, although it changed nothing.
“I couldn’t ever even express my love!” he said.
Considering the past, the word was false, a bribe, meaningless. Ruth tossed her head to dismiss it. Although it made an impression on her. She had not known he even thought of affection, except to make fun of it.
“Don’t you shake your head; I loves you and you mine!”
“Yours!”
“Mine,” he said, holding her with possessive eyes.
“What do you want with me now?” she asked. “I don’t know you and you don’t know me!”
“An’ I know who to thank for that! Grange won’t never let you forgive me. Long as you’re with him. That sly old cooter! If he so damn good to you, why wasn’t he a proper daddy to me?”
For all she knew it was an honest enough question. “I told you, you don’t know me. If you did you’d know I’m not just a pitcher to be filled by someone else. I have a mind, I have a memory,” she said.
“I loved my childrens,” said Brownfield, sweating now. “I loved your mama.”
These tortured words, and they did sound as if they escaped from a close dungeon in his soul, hung on the air as a kind of passionate gibberish. Ruth shook her head once more to clear it; truly she could not even understand him when he spoke of loving. It was odd, and she said nothing.
“I mean to have what’s mine,” her father said, much in the way she was used to hearing him spe
ak. He had the curt swagger and roughness of a robber.
“I’m not yours,” Ruth said humbly, for she felt, momentarily, a great dam about to fly open inside her, and when and if it broke she wanted it to be soft and gentle and not hurtful to him, although whatever she said, since she could never forgive him, or even agree with him, would have to hurt some. But suddenly he reached out for the first time to touch her. And his touch was not, as some of his words had been, either pathetic or kind. He grasped the flesh of her upper arm between thumb and forefinger and began to twist it. Her defenses went up again, higher than before, and bitter tears came to her eyes. He don’t know his own strength, she remembered Mem had said time after time, rubbing her own bruises.
“You belongs to me, just like my chickens or my hogs,” he said. “Tell that to your precious grandpa. Tell him he can’t keep you; and before I let him I’ll see you both in hell!”
“You said you loved me,” she said, crying. “If you love me, leave me alone!”
“No,” he said, pushing her away. “I can’t do that. I’m a man. And a man’s got to have something of his own!”
“A man takes care of his own when he’s got it!”
“Aw, Grange been messing with your mind. I would have took care of my own had the white folks let me!”
“I don’t like you, I don’t like you, I don’t like you!” she cried, stamping her foot. Her arm felt as if a plug had been pressed out of it.
“You going to like me better when I gets you in my house!” he said.
“You need shooting,” she said, and trembled. Making herself move very slowly she walked away from him. She held her books tightly and wondered what new thing under the sun she might learn in school that day.
When Brownfield returned to the small linoleum-and-tin-patched house he shared with Josie, he found Josie up to her elbows in soapsuds, muttering against him. Her existence with him since she left Grange, always so fraught with trials, had now reached its nadir with Brownfield’s crazy desire to capture one of his family to live with him. He did not want them out of love, Josie knew; he wanted them (or at least one of them) because having his family with him was a man’s prerogative. Josie called distrustfully on God to deliver her from evil, as she heard Brownfield walking up behind her. Two neighboring women stood by sympathetically. They took up their patent-leather pocketbooks as Brownfield came in. They never stayed in his house after he got there. Brownfield heard the thin pursy-mouthed one say to Josie that her husband didn’t like her to be around so notorious a man, and laughed to think she imagined he could be attracted to her, a woman so thin and juiceless she made a papery rattle when she walked. As he approached her she lowered her grayish head in a vain nod of virginal piety. Her fatter, bolder friend, whom Brownfield had occasionally and casually screwed, and who was never seen without her fan, vigorously fanned herself past him as if his presence in the room had upped the temperature a hundred degrees.
