We all drew in our chairs to a table with a white cloth, china cups and plates and saucers, shiny silver. We couldn’t get used to sitting on chairs at all, at a table with china cups. We had grown so used to our own black, flattened kettle, to sitting cross-legged on the brush with a tin cup and a tin plate, using one sheath knife between the two of us, that we had almost forgotten there were other ways. I felt that surely I would never get used to this kind of business again, and at the same time I had to resist an impulse to put my fingers into a jug of molasses that stood in the center of
...more
