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I could see how Miss Love could cheer up a man whose wife was short of breath for four years, dying for ten days, and dead for three weeks.
Hep Will Tweedy here see thet we got to accept dyin’ in exchange for livin’ and workin’, and havin’ folks like Miss Mattie Lou to love. And be loved by.”
Cold Sassy is the kind of town where schoolteachers spend two months every fall drilling on Greek and Roman gods, the kings and queens of England, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Marco Polo, Magellan, Columbus, the first Thanksgiving, Oglethorpe settling Georgia, and how happy the slaves were before the War. A good teacher could cover the history of the whole world in two months and spend the rest of the school year on the War of the Sixties and how the Union ground its heel in our faces after it knocked us down. Seems like we never got much past the invasion of Yankee carpetbaggers
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I kept glancing at the blank, stony, pinched faces of the men and women staring at me from steps and doorways, and at the children, all white-headed just like you see them in the Appalachians. They stared at me with sullen, mean eyes, like I was a strange animal. But whenever I looked right at them, their gaze dropped to the ground. Mill Town was watching the Town Boy pass.
to walk through Mill Town than to have our school cluttered up with snot-nosed children who had cooties and the itch, and who at dinnertime stayed at school to eat biscuits and syrup, making us town children feel guilty for going home to a big hot dinner. The mill boys were always picking fights with town boys—tripping
We saw a few mill people near the tracks, picking blackberries into lard buckets, and a whole family of colored people. The Negroes smiled and waved and held up their buckets for me to see. The mill people didn’t.
Sickening racist Southerners found another class of slaves
The fact that Cold Sassy put up with that for a month or more shows how much they respected my father. I respected him, too, as I said before. But I wished he knew what it felt like to need to go fishing.
I knew those blackberries weren’t picked to make a pie with or to put up as jam or jelly or wine. They were for supper. Like as not, all else her folks would have was fried fatback, cream gravy, and corn pone.
And if Mama and them found out it was a mill girl, I’d be hard put to explain it. No town boy or girl from a nice home would be caught dead with a linthead.
other people I couldn’t stand, like Hosie Roach, the mill boy in my class at school. Most mill children went to school just two or three years, then dropped out to work at the spindles. If they were too little to reach the spindles, they stood on boxes. Children caught playing on the job got a whipping from the supervisor.
the Cold Sassy Weekly ran editorials against “allowing cotton mill folks to mix and mingle with the children of our fair city,” the school board voted to close the mill school and let the lintheads come to ours.
If I looked like Grandpa, and Miss Love thought he was handsome, then that meant I was handsome, too.
eyes, just like Grandpa’s. “‘I’m tired of’m tryin’ to scare folks to Heaven with all thet hellfire and damnation. I want to hear bout the lovin’, forgivin’ God thet Jesus preached. But all you git at Christian churches is Old Testa-ment vengeance: watch out and be good or the Lord will smite you down.’”
“I been readin’ a novel, Miss Love, one called Damaged Goods.
There isn’t anything like planning a camping trip to get your mind off of what it shouldn’t be on.
“Thet was jest wishin’. Hit warn’t prayin’.”
‘Have you got that in writin’, Love Simpson?’” Miss Love said coldly, “Are you telling me your father would go back on his word?”
The color rose to my face. Clearly Miss Love didn’t understand. Despite she wasn’t exactly a Yankee, she was from way north of Cold Sassy. Before I could change the subject, she said, “Queenie uses an old knife and fork at your house, too, doesn’t she, Will? And always washes them and her pan and her jar last—just before the dog and cat dishes? That’s the custom, isn’t it?” “Queenie doesn’t care what she eats out of, Miss Love. No more’n she cares if pot licker runs off of the turnip salad and soaks her biscuits, or if the cream gravy gets all over her mashed sweet potatoes. She likes usin’ a
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Gosh, Miss Love sure knew how to make a boy feel like a man. Dipping up some water, I was careful to put my mouth where hers had been. I watched her over the rim of tin.
silver spoon that was tarnished, he’d say, “You know, white folks, ’ligion be jes lak dis here silver. You got to keep it polish reg’lar or it don’ shine, naw suh.”
Said anybody who’d marry a Yankee or a Jew was the same as dead—specially if it was a Yankee Jew.
“Hit jest depends,” Grandpa had said when Papa asked. “But I gol-gar’ntee you I ain’t a-go’n stay a day more’n I have to. I can stand them Yankees jest so long fore my arm goes to hurtin’.”
Loma was jealous. The store window being like a little stage and her having taken elocution, she considered herself the only person in Cold Sassy qualified to act like a dummy.
“Auntie?” I called. “Yassuh?” She had on a blue striped head rag and a dirty faded old feed-sack dress that blew in the wind against her knobby legs. She walked awful slow. “Make haste, we need some hep!” I yelled. I don’t know what I thought she could do. Give us a bucket, maybe. “Yassuh, I’s comin’! But I cain’t make no haste.”
Lee Roy had a thought that made him shudder. “You reckon colored folks turn white like that if they drown?” “Where you s’pose the color goes?” asked Smiley. “I reckon it just dissolves,” said I,
we put two scuttles of dusty coal and a faded half-furled Confederate flag, saved last year when Cold Sassy’s old wooden schoolhouse burned down. We had a brand-new brick school now, and a brand-new Confederate flag out there on the stage.
“He promised to fix the faucet in the bathtub if I’d just get out of his way. Said he couldn’t tackle the job with me standin’ there watchin’ him fail.” Poor ole Camp.
I heard water going drip, drip, drip into the bathtub. I picked up the wrench and changed the washer. Nobody was go’n say Campbell Williams was so sorry that he couldn’t even fix a faucet. It was a small thing to do for somebody brave enough to put a pistol in his mouth and shoot.
As we pushed our way through the hall toward the stairs, I heard somebody ask where was the poor fatherless child. Somebody else said the baby was over at the Tweedys’. “The cook’s keepin’ him.”
Aunt Loma could keep house for him now. But even if he hadn’t wanted Miss Love, it was just as well he didn’t wait for Loma. If she had been born colored, not a soul would of hired her to clean up or cook, either one.
There were those who thought it was going far too far to put somebody who was already halfway to Hell at the feet of a lady who’d been a saint on earth if ever there was one. But Grandpa didn’t ask anybody’s permission.
He did order Granny a coconut and a crate of oranges every Christmas to make him some ambrosia with,
found them sitting in the warm kitchen, him in a rocking chair with his glasses on, reading to Miss Love while she sewed.
you could read a book by the light on their faces.
Naturally he was barefooted, and his feet were cracked and bleeding from the cold.
