The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Read The Third Life of Grange Copeland Online
Authors: Alice Walker
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Alice Walker
For my mother,
who made a way out of no way
And for Mel, my husband
Contents
Sometimes I had an intense desire to cry because of something my father said, but instead, because life, cynicism, had taught me to put on a mask, I laughed. For him, I did not suffer, I felt nothing, I was a shameless cynic, I had no soul … because of the mask I showed. But inside, I felt every word he said.
—MANUEL, IN
The Children of Sanchez
BY OSCAR LEWIS
O, my clansmen
Let us all cry together!
Come,
Let us mourn the death of my husband,
The death of a Prince
The Ash that was produced
By a great Fire!
O this homestead is utterly dead,
Close the gates
With lacari thorns,
For the Prince
The heir to the Stool is lost!
And all the young men
Have perished in the wilderness!
—“SONG OF LAWINO,”
A LAMENT BY OKOT P’BITEK
“The great danger,” Richard told Sartre, “in the world today is that the very feeling and conception of what is a human being might well be lost.”
—RICHARD WRIGHT TO JEAN-PAUL SARTRE,
IN
Richard Wright
BY CONSTANCE WEBB
Part I
1
B
ROWNFIELD STOOD CLOSE
to his mother in the yard, not taking his eyes off the back of the receding automobile. His Uncle Silas slowed the car as it got to a place where a pointed rock jutted up out of the road: a week before he had busted an oil pan there. Once past this spot, which he had cursed as he passed to and fro over it during the week, he stuck out his arm and waved jauntily back at them. Brownfield waved sadly, his eyes blurred with tears. His Aunt Marilyn, not visible through the rear window of the car, waved a dainty blue handkerchief from her front window. It fluttered merrily like a pennant. Brownfield’s cousins had their faces pressed to the rear window, and their delicate, hard-to-see hands flopped monotonously up and down. They were tired of waving, for they had been waving good-bye since they finished breakfast. The automobile was a new 1920 Buick, long and high and shiny green with great popping headlights like the eyes of a frog. Inside the car it was all blue, with seats that were fuzzy and soft. Slender silver handles opened the doors and rolled the astonishingly clear windows up and down. As it bumped over the road its canvas top was scratched by low elm branches. Brownfield felt embarrassed about the bad road and the damage it did to his uncle’s car. Uncle Silas loved his car and had spent all morning washing it, polishing the wheel spokes and dusting off the running board. Now it bounced over gullies and potholes in the road, tossing Uncle Silas and his wife and children up in the air and slamming them down again. Brownfield sighed as the sound of metal against rock reached his ears. The road was for mules, wagons and bare feet only.
“A wagon’d be easier,” said his father.
“But not nearly ’bout as grand as that.” His mother looked after the car without envy, but wistfully.
Brownfield watched the automobile as it turned a curve and was finally out of sight. Then he watched the last of the dust settle. Already he missed his cousins, although they made him feel dumb for never having seen a picture show and for never having seen houses stacked one on top of the other until they nearly reached the sky. They had stayed a week and got over being impressed by his small knowledge of farming the first day. He showed them how to milk the cow, how to feed the pigs, how to find chickens’ eggs; but the next day they had bombarded him with talk about automobiles and street lights and paved walks and trash collectors and about something they had ridden in once in a department store that went up, up, up from one floor to the next without anybody walking a step. He had been dazzled by this information and at last overwhelmed. They taunted him because he lived in the country and never saw anything or went anywhere. They told him that his father worked for a cracker and that the cracker owned him. They told him that their own daddy, his Uncle Silas, had gone to Philadelphia to be his own boss. They told him that his mother wanted to leave his father and go North to Philadelphia with them. They said that his mother wanted him, Brownfield, to go to school, and that she was tired of his father and wanted to leave him anyway. His cousins told Brownfield this and much more. They bewildered, excited and hurt him. Still, he missed them; they were from a world he had never seen. Now that they were gone he felt the way he usually felt only in winter, never in June; as if he were waiting for something to happen that would take a very long time to come.
“I wish we lived in Philydelphia,” he said.
“Well, we don’t.” That was his father.
Brownfield looked at Grange with surprise. His father almost never spoke to him unless they had company. Even then he acted as if talking to his son was a strain, a burdensome requirement.
“Uncle Silas like to talk about his automobile,” said Brownfield, his lips bumbling over the word. It was his uncle’s word, a city word. In the country they always said car. Some people still called them buggies, as if they could not get used to a conveyance that did not use horses.
“I wish we had a automobile like that!”
“Well, we don’t.”
“No, we don’t,” said Margaret.
Brownfield frowned. His mother agreed with his father whenever possible. And though he was only ten Brownfield wondered about this. He thought his mother was like their dog in some ways. She didn’t have a thing to say that did not in some way show her submission to his father.
“We ought to be thankful we got a roof over our heads and three meals a day.”
It was actually more like one meal a day. His mother smiled at Brownfield, one of her rare sudden smiles that lit up her smooth, heart-shaped face. Her skin was rich brown with a creamy reddish sheen. Her teeth were small and regular and her breath was always sweet with a milky cleanness. Brownfield had hands like hers, long, thin aristocratic hands, with fingers meant for jewels. His mother had no wedding ring, however.
Brownfield listened to the familiar silence around him. Their house was at the end of the long rugged road that gave his uncle’s car so much trouble. This road looked to be no more than a track where it branched off from the main road, which was of smoothly scraped dirt. The road scraper, a man on a big yellow machine like a tank, never scraped their road, which was why it was so rough and pitted with mud holes when it rained. The house was in a clearing and at the edge of the clearing was forest. Forest full of animals and birds. But they were not large animals or noisy birds and days passed sometimes without a sound and the sky seemed a round blue muffler made of wool.
Brownfield had been born here, in the vast cotton flats of southern Georgia, and had been conscious first of the stifling heat in summer, and then of the long periods of uninterrupted quiet. As a very small child he had scrambled around the clearing alone, chasing lizards and snakes, bearing his cuts and bruises with solemnity until his mother came home at night.
His mother left him each morning with a hasty hug and a sugartit, on which he sucked through wet weather and dry, across the dusty clearing or miry, until she returned. She worked all day pulling baits for ready money. Her legs were always clean when she left home and always coated with mud and slime of baits when she came back. The baits she “pulled” were packed in cans and sold in town to gentlemen who went fishing for the sport of it. His mother had taken Brownfield with her to the bait factory when he was a baby, but he was in the way, and the piles of squirming baits, which were dumped first for sorting on a long table, terrified him. They had looked like a part of the table until one day his mother sat him down near them and he rolled over and became entangled in them. It seemed to him the baits moved with a perfectly horrifying blind wriggling. He had screamed and screamed. His mother was ordered to take him out of there at once and never to bring him back.
At first she left him home in a basket, with his sugartit pressed against his face. He sucked on it all day until it was nothing but a tasteless rag. Then, when he could walk, she left him on the porch steps. In moments of idle sitting he shared the steps with their lean mangy dog. And as the flies buzzed around the whiskered snout of the dog they buzzed around his face. No one was there to shoo them away, or to change the sodden rag that attracted them, and which he wore brownish and damp around his distended waist. For hours he was lost in a dull, weak stupor. His hunger made him move in a daze, his heavy eyes unnaturally bright.
When he was four he was covered with sores. Tetter sores covered his head, eating out his hair in patches the size of quarters. Tomato sores covered his legs up to the knee—when the tomatoes in his mother’s garden were ripe he ate nothing but tomatoes all day long—and pus ran from boils that burst under his armpits. His mother washed the sores in bluestone water. Suddenly, out of his days of sitting and of picking the scabs from his sores, there evolved a languid slow order of jobs he had to do. He fed the pigs, brought in wood and led the cow all over the clearing looking for fresh grass.
When he was six his mother taught him how to feed and milk the cow. Then he became fond of the calm, slow patience of the cow and loved to catch her rich milk in a tin syrup pail and drink it warm and dribbling down his chin.
His father worked: planting, chopping, poisoning and picking in the cotton field, which ran for half a mile along the main road. Brownfield had worked there too now, for four years, since he was six, in the company of other child workers. His father worked with men and women in another part of the field. The cotton field too was generally silent. The children were too tired to play and were encouraged not to play because of the cotton. The grownups talked softly, intermittently, like the sporadic humming of wasps. The buzz of their conversations became part of the silence, for nothing they said came clearly across the field to where the children worked.
At the end of the day all the workers stopped. There were close to twenty grownups, and each had several children who worked in the children’s section of the field. The children’s job was to go over the rows their parents had gone over the week before—“scrapping cotton” it was called. When the children saw their parents put down their sacks they came and stood beside them at the edge of the field as all of them waited for the truck to come. Brownfield waited for the truck along with his father. His father never looked at him or acknowledged him in any way, except to lift his sack of cotton to the back of the truck when it arrived. Brownfield was afraid of his father’s silence, and his fear reached its peak when the truck came. For when the truck came his father’s face froze into an unnaturally bland mask, curious and unsettling to see. It was as if his father became a stone or a robot. A grim stillness settled over his eyes and he became an object, a cipher, something that moved in tense jerks if it moved at all. While the truck stood backed up in the field the workers held their breath. A family of five or six workers would wonder uneasily if they would take home, together, a whole dollar. Some of the workers laughed and joked with the man who drove the truck, but they looked at his shoes and at his pants legs or at his hands, never into his eyes, and their looks were a combination of small sly smiles and cowed, embarrassed desperation.
Brownfield’s father had no smiles about him at all. He merely froze; his movements when he had to move to place sacks on the truck were rigid as a machine’s. At first Brownfield thought his father was turned to stone by the truck itself. The truck was big and noisy and coldly, militarily gray. Its big wheels flattened the cotton stalks and made deep ruts in the soft dirt of the field. But after watching the loading of the truck for several weeks he realized it was the man who drove the truck who caused his father to don a mask that was more impenetrable than his usual silence. Brownfield looked closely at the man and made a startling discovery; the man was a man, but entirely different from his own father. When he noticed this difference, one of odor and sound and movement and laughter, as well as of color, he wondered how he had not seen it before. But as a small child all men had seemed to merge into one. They were exactly alike, all of them having the same smell, the same feel of muscled hardness when they held him against their bodies, the same disregard for smallness. They took pride only in their own bigness, when they laughed and opened their cavernous mouths, or when they walked in their long fearsome strides or when they stooped from their great height and tossed him about in their arms. Brownfield’s immediate horrified reaction to the man who froze his father was that the man had the smooth brownish hair of an animal. Thinking this discovery was the key to his father’s icy withdrawal from the man, Brownfield acquired a cold nervousness around him of his own.
