The Third Life of Grange Copeland (17 page)

BOOK: The Third Life of Grange Copeland
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There were days of detailed description of black history. Grange recited from memory speeches he’d heard, newscasts, lectures from street corners when he was in the North, every- thing he had ever heard. There was impassioned rhetoric against a vague country of wealthy mobsters called America. And, when she was old enough to carry a gun, she was taught to shoot birds and rabbits. She would rather have done almost anything else. But rabbit was good cooked with potatoes, and birds were like chicken. Still, her heart was scarcely in it.

Ruth could not understand Grange’s aversion to white people. Mem had let her play with white children, and now, at her grandfather’s, there were wonderful ones, she thought, down the road. Playing with them, however, was strictly forbidden. Apparently they were not, at six and seven, as completely wholesome as they looked.

“Why?” she asked, rebelling and beginning nervously to chew her nails.

“One,” Grange said, “they stole you from Africa.”

“Me?” she asked.

“Be quiet,” he said. “Two. They brought you here in chains.”

“Hummm?” she murmured. Looking at her slightly rusty but otherwise unmarked ankles.

“Three. They beat you every day in slavery and didn’t feed you nothing but weeds….”

“Like we give Dilsey?” she interrupted.

“Collards,” he said. “And guts.”

“Chitlins? I like them. I like collards too.”

They did nasty things to women. (She was only nine then.)

“What, what!” she asked, excited.

They are evil.

They are blue-eyed devils.

They are your natural enemy.

“Stay away from them hypocrites or they will destroy you.”

“They didn’t do nothing to me, I think you making a mistake,” she said, fingering her buttons.

“They killed your father and mother,” he said.

As far as she was concerned her father still lived, although at times she wished he wouldn’t.

“No, they didn’t,” she said, for she just couldn’t see it.

37

T
O
G
RANGE HIS
son was as dead as his son’s murdered wife. If he had stopped long enough to consider that his son still lived, his opinion would not have been much different: he would have said he was a member of the living dead, one of the many who had lost their souls in the American wilderness. The cesspool of Brownfield s life was an approximation of nothingness. In prison now for the murder of his wife, Brownfield continued to plot evil. He spent every moment he could in the presence of vileness. His only confidante was his father’s wife. Grange considered the possibility of Josie, aided by Brownfield, turning against him, trying to make him suffer for his neglect of her in favor of his granddaughter. But he did not concern himself long with such wonderings; Ruth needed him to teach her the realities of life. What plotters might do to him, his wife and son, or otherwise, was something he could confront when the time came. In the meantime, he watched Josie coming and going, he heard Brownfield’s name often on her lips. He was not unmoved, but as Josie was one day to learn, he was by nature the most unjealous of men.

It disturbed Grange that Ruth appeared drawn to Brownfield at times, attracted to the same qualities that he knew repulsed and frightened her. It seemed to him that Ruth turned her father’s image over and over in her mind as if he were a great conundrum. When she was thinking about him her look was confounded, as if she knew a door very well but found it lacked a key. He did not like to recall the night he had rushed to Mem’s house to find Mem and her children piled in a heap in the middle of the yard. The other girls, Daphne and Ornette, were whisked away by a smooth-talking Northern preacher (Mem’s father), and his wife, who were all quivering chins and amazement. The old guy was sadder than his wife, so moved by the tragedy that he wanted to take all the children, though he had not, so long ago, wanted their mother. Ruth alone could not be pried loose from her grandfather’s arms. And he had wanted her so much he could not believe himself capable of such strong emotion. Not after everything. Josie had at first found his attachment to the small frightened child amusing. He’d never wanted
her
like that, she said. And it was true. His motives for marrying Josie in the first place were suspect, and she rightfully suspected them. Her weakness was that she cared for him and had waited for him a long time. She foolishly believed that having her he could do no wrong. When he had come back from the North, knowing that even if she had not remained faithful to him she would be waiting, there was no way for her to understand the changes he felt. When he had gone through Baker County on his way North he was a baby in his knowledge of the world. Although he knew the world was hard. He had not even comprehended what he was running to. He was simply moving on to where people said it was better. Josie had had no way of knowing how revulsed he was by what he found in that world, how much he needed to bury himself out of sight of everything. She could not understand, as so many people like her (small, untraveled, thoughtless), how he loathed the thought of being dependent on a white person or persons again, how he would almost rather be blind than have to see, even occasionally, a white face. He had found that wherever he went whites were in control; they ruled New York as they did Georgia; Harlem as they did Poontang Street. If he had taken Josie with him as they had planned, perhaps she would have understood. Two things and two only he wanted when he came back to Baker County. Independence from the whites, complete and unrestricted, and obscurity from those parts of the world he chose. For this security he needed Josie’s money. Josie had thought it was love for her that made him such a seeker of privacy. She thought he needed to own a secluded farm so as to enjoy her charms the better. Her vanity at all times was both provincial and great.

He had tried countless times to initiate her into the hatreds of the world, the irrepressible hatreds he contained, barely, in himself. Once he had told her of a murder (or suicide) which he had caused, and she had been horrified. As horrified that the victim was white as she would have been if she had been black. He could not make her understand there was a difference.

“One life is worth any other,” she said religiously, his fat whorish wife who was raped at sixteen and never avenged.

“What about what they have done to us?”

“How could
you
do such a thing?”

“An eye for an eye—anyway, you knowed I walked out on my wife and child. They could have starved. You never made no complaints about that!”

Josie ducked her head. “That were a little different,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. “Because by leaving them it meant you would end up with
both
of us?”

She began to cry. “The Lord
help
you,” she blurted, her chins shaking.

“’Bout time he did,” he said to her, “just about time he did!”

Now, as he sought to teach the ways of the world to his granddaughter and she resisted him, he was reminded of his own education in foreign parts of the world. For though he hated it as much as any place else, where he was born would always be home. Georgia would be home for him, every other place foreign.

“If you don’t like ’em, Grange,” said his Ruth, “if you don’t like ’em, seems like to me you’d a shot five or six of ’em in the head!” Her imagination beyond her warped reality was fixed by TV westerns. According to them, if you didn’t like the guys on the white horse you challenged them to a draw. You always won, of course, and a child of ten is very strict at applying the rules.

“There are more of them than me.”

“How many more?”

“Billions.”

“Wyatt Earp one time shot five men that were gunning for him. One was on the roof over the saloon, one was in the saloon door, one was in the middle of the street behind a wagon, and the other one was behind him hiding behind his wife. How many is that?”

“Too many in real life.”

“But you’re a good man, Grange,
all things considered,
and you’d be all right.”

Beside such faith his acts against injustice seemed not just puny and ineffectual and selfish but
cowardly
as well.

“I wonder if
He
don’t like them too?” She looked perplexed. Always she spoke of her father as He with a capital H, as if she were speaking of God. At times like now she both hated and respected him.

“Did you know I run away from your grandmother once a long time ago?” he asked her another time.

“Was
she funny
acting, like Josie?”

“What you mean?” He was surprised to know a child so young could be so blind.

“Aw, you know. I would have run away from her too. She was trashy!”

“She wasn’t trashy,” he said gently. “She was a pretty woman and wanted nice things like any pretty woman and when she couldn’t get them, well, she wanted something exciting to keep happening to her to take her mind off them. I wanted them things too, so after a long spell of not getting no pretty things nor no excitement neither we couldn’t seem to get no thrills from nothing but fighting each other.” Grange looked off over his granddaughter’s head.

“I worked for a old white man that would have stole the skin right off my back, if black hides’d bring a good price.”

“Ah!” she said, taking a step away from him.

He knew what was wrong. “Wait ’til you’re grown. You’ll see. They can be hated to the very bottom of your guts, can the white folks!”

“You put it
all
on them!” she said, starting up. “You just as bad as Him! He killed … !” She could not go on; furious tears filled her eyes.

“Let us go look at our traps,” he said, pretending not to see. He reached for his gun.

“The white folks didn’t kill my mother,” she said at last. “He did!”

“I won’t say you’re entirely wrong,” said Grange, putting an arm around her shoulder. “If there’s one snake that’d kill my theory it’s your pa.”

“Tell me something real mean that you did.” Ruth was soothed somewhat by their slow walking through the woods looking at the traps.

He was afraid all their arguments would end this way, and as he could not risk losing her he could never tell her. If he could never back up his words of fighting with actual deeds done and battles won, how could he teach her the necessary hate? The hate that would mean her survival. He was ashamed of himself. It was his weakness, this certainty that she thought him good. She honestly thought him incapable of real evil, of murder, which to her would always be the unthinkable crime. She would have no sympathy for anyone who took the life of another human being. And yet, he was not innocent, he had, once he had learned it, lived his code. The resistance of his choosing was all around her. Even she was part of it. He had lost his innocence, his naïveté, all the better qualities of himself. He had discovered, as Ruth must, that innocence and naïveté are worthless assets in a wilderness, as strong teeth and claws are not.

“Well … ?” she began.

“There was a time—” he said, and stopped. Slowly he shook his head. All his years of violence and hardness swirled through his mind, like bits of dirty paper with dates and pictures. Alone, from the vast sea of criminal debris, there arose the memory of a night many years ago.

It was in the spring of 1926 that he had left his wife and Brownfield and the baby, Star, to go North. He had stayed with Josie for several weeks at the Dew Drop Inn until her possessive “love” and jubilation over Margaret’s death began to get on his nerves. Yes, he had known about Margaret’s death the day after it happened, but he had not returned home. It had hit him hard though, and he had wondered and worried about Brownfield. But he had felt he must continue North. He had his mind on living free, and that meant that even Josie, especially Josie, could not come with him.

By the middle of that summer he had worked, begged, stolen his way North, to New York. Among the frozen faces and immobile buildings he had been just another hungry nobody headed for Harlem. For some months he existed on a variety of hustles. He soon found himself doing things he’d never dreamed he’d do; he sold bootleg whiskey and drugs and stolen goods; he sold black women to white men, the only men at that time who seemed to have money for such pleasures. All of his hustles were difficult for him at first because, as his partners in crime declared, he was just a small dog from the backwoods. Luckily, his backwoodsness did not rule out the possibility of his learning new tricks. Unlike some unfortunate Southern migrants, he did not starve, though he was often close enough to it.

He had come North expecting those streets paved with that gold, which had already become a cliché to the black people who had come before him and knew better, but who still went down home every summer spreading the same old rumors. He had come expecting to be welcomed and shown his way about.

No golden streets he was soon used to. But no friendliness, no people talking to one another on the street? Never. He was, perhaps, no longer regarded as merely a “thing”; what was even more cruel to him was that to the people he met and passed daily he was not even in existence! The South had made him miserable, with nerve endings raw from continual surveillance from contemptuous eyes, but they
knew he was there.
Their very disdain proved it. The North put him in solitary confinement where he had to manufacture his own hostile stares in order to see himself. For why were they pretending he was not there? Each day he had to say his name to himself over and over again to shut out the silence.

“Grange. My name Grange. Grange Copeland is my name.”

He had killed a woman with child on a day when he was in excruciating pain from hunger. He had been begging in Central Park, barely escaping arrest from mounted police. Evening was falling after a bright winter day. He crouched underneath some shrubbery, waiting for the park to empty of cyclists and walkers and the old people, who, forgotten by their children but at least well-dressed and fed, spent their days as long as there was any bit of sun in the lively park.

He had been in New York three and a half years then and was wearing the one warm suit of clothes he had managed to steal. He had become a good thief and, beyond a few beatings “on suspicion” (never for things he had done) by the police, had never been caught. There had been times when he hoped to be caught and sentenced, if only to be fed and kept bathed and warm, but his luck, like his need to run about unhampered, took him out of danger of that “safety” into another kind which suited his spirit to some degree but wreaked havoc in his mind.

BOOK: The Third Life of Grange Copeland
2.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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