The Third Life of Grange Copeland (23 page)

As she grew older, she was even more ostracized and neglected. By the time she was thirteen everybody knew she was the daughter of a murderer (and it was not just that he was a murderer that they minded—many of their own relatives had killed—but for a father to kill a mother was a thought that shook them) and although the overt harassment had gone—nobody taunted her any more—the tension remained. Then her father was released from prison, and was seen in town. The same week he was released Josie left the house she shared with Ruth and Grange and went to live with him. A fresh wave of gossip and ridicule swept through the school. Before they had teased her and shunned her for being the daughter of a murderer, now they taunted her for being the “wife” of her grandfather, who was so different from their own palsied and placid progenitors. The day after Josie left she must have done a lot of blabbing in curious ears, for the rumor was that Grange preferred his granddaughter to his wife and so she had left the two of them to the uninterrupted enjoyment of each other, Josie made their cabin, which Grange had built only as a playhouse for Ruth, sound indecent. She just had no idea what
really
went on down there between them, Josie was heard to say. Her classmates shied away from Ruth more obviously than ever, in a derisive, suspicious way.

Rossel Pascal was the only person at school she liked, and Rossel had never spoken to her. A brooding, beautiful girl with satiny skin and dark curly hair, Rossel was the only child of an alcoholic father. He never recovered from his wife’s death, people said, and, unfortunately, they also whispered, his wife had not been worth such bother. The teachers regarded Rossel with a distinct chilliness, which aroused Ruth’s fury and compassion, though Rossel herself never seemed to notice.

Rossel was in the twelfth grade when Ruth learned she planned to marry Walt Terrell. Walt was the richest black man in the county. He had returned a hero from World War II, with the remains of bullets in his legs and a chest full of carefully polished medals which he wore, at the drop of a hat, on any auspicious occasion, and even to Sunday School barbecues. The school was named after him, as it stood on his property, and everybody respected him. The schoolteachers fawned on him. Still, he was old, as old as her father, Ruth thought. Why would Rossel, who was no more than sixteen, marry him?

At the graduation ceremonies Ruth watched as Rossel stood beside her future husband. Rossel’s father stood close by, pale and abstracted, clearly not sober. Other people walked about and spoke, but he seemed to drift, like a chip, through the bright stream of Sunday dresses and children’s voices. When his daughter’s name was called his eyes brightened for a moment. Sitting beside Walt, who towered over him with his thick head and great shoulders, in that instant Rossel’s father came alive. When Rossel sat down again with them she looked as if she might like to fling herself into her father’s arms. Father and daughter gazed at each other with eyes like closing doors.

“Rossel,” Ruth said impulsively, as they walked carefully down the high school steps, “can I talk to you?”

“Sure you can,” said Rossel, deliberately careless and cool.

They walked away from the men as if disengaging themselves from a battalion of soldiers. Ruth looked behind her and saw Grange holding forth with some of the men. Whenever she walked away from him and looked at him like a stranger he seemed grotesque, his long frame gangly, his hair bushy in a style that went out with Frederick Douglass, his hands doing a wild emphatic dance in the air between him and whomever he spoke to.

“You’re Mrs. Grange,” Rossel said, and immediately Ruth felt an unbearable hurt, as if she had taken her cares to the Lord and he had asked if she was bringing his laundry. Rossel was smiling brightly, as if at her own drawl, which was an amusing one. Ruth herself spoke without an accent, at least she thought she spoke without one, even though she’d heard nobody talk in real life but Southerners. She did not know why she didn’t sound more like them. It was true her mind tended to blot out or change to something fine and imaginative whatever Southerners said. That included everybody, except Grange, whose speech she found colorful and strong. But Rossel spoke just like a Southern white woman, with the same careless softness. And on her too the accent sounded charming and dumb. When the other children called her “Mrs. Grange,” Ruth got angry, but with Rossel she felt only hurt.

“My name’s Ruth,” she said.

“I know,” said Rossel.

They stood under some trees at the edge of the schoolyard. Behind them was the girls’ outhouse, at the far side of the yard was the well. Several small children were waiting their turn for the dipper that was being passed around. A bigger boy stood by patiently, his hand holding the rope that held the big wooden bucket from which droplets of water fell and spattered on the ground.

“By the time you’re old as me,” said Rossel, “you won’t have to drink water from that dirty old well. You all can throw away that mossy bucket and that
slithery
communal dipper! That’s gonna be progress—an’ just a scant fifteen years behind the white folks.”

Ruth did not know what to say. She hated drinking from the dipper too, but hadn’t heard anybody say one day they wouldn’t have to. Rossel’s face was grim as she looked out toward the highway. Cars full of white people passed by without slowing down. There was no sign indicating that a school was near, and children who had to cross the highway did so at a run. A boy had been killed trying to get across the road, and the state of Georgia had put up a white wooden cross as a “death” marker for motorists, but had not thought to put up a warning sign.

Rossel was plainly bored; she looked questioningly at Ruth. It took all Ruth’s courage to ask her what she had drawn her aside to ask.

“Why you going to marry
him?”
she managed to blurt out finally.

“Why not?” Rossel asked indifferently. “I’d rather marry the devil than get stuck with any of the stinking jobs they give you round this town.”

“Jobs?”
asked Ruth. Her idea of marriage romantically included love. But she tried to imagine Rossel as a short-order cook in a hash house. Rossel was too lovely. She tried to see her as some woman’s maid. Rossel was too close to needing a maid herself. Rossel was not meant to be among the wretched of the earth, and Rossel apparently knew it.

She wanted very much to hug Rossel. But how could she hug somebody so cold, so indifferent, so unfeelingly beautiful, such a
grim
girl? Instead Ruth burst into tears, and it was Rossel who hugged her.

“Don’t cry over it,” Rossel said, her voice strange and thin and bleak. “Maybe someday we’ll both understand why marrying him is supposed to be so much better.” For a moment they clung together and then Rossel was gone, her face calm, set, resolute; the face, Ruth thought, of a doll. A face without anything but confidence in its own empty perfection.

It was a long time before she saw Rossel again, a whole year. It was at the funeral of Rossel s father, who had frozen to death in the cemetery on top of his wife’s grave slab. Rossel was richly robed in black and looked like a stricken queen. She had grown older in that year, and, apparently, more devoted to her husband, for she leaned within the protection of his arms with the abandoned dependency of a child. And Walt, through his perpetually dull and military exterior, seemed to beam with pride and accomplishment.

O
NE DAY THE
question of what her future was to be loomed very large. It was the day her body decided it was ready for a future and she knew she was not. She felt tightened and compressed by panic. Grange had bought her napkins, a belt, and a lovely talc that smelled like a warm rose. He was excited and troubled over what he would say to her about such an unplanned for, though not unexpected, development. However, she was too well read to make him struggle with her enlightenment. What scared her was that she felt her woman’s body made her defenseless. She felt it could now be had and made to conceive something she didn’t want, against her will, and her mind could do nothing to stop it. She was deathly afraid of being, as she put it, “had,” as young girls were every day, and trapped in a condition that could only worsen. She was not yet at a stage where the prospect of a man and marriage could be contemplated with equanimity.

“What
am
I going to do when I get grown?” she asked her grandfather with some alarm.

“What you mean? We got this farm. We can stay here till kingdom come.”

She looked at Grange’s patch of cotton that was so lovely under the moon. There was a garden and chickens and pigs. The life would be perfect for a recluse.

“I’m not going to be a hermit,” she said. “I want to get away from here someday. Meaning no offense to your farm, of course. You know, I think maybe I’ll go North, like you did; I want to see New York, 125th Street, all those nightclubs and people standing around cussin’ in public.”

“I won’t let you,” said Grange sternly.

“I wouldn’t try to go while
you
were here,” she said, as if he should be ashamed to imagine such a thing.

“I still don’t want you to go up there, it’s cold as a witch’s titty, and nasty, and the people speak to you funny.”

“You told me all that. But what would I do down here? I
could
take over Sister Madelaine’s job, except she’s still on it, old as she is. As a matter of fact, I suspect that’s what you’d want me to do, turn myself into a fortuneteller and scare the hell out of unbelieving white ladies. But I don’t think I’m cut out for digging up roots and nailing feces into trees! Ugh! Maybe I could teach down the road with Mrs. Grayson; two dumdums together. But I wouldn’t have the nerve to stand in front of those children knowing they can’t hear a word I’m saying. Besides, I despise Mrs. Grayson too much to subject her to the pleasure of my company.”

“You smarter than her,” said Grange. “You read enough stuff to know what to teach anybody.”

“Being smarter than Mrs. Grayson would be my greatest liability. She’d come up behind me one day and push me in the well. Mean old bitch!”

“You don’t need to get excited. She got her orders from me not to get rough with you no more. I told her I’d wring her neck till her eyes wall. Her husband’s too.”

Ruth sighed. “What is left!” She ran into her room and brought out the newspaper. Turning to the want ads she read: “ ‘Wanted: Beautiful Southern Belle type with charming, winning manner for job as receptionist in law firm.’” There was only one law firm in town and it was white. “My charm probably wouldn’t be up to it anyway,” muttered Ruth, continuing to read: “ ‘Wanted:
WHITE LADIES
—to fill vacancies in sewing plant. New plant recently revitalized and under new management needs seamstresses to make overalls. Will train.’ Blah,” she said. In the colored section of the want ads there was only one opening for “middle-aged colored woman to do light domestic work evenings with some light ironing and cooking. $6.00 per week.” Ruth put down the paper and looked at Grange.

“You know I ain’t going to be nobody’s cook, don’t you?”

“You ain’t,” he agreed.

“Well, what do you suggest I do when I’m grown? There wasn’t but one Walt Terrell,” she added bitterly, “and Rossel got him!”

“You won’t sell yourself; don’t even get that thought in your head. Maybe something’ll turn up. Things change,” he said, without much conviction. “Presidents change—we get some that help us sometime. Roosevelt, you don’t remember him, but he once had Booker T. Washington to lunch in the White House. The rest of us was starving, but it seemed to help us some then. And today there’s Eisenhower, as wishy-washy a lookin’ rattler as ever was, but the court been tellin’ everybody that the black schools ain’t up to the white ’n they say he’s back of it.”

“Meantime our school is hanging together by sheer inadequacy.”

“Don’t interrup’ me. What I know, and I reckon the
most
I know is that people change. That is the main reason not to give up on them. Why, if you had knowed me when I was a young blade, drinking and fighting and beating your grandma, you’d a give up on me. Sure, you would. You ain’t long on patience.
But,
now, you didn’t give up (mainly because you wa’n’t born or thought of then) and here you see me tamed and fairly civilized, taking my drinks for stomach’s sake, like a gentleman, toiling in the fields for just one gal, and bringing home all my money. And don’t you forget, there have always been black folks fighting for better. Maybe their ranks will swell till they include everybody. I don’t know how it can be done—I never
seen
such a sorry passel of niggers as in your daddy’s generation—but with the right change and some kind of leader it can be.

“There was a time I didn’t own my life and then there was a time I didn’t care if I lost it when I had it, long as I took a dozen or so white folks with me. I’m still inclined to believe that that
was
my finest hour. But then I came back here, sick of feeling that way and seeing all the rest of our folks standing around praying. And the Lord or something dropped you in my lap. A voice said to me you stop that cuttin’ up, Nig, here is a reason to get yourself together and hold on.

“When I die this farm ain’t going to be nobody’s but yours. I done paid for it with every trick I had. The fence we put up around it will enclose freedom you can be sure of, long as you ain’t scared of holding the gun. The gun is important. For I don’t know that love works on everybody. A little love, a little buckshot, that’s how I’d say handle yourself.

“Anyway, you might as well know I don’t care much for nobody except you. I ’member when I was a churchgoer proper, I tried to feel something real big, something that would make me love the whole world. But I just couldn’t come at that feeling no kind of way. Your grandma and me was fighting a heap then over one thing and another; and I think we scrappled so much because she
could
love all sorts of folks she didn’t have no business.

“The white folks hated me and I hated myself until I started hating them in return and loving myself. Then I tried just loving me, and then you, and
ignoring
them much as I could. You’re special to me because you’re a part of me; a part of me I didn’t even used to want. I want you to go on a long time, have a heap of children. Let them know what you made me see, that it ain’t no use in seeing at all, if you don’t see
straight
!.”