The Third Life of Grange Copeland (24 page)

“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
!.”

“And all from behind a fence?” Ruth looked doubtful. “I’d be bored stiff waiting for black folks to rise up so I could join them. Since I’m already ready to rise up and they ain’t, it seems to me I should rise up first and let them follow me.”

“What that takes I’m afraid you ain’t ready yet to give. How many black folks would you say you really know—I mean that would rise without squawking?” he asked. “And how many white?”

She counted the black ones on three fingers, only one an old warrior, the white ones not at all.

44

A
FTER
J
OSIE LEFT
, the house gradually took on the charm of the cabin, the charm of peace, of quiet and of the pursuit of interesting contentment thoroughly enjoyed. Together Grange and Ruth experimented with the beautiful in rugs, curtains, pictures and pillow covers. Ruth’s room was a veritable sun of brightness and yellow and white. For her bed she made a quilt of yellow-and-white cotton and her curtains were white-dotted Swiss which she could just see through. Her desk, facing the woods, was littered with books. She liked mythology, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, any romantic writer. If she had been shipwrecked on a deserted island she would have taken
Jane Eyre,
a pocket thesaurus she had, all her books about Africa. She would have taken her maps of the continents, everything she owned by Charles Dickens, plenty of paper and a stock of pencils. She would have left on her desk her red-covered Bible, which Grange had lifted from a cart that stood outside a motel room, her big dictionary, which he got for her she knew not how, and which would have been too heavy, and her copy of Miss Vanderbilt’s
Etiquette,
which she ignored as much as she could without making her grandfather feel like a fool for getting it for her. Of her clothes she would have taken her two pairs of dungarees and plaid shirts, her winter boots, her red woolen jacket and probably one dress. She would have taken her locket picture of Mem, which had been a present from Grange on her fourteenth birthday. In the picture Mem was a harried hopeful young wife with one child. She looked out of the little locket with calm, disbelieving eyes.

Grange’s room was all in brown and red and blue and black. His room was a part of him and was filled with his smell, of tobacco and hay and, lightly, orange wine. When he was seated by the fire, his brown brogans rested against the brown stones of his fireplace, and his red flannel underwear, as it hung over his rocker, complemented the red among the blue in the quilt on his bed. During three-fourths of the year there were flowers in every room of the house, in the two bedrooms as well as the kitchen, and of course in the “front” room, where their few visitors were allowed to sit themselves down and partake of a sip of iris root or sassafras tea.

“What
is
this stuff?” the boldest of their guests would ask, recalling perhaps some uncharitable comment made by himself or others regarding the oddness of his hosts.

“This is the tea of survival,” Ruth would say, with a wink at her grandfather, who sat silently smoking, ignoring the guest except to comment, “She give it to you, you better drink it,” and seeming entirely comfortable before ill-at-ease company who invariably visited out of curiosity.

“How you know?” they sometimes asked defensively.

“I told her,” would come the indifferent assertion from

Grange, with whom no one ever gathered up the nerve to argue.

The older Grange got the more serene and flatly sure of his mission he became. His one duty in the world was to prepare Ruth for some great and herculean task, some magnificent and deadly struggle, some harsh and foreboding reality. Nothing moved him to repent of his independent method of raising her. In vain did deacons of the church admonish him for teaching Ruth to avoid the caresses of pious sisters and to shun the embraces of baptizing brothers. In vain did preachers and missionaries warn him of the heathenism of her young soul. It was commonly supposed that Ruth was even taught to bite the hand that would spiritually feed her, and this supposition was correct.

“Before you let ’em baptize you in they muddy creeks an’ waterholes, after I’m gone, you kick the legs out from under ’em and leave ’em drown.” To that purpose he hired a poor white lad to teach her to swim.

“The shackles of the slave have one end tied to every rock and bush,” he said to her. “Before you let some angel-distracted deacon put his mitts on you, you git you a good grip on his evangelical ear and you stretch it till his nose slides.”

And if the various congregations believed the spirit of the devil had already entered young Ruth Copeland, her ready adoption of Grange’s teachings more than proved their point. They noted with shock that her greatest delight, along with her grandfather, when they came to church, was to giggle in serious places.

Part X

45

S
EVERAL TIMES AFTER
Josie began living with Brownfield, Ruth saw them loitering in the woods behind the school. Her classmates ran from her father, some of them jeered. Josie, whitely powdered and haphazardly wigged, would stand beside him supporting his drunken weight with a patient, long-suffering look that totally mystified Ruth. It was Grange’s custom, particularly on overcast days, to pick her up at the school well, and if not there at the small wooden powerhouse on the edge of the playground. One day they faced a confrontation with Brownfield and Josie. On that day they had indeed strolled along the edge of the school grounds like lovers, Grange carefully tucking her scarf around her neck every few steps. They were murmuring and giggling about the black janitor at the white library in town, whom Grange managed to get drunk each time he went to the library to steal books for her. They did not see Brownfield and Josie until they almost bumped into them.

“Well, if it ain’t the Gold Dust Twins,” said Josie, insolently, eying their closely knit fingers. For the first time Ruth was chilled by the naked jealousy she read in her stepgrandmother’s eyes.

“Yeah,” said Brownfield, who kept a proprietary hand on his stepmother’s shoulder, “goddam Gold Dust Twins. Out just taking the goddam air!” He rubbed the palm of one hand boldly down the front of his pants.

Ruth was startled and became hysterically baffled, pressing herself into her grandfather’s side and trying to walk past without seeing them. For although she had glimpsed her father’s profile from her classroom window she had been able to convince herself that he was not real, that he was at most a shadow from a very painful past and a shadow that could never gain flesh and speak to her. The drunken tones of his voice brought back a terror she had tried hard to forget.

“Well, well,” said Grange. “My wife and my son.” His eyes when Ruth looked up at him were a kind of flinty brown, almost black, and his skin seemed to have aged and become ashen and papery. It was one of the few times she thought of him as being old, one of the few times she thought it might be possible after all for him to declare he’d had enough of everything and die. That day he was wearing his overalls and brogans but with his old Sunday gabardine overcoat. It was very soft against her face, and it surprised her that her face reached all the way to his shoulder. “What do you want?” he asked the leering pair, a slight quaver in his voice.

“I want my goddam daughter!” said Brownfield. “She don’t belong to you. She belong to me and I want her.”

“Yes,” said Josie, pushing out her still incredible bosom, “she’s his child and he wants her. It ain’t decent for just a old man like you to try to take care of a little girl.” She turned to Brownfield for support, but he, while staring at Ruth, seemed to lapse into a trance. His daughter shivered under his dull incredulous stare. She had never considered that as a big girl she might look more than a little like her mother.

“I don’t know why they give you only seven years,” her grandfather said in a firm voice, drawing himself up. “They ought to have kept you in the pen.”

“But she
are
his child!” said Josie, trying to laugh but seeming frantically close to tears.

“Shet up,” Grange said, without looking at her. “I guess you intend to be a good mother to her?”

“Well, no,” said Josie, nervously reaching out to touch her husband and then succumbing to coyness. “If she go back to her daddy I’ll come back to you.” This jerked Brownfield out of his trance and he gave her a dangerous smirk. Ruth thought she saw Josie wince as if preparing to move away from a blow. That tremor was too much for her and Ruth began to cry. She threw herself into her grandfather’s arms, trembling uncontrollably.

“I don’t want you back, you distant strumpet, let the evil that men do go before them, which is what happened in your case. I wish I never had laid eyes on you.” Then he turned fiery eyes on his son.

“I took this child when you had made her an orphan. You killed her ma. Where was you all these years when she needed a daddy? Nowhere to be found! You wasn’t to be found even when you lived under the same roof with her, except in a whiskey bottle. And then you was in the pen for killing the only decent thing you ever had. I don’t know how you prevailed on the white folks to let you out so quick, for you ain’t repented; although we know they don’t give a damn nohow as long as all we kill is another nigger! You made a bargain,” he said, turning to Josie, who had begun to weep, streaking her face powder, “you stick to it. If you thought you could humble me by running off with my son you was wrong. You’re two of a kind; wallow in the mud together!”

“Don’t be so
hard,
Grange,” wept Josie.
“Don’t be so hard!”

“He thinks I ought not have run out on him a long time ago,” said Grange, ignoring Josie, “and he’s right. But I tried to make up and he wouldn’t let me. And
he
run out on this child. Now he won’t get her back, I don’t care what he do. He won t!

“Grange, I
tried
—” Josie began, but Brownfield cut her off.

“Don’t beg for nothing from him, he so damn righteous he ain’t going to hear you. But
you was no daddy to me
!” he said to Grange, “and I ain’t going to let you keep my child to make up for it!”

“You no-good rascal!” said Grange, pushing Ruth away from him, lifting his fists. “You say one more word—”

“You wasn’t no daddy to
me
!” Brownfield shouted, but made no move to get nearer his father’s fists.

“Grange,” said Josie, “your son
love
you. He done told me all about how it was. You walked out on him and then look like everywhere he turn the white folks was just pushing him down in the mud. You know how it is,” she pleaded. “They just made him do things when he didn’t
mean
them.”

For a moment Grange was too choked with disgust to speak. When he did, he turned to Ruth. “Your daddy’s done taught me something I didn’t know about blame and guilt,” he said. “You see, I figured he could blame a good part of his life on me; I didn’t offer him no directions and, he thought, no love. But when he became a man himself, with his own opportunity to righten the wrong I done him by being good to his own children, he had a chance to become a real man, a daddy in his own right. That was the time he should of just forgot about what I done to him—and to his ma. But he messed up with his children, his wife and his home, and never yet blamed hisself. And never blaming hisself done made him
weak.
He no longer have to think beyond me and the white folks to get to the root of
all
his problems. Damn, if thinking like that ain’t made
noodles
out of his brains.”

“Why,” said Brownfield, “you old bastard!”

Josie had pulled out a handkerchief too small for her. She soon watered it through with tears. “Grange,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with the small wet ball, “you know you got some blame; which, actually, you always did admit—”

“Shut up,” said Brownfield.

“—and you know you used to blame the white folks too. For they
is
the cause of all the dirt we have to swallow… .”

“Every bit,” said Brownfield.

Grange continued to speak to Ruth, his shoulder to Brownfield and Josie. He spoke rapidly, breathlessly, his hands doing their jabbing dance.

“By George, I
know
the danger of putting all the blame on somebody else for the mess you make out of your life. I fell into the trap myself! And I’m bound to believe that that’s the way the white folks can corrupt you even when you done held up before. ’Cause when they got you thinking that they’re to blame for everything they have you thinking they’s some kind of gods! You can’t do nothing wrong without them being behind it. You gits just as weak as water, no feeling of doing
nothing
yourself. Then you begins to think up evil and begins to destroy everybody around you, and you blames it on the crackers.
Shit!
Nobody’s as powerful as we make them out to be. We got our own
souls,
don’t we?”

“For a old man what could eat ten of ’em for breakfast, from what Josie tells me, you sure done turned into a cracker lover!” said Brownfield.

“I don’t love but one somebody, black
or
white,” said Grange, turning briefly to his son. “An’ what I’m talking about ain’t love but being a man!” He turned once more to Ruth. “I mean,” he said, “the crackers could make me run away from my wife, but where was the
man
in me that let me sneak off, never telling her nothing about where I was going, never telling her I forgave her, never telling her how wrong I was myself?”