Synopsis
Book by Spencer Elizabeth
Extrait
the little brown girl
Maybeth’s father had a business in the town, which was about a mile from where they lived, but he had about forty acres of land below the house that he planted in cotton and corn. The land was down the hill from the house and it was on two levels of ground: twenty acres, then a bluff covered with oak sprouts and vines, then a lower level, which stretched to the property line at the small creek. You could see it all from the house—the two fields and the creek, and other fields beyond the creek—but from the upper field you could just see as far as the willows along the creek bank.
For nine months of the year, Maybeth’s father hired a Negro named Jim Williams to make the crop. Jim would work uptown in the mornings and come in the afternoons around two o’clock—a black, strapping Negro in blue overalls, stepping light and free and powerful on the road from town. He would go around the house to the back to hitch up the black mule in spring, or file on the hoe blade in summer, or drag a great dirty-white cotton sack to the field in the fall. Spring, summer, and fall they saw him come, until he became as much a part of the household as Maybeth or Brother or Lester Junior or Snookums, the cook; then, after the last pound of cotton was weighed in the cold fall twilight, the Jim they knew would vanish. In winter, they sometimes spoke to a town Negro as Jim, and he would answer back, pleasant as you please, but it was no use pretending he was the same. The cotton stalks stood black and sodden in the field, and the cornstalks broke from the top, and there was nothing for a little girl to do in the afternoons but grow all hot and stuffy by the fire or pester Mother for things to eat or study schoolbooks sometimes. There wasn’t anybody much to play with out where they lived.
At last, the spring day would come when Maybeth could leap away from the school bus and the ugly children in the bus, and run up the drive to the house, then down the hill, under the maple trees, to the field. Jim would be in the field, plowing with the middlebuster, and she would get to follow behind him for the first time in the year. Jim did a lot of funny things out there in the field. Up ahead, where the rows ended at the top of the bluff, Jim sometimes stopped when he had pulled the plow out of the ground, and while the black mule circled in the trace chains he would fling up his head and sing out, rich and full, as loud as he could sing, “Ama-a-zi-in’ grace—” The air would quiver for the next line to come, but Jim would be well into the field by then, driving the plow down the furrow with a long, swinging stride.
Once, Maybeth tried to tell him the next line. “It goes ‘How sweet the sound,’ Jim,” she said, trying to put her little shoes in Jim’s broad tracks.
But all Jim Williams said was, “Git up, Jimson Weed!” Other times, he called the mule Daisy Bell, and that was funny, too, because the mule’s name was Dick, and Dick was a man mule, Maybeth was sure. But when she told Jim that, he only said, “Lawd, Lawd,” as though she had told him something he had never heard before, or something he had only half heard when she said it. You couldn’t tell which.
But most of the time Maybeth was asking Jim questions. When she got like that with Mother, Mother would finally say, “Now, what on earth made you think of that?” Daddy would laugh at her questions and say, “I don’t know, honey.” But Jim knew the answer to everything. He knew why the jaybird bounced on the air when he flew and why the mule swept his nose along the ground when he turned and why the steel plow slid out of the earth as clean as when it entered. Sometimes Maybeth knew that Jim was making up, but most of the time she believed him word for word, like the catechism in Sunday School.
One spring afternoon, a few days before Maybeth’s seventh birthday, Jim was sporting a new red bandanna in the back pocket of his overalls. Even before Maybeth reached him, she spotted it, and she asked about it first thing.
“My little girl give me that,” he said. He spoke in his making-up voice, but he looked perfectly straight-faced.
Maybeth hurried very fast behind him. “Aw, Jim, you ain’t got a little girl, have you? How old is she?”
“She be eight nex’ fall,” he said, very businesslike. “Gee, mule.”
“How big is she?”
“She jes’ ’bout your size, honey.”
A little brown girl in a starched blue-and-white checked dress stepped smiling before Maybeth’s eyes. From then on, Maybeth’s questions all went in one direction, and if Jim had any peace, it was only because he was Jim.
“When will I get to see her, Jim? When will she come and play with me?”
“Some day nex’ week, I reckon.”
“What day next week?”
“Long ’bout the middle part of the week, I spec’.”
“Aw, you’re just foolin’, Jim. Aren’t you just foolin’?”
“Ama-a-zi-in’ grace—” sang Jim Williams as the black mule turned in the trace chains against a low and burning cloud. And that night, when Jim had eaten his supper in the kitchen and gone, the little brown girl in the blue-and-white checked dress stayed on.
“Mother, guess what Jim told me today,” said Maybeth, opening her arithmetic book before the fire. “He said he had a little girl. She’s coming and play with me.”
“Oh, honey, Jim’s just fooling you. Jim hasn’t got any children, has he, Lester?”
“Not that I ever heard of,” said Daddy. “It’s a good thing, too— the way he drinks and carries on every Saturday night.”
“He’s fooling you,” said Mother.
Maybeth bent quickly to her sums. “I know it,” she said.
And in a way she had known it all along. But in another way she hadn’t known it, and the not knowing still remained along with the knowing, and she never thought it out any further. Nothing was changed, and she and the little brown girl played together before she went to sleep at night, in dull moments at school, and when she was being quiet on the bus, riding home with the noisy children. The little girl was the first thing to ask questions about when she ran to the field after school, the warm sun on her yellow hair, and her feet already uncomfortable to be out of their shoes.
The first thing, that is, until the Friday came when Maybeth was seven. It was a perfect birthday. Under her plate at breakfast that morning she found two broad silver dollars. The class sang “Happy Birthday” to her in school, and that night Snookums, the cook, who usually finished work in the afternoon, returned from her house to cook supper, and they all had fried chicken and rice and gravy and a coconut birthday cake.
Maybeth ran into the kitchen to show her silver dollars to Snookums and Jim. “Look, Snookums! Look, Jim!” she said.
“Lawd-ee!” said Snookums. She was a young, bright Negro with a slim waist and straight black hair.
“My, my!” said Jim. “That’s ringin’ money, ain’t it, Snookums?”
“Lawd-ee!” said Snookums.
“Which you druther have, Snookums,” said Jim, “ringin’ money or foldin money?”
The door was open to the dining room, and Maybeth heard her big brother laugh and holler back, “Either one’ll do to buy Saturday-night liquor, won’t it?”
Jim and Snookums just fell out laughing, and Maybeth somehow felt ashamed.
After supper, she put the two silver dollars in a little box inside a bigger box and put them in the very back right-hand corner of her drawer in the bureau.
The next day was Saturday, and it rained, so Jim stayed in the barn and shelled corn for the chickens, and Maybeth watched.
“I wuz gwine bring my little girl to play with you nex’ week,” said Jim.
Maybeth was stricken. “How come you can’t, Jim? Oh, how come you can’t?”
“She ain’t got no fine dress like you is. She ain’t got nothin’ ’cept one ole brown dress. She say she shame to come.”
Maybeth broke the stubborn grains of corn from a cob one at a time, and her heart beat very fast. “Have you sure ’nough got a little girl, Jim?”
Jim did not answer. “There’s dresses at the Jew store,” he went on mournfully. “But they’s nigh onto two dollars. Take the nigger long time to make up that money.”
A few minutes later, Maybeth was hurrying back to the house in the rain.
She took the two silver dollars out of the little box within the larger box, and ran back to the barn.
“What you fixin’ to do?” Jim Williams asked, holding the two coins in his open palm and cutting his eyes toward her.
“For the dress,” Maybeth said. “You know. For your little girl’s dress, Jim.”
“Your daddy ain’t gwine like you playin’ around with this money,” he said.
“He ain’t going to know,” said Maybeth.
“You sure?” he asked, snapping shut the three clasps on his little leather purse.
“I’m not going to tell him,” said Maybeth.
“Gwine git her a yalla dre-ess,” sang Jim softly, and the corn poured out of his fingers in rich handfuls and rattled against the side of the scuttle as fast as the rain on the tin roof.
Maybeth did not know why she had given Jim the money. It was like when you are playing mud pies by yourself and you get real salt and pepper for the pies...
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