around
Adelaide, I’m telling you, you will do no such thing. She’s been with us for four years now and she’s hardworking and faithful Except for once or twice when she was ill she’s not missed a single day Even in that fantastic hurricane she was here, when the trolleys had stopped running!
I can’t have her working here anymore. I can’t put up with this absolutely hangdog manner! This Yessum and No’m spoken with such hostility, as if I had requested some incredibly arduous service. And when Louise Marabie, trying to be nice, trying not to offend, suggests nonetheless, as you heard her tonight, that there is a big difference between polite reserve and rudeness, then I feel it’s the last straw. She’s out as of tomorrow morning. O-u-L
Adelaide, let me tell you something. Let me be candid I think you ’ve come a long, long way in the years since we first knew each other. We’ve discussed this before, and you will recollect your own admission that you came to Virginia with a load of ugly prejudices about colored people. Such an irony, too, a Pennsylvanian, a college graduate — sophisticated, widely traveled, reader of William Faulkner, bien èlevèe, and all that — carrying around this baggage of truly bizarre notions about colored people, as you still prefer to call them, or Negroes, as I call them. Crudely, if I might jog your memory, you said they all smelled — like onions, or perhaps garlic, if recollection serves me right — and you also uttered the howler that in terms of physiognomy there was no way to tell one Negro from another. And I remember clearly when Paul was about five your telling him to say “colored woman, ” not “lady. ” Good gracious, the ways of the world are strange. Here I was, not the grandson, mind you, but the son of a slave owner, born in a county 45 percent Negro, and reared in an atmosphere so benighted as regards this one matter that I was a fully grown adult before I realized that despite formal manumission, these people had continued to dwell in a state of slavery, in many ways worse. I don’t mean to sound self-righteous but it was I who had to teach you, not you me, that Negroes had essential qualities of dignity and decency. I, a shit-kicking Carolina yokel who, when I first met you, suspected you of being a neo-abolitionist —
Jefferson, stop, you are missing the point entirely — Wait a minute, Adelaide, and then you can proceed I fully concede that your attitudes have changed remarkably in recent years. You have become, if by my standards, not quite truly open-minded, then certainly tolerant, and your sense of fair play is exemplary when stacked up against that of some of the bigoted friends you play with, and of the other adherents of the dinosaur politics of Harry Byrd with his execrable poll tax and other felonies —
And that is the point, Jefferson! It’s not her color, it’s her class! She’s a servant! She’s of the servant class, the class that served our family in Connellsville, some Irish, some German, some Hungarian, but servants! Mama and Daddy asked only that they be pleasant-mannered, and finally that’s all I’m asking of this sullen, evil-spirited Florence you’ve supported so long —
That was a few years before, and my mother had, at last, come around to a frank affection for Florence, sullen or whatever, smile or no smile. In the alcove Florence and I sat silently together for a while, listening. We were alert to the motions upstairs, awaiting a murmur, a voice, even the creaking of a floorboard, but we heard nothing. And thus the silence, I knew, meant that my father and Miss Slocum had again taken up their vigil at my mother’s bedside, creating that virtually motionless tableau which—whenever I stole past the room, forbidden to go in—appeared to have existed immemorially, like some old painting or illustration I had seen (or thought I had seen) called “The Sickroom”: the recumbent form in the blue nightgown,
Adelaide, I’m telling you, you will do no such thing. She’s been with us for four years now and she’s hardworking and faithful Except for once or twice when she was ill she’s not missed a single day Even in that fantastic hurricane she was here, when the trolleys had stopped running!
I can’t have her working here anymore. I can’t put up with this absolutely hangdog manner! This Yessum and No’m spoken with such hostility, as if I had requested some incredibly arduous service. And when Louise Marabie, trying to be nice, trying not to offend, suggests nonetheless, as you heard her tonight, that there is a big difference between polite reserve and rudeness, then I feel it’s the last straw. She’s out as of tomorrow morning. O-u-L
Adelaide, let me tell you something. Let me be candid I think you ’ve come a long, long way in the years since we first knew each other. We’ve discussed this before, and you will recollect your own admission that you came to Virginia with a load of ugly prejudices about colored people. Such an irony, too, a Pennsylvanian, a college graduate — sophisticated, widely traveled, reader of William Faulkner, bien èlevèe, and all that — carrying around this baggage of truly bizarre notions about colored people, as you still prefer to call them, or Negroes, as I call them. Crudely, if I might jog your memory, you said they all smelled — like onions, or perhaps garlic, if recollection serves me right — and you also uttered the howler that in terms of physiognomy there was no way to tell one Negro from another. And I remember clearly when Paul was about five your telling him to say “colored woman, ” not “lady. ” Good gracious, the ways of the world are strange. Here I was, not the grandson, mind you, but the son of a slave owner, born in a county 45 percent Negro, and reared in an atmosphere so benighted as regards this one matter that I was a fully grown adult before I realized that despite formal manumission, these people had continued to dwell in a state of slavery, in many ways worse. I don’t mean to sound self-righteous but it was I who had to teach you, not you me, that Negroes had essential qualities of dignity and decency. I, a shit-kicking Carolina yokel who, when I first met you, suspected you of being a neo-abolitionist —
Jefferson, stop, you are missing the point entirely — Wait a minute, Adelaide, and then you can proceed I fully concede that your attitudes have changed remarkably in recent years. You have become, if by my standards, not quite truly open-minded, then certainly tolerant, and your sense of fair play is exemplary when stacked up against that of some of the bigoted friends you play with, and of the other adherents of the dinosaur politics of Harry Byrd with his execrable poll tax and other felonies —
And that is the point, Jefferson! It’s not her color, it’s her class! She’s a servant! She’s of the servant class, the class that served our family in Connellsville, some Irish, some German, some Hungarian, but servants! Mama and Daddy asked only that they be pleasant-mannered, and finally that’s all I’m asking of this sullen, evil-spirited Florence you’ve supported so long —
That was a few years before, and my mother had, at last, come around to a frank affection for Florence, sullen or whatever, smile or no smile. In the alcove Florence and I sat silently together for a while, listening. We were alert to the motions upstairs, awaiting a murmur, a voice, even the creaking of a floorboard, but we heard nothing. And thus the silence, I knew, meant that my father and Miss Slocum had again taken up their vigil at my mother’s bedside, creating that virtually motionless tableau which—whenever I stole past the room, forbidden to go in—appeared to have existed immemorially, like some old painting or illustration I had seen (or thought I had seen) called “The Sickroom”: the recumbent form in the blue nightgown,
Similar Books
