buses, and loud family gatherings, I welcomed the obscure lanes and lonely bungalows set back deep in dirt yards.
The resignation of its inhabitants encouraged me to relax. They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due. Their decision to be satisfied with life’s inequities was a lesson for me. Entering Stamps, I had the feeling that I was stepping over the border lines of the map and would fall, without fear, right off the end of the world. Nothing more could happen, for in Stamps nothing happened.
Into this cocoon I crept.
For an indeterminate time, nothing was demanded of me or of Bailey. We were, after all, Mrs. Henderson’s California grandchildren, and had been away on a glamorous trip way up North to the fabulous St. Louis. Our father had come the year before, driving a big, shiny automobile and speaking the King’s English with a big city accent, so all we had to do was lie quiet for months and rake in the profits of our adventures.
Farmers and maids, cooks and handymen, carpenters and all the children in town, made regular pilgrimages to the Store. “Just to see the travelers.”
They stood around like cutout cardboard figures and asked, “Well, how is it up North?”
“See any of them big buildings?”
“Ever ride in one of them elevators?”
“Was you scared?”
“Whitefolks any different, like they say?”
Bailey took it upon himself to answer every question, and from a corner of his lively imagination wove a tapestry of entertainment for them that I was sure was as foreign to him as it was to me.
He, as usual, spoke precisely. “They have, in the North, buildings so high that for months, in the winter, you can’t see the top floors.”
“Tell the truth.”
“They’ve got watermelons twice the size of a cow’s head and sweeter than syrup.” I distinctly remember his intent face and the fascinated faces of his listeners. “And if you can count the watermelon’s seeds, before it’s cut open, you can win five zillion dollars and a new car.”
Momma, knowing Bailey, warned, “Now Ju, be careful you don’t slip up on a not true.” (Nice people didn’t say “lie.”)
“Everybody wears new clothes and have inside toilets. If you fall down in one of them, you get flushed away into the Mississippi River. Some people have iceboxes, only the proper name is Cold Spot or Frigidaire. The snow is so deep you can get buried right outside your door and people won’t find you for a year. We made ice cream out of the snow.” That was the only fact that I could have supported. During the winter, we had collected a bowl of snow and poured Pet milk over it, and sprinkled it with sugar and called it ice cream.
Momma beamed and Uncle Willie was proud when Bailey regaled the customers with our exploits. We were drawing cards for the Store and objects of the town’s adoration. Our journey to magical places alone was a spot of color on the town’s drab canvas, and our return made us even more the most enviable of people.
High spots in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths.
Bailey played on the country folks’ need for diversion. Just after our return he had taken to sarcasm, picked it up as one might pick up a stone, and put it snufflike under his lip. The double entendres, the two-pronged sentences, slid over his tongue to dart rapier-like into anything that happened to be in the way. Our customers, though, generally were so straight thinking and speaking that they were never hurt by his attacks. They didn’t comprehend them.
“Bailey Junior sound just like Big Bailey. Got a silver tongue. Just like his daddy.”
“I hear tell they don’t pick cotton up there. How the people live then?”
Bailey said that the cotton up North was so tall, if ordinary people tried to pick it they’d have to get up on ladders, so the cotton farmers had their cotton picked by machines.
For a while I
The resignation of its inhabitants encouraged me to relax. They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due. Their decision to be satisfied with life’s inequities was a lesson for me. Entering Stamps, I had the feeling that I was stepping over the border lines of the map and would fall, without fear, right off the end of the world. Nothing more could happen, for in Stamps nothing happened.
Into this cocoon I crept.
For an indeterminate time, nothing was demanded of me or of Bailey. We were, after all, Mrs. Henderson’s California grandchildren, and had been away on a glamorous trip way up North to the fabulous St. Louis. Our father had come the year before, driving a big, shiny automobile and speaking the King’s English with a big city accent, so all we had to do was lie quiet for months and rake in the profits of our adventures.
Farmers and maids, cooks and handymen, carpenters and all the children in town, made regular pilgrimages to the Store. “Just to see the travelers.”
They stood around like cutout cardboard figures and asked, “Well, how is it up North?”
“See any of them big buildings?”
“Ever ride in one of them elevators?”
“Was you scared?”
“Whitefolks any different, like they say?”
Bailey took it upon himself to answer every question, and from a corner of his lively imagination wove a tapestry of entertainment for them that I was sure was as foreign to him as it was to me.
He, as usual, spoke precisely. “They have, in the North, buildings so high that for months, in the winter, you can’t see the top floors.”
“Tell the truth.”
“They’ve got watermelons twice the size of a cow’s head and sweeter than syrup.” I distinctly remember his intent face and the fascinated faces of his listeners. “And if you can count the watermelon’s seeds, before it’s cut open, you can win five zillion dollars and a new car.”
Momma, knowing Bailey, warned, “Now Ju, be careful you don’t slip up on a not true.” (Nice people didn’t say “lie.”)
“Everybody wears new clothes and have inside toilets. If you fall down in one of them, you get flushed away into the Mississippi River. Some people have iceboxes, only the proper name is Cold Spot or Frigidaire. The snow is so deep you can get buried right outside your door and people won’t find you for a year. We made ice cream out of the snow.” That was the only fact that I could have supported. During the winter, we had collected a bowl of snow and poured Pet milk over it, and sprinkled it with sugar and called it ice cream.
Momma beamed and Uncle Willie was proud when Bailey regaled the customers with our exploits. We were drawing cards for the Store and objects of the town’s adoration. Our journey to magical places alone was a spot of color on the town’s drab canvas, and our return made us even more the most enviable of people.
High spots in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths.
Bailey played on the country folks’ need for diversion. Just after our return he had taken to sarcasm, picked it up as one might pick up a stone, and put it snufflike under his lip. The double entendres, the two-pronged sentences, slid over his tongue to dart rapier-like into anything that happened to be in the way. Our customers, though, generally were so straight thinking and speaking that they were never hurt by his attacks. They didn’t comprehend them.
“Bailey Junior sound just like Big Bailey. Got a silver tongue. Just like his daddy.”
“I hear tell they don’t pick cotton up there. How the people live then?”
Bailey said that the cotton up North was so tall, if ordinary people tried to pick it they’d have to get up on ladders, so the cotton farmers had their cotton picked by machines.
For a while I
Similar Books
