The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker

children to eat their fill.
    He had once been a handsome man, slender and tall with narrow, beautiful hands. From trying to see in kerosene lamplight his once clear eyes were now red-veined and yellowed, with a permanent squint. From running after white folks’ cows, he never tended much to his own, when he had any, and he’d developed severe athlete’s foot that caused him to limp when the weather was hot or wet. From working in fields and with cows in all kinds of weather he developed a serious bronchitis aggravated by rashes and allergies.
    He was not a healthy man. When he first started working with cows his hands broke out and the skin itched so that he almost scratched it off. It was only after years of working every day milking cows that the itch gave up, and by then his hands were like gray leather on the outside, the inside scaly and softly cracked, too deformed for any work except that done to and for animals. The harder and more unfeeling the elephant-hide skin on his hands became the more often he planted his fists against his wife’s head.
    I ain’t never going to marry nobody like him, Daphne swore to herself, watching the big ugly hands that smelled always of cows and sour milk.
    “It’s all settled,” said Brownfield, belching loudly and digging under the table between his legs. “We going to move over to Mr. J. L.’s come next Monday and,” he spoke menacingly to Mem, “I don’t want any lip from you!”
    “I already told you,” she said, “you ain’t dragging me and these children through no more pigpens. We have put up with mud long enough. I want Daphne to be a young lady where there is other decent folks around, not out here in the sticks on some white man’s property like in slavery times. I want Ornette to have a chance at a decent school. And little baby Ruth,” she said wistfully, “I don’t even want her to know there’s such a thing as outdoor toilets.”
    “You better git all that foolishness out your head before I knock it out!”
    “I ain’t scared of you,” his wife lied.
    “When the time comes, you’ll see what you do, Miss Ugly,” he said, and pinched her tense worn cheek. Even as he did it he knew dull impossible visions of a time when that cheek was warm and smoothly rounded, highlighted and sleek. It was rare now when it curved itself in a smile.
    “Me and these children got a right to live in a house where it don’t rain and there’s no holes in the floor,” she said, snatching her cheek away. From long wrestles in the night he knew she despised his hands. He held one gigantic hand in front of her eyes so she could see it and smell it, then rammed it clawingly down her dress front.
    If I was a man, she thought, frowning later, scrubbing the dishes, if I was a man I’d give every man in sight and that I ever met up with a beating, maybe even chop up a few with my knife, they so pig-headed and mean.

22
    “’E VENING, B ROWN,” she said solemnly the following afternoon, Wednesday.
    “’Evening, Ugly,” Brownfield said, crossing the porch and eying her with suspicion. He detected a sad meager smile beginning to work itself across her broad lips. The sun across her hair made him notice how nearly gray it was. She was hanging there in the doorway, her ugly face straining between deep solemnity and sudden merriment. It had been years since he’d seen her look anything near this excited.
    “What you turning that idiot look on me for?” he asked, facing her, his hand on the screen door. He had never despised her as much. Was she looking like she was going to be this ugly when I married her? he asked himself, as the face in front of him spread itself out in a funny-shaped pie and Mem laughed soft and deep, as she used to laugh when they were first married and not one day passed without some word of deepest love.
    “We got us a new house,” she said, as if she were dropping something precious that would send up delightful bright explosions. “We got us a