Читать книгу Our Miss Boo - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 6

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When we opened the door, we thought there was nobody there because she and the night were the same color. And then we saw the pearly whites of her eyes, and her gleaming parenthesis of teeth, and we knew that a Smile and a Beseeching were standing out there in the darkness.

We found the switch and turned on the light, and she was a little thing, with a big suitcase. A little thing with a very small, very furry voice like a soft Virginia rabbit that had got lost up here in the Nawth.

“M’s Ames’ little girl say you-all lookin’ for a good maid,” she said.

“Oh, we are. At least ... come in, won’t you?”

She came in, looking about seventeen and frightened to death. But more frightened of not getting a job than of speaking to us, even.

“I kin do anything, plain or fancy,” she said. “I kin arn ruffles real good, an’ I kin make kohn-bread, southern or nawthin, an’ I don’ min’ livin’ in the country an’ I like chilluns ... an’ I’d work Sundays an’ I’d sleep anywheres. ... She ran down then, not from any lack of abilities, but from lack of breath.

“What we’re really looking for,” I said doubtfully, “is a housekeeper. Somebody to take full charge of us.” I didn’t admit that we needed a home economics expert, a stern matriarch, and a soft-bosomed colored mammy, all rolled into one. And this combined, furthermore, with a chauffeur, private secretary, button-sewer-on, sock-mender, and party-planner.

“What we’ve always had,” I said faintly, “is a working housekeeper, who sort of takes charge.”

“I take chahge,” she said in a whisper. “I kin do anything.”

“Well, you’d better stay the night anyway,” I said. “How on earth did you get out here at this time of night?”

“I walked,” she said. “I heard you-all needed a good maid. I kin ...”

She took a big breath and would have gone into another stanza, but I said, “Yes, I think you’d better stay the night anyway.”

We went into the kitchen, with some instinctive notion of meeting on common ground, I guess. Her eyes became two valentines when she looked at our kitchen. And it, I must say, warmed to her the way a candle seems to stand on tiptoe to meet a light which is offered to it. It was love at first sight for both of them.

She touched the sink with chocolate ice-cream fingers, and she said to herself, forgetting me now, “I cert’n’y do like plantses on mah window-sill,” and she reached up in the cupboard and got a glass and watered the pots, which we’d forgotten, what with everything else we had to bear after Mrs. Kingsberry decided we were just too much for her.

“Well, you might as well stay the night,” I said again. But I knew she had moved in, and I’d just better get used to it.

“You don’t look very old,” I said helplessly.

“I’se thirty,” she said. “But God did my carryin’ for me and that he’ps me. Castin’ your burdens on de Lord makes you look young. An’ he don’t mind, ’cause nothing couldn’t make Him any older than He is.”

Very gently she wound up the kitchen alarm clock without even looking at it, and tucked it under her arm to take upstairs, as if she had wound that clock a thousand times.

“My name’s Lilliam,” she came back downstairs to tell me, “ef’n you should want me for anythin’.”

It wasn’t just her thin buckwheat cakes brought to our bedrooms at eight; it wasn’t just the cheerfulness of her face when she waked us, nor the way she had found the laundry and started the “arnin’ ” it wasn’t the ham roasting in spicy juiciness in the oven. It wasn’t any of these things alone that made us know she belonged to us ... or we to her.

Mostly it was Miss Boo when they met that first morning. Boo came running into my room bringing amusements for the fifteen minutes we always have together: three fat books, a puzzle, two dolls, and a box of Christmas candy not yet opened on the first of February. Then, seeing the strange colored woman standing in the sunshine, looking eager and willing, she stopped.

They looked at each other, and neither of them spoke.

“This is our child, Lilliam,” I said, being careful of the “m.” “She has her breakfast at the little table in the kitchen.”

“ ’Deed, I done got the little table all set for her,” Lilliam said. “And I got some little bittie biscuits baked. Just her size. You come with me, Doll Baby.”

One side of the pact was made. But I held my breath, and for a wild moment I was afraid Boo was going to say something about that good black face, for I think she had never seen a Negro before.

She looked up into that kind dark face, and then she laid down her armful of toys and went over and put her arms around the limp knees. The two of them stood there, realizing each other for all time to come, the lonely colored woman and the little blonde child.

“Why ... I’ve got my Sister,” Boo said. “I’ve got my really truly Sister, and now I won’t have to have a make-believe sister any more!”

That’s how we knew we had our Sister. For her to take care of us, and for us to take care of her.