Читать книгу Cross Creek - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 12

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I bought Georgia of her father for five dollars. The surest way to keep a maid at the Creek, my new friends told me, was to take over a very young Negro girl and train her in my ways. She should be preferably without home ties so that she should become attached to me. My friends traced a newly widowered father of a large family that he was unable to feed as a unit. He was happy to "give" me Georgia, with no strings attached. A five-dollar-bill sealed the bargain. Two months of life with her made me wonder why he had not given her to the first passing gypsy caravan, or drowned her decently.

It is possible that in catching one young, I had picked from too early a litter. No one knew her exact age, but it was somewhere between ten and twelve. At any rate, Georgia was unteachable. I could remember having polished silver, made beds, dried dishes and dusted furniture on educational Saturday mornings at that age, so I knew the thing was possible. It was pure theory as far as Georgia was concerned. She was happy, in fact too happy for a brown child whose lifelong lot it would presumably be to earn her bread by the sweat of her brow. Georgia never moved fast enough to sweat. She had a passion for butterflies and I could never understand how she could put out her hand with enough speed to catch one. I decided that she just sat in the sun watching the butterflies, and sooner or later by the law of averages one lit on her hand and her fingers closed over it so slowly that it was not alarmed. At the moments when she caught the butterflies, the unwashed breakfast dishes were usually sitting as inert as she.

Great effort, after a month, produced the impression on her that not only were dishes meant to be filled with food and the food eaten therefrom, but that after this pleasant process the dishes must be cleansed and so made ready for the next serving. The chain of thought was difficult for her but at last I felt she understood. Progress was being made in teaching her "my ways." Guests came to luncheon and we adjourned afterward to the fire in the living room. I sat comfortably. When the guests left three hours later I went out to the kitchen. The luncheon dishes still sat on the dining table. The kitchen was in the supreme disorder that I achieve when I cook. Georgia sat in the sun on the back steps, playing with a butterfly.

"But you haven't touched the dishes," I said.

"You never told me," she answered.

As I remember, this ended all hope. The ha'nts had something to do with it. It was peculiarly upsetting to be awakened in the night by a figure in the doorway of my bedroom, saying, "The ha'nts has done come." When I insisted that there was no way for ghosts to get in, she informed me, "They comes in thu the cracks." This was unanswerable and so was Georgia. I made up my mind that I would teach her something. Her listless manner lent itself to the lesson. I taught her to announce a meal. I taught her to go to the veranda or the living room and say with her detached air, "Such as it is, it's ready."

And then I gave her father five dollars to take her back again.

Two or three years ago Martha said, "We had somebody you know come see us today. Georgia. She married and got three chillens. She said she used to work for you."

I could only say, "She said she used to do what?"

Georgia should have taught me the futility of taking a child and expecting results any sooner than seven or eight years. The theory came from the old plantation South, where already-trained and mature servants carried on while the younger generation was learning its trade. But I tried again. Finances had something to do with it, for at the time I could not afford the wages of a grown woman. I made no down payment on Patsy, but agreed with her grandmother, with whom she lived, to train her, clothe her, care for her, and to pay two dollars a week--to the grandmother. Patsy's mother was "off." This had no connotation of mental aberration. It meant only that she had wandered off with her latest lover and was not in direct communication with her family.

It was probably my fault that I never made much of a success with Patsy. The truth of it was, we had too good a time together. She was as charmed as I with the novelties of flora and fauna and we learned together. When I should have been teaching her to make biscuits and scour skillets, we were wandering in the wildest part of the hammock by the edge of the lake. There we discovered strange flowers and ferns, and a prize of a large planting of the finest yams, left behind unharvested by the previous grove owner. The yams were deep gold and of a size and sweetness and mellowness I have never tasted since. We found turtles laying, and dug their eggs to boil and eat, and Patsy discovered a new world of foods. She began to study everything with an eye to its edibility. A red bird sang from the pecan tree by the kitchen door.

"Is that ol' reddy-bird good to eat?" she asked me.

"I don't know. But I shouldn't eat him anyway, because he sings so sweetly."

She inquired if I meant to put a certain hen in the pot.

"Why, no. That hen is a good layer. I wouldn't want to eat her."

"Ha!" she said. "If I was that ol' hen, I'd fix to go right on layin'. And if I was that ol' reddy-bird, I'd fix to go right on singin'."

Having Patsy was strangely like having a child of my own; a black one, as though she were a changeling. She must have felt the same way. We walked one day up Old Boss' path on an errand. I was ahead, walking with a hurried gait that I am told is very awkward. My friend Dessie says of it that when I am in a hurry the head is thrust forward, the upper body lying on the wind, reaching for a speed that is quite beyond the legs and feet, carried hopelessly behind. The effect, she says, is that of a wild turkey hen making a getaway. Patsy was a yard or so behind me.

I heard her say, with a curious mixture of pride and affection, "Step it off, Mama! Step it off!"

I am never done with marvelling at the sensitivity to beauty of presumably the dullest and most ignorant souls. The black child Patsy had this response. We went together into the yard one night when the only light was from the stars. She stood motionless by the Oneika mandarin tree. She gave the little chuckle peculiar to her when ideas raced in her small kinky head.

"You can't see the tangerines," she said, "in the dark. But you know they're there, and you think you see 'em. And they look purtier than in the daytime. It's the same with the stars. You see 'em when the sky's plumb black, and that's when they shine the best."

The Negro imagination is dark and rich. As they grow older, they learn to save it for their own kind, to hide it from unfriendly minds, perhaps, in an alien civilization. But a Negro child will some day make a sad and lovely study for a poet. There was a small grandson of old Martha who came now and then to visit. He found a rare snail in the orange grove and brought it to me to say, "I fetched you this, Missy, for a play-pretty." He brought me once, too, a toad, cupped in careful black paws.

"Look at the little ol' hoppy-toad," he said. "He's got big eyes jus' like our baby."

I do not know whether Patsy would have stayed with me or not, if she had been left to herself. She was snatched away by her mother, who appeared, fat and slovenly and predatory, to claim her. My friends had not foreseen the fact that once a girl was old enough to be of real use, she had more value in a lazy home household than any wages she might turn in. Patsy went away, with a good rudimentary knowledge of housekeeping and cooking, to a turpentine camp where her mother lived with the latest paramour. The Creek always has few Negroes, and Patsy's cousin told me that Patsy, at not quite twelve, was "courting." She seemed to me no more restless than any kitten, but it may be that she saw bright boys' eyes in the darkness where there were none, and that like the mandarin oranges and the stars, they were the more glamorous for being invisible.