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Come in at the Door
By William March The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1962 W. E. Campbell, LLC
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8831-7
CHAPTER 1
That summer, during the long, hot afternoons, Mitty would often take the young boy by the hand and together they would go to the river to get sand for the kitchen floor. When they reached it, Mitty would sit against a sweetgum tree and fan herself with her apron, and the boy would rest his head in her lap, or sit upright against her shoulder, tracing patterns in the dust with his fingers.
To Chester, at eight, the world consisted of his father's farm, as a center, with Athlestan, the County seat, to the north, and the old Bragdon place a mile southward. To the west groves of pines, purplish-green and as level as water against the sky, stretched as far as eyes could see. To the east there were cotton fields, or fields of peanuts, and still farther on, beyond the cultivated land, was the river before which they now rested, a sluggish, unhurried river, colored like coffee with cream stirred into it.
The river flowed slowly, between yellow bluffs, high and concave, on which grew honeysuckle and wild pea vines. In some places the river broke into eddies, but where Mitty and the boy rested its movement was imperceptible, seemingly without motion: it flowed straight and flat before them. A mile to the north it turned gently in a golden curve and its source was lost to sight between the thick growing trees; toward the south it bent gradually eastward and was more agitated here, breaking up into minor whirlpools, with yellow foam on them. In these eddies stick and bits of broken refuse whirled about.
Years ago, before the railroads had come, shallow-draft river boats carrying passengers and collecting freight had steamed up the river. In those days wharves at which the boats might tie up safely had been built, and the farmers would haul down their cotton and pile it on the yellow banks near the wharves to await such steamers. When at last the boat arrived, the place, which before had seemed deserted and void of all life, took on sudden activity. But all this had happened in the past; it was part of a past which the boy could not remember or visualize. The river was quiet now. The boats and the activity were all gone. Even the wharves had rotted and were falling away.
Below Mitty and the boy the remnants of such a wharf persisted,—a few canted, unsteady posts with rotting planks. Water birds with calculating eyes rested on these pilings, watching the water patiently or rubbing their beaks against the oil sacs at the end of their spines and ruffling their feathers out as if a strong wind had disarrayed them for a moment. Occasionally a gull or a pelican blown inland from the Gulf sat there and surveyed the sluggish river with a distasteful, uncomprehending expression; flapping; stretching its body upward; clinging to its perch with sharp claws as if nailed there, and screaming its lonely, unbearably pure call. Mitty and Chester would often sit quietly, as they sat today on the bluff above the rotted landing, and watch the colored river and the strange, unhappy birds blown inland from the sea.
Mitty's world was larger than the boy's, and her memory of it was longer. She talked of places and things which he had never known: of Reedyville, Pigeon Creek or the Tallon homestead. They were all situated in a land called Pearl County and Chester could never hear enough about them.... And so Mitty would sit by the river fanning herself and talking of the past.
"Tell me about my mother," he would ask. "Tell me about my mother and my Grandfather Tarleton, too!"
Then Mitty would chuckle indulgently. She was an erect woman with a black skin as soft against the hand as velvet: a skin so completely and so deeply black that it seemed frosted with a lighter color, as the black skin of a muscadine appears silver in some lights. She walked with a flowing swing from her hips, her arms held tidily to her sides, her head thrown back at an exact angle, her chin slightly raised and held there poised as if she balanced, eternally, something precious upon her skull.
But in spite of her black skin and her short, nappy hair, her features were delicate and high-bred. Her nose was thin, high bridged and faintly curved; her eyes were heavy lidded and half closed as a rule. She sat fanning herself and glancing up the river, paying little attention to the boy's questions; then, finally, when he thought that she would not answer him at all, she began to talk.
"Your mamma died when you was a baby in long dresses," she said. "She taken sick on a Sunday and she was laid out for dead before the next Sunday come 'round." Mitty leaned backwards against the sweetgum tree and listened to the drone of insects about them, and the muffled tapping of birds.... "Your mamma was a gentle little thing, baby. She had blue eyes and the yallowest hair. She crimped her hair on pins at night, and fluffed it out like. Her skin was whiter than buttermilk." Mitty glanced down at her own arms, turning her wrists upward, and laughed: "He-e-e-e-e!" on a soft, ascending scale, as if she found her blackness amusing.
Chester waited until her laughter had died and she was wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. "All the Tarletons are light skinned, but your mamma was the lightest skinned of all. She was the very lightest skinned one!"
"Tell me about how you and mamma were born on the same day."
"Why, honey, I've told you that story more times than one; I done told you every word of that story, and often, too."
"Tell it to me again, Mitty!"
"Got to be a-gittin' down to the bar and dig sand. Got to be a-gittin' back to the house and start supper going."
"Mitty—please!" He rose to his knees and put his arms around her neck, hugging her close. "Tell it again, Mitty! Tell it to me one more time!"
"All right, baby. All right, sugarpie.... Mitty can't say no to nothin' her baby asks, when he sweet-talk her that way...."
She sat for a moment staring at the sluggish river, watching a log floating slowly down stream. "Your mamma and me was born on the same day, all right: that much of the story is sho.... I was born in the morning, and your mamma was born about sundown. The next day they taken the baby and give her to my own mamma to nurse, because your Grandma Tarleton didn't have nourishment for none of her children after your Aunt Lillian was born, and my mamma had enough for two, and to spare.... Leastways that's what she told us when we was little girls playing together." Mitty became silent. She was seeing pictures which Chester could not share. He knew that, somehow, and waited until she resumed.
"When your mamma started to school, she wouldn't learn out of her books 'lessen I learned with her. So your Aunt Sarah Tarleton had to teach us both." Mitty slapped her leg: "Lord!" she said, as if delighted; "Lord God! Lord God!" and swayed back and forth laughing.
Chester looked up quickly: "Baptiste can read, too. Baptiste can read better than any white man."
Mitty's laughter stopped. "What make you say that?" Then, without waiting for an answer: "I expect Baptiste tell you that himself."
"Yes, ma'am."
Mitty drew down her lips in disgust. "That yaller nigger!" She spat, as if repeating his name had soiled her lips. "That yaller nigger! Putting a high mark of respect on hisself; trying to pass hisself off for a Frenchman." Her face set sullenly. She got up, jerking the boy upright. "Come on, boy! Come on, white boy, let's get our sand and get back to the house!"
But Chester held onto her hand and would not move.
"Mitty, please!"
"Why don't you ask Baptiste to tell you 'bout your mamma and your Grandpappa Tarleton and your Uncle Bushrod and all iffen he so smart? What make you fool with a black, ignorant nigger like I is?"
"I like you best, Mitty."
But Mitty continued in an aggrieved voice. "I got an education, too. Miss Sarah taught me the same as she taught your mamma. I can talk proper, too, iffen I wanted to demean myself. I could pass myself off for white, too, iffen I wanted to do that." She looked at her blackness and her anger vanished. She laughed again, explosively, at the idea of her being taken for white.
"Tell me about how mamma used to look."
And Mitty said: "Your mamma was the very sweetest thing in this world. She had long yaller hair which she wore banged and hanging down her back. Some thought she was thin and puny like, but she run and frisked about like a hoppergrass. We were like sisters together: We played together all our lives, never having ere a secret from each other. Oh, but she was the prettiest thing! All the white gentlemen come to spark her after she come back, but she wouldn't have nothing to do with ere a boy or man of them. Then your pappa come courting her too, and she liked him better than the others; but she said she wouldn't marry him or no other gentleman unlessen I went to live with her." Again Mitty became silent. She looked with half-closed eyes at the trunk of a tree which had lost its footing and was leaning down the yellow bluff, its branches almost touching the water. "That's all there is to the story, baby." She lifted her bosom and raised her arms outward, letting them fall to her sides again. "Your mamma said she wouldn't marry no man or go nowheres without taking me with her, and here I is."
"Talk about my grandfather and my Uncle Bushrod."
"Now, baby!—Now, baby! You's the provokinest baby ever I seen; I done told you all about them a dozen times or more." But at last she gave in: "There was a big family of us Tarletons when your mamma and me was little girls, but they're all dead now, or married and scattered.... They're all married and scattered now, except your grandfather and your great aunt, Sarah, and your Uncle Bushrod and your Aunt Bessie."
They sat for a time silent after that and then Chester asked: "Why don't pappa take me to see them sometimes?"
Mitty shook her head. "There ain't no accounting for your pappa, baby.—He's an uncertain man."
She arose and picked up the basket which she had brought with her. She balanced herself on her toes, stretched herself widely and yawned, lifting her arms in a sudden back-flung movement which was more beautiful than the artifice of any dancer. "We'd better git our sand, baby, and git back to the house."
An old road, abandoned now and grown over with wire-grass and vines, led downward to the river where the skeleton of the rotting wharf stood.
Mitty said: "Be careful, baby, where you step! There might be a moccasin lying in that tall grass." Chester crowded closer to her skirts, but he did not answer. Together they walked down the slope that led to the river bank.
When boats ran up and down the river the sand bars which blocked it had been dredged away or channels cut through them; but now, after years of quietness, with life gone from the river, the bars had all come back. One had formed just behind the old wharf. It stretched from the bank to the center of the stream and it was shaped like a man's thumb, bent backward a little at the joint. The bar gleamed new and unsoiled and the August afternoon sun had put a shimmer above it.
Mitty and the boy reached the bar and began scooping up the sand, emptying it into the basket she had brought. The sand here was not white and dead, like sand that fringed the Gulf, but was richer in color: a pale gold, of the texture and shade of yellow cornmeal. It was soft to the fingers and soft to the feet, and Chester lay stretched on the bar letting the yellow sand run through his fists, from one to the other, like an hour glass.
For a few minutes Mitty worked silently, her back bending forward as she scooped up the gleaming sand. Then she stopped for a moment, wiped her forehead with her sleeve and gazed at the winding, yellowish river; at the green growth that crowded its banks. The trees which were tallest were so dark against the sky that they seemed at this distance not green at all, but rather the rich purple of Cæsars. They lay like an even river along the horizon, outlining the other greens beneath them and separating those shades from the mild blue of heaven. Below this wide ribbon of purple were layers and circles and half-moons of other greens; green with more blue than yellow in it and green with more yellow than blue. There were bright, lacquered greens so hard and brilliant that they seemed made of metal, and there were soft greens that were silver when winds lifted them upward. These shades were all blended and tied together in a pattern of color that stretched downward like a wedge to the yellow, gnawing river.
Mitty knelt on the bar and stared at the loveliness before her, a white cup limp in her black, unmoving hands. She raised her chin upward a little:
"This here place is as pretty a place to be in as ever I seen since I followed your mamma from Pearl County."
Chester did not answer, he was thinking his own thoughts. He turned over and the sand in his fist ran out slowly in a tiny, three-cornered stream. He lay on his back in silence. "I never saw my grandfather or my Uncle Bushrod or Aunt Sarah, did I, Mitty?"
"No, baby. No, baby, I expect not."
"Why don't they come to see us? Why don't they come to see us, if Pappa won't go to see them?"
"That I don't rightly know. That I can't answer."
Chester sat up on the bar. His face was set in a hard, mature line. "I hate him," he said quietly.
"Baby!" said Mitty in a shocked voice. "Don't talk like that!"
"I don't care," said Chester. "He's always—" But he stopped, unable to put into his words his vague discontent.
Mitty sighed. "Nobody but God Almighty is accomplished to judge. Your pappa has been a good father to you in lots of ways that you don't know nothing about."
Chester got up and stood on the sand, his feet braced and wide apart. "What makes him act the way he does? What makes him treat me like he does?"
"You'll understand when you're older, baby. You're too little to understand now."
Chester stared at the sun until the green trees and the yellow river wavered and ran together in wild confusion. He sat again on the sand and closed his eyes. When he opened them once more two water birds flew slowly up the river, crimson against the green of the far bank. "I wish he was dead," he muttered, his words intended for his own ears alone. "I wish he was dead and already buried!"
But Mitty had heard him. She dropped her basket and made a strange noise. She drew a circle from right to left, quickly, and began breaking twigs and placing them in a pattern outside the circle, whispering words to herself and swaying sidewise.
When she had finished she seemed tired. She lay upon the sand so long that Chester became alarmed. He crept up and tried to put his arms around her, but Mitty shoved him away. "Don't you ever put a deathmouth on your pappa again! ... Don't ever do that as long as you live!"
She got up angrily and lifted the filled basket to her head, balancing it there as she walked across the sand. Chester got up in fright and ran toward her, catching at her hand, but she paid no attention to him.
"Get away from me, white boy! Don't ever speak to me again." She muttered sullenly to herself and shook her shoulders, walking up the incline with long strides, her head balanced precisely; but when they reached the top of the bluff, she stopped, knelt beside the boy and put her arms about him. "How do you think your mamma up in heaven feels when she hears you talking that away? How does she feel to have shame put on her amongst God's other sweet angels?"
Chester stood quietly, feeling her arms about him.
"I won't put a deathmouth on him again, if you say not to." But to himself he thought stubbornly: "I wish he was dead, though. I don't care what she says."
Mitty put down her basket and held him close to her bosom. "Baby!—Baby!" she whispered in despair. "I don't know what's come over you lately." She sat down on the bank and held him in her lap, singing songs to him.
Finally she squinted her eyes and looked up at the sun. She had spent more time than she had intended beside the river. It was already past time for starting supper. She got up abruptly, balanced her basket again and began to hurry with her long, flowing stride, her head poised at its exact, queenly angle, and Chester trotted by her side.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Come in at the Door by William March. Copyright © 1962 W. E. Campbell, LLC. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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