The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  Oddly, it was the first time Josie felt genuine pity for Mem. She stared at Brownfield with horror, seeing for the first time that he was, as a human being, completely destroyed. She was shocked that what he was telling her went beyond the meanness to which, by now, she was thoroughly accustomed, into insanity, the merest hint of which always unnerved her.

  "I know what you think," he said to Josie. "You sitting there saying to yourself, he crazy! That's why all this is. But I ain't crazy, no more'n anybody else. All it was was that I jest didn't feel like trying to like nobody else. I jest didn't feel like going on over my own baby, who didn't have a chance in the world whether I went on over him or no. It too much to ask a man to lie and say he love what he don't want. I had got sick of keeping up the strain."

  "If you had kept up the strain," said Josie, with a rare combination of logic and courage, "you'd a had a son now."

  "Little white bastard!" said Brownfield, waving her away.

  Oh, no. He wouldn't repent. None of what he had done mattered any more. It was over. What had to happen happened: the beautiful faded, the pretty became ugly, the sweetness soured. He had never believed it could turn out any other way. But what had she thought, his quiet wife, when he proved to be more cruel to her than any white man, or twenty? She was not a fighter, and rage had horrified her. Her one act of violence against him, which she must have considered an act of survival, brought her lower than before. Instead of rage she had had an inner sovereignty, a core of self, a rock, which, alas, her husband had not had. She had possessed an embedded strength that Brownfield could not match. He had been, at the best times, scornful of it, and at the worst, jealous.

  "It's done, doner he muttered to himself as he drifted near sleep. But now Ruth's face floated before him and her eyes glared accusingly at him. Ruth, with her thin legs and startled eyes, always running from him, her mind behind the eyes always in flight. She still ran toward something. This annoyed Brownfield. What did she see in the world that made her even wish to grow up? he wondered. He had to make her see that there was nothing, nothing, no matter what Grange promised her. He had seen the nothingness himself. And if she hated him more than ever, what did it matter? That was what the real world was all about.

  But what about love? he asked himself, and a great hollow emptiness answered.

  "It's a lie!" he cried into the dark, causing Josie to jump in her sleep. For Brownfield felt he had loved. But, as he lay thrashing about, knowing the rigidity of his belief in misery, knowing he could never renew or change himself, for this changelessness was now all he had, he could not clarify what was the duty of love; whether to prepare for the best of life, or for the worst. Instinctively, with his own life as example, he had denied the possibility of a better life for his children. He had enslaved his own family, given them weakness when they needed strength, made them powerless before any enemy that stood beyond him. Now when they thought of "the enemy," their own father would straddle their vision.

  Brownfield ground his teeth under the pressure of his error, though too much thought about it would make it impossible to sleep. It occurred to him, as an irrelevancy, that Ruth might never believe "conditions" caused his indifference to her. He wished, momentarily, that he could call out to someone, perhaps to Mem, and say he was sorry. But what could he give as proof of his regret? He must continue hard, as he had begun. He would take his daughter from her grandfather, not because he wanted her, but because he didn't want Grange to have her. He gave no thought whatsoever of how he might attempt, once he had Ruth under his roof, to treat her kindly.

  Part XI

  47

  THE MONTHS THEY waited to see what Brownfield planned to do, the world moved in on Ruth. She found it not nearly so lovely as she had occasionally dreamed, nor quite as unbearable as she had been prepared to accept. She found it a deeply fascinating study, a subject for enthusiasm, a moving school. It all happened with the news and the Huntley-Brinkley Report. It was her last year in school and each afternoon she hurried home to watch the news on television. She became almost fond of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, especially David Brinkley, who was younger than Chet and whose mouth curved up in a pleasingly sardonic way. The only black faces she saw on TV were those in the news. Every day Chet and David discussed the Civil Rights movement and talked of integration in schools, restaurants and picture shows. Integration appealed to Ruth in a shivery, fearful kind of way. Her grandfather thought it negligible. Ruth often wondered if she would have liked the newscasters as much were they not discussing black people. She thought not; for though she had listened to them before, only now did they become real to her; she could look at David's smirk-smile and often cheer the bit of news that caused it. Each day there were pictures of students marching, singing, praying, led by each other and by Dr. Martin Luther King. She accepted the students and the doctor as her heroes, and each night she and Grange discussed them.

  "Do you think he's got something going?" she asked Grange one night, pointing to Dr. King's haggard, oriental eyes which looked out impassively and without depth from the TV screen.

  "I'd feel better about 'im if I thought he could be the President some day," Grange said. "Knowing he ain't never going to be somehow take the sweet out of watching him. He a man, though," he said. "'Course," he had continued, "I believe I would handle myself different, if I was him. Then again, I ain't handling myself at all, setting here on my dusty, so I ain't the one to talk. The thing about him that stands in my mind is that even with them crackers spitting all over him, he gentle with his wife and childrens."

  "Why do they have to sing like that?" she asked one night, moved to tears without realizing it.

  "For the same reason folks whistle in a graveyard," Grange answered.

  "They don't believe what you do," she said another evening, seeing black hands clasp white hands, marching solemnly down an Atlanta street. "They think they can change those crackers' hearts."

  "I'm glad," said Grange. "On the other hand, they might be trying to learn in two weeks what it took me twenty years; that singing and praying won't do it. If that is the case I'm still glad. No need for them to stay all murked up in fog the way I was an' the way your daddy is yit." He leaned closer to the TV, his face contorted. "Look at them ugly cracker faces," he said. "What kind of 'heart' is anybody going to rouse from behind them faces? The thing done gone on too long; them folks you see right there before you now, chasing that nigger down the street, they is wearing what heart they got on they sleeves. Naw, better than that. They is wearing they tiny hearts on they faces. Which is why they faces is so ugly. If any amount of singing and praying can git the meanness out of them eyes you let me know 'bout it. Crackers been singing and praying for years, they been hearing darkies singing and praying for years, an' it ain't helped 'em. They set round grinning at theyselves, floodin' the market with electric can openers! Ugh!"

  "I think I believe like the students," Ruth declared. "Ain't nothing wrong with trying to change crackers."

  "What I want is somebody to change folks like your daddy, and somebody to thaw the numbness in me." He looked at his granddaughter and smiled. "Course," he said, "you done thawed me some."

  One evening, as she was watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report, Grange came home looking sick.

  "What's the matter with you?" Ruth asked, looking up. She thought their time had come, that Brownfield had done his worst.

  Grange didn't answer. He turned his chair from the TV and toward the fireplace. He took out his pipe and knife and scraped out the pipe bowl. Then he filled the pipe with fresh tobacco. Ruth turned off the television and sat beside him. Soon the two of them were engulfed in thick, aromatic smoke.

  "You 'member my old gambling buddy, Fred Hill?" Grange spat into the fireplace. "They found 'im yestiddy face down in a ditch."

  "Too drunk to move?" asked Ruth.

  "Naw, not no more drunk, he wasn't. Half his head was blowed off."

  "What?"

  "From here to he
re," said Grange, running his finger from ear to chin.

  "Well, who done it?"

  "Them as has the last word say he done it hisself."

  Ruth was stunned.

  "Course, wasn't no gun nowhere near the ditch," said Grange.

  "How did he manage to shoot half his head off without a gun?" she asked.

  "A neat nigger trick," said Grange.

  He stared into the fireplace for ten minutes without speaking. "I once seed a woman," he said, "had been strung up, slit open and burned just about up." He thought for five more minutes, Ruth waiting impatiently for him to speak. "They said she was one of them people bent on suicide. Kill herself three ways." He smoked, pulling on his pipe as if to jerk it from between his teeth. "Do you know, they writ it up in the paper just that way. Said she was one nigger with determination!"

  Ruth sat thinking about Fred Hill. She'd heard about the "suicide" case before. Fred Hill was a short, pudgy, tan-skinned man with boyish bowlegs; when he walked he seemed to be swinging. His head was very round and he had had no neck. She had watched him play poker with Grange around the kitchen table. He had taught her how to shoot marbles when she was nine. Now he was dead.

  "What was you watching on TV?" asked Grange.

  "News."

  "Fred Hill's grandson is making news. Tried to get into one of them cracker schools."

  "And did he make it?"

  Grange leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling, his chair tilted back on two legs. "Naw," he said, "he didn't make it. How you going to study in a cracker school with half your granddaddy's head missin'?"

  "Well," said Ruth, attempting to see a bright side, "you don't need your granddaddy's head to study. You just need your own."

  "Everything going to prove you wrong, girl," he said, getting up and walking heavily out into the dark.

  And then it was spring and school was over and the student marchers were in Baker County. Ruth saw a long line of them parading up and down the streets when she went into town. Their signs were strange and striking, I AM AN AMERICAN TOO! said one. THIS IS MY COUNTRY TOO! said another. I WANT FREEDOM TOO! said still another. Although she had seen marchers before on television she was amazed to see real blacks and whites marching together in her home town! There were trim white girls in jeans and sneakers with clean flowered blouses marching next to intense black girls in high heels and somber Sunday dresses. There were dozens of young black and white male marchers; it looked peculiar to Ruth to see them whispering confidences to one another, curious that she could detect no sign of mutual disgust. "Are they for real?" she wondered. She watched wide-eyed, her glances moving from the marchers to the residents of Baker County. Baker County had been so surprised by the students' arrival it had not done anything yet. Even the sheriff stood on a street corner and stared with his mouth slightly open. His deputies hung around him, so closely it looked as if they needed protection, or at best, minute instructions on how to handle the demonstrators. Local blacks and whites stood under the trees on the courthouse lawn and gawked at the white girls. Some of the men sneered and called them dirty names. Of all the people marching the white girls got the most abuse. One of them carried a sign that said BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER and each time she passed a group of whites they spat at her and hissed "I'll bet!" One of them added, aiming a Coke bottle at her, "You nigger-fuckin' whore!" Ruth passed close beside this girl and noticed her right ear, the one next to the bystanders, was bleeding, and that she marched with stiff wooden steps as if to a chilling inner music. Tears slipped quietly and endlessly down her pale cheeks and the sign in her hand had begun to waver.

  As Ruth was leaving town someone pushed a piece of paper into her hands. At the top of the page she saw a white man and woman chained to a rock. The rock was called "racism"; underneath was written "You Will Not Be Free Until We Are Free." She looked back to see who had given it to her and saw a tall, thin young man in overalls like her grandfather's. He was trying to hand the leaflet to whites who passed, but none took it. She looked back a couple of times and one of the times he was watching her. She felt her heart give a kind of bump against her ribs, such as she'd never felt before. The young man continued handing out leaflets, though only black people took them. The sun on his skin made him all aglow in different shadings of brown, like autumn leaves late falling from the tree.

  On her way home she drove the car with her left hand and with her right she touched the paper, then her face and hair, then the paper again, and its message meant less to her than the young man who'd given it to her. Drawing close to their white neighbor's mailbox, she stuffed the leaflet in, then drove pensively onto her grandfather's farm.

  Three days later Ruth and Grange were sitting on the front porch. They had just learned that Brownfield, in order to get Ruth, had decided to take them to court. To calm their rather severe case of jitters, Ruth was eating watermelon compulsively and reading Bulfinch's Mythology, and Grange was just as compulsively polishing shoes. When they saw the dust in the distance Grange went inside and got his shotgun and leaned it against the banister in front of him, then sat down and continued polishing shoes. The car turned into the yard, made a half-circle around the trees and came to a stop. It was a dark blue car, covered with layers of red dust, as if it had traveled hundreds of miles over Georgia's back roads. The thin young man from town got out on the driver's side. A white girl and boy were in the back seat and a black girl got out of the front seat on the side of the car near the porch. Ruth looked the black girl up and down almost hostilely. It surprised her that she felt a small tug of jealousy. After all, she knew nothing about the young man who'd given her the leaflet and who now stood before her--not even his name.

  "So this is where you live!" the young man said, looking up at her from the yard. He was beginning to grow a beard and it made his shapely lips very rosy and well-defined.

  Grange looked over at Ruth. She was standing at the edge of the porch with one arm around a roof support. Her eyes were shining! He could almost feel the hot current that flowed through her, making her soft young body taut and electric with waiting. He would not have admitted that he was slightly shocked, but he was.

  "This is where I live," Ruth answered the young man "Anybody could have told you!" She was laughing a shy but bubbly delighted laugh; forgotten completely was the fact that nobody ever visited the farm without her grandfather's permission.

  "Where you know him from?" asked Grange, who at that moment decided he didn't like young men with beards.

  The young man made long strides up the steps and across the porch to Grange. "How do you do, Mr. Copeland," he said, smiling. He was thinking how much Grange reminded him of Bayard Rustin, except Grange was more leggy and stuck his thumb in his belt like a cowboy. He held out his hand for Grange to shake. Grange scowled up at his smile and looked at his granddaughter, whose eyes had never left the young man, and whose eyes also roamed up and down the young man's body. She was a Copeland, he thought. Sighing and putting down his polishing cloth he shook hands with the young man. His handshake was warm and firm and he was taller than Grange. Grange felt old and gray and as if his hand couldn't squeeze hard.

  "How you?" he mumbled. Something about the young man seemed familiar to him. He looked up at him quickly. "Say, don't I know you from somewhere?" he asked, cocking his head to one side. The young man's smile turned into a chuckle.

  "I was the little joker used to trail along behind Sister Madelaine," he said. He had spent much of his childhood ashamed that his mother was a fortuneteller, but by the time he left Morehouse and joined the Movement he was as proud of how she earned her living as his best friend was that his father was a surgeon. His mother had faced life with a certain inventiveness, he thought, and for this he greatly respected her.

  "Yass ..." said Grange, thawing, "I can see the resemblance." He had no remembrance of the young man as a child, but he had known and admired his mother for years. He hadn't ever believed in her magic powers much though.


  The black girl had come and stood beside the young man. The two whites had not come closer than the steps.

  "My name is Quincy," the young man said, "and this is my wife, Helen."

  Grange shook the young woman's hand, then looked over her head at Ruth. Ruth's arms had dropped to her sides and the corners of her mouth sagged. Not only was Helen the young man's wife, but she was pregnant. Ruth saw her grandfather's look and shrugged her shoulders. She pushed a chair behind Helen and mumbled for her to sit down. Quincy had settled himself on the banister.

  "Who them?" asked Grange, pointing with his chin. "Is they white, or do they just look white?" His whisper could be heard for yards.

  "This is Bill and this is Carol," said Helen. "They're working with us." Bill and Carol nodded, but made no move to climb the steps. Bill was dark and muscular with brown eyes. Carol was small with freckles like a second skin.

  "They've heard, as have we all, about how you feel about white folks. We had planned to leave them outside the gate near the highway, but we were being followed," said Helen. She sat solidly in the chair, her hands on top of her rounded stomach. She laughed suddenly, looking down at Bill. "He's already been shot at once."

  Grange looked down at the young man who looked back at him with nothing in particular in his eyes. Bill took Carol's arm and they walked slowly back to the car. Grange wanted to invite them up to the porch but the urge lasted only a moment. He could not bring himself to admit a white woman under his roof. He said nothing, however, to Ruth, who traipsed out to them with cool water, and he watched her chatting with them for a minute or two.