12/26/2023 0 Comments Emperor escape checkers challenge![]() ![]() Ike Green sat on her case seriously one evening on the store porch when he was lucky enough to catch her alone. She felt like slapping some of them for sitting around grinning at her like a pack of chessy cats, trying to make out they looked like love. She had already experienced them through Logan and Joe. These men didn’t represent a thing she wanted to know about. Janie laughed at all these well-wishers because she knew that they knew plenty of women alone that she was not the first one they had ever seen.īesides she liked being lonesome for a change. You been well taken keer of, you needs uh man.” You ain’t been used tuh knockin’ round and doin’ fuh yo’self, Mis’ Starks. God never meant ’em tuh try tuh stand by theirselves. “Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing,” she was told over and again. Janie found out very soon that her widowhood and property was a great challenge in South Florida.īefore Jody had been dead a month, she noticed how often men who had never been intimates of Joe, drove considerable distances to ask after her welfare and offer their services as advisor. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song.Īnd the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. ![]() She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around.īut she had been set in the market-place to sell. Most humans didn’t love one another nohow, and this mislove was so strong that even common blood couldn’t overcome it all the time. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon-for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you-and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships.īut Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps. It was all according to the way you see things. She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her.īut she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things. She hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity. Sort of look over the old stamping ground generally.ĭigging around inside of herself like that she found that she had no interest in that seldom-seen mother at all. She asked if she wanted to leave and go back where she had come from and try to find her mother. Then she’d lie awake in bed asking lonesomeness some questions. Most of the day she was at the store, but at night she was there in the big house and sometimes it creaked and cried all night under the weight of lonesomeness. She would have the rest of her life to do as she pleased. She saw no reason to rush at changing things around. She kept the store in the same way except of evenings she sat on the porch and listened and sent Hezekiah in to wait on late custom. That was the only change people saw in her. She sent her face to Joe’s funeral, and herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world.Īfter a while the people finished their celebration and Janie went on home.īefore she slept that night she burnt up every one of her head rags and went about the house next morning with her hair in one thick braid swinging well below her waist. She did not reach outside for anything, nor did the things of death reach inside to disturb her calm. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life. Janie starched and ironed her face and came set in the funeral behind her veil.Īll things concerning death and burial were said and done. The Little Emperor of the cross-roads was leaving Orange County as he had come-with the out-stretched hand of power. The Elks band ranked at the church door and playing “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” with such a dominant drum rhythm that it could be stepped off smartly by the long line as it filed inside. People on farm horses and mules babies riding astride of brothers’ and sisters’ backs. Then again the gold and red and purple, the gloat and glamor of the secret orders, each with its insinuations of power and glory undreamed of by the uninitiated. Henderson there in his Lincoln the hosts from far and wide. The motor hearse, the Cadillac and Buick carriages Dr. Joe’s funeral was the finest thing Orange County had ever seen with Negro eyes.
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