Part 8 (2/2)
Frances often sat in the kitchen with Zaddie, and was astonished by the number of black children who came to the lattice door and knocked softly. Zaddie always had a plate of cornbread or a part of a ham 109.
or a slab of bacon for them to take home. Next day the child would return with the plate, and a thank you from its mother.
Frances asked her mother about this.
”n.o.body has anything, darling. I wish we could afford to do more, but even we don't have what we used to.”
Frances shook her head; she understood nothing about money.
”We'll be all right,” Elinor a.s.sured her. ”But while you were upstairs”-Elinor always referred to her daughter's illness by that euphemism-”your daddy had some hard times out at the mill. He had to let people go.”
”Is it all right now?”
”I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. Henry Turk, it looks like, is going under. He's going to have to sell out.”
”To whom?”
Elinor shook her head. ”To us, I'd like to think. He hasn't got anything left except his land. He shut down the mill last year. I'd like to get hold of that land, but only your grandmama has the money for that, and I don't think she'll put it up.”
”Why not?”
Elinor laughed. ”Why am I telling you all this? Do you care?”
”Yes, ma'am.”
”No, you don't, darling. You don't know anything about it, and there's no reason for you to care one little bit.” Elinor laughed, and held her daughter close.
When Sister Haskew moved away from Perdido in 1926 and took up residence first in Natchez and later in Chattanooga, she insisted on introducing herself to new acquaintances as Elvennia, her given name. By then she was thirty-five, two years older than her husband, and felt that it was high time she 110.
was called by a name that was hers alone, and did not suggest-as the t.i.tle ”Sister” did-that her ident.i.ty was subservient to a familial relations.h.i.+p. In her occasional visits to Perdido, however, nothing in the world could persuade Mary-Love Caskey from calling her daughter anything but Sister.
This was a minor irritation, however, and no more than was to have been expected from Mary-Love. Sister-or El, rather-was happy in her new life. She liked the sense of rootlessness after so many years of having had such strong bonds to Perdido, to the house in which she had been born, and to her mother. She liked making new friends who knew nothing of what she had been before her marriage to Early, who were wholly ignorant of sawmills and board feet, and didn't care about her family history. She wrote her mother twice a week, as Mary-Love had commanded, and on alternate weeks wrote to James and to Elinor. Sometimes, when Early was called away for a week or two on a job, Sister would pack her bag and take the train back to Perdido. On these occasions she would always begin to argue with her mother as soon as she walked in the door.
”h.e.l.lo, Sister!” Mary-Love would cry. ”We cain't tell you how much we have missed you!”
”Mama, everybody calls me El now.”
”Oh, Sister, after all these years, you cain't expect me to change what I call my little girl...”
Mary-Love's little girl was now a woman of middle age, and Mary-Love herself was approaching old age, although she would never admit to such a thing.
”Sister,” Mary-Love always wanted to know, ”are you settled down yet? Have you got you a good cook?”
”Mama,” said Sister, ”I don't have a cook, I do all the cooking.”
”Oh, Sister, is that man driving you into the ground and making you work all day long?”
”Mama, Early and I cain't afford to have a cook, so I do it myself.”
Ill ”If you lived here, Ivey and I would be able to take care of you. You wouldn't have to lift a finger.”
It was usually at this point that Sister, weary of making the old arguments, would simply say, ”Mama, Early and I are never gone come back here, and the reason we aren't is that we don't want to live with you, because you drive us both crazy.”
”I don't think you and Early are very happy in Chattanooga.”
”We love it there!”
”I don't believe that you and Early would be happy anywhere.”
”What do you mean?”
”If you and Early had been happy all these years away from me, then you would have had children. Now you're too old for that. And there must be a reason why you leave your husband and come to see me every three months, Sister.”
”I come to see you, Mama, because every week you are on the telephone for half an hour saying, 'Sister, why don't you ever come home?'”
”If you loved your husband the way you should, you wouldn't be leaving him so often.”
Mary-Love didn't approve of the independence exhibited by her daughter since her marriage to Early Haskew, and it was only a short step from that to disapproval of the man responsible for Sister's liberation. Because he wasn't around, it was convenient to attack him; and because Sister was his wife, she must be ever on the defensive. ”I'm still not sure,” Mary-Love said soon after Sister's arrival on a visit in late winter of 1936, ”that Early Haskew was the right man for you, Sister.”
”Who was?”
”Oh, somebody else. Somebody with a little education. A little polish.”
”Early attended Auburn. Early's been to Europe. I never even got to go to college. And I never got taken to Europe, either.”
112.
”Does he still eat his peas off a knife blade?”
”He does! And he said one day he'd teach me how to do it too!”
”Does he eat that way in a restaurant?”
”Mama, we cain't afford to go out much.”
Mary-Love shook her head and sighed. ”I hate to see you grubbing for money, darling, when I have so much.”
”Then give me some, and I won't have to grub.”
”I cain't do that.”
”Why not, Mama? It wouldn't hurt you to send me a little something now and then.”
”Early would think I was interfering. And I would be.”
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