Everyday U for your grandmama
Alice Walker
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yester day afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the hou.
Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her.jolene
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youngchina18 25 You've no doubt en tho TV shows where the child who has "made it" is confronted, as a surpri, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A Pleasant surpri, of cour: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to cur
out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other's face. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have en the programs.
Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a cark and soft-ated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tear s in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks or chides are tacky flowers.
产量英语 In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open tire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in
the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill be-fore nightfall. But of cour all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pan-cake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Car – son has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.
But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It ems to me I have talked to them always with one toot raid in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.
fire in the hole什么意思batch "How do I look, Mama?" Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blou for me to know she's there, almost hidden by the door.
"Come out into the yard," I say.
Have you ever en a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind of him?
king arthur>thank you 什么意思>snow andreea balan
That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other hou to the ground.
Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She's a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other hou burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes emed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflect-ed in them. And Dee. I e her standing off under the sweet gum tree she ud to dig gum out of; a look at concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the hou tall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don't you do a dance around the ashes? I'd wanted to ask her. She had hated the hou that much.
I ud to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raid the money, the church and me, to nd her to Augusta to school. She ud to read to us without pity, forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with
a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know. Presd us to her with the rious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we emed about to understand.
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she'd made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own' and knew what style was.
I never had an education mylf. After cond grade the school was clod down. Don't ask me why. in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can't e well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness pasd her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I'll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to mylf. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man's job. 1 ud to love to milk till I was hoo
ked in the side in '49. Cows are soothing and slow and don't bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.
I have deliberately turned my back on the hou. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin: they don't make shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutter s up on the outside. This hou is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee es it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we "choo" to live, she will manage to come e us. But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?"
She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impresd with her they worshiped the well-turned phra, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.
When she was courting Jimmy T she didn't have much time to pay to us, but turned all h
er faultfinding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompo herlf.
