Black Betty Read Online Free PDF Page A

move a mile or so further on, hang up the same sign, and collect children like a crow taking in glass.
    Georgette was sitting on her front porch smiling down at her family of kids. Next to her on a slender black table sat a telephone that led from the house on a long, knotted cord.
    Little black boys and girls, a dozen of them, ran ragged in their dusty pen. There was a rubber pool that overflowed with six children and about a cupful of urine-laced, tepid water. Everybody was screaming for joy. That’s what children do—they scream because life is just too much for them but they don’t know it yet.
    When I walked into the yard everything went quiet. The kids all stopped and stared at me. Crusty-nosed boys and girls with their short skirts turned up over their underwear. A couple of them were bleeding from fresh scrapes on their knees. All those little bright eyes on me were just waiting to get back to the business of noise. Not one of them looked hungry or tired. And I’m willing to bet that they all would look back to the days of Mrs. Harris’s yard with the greatest pleasure. Running wild with the animals before the hunters started tracking them down.
    “Easy,” Georgette called.
    I said hello back but I’m sure she didn’t hear me. The children took her greeting to me as a sign that they could go back to calling up the dead.
    I made it up to the porch and nodded. There was no extra chair up there so I leaned against a porch beam.
    “What you want, honey?” she asked me.
    I didn’t really know Georgette. She lived in my old neighborhood, down near Watts. But I had moved away from there, with Jesus and Feather, to West Los Angeles.
    I decided on a new neighborhood soon after my wife left me. My old friend Primo and his family took my old house over. And I took my kids to an anonymous place where people didn’t know me; where no one asked painful questions about my wife and daughter; where no one knew enough about me to question my legal guardianship of Jesus and Feather. The only agreement between us was love and mutual need—not the kind of agreement they like in courts.
    So I left Watts. At first I’d bought a house in a middle-class black neighborhood. But then my money problems forced me to sell and rent the place on Genesee.
    Georgette lived on McKinley between Eightieth and Eighty-first. The nursery school had been her dream ever since she was a little girl in Minnesota.
    You had to have a better education than Georgette was ever likely to get to have that kind of school, so she came to L.A. She took in the children of a man I knew and sometimes I’d pick up one of his boys to play with Feather.
    Georgette had her dream, but as so often happens, her dream didn’t pay the bills.
    The big black telephone barked and Georgette was quick to snatch it up.
    “Animals,” she said. Then, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, she shouted, “Leo, get outta that dirt, boy!
    “What’s that?” she asked into the phone. Then she wrote something down on a sheet of paper that she kept on a clipboard in her lap, and hung up.
    “Yes, Easy?”
    I was stumped. It seemed to me almost crazy that I was standing there among all those wild shrieks, next to this placid bookie. It didn’t make any sense. I actually forgot what I was there for.
    “Um,” I mumbled. “You, uh, you been doin’ okay?”
    “Yes?” Georgette wondered what I wanted.
    “I, uh, um, ah,” I faltered, then I laughed and sat down on the stairs like I was one of her charges. “I’m sorry, Georgette. You know, I got outta bed at five and I been all over town since then. I seen people don’t even want me in their house. I been with bad men and gamblers and…” I remembered what I had to ask. “And seein’ all these beautiful babies you got here just didn’t fit.”
    Georgette smiled. If you said something about her kids she was happy. California worked for some people.
    “I’m lookin’ for a guy called Bluto,” I said. The slant of the