Guardian Read Online Free PDF

them. They are content with life in Davis as it is. Even your father, Ansel. I’ve known him all my life. I had high hopes for him. He has such a fine mind. He sat right here in this parlor, and we talked about going to school and never coming back to Davis. But his father convinced him there was nothing out there in the world, that everything he needed was right here in Davis. He was wrong, Ansel! Wrong!”
    How could his father be wrong? Fathers were always right. Weren’t they?
    â€œWhat do you want for your life?” Esther continues insistently, desperately.
    Ansel decides he does not like her. Who does she think she is to say his father is wrong? “What I want is not important. What Papa wants is what’s important,” he says flatly, stubbornly.
    â€œDon’t let your father do that to you!” Esther exclaims heatedly. “It’s your life! Yours! Do you hear me? Yours!”
    She is scaring them. She can see it in how their bodies have stiffened, in how they are looking at her, fear in their eyes, in how they have moved back to the edge of the settee like tiny birds about to take flight.
    â€œMa’am? We have to get back to the store. We have a lot of deliveries today.”
    Everyone knows Ansel is lying, and they are grateful for it.
    Willie and Ansel get up, thank Esther and Amanda, and leave the house quickly.
    4.
    Each morning after Bert and Ansel leave for the store, Maureen stands in front of the oval mirror atop her dresser and stares. What she sees is a woman who is not as thin as she used to be, a woman whose body is becoming soft and round. Even her face is more fleshy. What has not changed are her eyes, which are so dark they seem to absorb light instead of reflect it.
    For some moments she stands there. Repeatedly, she forces her lips up so that they curve at the ends. She parts her lips to reveal her teeth. That is what people do to make a smile, but she looks like she is grimacing in pain.
    Because she can’t smile, Bert stopped her from working in the store except on Saturdays.
    Colored people don’t seem to mind that her smile is filled with pain. They have an instinctive understanding of what it is to smile when you want to cry. They have to smile at any and every white person they see, no matter how young.
    If they don’t, somebody might complain to Cap’n Zeph that such-and-such a nigger has a sullen look on his face. A nigger who didn’t smile was an uppitynigger, and there was no place this side of heaven for an uppity nigger.
    But many of them looked forward to seeing Mister Bert’s wife’s face as much as whites looked forward to seeing Bert’s.
    It takes Maureen a while to understand why she looks forward to seeing the colored faces every Saturday. Their lips turn up at the ends and their lips part to reveal their teeth, but she sees only sadness in their eyes.
    One Saturday morning she understands. Smiles begin in the eyes and flow downward to the lips.
    Her eyes are dead.
    She wonders: “When did I die?”
    And that leads her to ask: “Was I ever really alive?”
    â€œI breathe. My heart beats.”
    â€œBut there is more to life than that. Isn’t there?”
    She has never been sure. When she was in high school, the girls talked about their boyfriends and what they did with them and when they were going to get married.
    That must be like what it is to be alive, she had thought.
    When Bert Anderson seemed interested in her, her spirit brightened.
    She didn’t know why Bert was interested in her. Her father didn’t have a lot of money like his. Her father was a straw boss on Cap’n Zeph’s plantation. That was only a little better than being colored.
    Maureen had wanted to ask Bert what he saw in her. If he told her what that was, perhaps she could see it, too.
    But she had been afraid to ask, afraid he would say he didn’t see anything besides how big her breasts looked behind