High Cotton Read Online Free PDF

squeeze.
     
    The next morning Grandfather and I were alone in the kitchen. We both wore “flesh-colored” nylon stocking caps. His was knotted in back. I had on two stocking caps. The feet drooped over my ears. I was in a Cleo the Talking Dog phase. I got up with the earliest light, lapped chocolate milk from a bowl on the floor, lay down by the back door, panted, and tucked my paws up under me.
    Grandfather looked at me, a severe expression I was to see again years later when I had to confess in person that I’d flunked a course, which meant my chances of getting into his alma mater were dwindling, and at a time, he said, when blacks were wanted so desperately that any park ape who could manage long division was admitted. Grandfather’s look said he knew my brain was damaged but not in any way he could pin down.
    “Come here, and on two feet, if you please,” Plessy vs. Ferguson contemplated Brown vs. Board of Education . “I want to tell you something and you remember it, you hear? You might not see me again.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “Never you mind. I’m not coming back and that’s a fact. Your daddy has no right to make you live here. He has no right to turn you into a dog.”
    Grandfather, as ever, was true to his word. He didn’t come to see us again until we invaded the white suburbs.

2 /
    O ld Y ellow
    M y friend the television set had begun to send awful pictures from the Old Country. Nice Negroes, in 1962, before mothers and children went to war over “naturals,” looked like disciples of Father Divine—austere hair, correct clothes. “Put it in the bank, not on your back.” But being or looking like someone who came from a decent home wasn’t protecting anyone down there.
    I worried that when the plane landed in Atlanta we’d be put in jail; that when I was stung by a bee in my grandmother’s garden the hospital would not allow my mother to visit. Maybe there were signs over the raised marble water fountains, maybe my mother pretended not to see them, maybe the old woman with Parkinson’s disease who sat two seats in front of me was white, I couldn’t tell, but even if there had been a law against Jim Crow trains, blacks were so scared we would have sat in the colored car. Going to visit Aunt Clara in Opelika, Alabama, demanded, like taking a vow, that a part of the self must die.
     
    I liked my mother’s Aunt Clara because in her photographs she had an organ and looked like Miss Havisham in the film Great Expectations . When her driver, G.C., came to fetch us from the dinky colored waiting room in a powder-blue Cadillac, I liked her even more.
    Opelika slept in a liverish tranquillity, and it was clear to my sisters and me that we would have nothing to do with the town proper and had better not ask why. My mother didn’t know the name of the movie house because nice people did not let themselves be foisted upstairs to the buzzards’ roost. That summer of surreptitious feeling even strolls for a Sun Drop soda at the drugstore with the tin FROZEN-RITE signs that Aunt Clara owned were in doubt. G.C. said that cracker youth, “Kluckers,” sometimes rode around in darkened cars, just to frighten people, but everybody knew that Opelika had no facilities worth integrating. “I guess folks go to school.”
    Exhausted camellias sagged over lawns. Those were the fine houses of Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, G.C. said. Yes, my mother said, every house was owned by the same people and she hoped I would never meet them. Then came an intersection, and immediately after it the scent of spearmint from either side of Aunt Clara’s blue drive.
    Her house, a respectable structure of glazed brick fronted by four sleek columns, peeked at the road—Avenue A, the battered pink post said—through a regiment of willows and wretched dogwoods. Avenue A continued downhill, unpaved as it entered the Bottom. We didn’t have to be told who lived there.
    Aunt Clara waited inside the front door. She had never