High Cotton Read Online Free PDF Page B

been a beauty but passed for one because of her light, almost transparent skin—green veins were visible in her face. There was something girlish in her step, in the way she arranged her pleats and hands when she sat, handed around questions, cups, and crystal tumblers of Nehi. Small, with a high forehead and a little colorless hole for a mouth, swabbed by many years of liking
herself, Aunt Clara was accustomed to being, if not admired, at least talked about, and if not for her looks or heart, then for the strand of pearls that lay like a pet against the folds of her neck and the sea pearls that dangled below her unconvincingly dyed black hair.
    Uncle Eugene had been dead for some time, but Aunt Clara did not lack for company. Arnez, Muriel, and Nida Lee busied themselves around her. Childless, Aunt Clara had sort of adopted Nida Lee. She sent her to school and Nida Lee worked at a small college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, when she was not living across the road from Aunt Clara’s drive, ready with talk like a wet mop while “Miss Clara” opened magazines.
    Nida Lee came out of her corner gushing, extremely tall, fat and alarming. She got me alone in a window seat and said we were going to get better acquainted. She announced and won a contest to see who could identify what tree in the pampered forest that deluded me was Aunt Clara’s foxwood, her laurel and cherry. I was not to overlook the peach trees, the fledging Cedar of Lebanon, and was clearly old enough to appreciate skyrocket juniper. Her voice rising, she made me approve patches of parsley and thyme, and cluck over what should have been marigolds.
    We weren’t used to a nice elderly black lady telling anyone to shut up, but then we also weren’t used to Nida Lee’s maddening tidbits of news—“Negro socialites” had tried to crash the opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. She said the next thing you knew they’d be dining in the Magnolia Room at Rich’s Department Store. Aunt Clara said she would not frequent establishments where they stroked the dog with one hand and fed customers with the other.
    Nida Lee had a savory item up her sleeve. Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. I’d never heard the word before. My
mother acted as though Nida Lee carried a dead mouse in her mouth.
    “What is it, Nida Lee? We’re not paying you any mind,” Aunt Clara said.
    Arnez said after lunch she would show me the little house in the back yard where they once had peacocks and still kept chickens if I promised not to get dirty. “They don’t do nothing but poot all night, but it’s good for the flowers.”
    “Cousin Arnez, aren’t you hungry?”
    “I ate.”
    “She’s not your cousin,” Nida Lee said behind a door.
    “Who is she?”
    “The maid.”
    Arnez lived quietly in one of Aunt Clara’s shotgun cabins across the creek with her old mother and her sister, Muriel, who was paid to fidget with scissors. I was to hear them on the footbridge as they came to and left work, the weight of Arnez’s slow, even tread, the staccato of her sister’s high-strung steps, running ahead, turning back, and catching up. Muriel’s head had destroyed her life. Her hair was shorter than mine. It wouldn’t grow and she’d tried everything.
     
    Most of the elderly people I visited kept their living rooms separate from real life as I knew it. Plants and slipcovers and an undemocratic fastidiousness around the obligatory bowl of stuck-together rock candy I took to be a natural part of getting on in years. Aunt Clara’s house had no hierarchy of dishes, no child-free zones, hostile borders, or speed limits, but the rooms themselves slowed me down. Her house was a zoo of things, dewdrop prism lamps and fire screens, a wild preserve for the pedestal sideboard, the painted sofa with potpourri sewn into the cushions.
    I was perfectly free to study the living habits of lyre-backs in the vestibule, rockers, tables, mirrors, walls, secret doors, and gilt settees maybe