Mercy Read Online Free PDF

class. And m y mother said she
    was the teacher and an adult and I had to be respectful and do
    what she said. I had to be nice to adults and do what they said
    because they were adults and I wanted to grow up so I
    w ouldn’t have to listen to them anymore and obey them but
    the only w ay to get them to think you were grow n up was to
    obey them because then they would say you were mature and
    acting like an adult. Y ou had to brush the teacher’s collar and
    no one ever had to say w hy to you even i f you kept asking and

    they just told you to keep quiet and stop asking. She could
    make you stand in the corner or sit alone or keep you after
    school or give you a bad mark even if you knew everything. I
    wanted to be an adult like my daddy. He was always very
    polite and intelligent and he listened to people and treated
    them fair and he didn’t yell and he explained things if you
    asked why except sometimes when he got tired or fed up. But
    he was nicer than anyone. He didn’t treat people bad, even
    children. He always wanted to know what you were thinking.
    He listened to what everybody said even if they were children
    or even if they were stupid adults and he said you could always
    listen even if you didn’t agree and even if someone was dumb
    or rude or filled with prejudice or mean and then you could
    disagree in the right way and not be low like them. He said you
    should be polite to everyone no matter who they were or
    where they came from or if they were colored or if they were
    smart or stupid it didn’t make any difference. M y relatives and
    teachers were pretty stupid a lot and they weren’t nice to
    Negroes but I was supposed to be quiet even then because they
    were adults. I was supposed to know they were wrong
    without saying anything because that would be rude. I got
    confused because he said you needed to be polite to Negroes
    because white people weren’t and white people were wrong
    and Jew s like us knew more about it than anyone and it was
    meaner for us to do it than anyone but I also had to be polite to
    the white people who did the bad things and used the bad
    words and said the ugly things that were poisonous and made
    the six million die. M y daddy said I had to be quiet because I
    was a child. M y daddy said I had to be polite to my uncle who
    called colored people niggers and he said I had to stay quiet and
    when I was grown up I could say something. I watched my
    daddy and he was quiet and polite and he would wait and listen
    and then he would tell m y uncle he was wrong and Negroes
    were just like us, especially like us, and they weren’t being

    treated fair at all but I didn’t think it helped or was really good
    enough because m y uncle never stopped it and I wanted to
    explode all the time. M y daddy always said something but it
    was ju st at the end because m y uncle would go aw ay and not
    listen to him and no one listened to him, except me, I’m pretty
    sure o f that. And once when m y mother was sick and going
    into the hospital and I had to go stay in m y uncle’s house I cried
    so hard because I was afraid she would die but also I knew he
    would be calling colored people bad names and I would have
    to be quiet and I had to live there and couldn’t go aw ay and m y
    daddy told me specially as an order that I had to be quiet and
    respectful even though m y uncle was doing something awful.
    I didn’t understand w hy adults were allowed to do so many
    things w rong and w hy children had to keep quiet all the time
    during them. I stayed aw ay out o f the house as long as I could
    every day, I hung out with teenagers or I’d just hang out alone,
    and I prayed to God that m y uncle w ouldn’t talk but nothing
    stopped him and I would try not to m ove and not to breathe so
    I w ouldn’t run aw ay or call him bad names or scream because
    it caused me such outrage in m y heart, I hated him so much for
    being so stupid and so cruel. I sometimes had cuts on the inside
    o f m y