Song of Solomon Read Online Free PDF

conflict.
    “Can they make it in the street, Mrs. Bains? That’s where they gonna be if you don’t figure out some way to get me my money.”
    “No, sir. They can’t make it in the street. We need both, I reckon. Same as yours does.”
    “Then you better rustle it up, Mrs. Bains. You got till”—he swiveled around to consult the calendar on the wall—“till Saturday coming. Saturday, Mrs. Bains. Not Sunday. Not Monday. Saturday.”
    If she had been younger and had more juice, the glitter in her eyes would have washed down onto her cheeks. New, at her time of life, it simply gleamed. She pressed the flat of her hand on Macon Dead’s desk and, holding the gleam steady in her eyes, pushed herself up from the chair. She turned her head a little to look out the plate-glass window, and then back at him.
    “What’s it gonna profit you, Mr. Dead, sir, to put me and them children out?”
    “Saturday, Mrs. Bains.”
    Lowering her head, Mrs. Bains whispered something and walked slowly and heavily from the office. As she closed the door to Sonny’s Shop, her grandchildren moved out of the sunlight into the shadow where she stood.
    “What he say, Granny?”
    Mrs. Bains put a hand on the taller boy’s hair and fingered it lightly, absently searching with her nails for tetter spots.
    “He must’ve told her no,” said the other boy.
    “Do we got to move?” The tall boy tossed his head free of her fingers and looked at her sideways. His cat eyes were gashes of gold.
    Mrs. Bains let her hand fall to her side. “A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see. A terrible, terrible thing to see.”
    The boys looked at each other and back at their grandmother. Their lips were parted as though they had heard something important.
    When Mrs. Bains closed the door, Macon Dead went back to the pages of his accounts book, running his fingertips over the figures and thinking with the unoccupied part of his mind about the first time he called on Ruth Foster’s father. He had only two keys in his pocket then, and if he had let people like the woman who just left have their way, he wouldn’t have had any keys at all. It was because of those keys that he could dare to walk over to that part of Not Doctor Street (it was still Doctor Street then) and approach the most important Negro in the city. To lift the lion’s paw knocker, to entertain thoughts of marrying the doctor’s daughter was possible because each key represented a house which he owned at the time. Without those keys he would have floated away at the doctor’s first word: “Yes?” Or he would have melted like new wax under the heat of that pale eye. Instead he was able to say that he had been introduced to his daughter, Miss Ruth Foster, and would appreciate having the doctor’s permission to keep her company now and then. That his intentions were honorable and that he himself was certainly worthy of the doctor’s consideration as a gentleman friend for Miss Foster since, at twenty-five, he was already a colored man of property.
    “I don’t know anything about you,” the doctor said, “other than your name, which I don’t like, but I will abide by my daughter’s preference.”
    In fact the doctor knew a good deal about him and was more grateful to this tall young man than he ever allowed himself to show. Fond as he was of his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife had died, lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion. Her steady beam of love was unsettling, and she had never dropped those expressions of affection that had been so lovable in her childhood. The good-night kiss was itself a masterpiece of slow-wittedness on her part and discomfort on his. At sixteen, she still insisted on having him come to her at night, sit on her bed, exchange a few pleasantries, and plant a kiss on her lips. Perhaps it was the loud silence of his dead wife, perhaps it was Ruth’s disturbing resemblance to her mother. More probably it was the ecstasy