The Personal History of Rachel DuPree Read Online Free PDF Page A

baby what was just a few weeks off. Then I got to worrying about water, and that turned my mouth even drier. I thought about having a long drink of cool water, and that set the baby off, pushing on me. I got up and went outside.
    I liked to think my feet had eyes—they were that good about getting me around in the star-bright darkness. They carried me over the rocky ground and around the empty prairie-dog holes that were deep enough to snap an ankle if you stepped just a little bit wrong.
    I went in the outhouse. There, I did what I’d been doing for the past two weeks. I unbuttoned the top half of my nightdress. I put my hands to my bosom and like before, a chill caught ahold of me. There wasn’t enough swelling; I was going to have trouble feeding this baby.
    I stroked my belly for a moment, then fixed my nightdress. I left the outhouse and for some reason I couldn’t explain, I turned the other way and went down the rise to the well by the barn. From the way the moonlight hit it, the well looked to be shining. The wood-slatted cover was over the opening. The plank, tied to the pulley rope, swung back and forth in the breeze. I put my hand to it to stop it.
    Folks in Chicago had running water in their houses.
    And just like that, I was homesick. That quick, my chest started aching. I missed how me and Mama and Sue, my sister, used to sew together on Sunday afternoons, talking over the past week. I missed Johnny, my brother, and how we used to do our lessons together at the kitchen table. I missed how Dad came for me at the boardinghouse where I worked and how he walked me home at the end of each day.
    I put my hand back up on the plank hanging over the well. In Chicago, open crates showing off crisp, shiny apples filled market windows. I gave the plank a hard push. In Chicago, men delivered bottles of milk to people’s back stoops. I caught the twirling plank. In Chicago, I had a job; I had a little money in my purse. In Chicago, Isaac’s mother had money. Has money. My hand tightened its hold on the plank. My pulse hurried.
    I pictured Mrs. DuPree, squatty shaped and her mouth always turned down. She owned three boardinghouses. I pictured the boarders and all the money they handed her week after week. Me and Isaac wouldn’t ask for much, just a little. It’d be for the children—Mrs. DuPree’s only grandchildren. We’d pay her back. It’d been years. Maybe she was a changed woman, maybe she had softened some. Maybe she had forgiven us.
    I gave a short laugh. Isaac would never ask his mother for money. He’d eat dirt before he’d stoop to begging.
    I gripped the plank and gave it a hard push. This time it went spinning so high that it whacked the pulley. It was a gratifying noise. It was so gratifying that I did it again.

3
    MRS. DUPREE
    I saac’s mother, Mrs. Elizabeth DuPree, owner of the DuPree Boardinghouse for Negro Men in Chicago, had standards. She took only the men what worked the day shift at the slaughterhouses. She said they were a better class than the ones what worked nights. No drinking, no swearing, no women visitors in the rooms—those were a few of Mrs. DuPree’s rules.
    “My responsibility is to do my part in advancing the respectability of hardworking Negroes,” she told the men when she collected the rent every Saturday. “We’ve got to be as good, even a little better, than white folks if we’re ever going to get ahead.”
    That was how Mrs. DuPree talked.
    The men listened to her, showing their respect by nodding when Mrs. DuPree fixed them with a sharp look. What they said, though, when she wasn’t around, was that they stayed on, paid the extra dollar on the week, and put up with her fancy standards all because of the fine meals I cooked. Not that Mrs. DuPree would admit to that. She was forever pointing out that her boardinghouse was the cleanest in the city. Her house was quality; it was on the far edge of the stockyard district. Quality and cleanliness—that was why her