The Warmth of Other Suns Read Online Free PDF

singled out that day. She wasn’t saying she hadn’t done a devilish thing in her life. She was just thinking to herself all she had done was miss the word, and the whipping wasn’t called for. After school, she went up to Mr. Kirks and told him so.
    “If I had a daddy, you wouldn’ta whoop me,” Ida Mae told him. “You whoop me ’cause I don’t have a daddy.”
    He never whipped her again.
    She seemed to be more aware of how life was harder now. Things she wouldn’t have paid attention to before, she seemed to be noticing.
    On her way to and from school, she passed the farm of a man named Mr. Bafford. His wife had left him to raise their son by himself, and he seemed to take out his grief on those around him. He had a yard full of trees that bore more fruit than he could ever consume or pick fast enough to sell. The peaches and apples and pears were some of the biggest and sweetest in the bottoms. They ripened and fell to the ground, and still he dared anyone to come onto his land to get any.
    Ida Mae figured out a way to get some. She stopped by and talked with Mr. Bafford and made sure to keep him talking. And if he ever looked away, she reached down and slipped a pear or an apple into her dress. “You know they fall off, he coulda give us some of ’em,” she said. “Every time I got a chance, I got me some.”
    It was approaching Christmas, the first Christmas since her father had died. One day when Ida Mae stopped to see Mr. Bafford, she startedwondering aloud whether Santa Claus was going to come this year, what with her daddy gone and all.
    “That’s the first thing they teach y’all, a lie,” Mr. Bafford said. “Ain’t no such thing as Santa Claus.”
    It crushed Ida Mae to hear him say that. She was ten, and, even in the gaunt world she lived in, she still believed in Santa Claus. She started crying when Mr. Bafford said it.
    “That taken all the joy out of life then,” she said.

    There would be no Christmas that year. “I’m not able to pay Santa Claus to come to us,” Miss Theenie told the girls. Ida Mae began to resent everybody now. She was getting into more scrapes coming and going to school and getting ornery without cause.
    A boy named Henry Lee Babbitt used to ride his horse to school every day and brought corn to feed him with. Ida Mae lived farther than Henry Lee did and had to walk. Something got into Ida Mae one day, and she told Henry Lee she was going to set his horse loose. She went up to the horse and reached for the bridle bit that tied the horse to the hitching post.
    “Tom, you bet not turn my horse aloose,” Henry Lee said.
    “What if I do?” Ida Mae shot back.
    “You do, I beat your brains out.”
    The two of them stood there next to the horse, Ida Mae holding the bridle bit and threatening to pull it off and Henry Lee trying to keep her from doing it.
    “I dee-double-dog-dare you to pull that bridle,” Henry Lee said. “You take that there, and you take a nickel off a dead man’s eye.”
    She yanked the bridle off the horse and dropped it to the ground. “And down the road we went, me and the boy there, fighting,” she said years later.
    Henry Lee reached down and grabbed the bridle bit from where she left it and raised it up against her. “He took it and nearly beat me to death,” she said. “I got a knot in back of my head now where he hit me with that bridle bit.”
    Without her half brothers and her father around, she was on her own. “You had to fight,” she would later say. “Them boys would mess with you. You couldn’t whoop ’em. But you did what you could.”
    Within a few years, the boys would not want to fight with her anymore. They wanted to sit and hold her hand and talk. The spark thatmade her fight them drew the quiet ones to her when it came time for courting. She was fifteen when two in particular started showing up at the front porch with those intentions.

    On a Sunday after service in the summer of 1928, the church mothers at New