The Women of Brewster Place Read Online Free PDF

pegged over the front door. She struggled with the heavygun, and her hand was trembling so much it was difficult to load the bulky shells, but she got them in and snapped the gun shut. She wrapped her finger around the trigger, aimed, and pulled. The force of the gun’s blast almost knocked her off her feet. The edge of the fireplace exploded and sent flying bits of bricks into Mattie’s back and cut up the right side of her father’s face.
    The blast stunned him for a moment, and he looked toward his wife with sweat and blood dripping down his face.
    “So help me Jesus, Sam!” she screamed. “Hit my child again, and I’ll meet your soul in hell!”
    She cocked the gun again and this time aimed for the center of his chest.
    “Look! Just look a’ what you done!”
    Sam seemed like a man coming out of a trance. He stared stupidly at the barrel of the gun and then at the stick in his fist and then at the girl balled up in spasms on the floor. His head kept moving numbly back and forth, like a badly timed mechanical toy.
    “Fannie, I…Fannie, she…” he mumbled dazedly.
    A slow moan came from the pile of torn clothes and bruised flesh on the floor. Sam Michael looked at it, saw that it was his daughter, and he dropped the stick and wept.
III
    A week later the northbound Greyhound pulled across the county line, turned right on the Interstate, and headed toward its first stop in Asheville, North Carolina. It was one of a legion of buses, trains, and rusting automobiles that carried the dark children of the South toward the seductive call of wartime jobs and freedom in urban areas above the Mason-Dixon. Mattie sat in an aisle seat and tried to ignore the melting of familiar landscapes. She didn’t want to think about the strange city that lay ahead or even of her friend Etta, who would be at the depot to meet her. And she didn’t wantto think about the home that had been lost to her, or her mother’s parting tears, or the painful breach with her father that throbbed as much as the soreness that was still in her back and legs. She just wanted to lay her head on the cushioned seat and suspend time, pretend that she had been born that very moment on that very bus, and that this was all there was and ever would be. But just then the baby moved, and she put her hands on her stomach and knew that she was nurturing within her what had gone before and would come after. This child would tie her to that past and future as inextricably as it was now tied to her every heartbeat.
    So as Rock Vale, Tennessee, was buried under the miles of concrete that ribboned behind the bus, Mattie worried and planned for the child within her. When her mind would reach out behind, she forced herself to think only of the back road to the house, the feel of summer, the taste of sugar cane, and the smell of wild herbs. And when her son was born five months later, she named him Basil.
    “Well, look a here,” Etta marveled as she stroked the cracked red fist of the baby. “We come a long way from the time the old folks told us babies were mailed from heaven. ‘C.O.D. or Special Delivery?’ you’d ask, and set ’em all a howling. Guess you know what it’s all about now?”
    “Oh, no, Etta,” Mattie looked up at her friend with her son mirrored in her eyes, “they still do. Isn’t he the most perfect thing you ever saw?”
    “Hardly that,” Etta teased, as she took the baby from Mattie’s lap. “He’s ugly and wrinkled as a monkey, like most newborns. But I do see definite possibilities. Yup, I think we got the makings here of the first colored President.”
    Their laughter startled the baby, and he began to cry. “Lord, he’s starting to squall! Here, take him. There, now, there’s your mama.”
    She gave him back to Mattie and watched as she gently rocked and patted him to sleep. “See why I can’t have nochildren? I ain’t got the patience for all that.”
    “No one does, Etta, but it comes—when you know it’s yours and you