This Bitter Earth Read Online Free PDF

to plant in her.
    “Ohhhh my goodness.” Sara yawned and stretched her bony arms above her head. She didn’t speak again for a long time. The only sounds that filled the room were the soft creaking noises from the rocking chair and the wind outside the window.

Chapter 4

    WE told you some of the truth last time you come through. Well, some.“
    Sugar propped herself up on one elbow and tilted her head closer to Sara.
    “Your mama was a beautiful woman, I won’t deny that. Beauty like that hadn’t been seen ‘round here in years. Well, her mama, your grandma Ciel, she was half-white, so all her babies had that high-brown color and good hair. Ciel’s mama was some woman who got pregnant from the white man she worked for. So I heard. Lord knows who Bertie Mae’s daddy was, but he musta been a little thing ’cause that was what Bertie Mae was, little.
    “Little, timid and unstrung. The unstrung part being her mama’s doing.” Sara’s face screwed up at the end of that statement.
    “Bertie Mae was always trying to make herself invisible. Kept her head down, always looking at her shoes instead of the people and things around her. But the men noticed her anyway, like you notice a shiny penny in the dirt, and they taunted her by snatching at her hands and calling her name out loud: ‘Bertie Mae Brown!’
    “That’s how they honored her beauty. Bertie Mae didn’t see it as an honor, she saw it as them making fun of her, because her mother, your grandmother,” Sara said, pointing a shaky finger at Sugar, “Ciel Brown, told her every day of her life that she was homely and ugly!”
    Sara’s whole body shook when she said that and it took her a while to compose herself before she could continue.
    “But she wasn’t ugly or homely, she was beautiful and I have a picture of her to prove it,” Sugar shot at Sara.
    “I know that, you know that and so did Ciel. But she hated that child, and none of us ever figured out why,” Sara said thoughtfully.
    “Shonuff Clayton was the one who had started the whole bowing thing—”
    “What you say?” Sugar said, sitting up.
    “I said, Shonuff Clayton the one that—”
    Sugar cut Sara’s words off again. “Clayton was the last name?”
    “Yes, yes I’m sure ‘bout that,” Sara said. Her response held a tinge of doubt. “No, I’m right, it was Clayton. Why you ask?”
    Sugar’s heart thumped in her chest and the wounds that were still puffed and raw across her abdomen began to burn. Lappy Clayton’s face swam before her and her body shuddered with the memory of what he’d done to her.
    Sara gave Sugar a curious look before continuing.
    “Shonuff Clayton, with his bone-straight hair, yellow freckled skin and gray-blue eyes. Shonuff Clayton, with his wanton ways and filthy mouth.”
    Sara giggled and ran her hands down her arms. “He wasn’t worth shit, but I loved him anyway. Can’t help who you love.”
    As Sara said those last five words an expression crossed her face as if she was looking for an acquittal from Sugar for the love she had, still seemed to have, for Shonuff Clayton.
    Sugar just stared at her.
    “His mama was Susie Clayton. She was a white woman whose family had disowned her. Her own daddy, Edgar, labeled her trash and put her out the house when he found her laid out on top of a bale of cotton, legs spread-eagle, the stable boy, half her age and gleaming black, between them.
    “Her daddy would have shouted rape, even though his daughter’s arms were wrapped around the stable boy’s waist and her head was thrown back in pleasure. Even still, he would have had the boy hung from a tree, castrated, skinned and burned, but he thought back to a time when he had doubts about his wife’s faithfulness and wasn’t ever really convinced that Susie was his anyway. She didn’t look like any of her siblings, didn’t even have the famous Clayton dimples. All his kids, including himself, had those dimples.
    “When that black boy’s body stiffened