Tobacco Road Read Online Free PDF

beautiful girl anywhere in the world. And for that matter, no man who had ever had the opportunity of seeing Pearl had ever gone away without thinking the same thing. It would have been impossible for her to dress herself, or even to disfigure herself, in a way that would make her plain or ordinary-looking. She became more beautiful day by day.
    But Lov’s wishes were unheeded. Pearl, if it was possible, was more determined than ever by that time to keep away from him. And now that Ellie May had dragged herself all the way across the yard, and was now sitting on his legs, Lov was thinking only of Ellie May. Aside from her harelip, Ellie May was just as desirable as the next girl a man would find in the sand-hill country surrounding the town of Fuller. Lov was fully aware of that. He had tried them all, white girls and black.
    “Lov ain’t thinking about no turnips,” Dude said, in reply to his father. “Lov’s wanting to hang up with Ellie May. He don’t care nothing about the way her face looks now—he ain’t aiming to kiss her. Ain’t nobody going to kiss her, but that ain’t saying nobody wouldn’t fool with her. I heard niggers talking about it not long ago down the road at the old sawmill. They said she could get all the men she wanted, if she would keep her face hid.”
    “Quit chunking that there ball against that old house,” Jeeter said angrily. “You’ll have the wall worn clear in two, if you don’t stop doing that all the time. The old house ain’t going to stand up much longer, noway. The way you chunk that ball, it’s going to pitch over and fall on the ground some of these days. I declare, I wish you had more sense than you got.”
    The old grandmother came hobbling out of the field with the sack of dead twigs on her back. She shuffled her feet through the deep sand of the tobacco road, and scuffed them over the hard sand of the yard, looking neither to the right nor to the left. At the bottom of the front steps she dropped the load from her shoulder and sat down to rest a while before going to the kitchen. Her groans were louder than usual, as she began rubbing her sides. Sitting on the bottom step with her feet in the sand and her chest almost touching her sharp knees, she looked more than ever like a loosely tied bag of soiled black rags. She was unmindful of the people around her, and no one was more than passingly aware that she had been anywhere or had returned. If she had gone to the thicket and had not returned, no one would have known for several days that she was dead.
    Jeeter watched Lov from the corners of his eyes while he tried to make another patch stick to the cracked rubber inner-tube. He had noticed that Lov was several yards from the sack of turnips, and he waited patiently while the distance grew more and more each minute. Lov had forgotten how important the safety of the turnips was. So long as Ellie May continued to tousle his hair with her hands he would forget that he had turnips. She had made him forget everything.
    “What you reckon they’re going to do next?” Dude said. “Maybe Lov’s going to take her down to the coal chute and keep her there all day.”
    Ada, who had been standing on the porch all that time as motionless as one of the uprights, suddenly pulled her dress tighter over her chest. The cool February wind was barely to be felt out in the sun, but on the porch and in the shade it went straight to the bones. Ada had been ill with pellagra for several years, and she had said she was always cold except in midsummer.
    “Lov’s going to big her,” Dude said. “He’s getting ready to do it right now, too. Look at him crawl around—he acts like an old stud-horse. He ain’t never let her get that close before. He said he wouldn’t never get close enough to Ellie May to touch her with a stick, because he don’t like the looks of her mouth. But he ain’t paying no mind to it now, is he? I bet he don’t even know she’s got a slit-lip on her. If he