Read Online Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons - Free Book Online

all night.
    She would catch me snooping around sometimes and say to me I’ll break your little hand if you touch that vase! Not joking but serious to make me think of how a broke hand might feel.
    I would go off by myself and imagine turning my buddy Starletta loose in here. She could have a rampage in one room and out the other.
    Or maybe I will invite the whole family that eats off records. Nobody needs four sets of dish plates anyway. They can visit while you are at the beauty parlor I thought and I felt better to imagine it all. At least it was funny to me.
    And all the time I was dying to know why she was so mean.
    Some days I felt like it was a torture chamber and I counted the days until school.
    I was there for a week when she said she had found something to do with me.
    Finally I thought.
    On the first Monday in June she woke me up with the sun and said it is time to get to work.
    She has found a job for me I thought. I figured we were going out to deliver the newspapers. She would drive and I could pitch the papers out the car window. But she drove me instead to the cotton field and said to come home for lunch. Ask a nigger what to do is what she said before she drove off.
    Five or six people were already chopping and they were way far down the rows and not noticing me.
    I just looked.
    Then the biggest lady yelled you better get on a row!
    And I’ll be damned if I’ll do it I said to myself.
    You better get on a row! she yelled again. The bosslady left you here to work not to stand. And I needs to make sure you do it. Now get you a hoe. When I gets to the end of mines I’ll catch you up to the rest of us.
    That was the first thing I had heard reasonable so I started chopping my row.
    I lived on a farm with my mama and daddy but they hired colored people to do my part of the slave labor. I was too small to work right. I used to play in the fields with Starletta and watch her mama and daddy chop but I never figured it would be me one day.
    Lord how did they stand it so hot? I wondered.
    The big lady helped me catch up to them and they all told me their names that sounded alike except for hers. Mavis.
    All I could think to say after my name was did they know Starletta’s mama and daddy?
    They go to the same church!
    We started chopping again and I did not feel sick until the afternoon. I had to sit down and every time I tried to stand up I just had to sit back down.
    Mavis fanned me with her apron and I felt much cooler.
    Then she said what the bosslady is up to is her business but it must be a mighty bad debt you is out here working off. They is no sense in a white chile working in this heat. I can hardly stands it my own hot self.
    I’ll feel better in a minute.
    You sit here and rest some. And you is not wearing a hat on your head. What you think that sun won’t fry your brain? Lord chile.
    The next morning I got a straw hat out of the garden shedand wore it all day. I felt cooler all over and did not get sick anymore.
    While I worked I mainly counted in my head or recited the poems I knew good to myself. You can keep time with the hoe chopping around a plant. It breaks up the day that way.
    I tried not to think and work at the same time because that made me slow. If I did think though I wondered about Roy and Julia and how the chickenshit worked out. Then I would need to get back on the beat of my poem.
    Whenever I fell behind Mavis would catch me up. She said they were born to chop and that is how they could work so fast and steady. She would say that and laugh but it was not funny to me.
    One day when I had gotten to know her pretty good she asked me why my mama’s mama sent me out to the fields and why I was not in Vacation Bible School or at least somewhere out of the sun.
    I told her exactly what I was told. My mama’s mama said I was under her feet and besides that she could not bear to look at my face day in and day out. Also she said I might learn a thing or two out there.
    Which I did.
    I bet she