Read Online The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara - Free Book Online
Authors: Toni Cade Bambara
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concentrate on this growler scowler Henry gal that’s blocking my sun. She’s good material, ya know. We need to get her back into circulation.”
“I know this. Trouble is, Min, she got piss-poor guardians.”
“Well, don’t look at me. I ain’t fixin to die yet just to be her guardian … am I?”
“Am you which?”
“I’m hushing up as of now, cause I see you are determined to be raffish,” stepping high over the lemon grass toward the fountain, the cooling spray against her cheek.
“Your dress misbehavin, Min.”
“Wind.”
“Beggin your pardon, but wind my foot. You fixin to mess with that young doctor man behind yo corporal body. I seen you casting a voluptuous eye in that doctor man’s direction. You fixin to get into somp’n, Min.”
“Ahhh, so you are omniscient or clairvoyant one,” leaning against the fountain for a full appraisal of this woman friend who’d been with her for most of her life, one way and then another. Nothing much had changed since she passed. Old Wife’s complexion was still like mutton suet and brown gravy congealed on a plate. She was still slack jawed. The harelip was as deep a gouge as ever. Nothing much to recommend her, or to signal she was special. “You’d think they’da fixed that lip,” Minnie muttering to herself, sitting down on the ledge she’d built during her apprenticeship. A fountain made from ceramic pipes she’d thought much too lovely to be laid underground conducting sewerage. A pause to view the water, to watch the fishes glinting shots of shine around the pool, the aromas from the right wafting past like a brushstroke in a cartoon. Gardenias, lily of the valley, lavender, cosmos, fuchsia, woolly apple mint, spearmint and foxglove lush on either side of the chapel’s circle doors, bumblebees drunk and swollen staggering from petal to pistil.
“Come.”
The journey, though familiar, was not the journey usual. Was like the old times before the gift unfolded. The days when everyone but her daddy was worried crazy about her, running off from Bible college to New York to get sick and be sent home on the train lying down. They called her batty, fixed, possessed, crossed, in deep trouble. Said they’d heard of people drawn to starch or chalk or bits of plaster. But the sight of full-grown, educated, well-groomed, well-raised Minnie Ransom down on her knees eating dirt, craving pebbles and gravel, all asprawl in the road with her clothes every which way—it was too much to bear. And so jumpy, like something devilish had got hold of her, leaping up from the porch, from the table, from morning prayers and racing off to the woods, the women calling at her back, her daddy dropping his harness and shadinghis eyes, which slid off her back like slippery saddle soap. The woods to the path to the sweet ground beyond, then the hill, the eating hill, the special dirt behind the wash house. The days when stomping along the path, her shoes in her jumper pocket, stomping to alert the snakes that someone was coming through, she’d encounter Old Karen, the Old One, Wilder’s woman, Old Wife, the teller of tales no one would sit still to hear anymore, not when the new tellers could prophesy with such mathematical certainty who would be ill and who well, who fertile and who sterile, who crazy and who all right, who deserved to live and who was bound to die and in precisely what manner.
And Minnie would slow down just as she was told. And the older woman would hold her there on the path like a mama cat with gripping teeth. A full-grown Minnie blocked, it seemed, to the women who hurled warnings at her back, by front-pew every-Sunday-spreading-no-gettin-around-them Karen Wilder hips. Not blocked but stopped by the thoughts, by the telling, watching the cracked lips slide away as though the teeth had been greased for some finicky photographer. Waiting for Old Wife to speak, Minnie’d be stomping in place, for while it was customarily polite to pause on the
“I know this. Trouble is, Min, she got piss-poor guardians.”
“Well, don’t look at me. I ain’t fixin to die yet just to be her guardian … am I?”
“Am you which?”
“I’m hushing up as of now, cause I see you are determined to be raffish,” stepping high over the lemon grass toward the fountain, the cooling spray against her cheek.
“Your dress misbehavin, Min.”
“Wind.”
“Beggin your pardon, but wind my foot. You fixin to mess with that young doctor man behind yo corporal body. I seen you casting a voluptuous eye in that doctor man’s direction. You fixin to get into somp’n, Min.”
“Ahhh, so you are omniscient or clairvoyant one,” leaning against the fountain for a full appraisal of this woman friend who’d been with her for most of her life, one way and then another. Nothing much had changed since she passed. Old Wife’s complexion was still like mutton suet and brown gravy congealed on a plate. She was still slack jawed. The harelip was as deep a gouge as ever. Nothing much to recommend her, or to signal she was special. “You’d think they’da fixed that lip,” Minnie muttering to herself, sitting down on the ledge she’d built during her apprenticeship. A fountain made from ceramic pipes she’d thought much too lovely to be laid underground conducting sewerage. A pause to view the water, to watch the fishes glinting shots of shine around the pool, the aromas from the right wafting past like a brushstroke in a cartoon. Gardenias, lily of the valley, lavender, cosmos, fuchsia, woolly apple mint, spearmint and foxglove lush on either side of the chapel’s circle doors, bumblebees drunk and swollen staggering from petal to pistil.
“Come.”
The journey, though familiar, was not the journey usual. Was like the old times before the gift unfolded. The days when everyone but her daddy was worried crazy about her, running off from Bible college to New York to get sick and be sent home on the train lying down. They called her batty, fixed, possessed, crossed, in deep trouble. Said they’d heard of people drawn to starch or chalk or bits of plaster. But the sight of full-grown, educated, well-groomed, well-raised Minnie Ransom down on her knees eating dirt, craving pebbles and gravel, all asprawl in the road with her clothes every which way—it was too much to bear. And so jumpy, like something devilish had got hold of her, leaping up from the porch, from the table, from morning prayers and racing off to the woods, the women calling at her back, her daddy dropping his harness and shadinghis eyes, which slid off her back like slippery saddle soap. The woods to the path to the sweet ground beyond, then the hill, the eating hill, the special dirt behind the wash house. The days when stomping along the path, her shoes in her jumper pocket, stomping to alert the snakes that someone was coming through, she’d encounter Old Karen, the Old One, Wilder’s woman, Old Wife, the teller of tales no one would sit still to hear anymore, not when the new tellers could prophesy with such mathematical certainty who would be ill and who well, who fertile and who sterile, who crazy and who all right, who deserved to live and who was bound to die and in precisely what manner.
And Minnie would slow down just as she was told. And the older woman would hold her there on the path like a mama cat with gripping teeth. A full-grown Minnie blocked, it seemed, to the women who hurled warnings at her back, by front-pew every-Sunday-spreading-no-gettin-around-them Karen Wilder hips. Not blocked but stopped by the thoughts, by the telling, watching the cracked lips slide away as though the teeth had been greased for some finicky photographer. Waiting for Old Wife to speak, Minnie’d be stomping in place, for while it was customarily polite to pause on the
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