The Right Thing

CHAPTER 14


After Starr left the first time, the new year of 1964 came like a cut-off notice from the electric company.

Within the first week after the Christmas holidays, my name found itself figuring prominently in Miss Bufkin’s green ledger of problem students. I missed Starr so much I couldn’t bring myself to play with Lisa Treeby or any of the other, more tractable children my grandmother tried to force upon me. I was such a consummate brat because they weren’t Starr: “accidentally” sitting on Lisa’s Kenmore playhouse, collapsing it beyond repair (she cried), taking Laddie’s Christmas money in a game of poker with the Old Maid cards where I made up the rules and so couldn’t lose (he cried), cutting the real human hair off of Julie’s Madame Alexander doll (she smacked me). Among many other infractions, I was so bad that everybody’s parents complained and that put a stop to that. My grandmother was livid, but for once she couldn’t make everybody do her bidding and have me back over to play. No, I was anathema, and the word got around.

But the weeks passed and I eventually got used to the isolation, to having no best friend. In time, the intolerable pain of missing Starr faded but, feeling obscurely vengeful and wanting to make a point, I turned again to the forbidden company of the Bad Kids. No matter how often I was punished for my part in their exploits, I sneaked, lied, and hung out with them anyway. My mother despaired of me during the dark days of that long winter.

Like all seasons, though, the winter ended. Finally summer vacation rolled around, and true to winter’s promise, life had become a slow-motion disaster epic from which I seemed to learn nothing. Even so, when Joel Donahoe tried to put my eye out that June, by then I was eight years old and should have known better. Buddy Bledsoe had been shipped off to Boy Scout camp again for the summer, and so Joel obligingly filled the miscreant vacuum to become the baddest of the Bad Kids in the neighborhood. That alone should have been proof no good could come of us playing circus together in our garage during a rare, unsupervised afternoon.

“Hold still, Annie,” Joel warned. He was balanced on one foot, my mother’s sewing scissors in his hand cocked and poised to let fly. My back was pressed flat against the stucco wall, arms outstretched in a classic posture of a knife thrower’s girl-target. Joel let fly, and the sharp point of the scissors struck my forehead just above my left eyebrow, then fell to the garage’s cement floor with a clatter.

“Ow!” A warm trickle flowed into my eye. It didn’t hurt yet, but I couldn’t see for the blood. “Methyl Ivory,” I screamed, running for the back door and the pillowed fortress of her dark arms. “Joel Donahoe put my eye out!”

“I didn’t do it.” Joel’s yelp was already far away, past the ligustrum hedge separating our yard from Dr. Thigpen’s house next door.

That summer, my mother was playing a lot of bridge. When she got home and saw the bloody Band-Aid over my left eye, she didn’t wait to hear the whole story. Her face assumed that some one’s-go nna-p ay-for-this expression indicating the end of that someone’s life. Not even stopping to take off her hat, she marched out the wide front doors in search of Joel Donahoe, stomping down the steps, and across the St. Augustine in her spike-heeled pumps, white gloves fisted, her gray silk shantung skirts billowing gun smoke. From the homeland of Methyl Ivory’s vast lap, I contemplated the death of Joel Donahoe with a self-righteousness reserved only for the young and na?ve. Vengeance, I was sure, would soon be mine.

Five minutes later, my mother banged back through the front door, down the long center hall, and into the kitchen, a Fury in a pillbox hat. The hem of her skirt was covered in grass stains.

“The little hooligan got away,” she snapped. “Methyl Ivory! What were you doing all day? How could you let Annie play with that, that little . . . weasel?”

Methyl Ivory was imperturbable before my mother’s wrath, but I felt her stiffen. Her voice composed, she said, “Annie s’posed to stay in the backyard, where’s I can keep an eye on her, ma’am. I plenty busy cleaning this house, cooking dinner, doin’ the laundery.”

Sensing things were not going my way, I commenced a noisy demonstration of sniveling victimhood. Methyl Ivory gave me a discreet push, and I slid off her lap into disgrace, my bare feet coming to rest on the cool linoleum. A tear plopped wetly on my big toe.

“That’s it,” my mother announced in disgust. She yanked off her gloves. Rummaging in her purse, she fished out her cigarettes and fired one up with a snap of her lighter. “If it’s not one thing, Mercy Anne Banks, it’s another,” she said, expelling smoke in a furious stream. “Before you lose an eye or end up in the back of a police car, I’m sending you to stay with Aunt Too-Tai in the country. You’ve got to learn to be more responsible.”

“But I don’t want to go to Aunt Too-Tai’s,” I squalled. “It’s boring. And she, she . . . doesn’t have air-conditioning!” Rattling window units had been installed late last summer when my father had finally saved enough money to get the house—a big old Greek Revival relic—air-conditioned. This summer, we would no longer be too embarrassed about the box-fans on the floor to invite people over for cocktails. The air-conditioning seemed like an excellent reason not to be banished.


“Too bad, missy,” my mother announced, looking grim. She stabbed her cigarette out in the sink. “I’ll go write her a letter right this minute.” Aunt Too-Tai lived so far out in the country, she didn’t have a telephone either.

My summer vacation was going to be ruined.

Awaiting Aunt Too-Tai’s reply, my mother made sure that I was practically chained to the rusted swing set in the backyard for the duration. Joel and the other Bad Kids leaned over the fence, daring me to climb out and join them on expeditions of thievery and random vandalism.

“We’re going down to the creek,” Joel taunted. The creek was an enormously attractive drainage ditch across Fortification Street, past the old garage above the railroad tracks. It was full of interesting household debris and deformed frogs: just this past spring we’d found half a dozen wriggling tadpoles with two heads. “Too bad you can’t come.” Joel sniggered. Then he lobbed a brown paper bag over the fence. “Here’s something to play with, crybaby.” I glared at him from my perch on the top of the slide.

“Joel Donahoe, I hate you,” I shouted.

After the Bad Kids left, though, I slid down the scalding metal chute and ambled over to investigate the bag. It was full of dog shit, probably the product of King, Dr. Thigpen next door’s German shepherd. I dropped it in the grass in my rush to report this latest infamy to Methyl Ivory. She was in the living room, watching As the World Turns on the black-and-white TV while she ironed my daddy’s shirts.

“Methyl Ivory, Joel Donahoe threw dog shit in our backyard,” I complained. “Can’t I go beat him up?” I held up my fists like Cassius Clay. “I’ll teach him not to be so mean.”

“Don’t you say shit.” Methyl Ivory tested the iron with a finger-flick of water from the tall, condensation-beaded glass on the ironing board beside her. The iron hissed.

“You said it,” I pointed out.

“Talk like that why you going to the country. You best stay inside till you mama get home from the bridge party.” I was speechless at her indifference. How could she not understand that this salvo couldn’t be ignored? If I was going to be gone for weeks this summer, who was going to defend our home and our honor? I had a vision of stinking brown bags in heaps all over the backyard. “Go on now, read one of your books,” Methyl Ivory advised me.

“But Joel Donahoe—”

“That boy gone end up in the ’formatory ’stead of the work farm, he keep at it.” Serenely sure of her predictions as ever, she added, “You gone have a good time with your old auntie this summer ’fore you come home and go to third grade. All kinds of chirren’d love it out there. Didn’t I hear your mama say Miss Too-Tai got a horse for you to ride?”

I folded my arms and sniffed, refusing to be mollified. It wasn’t a horse; it was a mule, and Aunt Too-Tai’s mule, Bob, was even more ancient than she was. Besides, the whole barn area had been off-limits to me whenever the family had made the pilgrimage to Chunky to visit: my mother wanted me to keep my company clothes clean, and Daddy worried about hookworms.

At any rate, the lingering hope of appealing to my father for relief was utterly extinguished that evening when he went outside to light the barbeque and stepped on the paper bag.





Late in the day the next Saturday afternoon, I was spying from behind Dr. Thigpen’s oak tree as a dusty black Chevrolet rolled into the driveway. My great-aunt Theodosia Imogene sat in the front seat. Long before my time, my grandmother Isabelle had nicknamed her Tootie. When their mother told her to stop it, she called her little sister Too-Tai instead. Great-Grandmother Gooch had wisely let that particular dog sleep in peace, probably knowing from experience with the awful Isabelle that things could only get worse.

Aunt Too-Tai got out of the passenger side in her bib overalls and men’s work shoes. She adjusted the wide-brimmed straw hat on her head and walked up the steps to the front door. Her farm man, George, stayed with the car.

I’d seen George before, of course, but I’d never heard him say anything. He was the oddest man, taller than my daddy, with long, skinny flamingo legs that seemed like they should bend backward at the knee. Unlike a flamingo, though, George was black, a black that was almost blue. His hair was a curling, steel-wool silver, but most fascinating of all was the white-veined scar twisting his full upper lip, winding in a mysterious serpentine to his left nostril. I’d imagined he’d caught it in one of the savage-looking machines piled up in my aunt’s barnyard. Sidling closer to the car in shameless voyeurism, I stared at the scar while George pretended I wasn’t gawking at him. Daddy lugged my little cardboard suitcase and box of books down the steps. George unfolded like a stepladder from the front seat and arranged my worldly goods in the cavernous trunk while my parents and Aunt Too-Tai discussed the terms of my exile.

“Make her wear shoes,” Daddy stated. “The hog pen is awfully close to the house.”

“And keep an eye on her,” my mother broke in. Her eyes met mine with a fearsome promise. “You’ve got to be more responsible, Annie.”

But I was already planning on making a run for it. I eyed the Chevrolet. I could steal the car. I already knew how to drive, although after I’d run the Buick into the garage last summer I hadn’t been able to practice since. I was certain I could join the French Foreign Legion once I got to Africa, but ten minutes later I was fuming in the back of the Chevrolet while George drove and Aunt Too-Tai smoked all the way to Chunky, some forty miles of two-lane road from home.





After my dreadful behavior since Starr left, responsibility was a big theme that summer. Undaunted, though, on my first day of vacation I’d conducted a scientific inquiry: I put dead houseflies in the freezer ice cube trays and filled them with water so I’d have my own personal Ice Age specimens, timing the experiment with my late grandfather’s gold pocket watch. When my daddy came home and went to make old-fashioneds, he discovered the watch atop a container of ice cream. Dr. Thigpen discovered the flies when he finished his old-fashioned and rattled the ice cubes to signal my dad for another round.

The summer was young, so over the course of the next week I’d gone on to set a fire in the barbeque pit with sticks from the backyard, using my mother’s silver sandwich scissors to make s’mores with pilfered marshmallows; dye the Poseys’ white poodle pink in a tin-tub bath infused with scarlet crepe paper; steal the entire block’s mail from the boxes to play postman and, after it began to rain, leave every scrap of it—wedding invitations, bills, letters from the government, etc.—under the ligustrums. When in desperation my mother enrolled me in an unsuspecting playgroup in another, far-off neighborhood so as to keep me out of trouble, I told all the little girls it wasn’t true, babies being born under piles of cabbage leaves in a gestational truck garden. Now everybody’s command of the facts of life was clinically accurate thanks to my father’s commitment never to lie to his child.

And concluding with the incident involving the off-limits scissors in the garage, this was all accomplished in seven days, a span of time nothing short of biblical considering the damage I’d done. Since these were the days before time-outs, I’d received seven spankings followed by seven lectures on responsibility. I should think before I acted. I should respect my parents’ wish to live a peaceful life on Fairmont Street. Did I want to grow up to be a lady, or was I going to jail? Methyl Ivory’s being inconvenienced wasn’t mentioned at all, but she let me know about it just the same.


“Why you want to cut up, child? Don’t you know I got the heart-flops?”

Summer in the country was the price of irresponsibility. I should have been reflecting on my behavior that long afternoon in the back of the Chevrolet, but the combination of Aunt Too-Tai’s Pall Malls, the road, and strenuous unrepen-tance put me to sleep.





George must have carried me inside the house when we arrived because I woke early the next morning on a pallet beside Aunt Too-Tai’s bed. I yawned and scratched, feeling grumpy as a damp cat, unwilling to get up and explore my new surroundings. The ceiling fan creaked overhead, pushing a tepid wash of air to ruffling the lace curtains, fluttering the hem of my aunt’s nightdress hanging from a hook on the bedroom door. She was already risen and gone, as evidenced by her voice coming from through the open window from outside.

“Hand me that crescent wrench.” A clanging racket commenced. “Dammit, hold her steady.” Some large piece of machinery struggled to life with a series of barking coughs. I wandered to the window and stuck my head out into the day through the moon vine overtaking the side of the house. Aunt Too-Tai and George were beside a coffin-like, wheeled contraption containing a mess of gears, belts, and toothed cogs. The dew-covered tractor hitched to this mystery chugged blue exhaust into the brilliant eastern sky. The engine’s growl covered my aunt’s voice, but she was deep in a conversation with George. His hands were planted on his thin hips, George’s scarred face dubious. He shook his head, and his mouth moved. My aunt leaned in to hear his reply, putting her hand on his shoulder. So George could talk, I thought, if he wanted to.

By the time I went to the bathroom, put on my shorts, shirt, and shoes, and scraped my thick blond hair into a messy ponytail, Aunt Too-Tai was in the kitchen. It was a long, narrow room with an old-fashioned iron stove at one end, a deep porcelain sink, a table, three chairs, and a new refrigerator.

“I’m hungry,” I declared. My stomach was rumbling.

“Here,” she said. Aunt Too-Tai handed me a spoon and a bowl with some dry cornflakes in it. “Milk’s in the icebox.”

“Where’s the sugar?”

“Rots your teeth,” my aunt threw over her shoulder. She was at the sink, washing her big-knuckled hands with a cake of yellow soap. “We don’t keep sugar here,” Aunt Too-Tai added.

Glaring at her back, straight and tall as a white-haired telephone pole, I didn’t dare argue, for it had dawned on me that my aunt was no Methyl Ivory, making sugar-butter sandwiches whenever I wanted. Instead, I ate my cereal without sweetening while Aunt Too-Tai drank black coffee. She lit a cigarette, popping the match head into a bloom of light. The sharp, sweet scent of cigarette smoke reminded me of my mother, and in that moment I missed her desperately. It would be months before I’d be allowed to go home.

“We’re not going to church this morning,” my aunt announced without preamble. That was good. A more useless waste of time hadn’t been invented, in my experience: even school was preferable to the eternity I spent squirming on St. Andrew’s varnished oak pews in my Sunday dress with its scratchy petticoats.

“We’re going to the garden,” Aunt Too-Tai said, “before it gets too hot. The tomatoes are covered with cutworms.”

The sun was well up when we stood at the edge of the garden’s long rows of growing things. Our shadows, one tall and one much smaller, stretched before us in the morning. A haze of moisture lifted off the plants, soon to evaporate in the day’s coming heat.

“Take off your shoes,” Aunt Too-Tai said. I piled my Keds and ankle socks beside a coiled garden hose. “Here.” She handed me a large glass pickle jar. “I’ll pay you a nickel for every five worms you put in this jar,” my aunt said, pulling on a pair of work gloves.

“A nickel?” Even in 1964, it wasn’t much.

Nodding, Aunt Too-Tai parted the towering rows of tasseled sweet corn and at once vanished from view. Her voice faded as she called, “If you’re thirsty, get a drink from the hose. I’ll be back in about an hour.” Corn stalks rustled, and I was alone except for the conversational grunts of the hogs in the nearby pen.

The dirt was cool and damp between my toes. I eyed the tomato plants with misgiving but didn’t mean to ignore my instructions—not yet, anyway. Squatting beside the row, I wondered if there would be enough worms to be worthwhile. Tomatoes hung in green-striped balloons from their staked vines, and I soon discovered that hidden underneath their leaves were armies of cutworms. I held one up for a better look: the front end and the back end both had faces. The worm writhed as I dropped it in the pickle jar, coiling into a fat bud of destruction.

“That’s one.” I was determined to keep count. Surely by the time I’d captured a jarful of worms, I’d have enough money to support myself when I took the Chevrolet and drove off to join the Foreign Legion. The garden was still in the hot morning, and sweat ran down the back of my checked shirt. A mockingbird called, another answered, and the verdant aroma of the tomato plants, rich and sharp as gasoline, filled my nose while a smiling breeze tickled the back of my neck. Engrossed in cutworm removal, I was fully into plans for getting to Africa and concentrating on the best way to stow away on a freighter when two big work boots appeared beside me in the dirt.

“I got fifty-nine, Aunt Too-Tai,” I said. “You owe me a bunch of nickels.” I looked up, squinting in the sun. The boots belonged to George. His ruined face was serious, arms in his faded denim shirt folded across his thin chest.

“Hey, Mr. George,” I mumbled. I couldn’t take my eyes off that scar. Maybe he would finally say something. But no, his eyes were patient as he sighed just once and glanced in the direction my aunt had taken.

“Oh—you want Aunt Too-Tai?” I asked.

He nodded.

“She went thataway.” I pointed a dirty finger at the corn where a thin plume of cigarette smoke wafted. With a nod that might have been a thank-you, George disappeared between the tall, green spears.

“Did you get the spreader going?” Several rows over, my aunt’s voice was faint but clear. “Just leave it behind the barn, then. We’ll fill it with that moldy hay, spread the bad stuff over the south pasture after you’re done with the gear box.” Shrugging, I went back to work. Sixty-one, sixty-two . . . A sibilant whisper of corn shocks meant Aunt Too-Tai’s return, and I clapped the lid on the pickle jar just as I finished the row.

“You done with the worms? Good.” She took the glass jar from my hands. “Looks like about, oh—sixty to me.”

“I got eighty.” Well, it was almost that.

“Eighty, you say? That’s sixteen nickels, then. Put your shoes back on and come along.” My thighs aching, I stood up, but as we walked across the backyard toward the barn, a dark, sinuous shadow slung itself in rapid S-curves across the mown grass.

I jumped backward in instinctive fright at the snake. I was mortally afraid of snakes. In a panic, I froze, my mouth wide open and ready to holler like I’d seen Frankenstein’s green-skinned monster lurching around the yard, but Aunt Too-Tai put her hand over my lips.

Almost too low to hear, she said in my ear, “Stay put now, Annie. Don’t move a muscle.” The shadow had coiled under the shade of a sweet gum tree, near hidden in the tall grass around the roots. My aunt slipped away from my side and let herself into the darkened doorway of the barn.


“Aunt Too-Tai!” It was a tin-whistle whisper of a scream. “Don’t leave me!”

An age ticked by. Positive I would have no choice but to stand there and burn up in a fever of terror, I practically melted in relief when Aunt Too-Tai came through the barn doorway with a garden hoe. Raising a finger to her lips, she glided across the grass to the sweet gum tree, and fast as a snake herself, she raised the hoe and struck. Divots of earth flew. A meaty hunk of snake shot skyward as she reduced the snake to its component parts in unimpassioned efficiency until it was done. I was openmouthed with admiration. The snake’s dispatch was the most thrilling thing I’d ever seen that wasn’t on television.

“Come on to the house, Annie,” Aunt Too-Tai said. She leaned the hoe against the tree trunk. “I’ll get George to bury that cottonmouth.”

Back inside at the kitchen table, she lit a cigarette and poured us each a glass of ice water. “Here.” She handed me a twist of paper. “Put this BC Powder on the back of your tongue.” I rolled my eyes like a balky horse since I was skittish of even baby aspirin and dreaded pill taking to the point of hysteria, but Aunt Too-Tai was too forceful a presence to deny. Look at what had happened to the snake.

“Why do I have to take it?” I asked plaintively. “I don’t have a headache.”

“Do it. It’ll calm your nerves.” The powder was bitter and dry, but I managed to wash it down with the cold water. My tongue burned like I’d scrubbed it with Comet. “Now you sit here and wait for that to make you feel better. I’ll go find George.” She hesitated and then landed an awkward pat on my shoulder. “Be a good girl and put that snake out of your mind.” The screen door banged shut. “George!” she called. “Get a shovel.”

Alone again, I sat on the kitchen chair, swinging my feet and drawing faces in a puddle of water on the rock-maple table, fast becoming bored, never a desirable state. My eyes lit on the pack of Pall Malls by the sink.

Smoking. I’d always wanted to try it but knew my mother would have shaken me bald-headed if she’d ever caught me. I tiptoed to the sink, shook the pack, and a lone cigarette fell on the floor. Almost without thinking, I put it in my shirt pocket—but I was definitely planning ahead when I took the matchbook.

I had just returned to my chair when Aunt Too-Tai called to me from the yard, “You can come out now.” Still, I lurked on the other side of the screen door until George had finished with the last of the cottonmouth, finally screwing up my courage to edge past the sweet gum tree. I tried not to look at the blood and ran to join my aunt at the barn.

The old wooden barn was a dim, vaulted cathedral of cobwebs and dust, where ancient birds’ nests festooned the crossbeams. Arrows of sunlight pierced the tin roof high overhead, falling on sawhorses, a decrepit set of harness, bald tires, a rowboat with a hole in the bottom, tools, stacks of lumber, an engine, heavy tow chains, paint cans, bundled magazines, and a thousand other discarded, wonderful things. An orange cat stretched in the shaft of light pooling on top of a mountain of hay.

“That’s last season’s hay crop. It’s gone to mold.” Aunt Too-Tai stooped to pick up a snarled length of baling twine. “It needs out of here before we get the first cutting done next week. You can handle this—you did a fine job on those worms.” My aunt smiled, and her sun-faded eyes looked at me with an unusual expression. It was a moment before I recognized it as approval, an opinion I was fairly unfamiliar with, especially recently.

“You did well before, too—being so still,” she said. “I bet you didn’t know that if you run from a cottonmouth, it’ll chase you all the way to Memphis. You were a brave girl.”

Well, I had been, hadn’t I? Joel Donahoe would’ve run off screaming for his mommy, more than likely. My aunt handed me a pitchfork taller than I was, then pushed open a big sliding door in the back of the barn, allowing the breeze to come play inside.

“Just toss that hay into the manure spreader behind the barn over here.” Aunt Too-Tai gestured at the boxy machine attached to the tractor just outside the door. That machine was the manure spreader, whatever that was. “Come on back to the house after you’re done, and we’ll have dinner.” Then she was gone, leaving me with a pile of hay higher than my head.

I got busy right away, stoutly flinging the hay through the door into the waiting manure spreader. As I struggled with the unwieldy pitchfork, dropping more hay than I picked up, I reflected on the morning’s activities and discovered I enjoyed the newfound feeling of being responsible.

At home, responsible meant “don’t do that.” Here, I’d eaten cereal without sugar. I’d made sixteen nickels and saved the tomato crop single-handed. I’d helped Aunt Too-Tai kill a dangerous snake and taken bitter medicine without complaining. Now I was in charge of moldy hay removal, and it wasn’t even dinnertime yet. I was in love with this feeling until about ten minutes into the project, and then the hay began to get under my shirt collar, into the waistband of my shorts. My nose itched. The cat had moved to another patch of sunlight on top of the lumber pile. She opened one eye, blinked, and went back to sleep. I deserved a break, I decided. The breeze beckoned me out behind the barn, so I dropped the pitchfork and slipped outside.

A crow lit on the steering wheel of the tractor and cocked its head, cawing once before it flapped off to the fig trees to poke holes in the ripening fruit. Off in the distance down by the pond, Bob the white mule grazed in the water-meadow amid the purple vetch and cow parsley, his switch tail busy swatting flies. Resting against the manure spreader, I contemplated the new me with satisfaction until I remembered the cigarette in my shirt pocket.

It was time to have my first smoke.

Unaccustomed to playing with fire, I used half the matchbook before I could get the thing lit. The first puff was awful, and the second one was worse. I tried to get the hang of it with another drag and broke into a coughing fit. The cigarette had lost its charm, but I carefully stubbed it out on the edge of the manure spreader and was ready to put it back in my pocket when I heard my aunt’s voice.

“Annie—dinnertime!”

I forgot about saving the cigarette for later. Tossing it over my shoulder, I ran around the back of the barn to the house, suddenly starving.

Sunday dinner was on the table, a feast of vegetables in bowls: sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, tender corn fried in bacon drippings, snap beans with bacon, stewed okra, butter beans and bacon, biscuits, and golden summer squash, also with bacon. Three desiccated pork chops looked lonely on a platter all by themselves. I seated myself, and George walked in the back door and came in the kitchen. He washed his hands and sat down at the table.

I was more than a little surprised. I’d never eaten with a colored person before. The rare times I’d seen Methyl Ivory eat at our house, she took her meals in the laundry room and used her own plate and silverware, kept in the cabinet with the box of Tide soap and the Pledge.

But George put his napkin in his lap, just like everybody always did, so I put mine in my lap, too. After my Aunt Too-Tai’s perfunctory grace (“Bless this food. Amen.”), I helped myself to some fried corn and a pork chop, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scar climbing George’s upper lip as his jaw worked around a mouthful of butter beans.


“Please pass the salt, Annie.” My aunt generously salted everything on the table. “And don’t stare—it’s impolite.” She speared a tomato slice on her fork.

I looked down at my plate.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Sneaking a glance at George again, I marveled at his stoic mastery of the tough, dry pork chop with his knife and fork. I’d barely made a dent in mine. He wiped the scar with his napkin and broke a biscuit, raising a piece to his mouth. There was an eyeblink of knurled red gum, a twisted knot of flesh brilliant against his dark lip.

“Annie!” My aunt put her fork down. Her look was icy. “What did I just say?”

“But Aunt Too-Tai,” I said, defensive, “I can’t help it. What’s wrong with Mr. George’s mouth?” George pushed snap beans around on the plate with a hunk of biscuit.

“Mr. George has a harelip.” Aunt Too-Tai looked tired.

“What’s a harelip?” I couldn’t imagine how George got along with a lip made of hair.

“The roof of his mouth has a hole in it. That makes it hard for him to speak or to eat, but that’s no reason for you to stare.” She picked up her fork again and pointed it at the blue bowl of okra. “Now pass him some of that. We’ll have no more rudeness at my table.”

Chastised, I passed the okra. We ate in silence, but inside I was seething. It was George’s fault, surely—Aunt Too-Tai’s being so unhappy with me, the ruination of my previously wonderful morning. Everything had been fine until he sat down with us, him and that scar. I spooned fried corn into my sullen mouth. It was delicious. Why did Aunt Too-Tai let him in the house, anyway? And so my thoughts went in a hateful round-song of self-pity and blame until dinner was almost done.

Perhaps it was the breeze, suddenly shifting to the south and wafting through the screen door, or maybe up until then the omnipresent aroma of smoked pork products had overlaid the smell of something burning, but my aunt’s head lifted, her eyes narrowing. She sniffed the air.

“Do you smell that?” she asked, sharp and apprehensive. George stood up from the table, knocking his chair to the floor.

“You didn’t say excuse me,” I accused before I remembered George didn’t talk.

Aunt Too-Tai jumped up. George was already halfway across the backyard, those long flamingo legs pumping in a ground-covering stride. My aunt was running down the steps before I could speak another word.

“Wait!” I called after them from the kitchen table, my mouth full of biscuit and slack with amazement. Why were they running for the barn? In a tempest of curiosity, I ran outside, too. George and Aunt Too-Tai were nowhere to be seen, but a thin blanket of smoke lay over the backyard. Through the half-open barn door the cat streaked across the grass, an orange ghost in the hazed sunlight, its tail electric in alarm. The hogs squealed and milled in their pen. My eyes smarting, I slipped through the barn door in search of my aunt.

Inside was all choking smoke, lit with an eerie glow. The manure spreader was in flames just outside the back door of the barn.

“Aunt Too-Tai?” I tripped over the pitchfork and fell to the hay-covered floor. As I struggled to my knees, a strong arm grabbed me by the back of my shirt, yanking me upward and swinging me effortlessly over a bony shoulder. My forehead bounced on the back of my aunt’s overalls as she ran with me through the barn, coughing. She banged the barn door open with her hip. My chin slammed the ground when Aunt Too-Tai flung me under the sweet gum tree.

“Stay there.” My aunt was already racing back to the barn. “George!” Her scream was broken with smoke. “Don’t do it!” In the next instant the tractor’s engine caught with a harsh growl. Coughing, gasping like a fish on a riverbank, I sucked the smoky air deep into my lungs.

“George!” Aunt Too-Tai sounded terrified.

Then, with a screech of straining gears, the tractor hove into view from around back of the barn, pulling the flaming manure spreader behind it. High on the wooden seat of the tractor, George’s face was a scarred mask as he steered the tractor in a slow arc toward the pasture, down the rutted track leading away from the barn.

“George!” my aunt called. The tractor lurched onward while the fire in the manure spreader grew huge, fed by moldy hay, smoldering tires, and engine grease. George was hunched low over the steering wheel, the sleeve of his denim shirt smoking where a spark had caught. My aunt ran behind in the tall grass, calling for him to stop, but he held the tractor to its grinding track, hauling the burning manure spreader away from the barn.

George’s shirtsleeve was in flames now. At the last minute he threw himself off the tractor just before the gate to the pasture and rolled when he hit the dirt, but one of the big wheels ran over his work boot before he could yank his foot out of the way. Driverless, the tractor shuddered on and knocked the old iron gate off the hinges, crushing it to rusted ruin while rambling onward into the pasture. Bob the mule galloped to the far end of the field near the pond, honking defiance as though the flaming manure spreader had been sent by Beelzebub to come and take him to hell.

“George!” Aunt Too-Tai stumbled down the path to where he was just trying to get to his feet. When she took his arm across her shoulders to help him get off the ground, George cried a wordless moan of pain. He didn’t put any weight on his right foot.

Under the sweet gum, I stood up and something fell out of my shorts pocket.

The little matchbook.

I was a dead child: even Baby Jesus couldn’t help me now. I closed my trembling hand on the matchbook and stuffed it deep in my pocket. My aunt and George were almost to the backyard, and the hogs were shrieking and trying to climb out of their pen. Down in the pasture the manure spreader was a bonfire, the tractor smoking now, too. Around it a field of flames wavered glass-blue on a black plain of ash, but the barn was safe and the fire would eventually burn itself out in the water-meadow. My great-aunt and George limped past me on their way to the back door, smoke-begrimed and exhausted, and I burst into tears.



In the kitchen, Aunt Too-Tai took care of George.

She cut what was left of the denim shirt off him, washing and salving the burn. George’s arm was spalled and blackened, the skin raw, the smell sickening, like nothing I’d ever known. I stood in the corner by the icebox, still crying, and tried not to draw attention. After dosing him with a BC Powder, Aunt Too-Tai helped George out to the Chevrolet and drove forty miles back to Jackson, to the closest hospital that would treat Negroes. This time, I rode in the front. George lay across the back seat, his broken ankle on a bed pillow, cradling his burned arm across his undershirt and apart from that solitary cry he never made a sound. When we got to the University Hospital, my aunt and I sat in the colored waiting room with George until a harried resident came, put him in a wheelchair, and took him away.

Deep in the pocket of my shorts, I clutched the matchbook in my sweaty palm. You must be more responsible, Annie. Oh, a great weight of responsible descended with giant, thundering treads on my soul until I thought I would suffocate with it. All that long Sunday night in the waiting room, my aunt didn’t call my parents. She never accused me of having set the manure spreader on fire. She didn’t have to, for the cast of her mouth and the fact she wouldn’t look at me buried me deep in the pit of responsible. Unable to bear her silence, I pretended to read a National Geographic while Aunt Too-Tai watched the big double doors for George to come out. When he did—on crutches, white gauze swathing his dark arm—we drove back to the farm in Monday’s dawn.


George, Aunt Too-Tai—they were responsible for each other, and I was responsible for a burned manure spreader, a dead tractor, and the new scar George would wear for the rest of his life, the limp he would have until the day he died.

I spent the rest of that summer in Aunt Too-Tai’s gloomy parlor on the spavined sofa, reading books she would hand me wordlessly before she went out to work on her farm, without the tractor and single-handed until George could come back. I read the Bible mostly, but also several severe, old-fashioned books about heedless children who came to spectacularly dreadful ends. When we had exhausted these instructional tracts, she told me to move on to the antediluvian set of encyclopedias for a little light reading. The day I got to the O volume, at last I was allowed outside and given various menial chores—but only under her watchful eye. Aunt Too-Tai gave up smoking.

Near the end of my visit we had a talk, Aunt Too-Tai and I. It would be time for me to return home soon, and we’d never discussed the events of that day. I had to find out if she’d forgiven me, as well as whether she was going to tell my mother.

It was late, I remember, and the air in the house was sleeping off the day’s heat as though the relentless sun had beaten it half to death. Taking a deep breath to fortify myself, I knocked on the door to the room that Aunt Too-Tai and I had shared all that summer.

“Come in,” she called. Wearing her old housecoat, Aunt Too-Tai was sitting on her bed and had just finishing brushing her iron-gray hair in front of her pier glass. Her faded blue eyes met mine in the mirror. “What is it?”

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, dropping my gaze. “I’m so sorry about Mr. George. I didn’t mean to do it.”

Turning from the long mirror, Aunt Too-Tai patted the bed, inviting me to sit down on it beside her. “It’s a terrible thing, Annie—doing something you know you can never take back. I know you’re sorry, child.”

I swallowed hard. “Are you going to tell my mother?”

Her face was grave. “Do I need to? I have a feeling that you’ve already learned an important lesson, maybe the most important lesson you’ll ever learn. No matter how sorry we are, we still have to take responsibility for what we do. Forever. I don’t think you’ll forget it, will you?”

“No, ma’am.” I shook my head. “But it’s hard, Aunt Too-Tai.” My chest burned, on fire with the longing to say something, anything, to make this right between us. I didn’t realize then that Aunt Too-Tai had already forgiven me, that it would be many years before I’d forgive myself. “It’s real hard.” And it still is.

Aunt Too-Tai smiled ruefully and smoothed the hair on my bowed head. “I know, child. That part never goes away, no matter how old you get.”





Later on that last week at the farm, George came back to work, but he wasn’t able to get a full day in yet. I brought him a glass of ice water where he sat in the shade of the sweet gum tree, mending some arcane piece of machinery. He nodded his thanks as I approached.

“Here you go, Mr. George,” I said politely, and ran to rejoin my aunt in the garden. We were picking the tail end of the pole bean crop, and she was counting on my help.

“Pay attention to me now, Annie,” she said. Though my bucket was heavy and my fingers were tired, by then I knew better than to do anything but keep on picking pole beans and listen. Responsibility, Aunt Too-Tai said, is a ladder. We move up, we move down, and sometimes we miss a rung and swing out into the void, but the ladder is forgivingly endless. I was young, she said. Don’t worry, she said. I’d have many chances at that ladder. She set her bucket down in the dirt and gave me a hug.

I still have the book of matches.