Georgia Boy (8 page)

Pa laughed a little and looked around to see if anybody else had heard what she said. All the other gypsies were backing away towards the wagons. The women on the porch left, too. They went through the house towards the front door, but Ma followed them to make sure they didn’t touch anything else on the way.

While Pa was thinking about what the Queen had told him, she took him by the arm and led him inside the woodshed. They went in and closed the door.

Handsome went around to the front to make sure the gypsy kids didn’t try to come back and take something else from under the house. I could hear Ma walking around inside as if she was looking to see what was and what wasn’t missing. I was standing by the bedroom window when Ma leaned out.

“William!” she said. “Go get your Pa this instant! The sheriff is going to hear about this! I’ll have those gypsies arrested if it’s the last thing I do! I’ve already missed your Grandpa’s picture from over the mantelpiece, and I can’t find my best Sunday dress that was hanging in the closet! Goodness knows what else is missing! Go get your Pa this instant! He’s got to notify the sheriff before it’s too late!”

I went around to the woodshed where the Queen and my old man were, and when I tried to open the door, it was locked, I started to call Pa, but just then I heard him giggle as if he was being tickled. In a minute the Queen began to giggle, too. Both of them were giggling and saying something I couldn’t hear. I went back to the window where Ma was.

“Pa’s in the woodshed,” I said, “but he didn’t hear me.”

“What’s he doin in the woodshed?” Ma asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He and the gypsy woman who said she is the Queen are both in there.”

“Then call your Pa out of there this instant,” Ma said. “There’s no telling what he’s up to.”

I went back to the Woodshed door and listened. I couldn’t hear a single sound, but when I tried to open it, it was still locked. I waited a little while and then called my old man.

“Ma wants you right away, Pa,” I said. “You’d better come.”

“Go away, son,” Pa said. “Don’t bother me now.”

I went back to tell Ma, but when I got to the window she had left. On the way back to the woodshed, I heard Ma come tearing out of the house. She came as far as the back porch.

“Morris Stroup!” she yelled. “You answer me this instant!”

There wasn’t a sound anywhere for a long time, and then I heard the lock on the woodshed door rattle. In a minute or two the Queen stepped out. She took a good look at Ma, and then she hurried around the corner of the house towards the teams and wagons. As soon as she got there, all the men whipped up the horses, and the wagons rattled down the street out of sight.

I looked around, and there was my old man peeping through a crack in the woodshed door. Ma saw him, too, and she hurried across the yard and jerked the door open. My old man was standing there with only his underwear on, and he looked like he didn’t know what to do.

“Morris!” Ma yelled. “What on earth!”

Pa tried to duck behind the door, but Ma caught him and pulled him back where she could get a good look at him.

“What does this mean?” Ma said. “Answer me, Morris Stroup!”

Pa hemmed and hawed for a while, trying to think of something to say.

“The Queen told me my fortune,” he said, cutting his eyes around to see how Ma was acting.

“Fortune, my foot!” Ma said.

Ma turned around.

“William,” she said, “go inside the house and pull down all the window shades and shut the doors. I want you to stay there until I call you.”

“It really wasn’t much to get excited about, Martha,” Pa said, standing first on one foot and then on the other. “The Queen—”

“Shut up!” Ma said. “Where are your clothes?”

“I reckon she made off with them,” Pa said, looking around the shed, “but I got the best of the deal.”

Ma turned and motioned me toward the house. I started off, backing as slow as I could.

“While she wasn’t noticing,” Pa said, “I got hold of this.”

He held up a watch in a gold case. It had a long gold chain, and it looked as if it were brand-new.

“A watch like this is worth a lot of money,” Pa said. “I figure it’s worth a lot more than my old overalls and jumper, and anything else they carried off. The old ax wasn’t worth anything, and that old bucket with the hole in the bottom wasn’t, either.”

Ma took the watch from Pa and looked at it. Then she closed the door and locked it on the outside. After she had gone into the house, I went back to the woodshed and looked through a crack. My old man was sitting on a pile of wood in his underwear untying a yellow ribbon that had been tied in a hard knot around a big roll of greenbacks.

H
ANDSOME WAS IN AND OUT
of the house all morning, scrubbing the floor and splitting fat-pine lighters and sweeping the yard with the sedge broom, but we didn’t miss him until just before dinnertime when my old man went out on the back porch to tell him to take two eggs from the hen nests and to go down to Mr. Charlie Thigpen’s store and swap them for a sack of smoking tobacco. Pa called him four or five times, but Handsome didn’t answer even the last time Pa called. Pa thought he was hiding in the shed, the way he had a habit of doing, so he wouldn’t have to come out and do some kind of work, but after looking in all of Handsome’s hiding places, Pa said he couldn’t be found anywhere. Ma started in right away blaming my old man for being the cause of Handsome’s leaving. She said that Handsome would never have gone off if Pa had treated him halfway decent and hadn’t always been cheating Handsome out of what rightfully belonged to him just because he was an orphan colored boy and scared to speak up for his rights. My old man, Handsome and me played marbles sometimes, and Pa was always fudging on Handsome and breaking up the game by taking all his marbles away from him even when we weren’t playing for keeps.

“Anything might happen to that poor innocent colored boy when he gets out in the cruel world,” Ma said. “If he hadn’t been driven to it, he’d have never left the good home I tried to provide for him here.”

“Handsome didn’t have the right to run off like he done,” my old man said. “It oughtn’t to matter how much he was provoked and, besides, it ought to be against the law for a darkey just to pick up and go without a by-your-leave. He might have owed me some money.”

“What did you do to Handsome this morning that would’ve made him run off?” Ma asked him.

“Nothing,” Pa said. “Anyway, I can’t think of nothing out of the ordinary.”

“You done something,” Ma said, getting angry and moving towards my old man. “Now, you tell me what it was, Morris Stroup!”

“Well, Martha,” Pa said, “any number of things might have peeved Handsome and made him run off. I declare, I just can’t think of everything.”

“You stand there and think, Morris Stroup!” she said. “Handsome Brown would never have gone away like this if you hadn’t caused it.”

“Well, I did sort of borrow his banjo,” he said slowly. “I asked him to lend it to me for a while, but he wouldn’t do it, so I went up in the loft where he keeps it in the shed and took it down.”

“Where’s Handsome’s banjo now?” she asked.

“That’s something I can’t say truthfully, Martha,” he answered, standing first on one foot and then on the other. “I was walking along the street downtown last night with it under my arm and a strange colored fellow I never saw before in my life asked me how much I’d take for it. I told him a dollar, because I sort of halfway didn’t expect him to have a dollar but, sure enough, he had the money right in his pocket, and so I couldn’t honestly back out of the deal since I’d come right out and named the price.”

“You go find the darkey you sold Handsome’s banjo to and get it back,” Ma said.

“I couldn’t do that,” Pa said right away.

“Why couldn’t you?” she asked him.

“How in the world am I to know what darkey it was I sold it to?” he said. “It was pitch-black on the street, and I couldn’t begin to see the darkey’s face. I wouldn’t know him now from a million other colored people.”

Ma was so mad by that time that it was all she could do to keep from picking up the broom and hitting my old man with it. I guess she didn’t want me standing around listening to what she was saying to my old man, because she turned around and called me.

“William,” she said, “go downtown right away and start asking people if any of them has seen Handsome Brown. He couldn’t have been swallowed up in a hole in the ground. Somebody surely has seen him,”

“All right, Ma,” I told her. “I’ll go.”

I ran down the street, leaving Ma and my old man standing on the back porch staring at each other, and went as fast as I could to the ice house where Handsome sometimes went on a hot day to cool off on the wet sawdust. When I got there, I asked Mr. Harry Thompson, who owned the ice house, if he had seen Handsome, but Mr. Thompson said he hadn’t seen him in two or three days. I was about to leave and go down to the back door of Mrs. Calhoun’s fish market where Handsome went sometimes to get one of the mullets that were too small to sell, when one of the Negro boys who sawed ice for Mr. Thompson told me that Handsome had gone up the street about an hour before to where the carnival had put up the show tents that morning. Everybody knew the carnival was coming to town, and that was why my old man had sold Handsome’s banjo for a dollar. I had heard him try to borrow fifty cents from Handsome, but Handsome didn’t have any money, and Pa had decided right then and there that the only way he could get enough money to go to the carnival was to sell the banjo. Pa had spent the dollar before he got home with it, though.

I ran back home as fast as I could to let Ma know where Handsome was. When I got there, she and my old man were still standing on the back porch arguing. They stopped what they were saying to each other as soon as I opened the gate and ran up the steps.

“Handsome’s gone to the carnival!” I told Ma. “He’s up there right now!”

Ma thought a minute before she said anything. My old man moved away from her sideways until he was a good distance out of her reach.

“Morris,” she said finally, “I’m going to trust you this one time more. Go up to that carnival and bring Handsome home before anything dreadful happens to him. I’ll never be able to make my peace with the Good Lord and die with a clear conscience if anything should happen to that poor innocent darkey.”

My old man started down the steps.

“Can I go, too, Pa?” I asked him.

Before he could say anything, Ma spoke up.

“You go along with your father, William,” she told me. “I want somebody to keep an eye on him.”

“Come on, son,” he said, waving at me. “Let’s hurry!”

We hurried down the street, across the railroad tracks, and straight to the carnival lot where the weeds were still growing knee-high in some places.

There were dozens of tents strewn all over the lot, and people were already milling around in front of the shows. The tents had large colored pictures painted on big sheets of canvas stretched across the front of them, and every show had a stand where somebody was shouting and selling tickets at the same time. My old man stopped in front of one of the tents that had pictures of naked girls on it.

“Have you got a dime in your pocket to spare, son?” he whispered to me. “I’ll pay it back to you the first chance I get.”

I shook my head and told him all I had was the quarter I had been keeping to pay my way into the Wild West show with when the carnival came to town.

“You just lend me the quarter now, son,” he said, poking my pants pocket with his finger. “I’ll give it back to you in no time at all. You won’t even miss it, it’ll be that quick.”

“But I want to see the Wild West show, Pa!” I told him, putting my hand in my pocket and locking the quarter in my fist. “Can’t I keep it for that, Pa? Please let me keep it! I saved for more than two weeks to get this much.”

The man who was selling the tickets picked up a long yellow megaphone and shouted through it. My old man got real nervous and started prancing up and down and pulling at my pocket.

“Now, look here, son,” he said. “There ain’t a bit of sense in me and you arguing over a little thing like a quarter. By the time you want to spend it, I’ll have it back for you, and you won’t miss it none at all.”

“But Ma told us to find Handsome,” I said. “We’d better go look for him, anyway. You know Ma. She’ll be as mad as all get-out if we don’t find him and take him back home.”

“Looking for a pesky darkey can wait,” he said, getting a good grip on my arm and trying to pull my fists out of my pocket. “I know what I’m talking about, son, when I say you ought to lend me that quarter you’ve got in your pocket without a bit more argument. Ain’t I always lent you a dime, or whatever it was, from time to time, providing I had it, when you asked me for it? Now, it’s only fair that you lend me that quarter for a little while.”

Music started up inside the tent, and the man selling the tickets shouted again.

“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” he said, looking straight at my old man. “The show’s about to begin! The unadorned-dancing-girls-of-all-nations are getting ready to perform! Don’t miss the show of your lifetime! Don’t live to regret it. Step right up and buy your ticket before it’s too late! The girls want to dance—don’t keep them waiting! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

“See there, son?” my old man said, getting a tight grip on my arm and pulling with all his might. “The show’s about to start and I’ll miss seeing it if I don’t get in there right away!”

He pulled my fist out of my pocket and pried open my fingers. He was a lot stronger than I was, and I couldn’t hold on to the quarter any longer. He got it and ran up to the man selling the tickets. As soon as he could get his hand on it he grabbed the ticket and dashed inside the tent. There wasn’t anything I could do then, so I just sat down beside one of the tent stakes and waited. The music began getting louder and louder, and I could hear somebody inside the tent beating on drums. After about five minutes, the music suddenly stopped, and somebody threw back the flaps on the tent. A crowd of men came piling outside, and right behind them, the next to the last one to leave, was my old man. He looked a lot calmer than he did when he went in, but he walked straight into an electric light pole before he knew what he was doing.