High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney Read Free Book Online Page A

enforce her ban on having balls themselves in the house, as if toys were as dirty as pets.
    Killjoy Nida Lee wondered how one child could make so much noise in a driveway. When Nida Lee brought a message from “Miss Clara,” she smirked as though she had once again one-upped Arnez by leaving her to bring the platters. My sisters retaliated by shrinking ever so slightly from her pinches and pats. We were supposed to feel sorry for her because she was once on a regimen of cortisone injections and had never been able to lose the weight. I was warned not to ask Nida Lee to play the second piano in the back room.
    “Touch me, Lord.” Her inner spark had been ignited again.
    “What is it, Nida Lee?”
    “No harm in praise.”
    “I don’t want that foolishness today,” Aunt Clara said.
    Nida Lee was driven to the piano in the back room whenever Aunt Clara seemed in the mood to pass remarks about ugly black
women with pierced ears, or when she couldn’t participate in Aunt Clara’s grilling of my mother for news about nice Negro women’s clubs, those groups that met and raised scholarship money between discussions about how the salad spinners that had just come on the market could be used to dry stockings when the machine was broken.
    “How is the Links Club?”
    “It’s getting browner.”
    When Nida Lee let herself expand at the upright, she tried to coax me into prayer. “Until my hands are new, aw, I’ll be clean when You get through.” Religious emotion was funny to me. Added to the way Southern blacks talked, it was difficult for me to control myself.
    I looked down the road into the Bottom. Flat trucks raised a sultry dust in the mornings. Women went by with baskets of laundry for white people on their heads. Two women, their faces protected from the sun by black rain umbrellas, with big pocket books crooked in their arms, feet spread out in shoes that slapped against their heels, nodded my way as they ambled by.
    “Where are you going?”
    “A good piece up the road.”
    I was about to double up for a good laugh. “Better not,” Arnez said. “Better not.”
     
    Nida Lee enjoyed the highest opinion of herself as Aunt Clara’s eyes and ears around town, down in the Bottom. She was often on the lookout to see who was coming ‘from down under the hill.’ If Aunt Clara needed anything, Nida Lee would hurry to volunteer. “Now, you know how you get from exposure.”
    “You are a saint.”
    “Go on, Miss Clara.”
    She enjoyed getting out of the house, especially when it meant
that she could wake G.C. and make him back out the Cadillac. Nida Lee returned with tea, tumid pound cakes—Arnez’s baking was not what it used to be, she said confidentially—and a whole lot extra.
    “Now tell me,” Aunt Clara said, “what has that woman done now?”
    I got the impression from the names of the miscreants who featured in Nida Lee’s daily reports that the black South was filled with “bigs” and “littles”—Big Johnny, Little Johnny. “Big Mary said to this white lawyer when he called that Mrs. Harris was having her teeth made and after this week she will talk to her and see what she can get her to do. Big Mary is like they say. Underworld people play a profit game. That woman is doing this on Mrs. Harris. It hurts me to see people deceive an aged person for their own profit.” She practically screamed her report, not caring that little pitchers were present, because she wanted to get it out before she forgot something, like model students who deliberately left their notecards behind when they recited Mother’s Day speeches.
    “Mrs. Harris is failing fast and Big Mary is with her night and day.” Nida Lee put on her solemnly satisfied expression, that of the cat with the dead mouse, when she insinuated herself onto the sofa near Aunt Clara’s ear.
    “It is very hard for Mrs. Harris to get up out of the large chair in the dining room and when she does she’s out of breath and some days she