Love by Toni Morrison Read Free Book Online Page A

the water as though the mystery was floating down there. “I lost it for a while. Took a long time to get over it.”
    “But you did. Get over it.”
    “I did,” he answered, smiling. “A pretty woman came along and the clouds just drifted off.”
    “See there. And you complaining.”
    “You’re right. Still, I was so caught up with him, I never took the trouble to know him. I used to wonder why he picked a woman like May to marry. Maybe he was somebody else and I made him my . . . shadow. And now I’m thinking
I
don’t understand anybody. So why should anybody understand me?”
    “Hard to know people. All you can go by is what they do,” Sandler said, wondering, Is he trying to say he’s lonesome, misunderstood? Worrying about a son dead for twenty-some years? This man, with more friends than honey had bees, worrying about his reputation? With women fighting so hard for his attention you’d think he was a preacher. And he moaning about the burden of it? Sandler decided the whiskey had pushed Cosey to the crying phase. It had to be that, otherwise he was in the company of a fool. He could swallow hot rocks easier than he could the complaints of a rich man. Vaguely insulted, Sandler turned his attention to the bait box. If he waited long enough, Cosey would skip to another topic. Which he did, after singing a few refrains of a Platters song.
    “Do you know that every law in this country is made to keep us back?”
    Sandler looked up, thinking, Where did that come from? He laughed. “That can’t be true.”
    “Oh, but it is.”
    “What about . . .” but Sandler couldn’t remember any laws about anything except murder, and that wouldn’t help his case. Everybody knew who went to prison and who didn’t. A black killer was a killer; a white killer was unhappy. He felt sure that most law was about money, not color, and said so.
    Cosey answered with a slow wink. “Think about that,” he said. “A Negro can have A-one credit, solid collateral, and not a hope in hell of a bank loan. Think about that.”
    Sandler didn’t want to. His marriage was fresh, his daughter new. Vida was all he knew of A-one; Dolly was all he needed for hope.
    That was their first of many fishing trips, confidences. Eventually Cosey persuaded Sandler to stop cleaning crab at the cannery. With tips, waiting tables at the hotel would put more in his pocket. Sandler tried it for a few months, but in
1966
, with riots in any big city you could name, a cannery boss offered him a supervisory job, hoping the gesture would forestall any restlessness that might infect the all-black labor force. It worked out. Cosey felt easier in a friendship between himself and a foreman than with one of his own waiters. But the more Sandler learned about the man, the less he knew. At times sympathy conquered disappointment; other times dislike overcame affection. Like the time Cosey told him a story, something about how when he was little his father made him play in a neighbor’s yard to see who came out the back door. Every dawn he was sent to watch. A man did slip out one day and Cosey reported it to his father. That afternoon he saw the man dragged through the street behind a four-horse wagon.
    “You helped catch a thief, a killer?” Sandler asked in admiration.
    “Yep.”
    “Good for you.”
    “Bunch of kids ran after the wagon, crying. One was a little girl. Raggedy as Lazarus. She tripped in some horse shit and fell. People laughed.”
    “What’d you do?”
    “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
    “You were a kid.”
    “Yeah.”
    During the telling, Sandler’s quick sympathy changed to embarrassment when he wondered if Cosey laughed too. Other times he felt active dislike for the man, as when he refused to sell land to local people. Folks were divided on whether to blame him or his wife for selling it to a developer cashing in on HUD money. By way of fish fries, bake sales, rummage sales, and tithing, they had collected enough for a deposit. They