The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online Page A

people were going north. Brown was what she called herself and Bettina. Their father had taught them. “Don’t you call yourselves niggers,” he had told them. “You’re my daughters, damn you! Brown—brown—that’s what you are. Brown’s a good color, isn’t it?” But when he got old and drowsy he had not cared what color they were.
    “Wonder how would I look with my hair up high?” she thought.
    She glanced at the door. They’d be downstairs now together—no danger of their coming up. The mirror in the attic was a cracked old thing and she could never see herself in it. Besides, she was ashamed to fuss with herself before Bettina. Bettina was younger, but she acted older.
    She loosened her curly black hair and let it fall on her shoulders. “I daren’t use her combs and brushes, though,” she murmured. She was sorely tempted. She washed them out every day anyway, and she would wash them out right away. Upstairs she and Bettina shared a bit of broken comb. She didn’t know what a brush felt like in her hair though she brushed ma’am’s hair an hour every single night before bedtime until it shone like the copper kettle. She lifted the silver-backed brush on the toilet table and then jumped. There in the mirror she saw her master standing. She put the brush down softly and without turning around she bundled her hair back into her net.
    “Are you beautifying yourself, Georgia?” Pierce asked, and laughed.
    She did not answer nor did she turn. She was too honest to excuse herself.
    “You better not let your—you better not let her see you,” he said.
    “No, sir—I know I am doing wrong,” Georgia said in a faint voice.
    He was watching her face in the mirror. It was downcast, and the heavy fringes of her black eyelashes lay on her pale gold cheeks. “Why, the girl is a beauty, poor thing,” he thought.
    “Where’s your—” he stopped, and Georgia lifted her eyelashes.
    “Hang it,” he swore, “I keep trying not to say ‘your mistress.’”
    She turned and smiled at him with pity. “I wish you wouldn’t bother. I don’t mind,” she said.
    “It was only yesterday I decided I wouldn’t let you say master and mistress any more,” he reminded her.
    “Yes, sir, but I know how you want to do, and so I don’t mind,” she said.
    The girl’s lips were red and her teeth very white. He did not remember ever having seen a brown girl’s lips so red.
    “Then where’s your mistress?” he asked. He heard the harshness in his voice and could do nothing to quell it. For the first time the future loomed as something monstrous. The end of this war meant that Georgia and all like her were free and they were his and Lucinda’s equals. The distance that had once been between had been taken away. Anything could happen, and there were no laws to check it. If there were to be new barriers, they must be made by people like himself, or there were no barriers—he refused to think further. There must be barriers, of course, between white and black.
    “Pierce!” Lucinda’s voice floated up the stairs.
    “She’s downstairs to meet you, Master Pierce,” Georgia said. As though she felt new distance shaping between them she returned to her old shape of his name.
    He turned and left her standing there. From the head of the stairs he looked down at his wife at the foot. She had left the big front door open and she stood against a silver screen of light. Her golden hair caught it and the whiteness of her skin caught it and her eyes were like the sapphires she loved. She saw him and ran up and he met her halfway and took her in his arms.
    “Pierce—in broad daylight—” she protested.
    “Day and night,” he muttered, “night and day—”
    He held her and for once she stood pliant in his embrace. But it could not last. The boys were running in from outdoors and behind them Joe was making efforts to catch them.
    “Mama, Mama!” Martin screamed, and then saw them on the stairs. Lucinda turned in