The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online

my son you wouldn’t need a fortuneteller, you’d need a dose of salts.”
    “He rides me,” Josie cried, pleading for belief. “I seen him do it.”
    “Who?”
    “Now,” said Josie, “I can’t tell you that.”
    “Well,” said Sister Madelaine, handing Josie a cup of tea, “you wouldn’t go to a doctor with a pain in the behind without telling him a mule kicked you, would you? I am a fortuneteller, but I ain’t God. I got limits. Also a boy in college.”
    Josie took a sip of tea and handed over some bills.
    Sister Madelaine paced, her Indian-chief profile to Josie.
    “That theory about witch-riding belongs wholly to my educated child. I don’t argue with him to keep peace in the family. But I ask you, what kind of business could I have built up if I didn’t believe in witches? I know they are real because I have had to shed a few of my own. My son has learned they are not real in college, where everybody believes in a man called Freud who uses old couches. Well, I don’t believe in couches! But what do youngsters know about anything?”
    She stopped pacing and looked down at Josie. There was never pity in Sister Madelaine’s eyes, just a steady, beady waiting. This unnerved Josie, who thought of the fortuneteller as of another species than herself. She could not bear to look Sister Madelaine straight in the eye.
    “Everyone who is straddled by a witch knows the identity of the witch,” Sister Madelaine said with her back to Josie. “If you can call his name,” she said, as Josie was leaving, “you will be cured.”
    After Josie was gone, Sister Madelaine scribbled a short note to her son, put it in an envelope, together with the money Josie had paid her, and then sat back reflectively in her chair, savoring the last drops of her tea.

8
    J OSIE HAD NOT been able to say his name. She even told herself she did not remember him. She did not know why he came to her while she slept, drenching her in perspiration, racing her heart with fear, holding her immobile with his weight, like judgment, across her chest. For her father had been a heavy man, and it was her father who rode Josie, stifled through the night.
    Her father. How did she remember him? A question asked slowly, always in bewilderment, to dull the unforgotten impression of one cruel night over thirty years ago. Her last night in her father’s house as a young girl. The night that was to have changed her life of sin back to its original country righteousness.
    She had thought her father agreed to let her back into his house. He had not refused her gifts to his other children or to himself or to Josie’s mother. And Josie had worked hard to buy them. She had thought, at last I will go home to stay, to be again a child, be again sixteen, and near his heart and hand.
    It happened on her father’s birthday. Josie came walking down the road, dusty-shoed, into the hard swept yard. Her father was on the porch, a shabby dais of power, not knowing about the party she planned for him. She carried small bundles, but had hidden away larger ones the night before. His deep solemn eyes followed her up the steps and into the house. He did not speak. But his eyes seemed to glow with promise and there was a bemused smile on his lips. She thought she was about to be forgiven.
    “Do you think he’ll let me come back?” she asked her mother, who, like her daughter, was big with child. The money Josie put into the party for her father would be the last she would earn before she delivered. Her mother’s answer was a prayer in silence, a frightened and hopeful cautious nod of the head. Her mother was a meek woman, and though she rarely agreed with Josie’s father she never argued with him.
    Josie had come early to prepare the food, mix the drinks—corn liquor, sugared water, crushed mint leaves—and to greet her father’s guests. They knew her shame but would come, fearing her father in his stiff sobriety and decency, but depending on his abundant