Then make room, Hilly says, because this is pretty darn important.
Constantine lived about a mile from our house, in a small Negro neighborhood called Hotstack, named after the tar plant that used to operate back there. The road to Hotstack runs along the north side of our farm, and for as long as I can remember, colored kids have walked and played along that mile stretch, kicking at the red dust, making their way toward the big County Road 49 to catch a ride.
I used to walk that hot mile myself, when I was a girl. If I begged and practiced my catechism, Mother would sometimes let me go home with Constantine on Friday afternoons. After twenty minutes of walking slow, wed pass the colored five-and-dime store, then a grocer with hens laying in back, and all along the way, dozens of shacky-looking roadside houses with tin roofs and slanting porches, along with a yellow one that everybody said sold whiskey from the back door. It was a thrill to be in such a different world and Id feel a prickly awareness of how good my shoes were, how clean my white pinafore dress that Constantine had ironed for me. The closer we got to Constantines house, the more shed smile.
I used to walk that hot mile myself, when I was a girl. If I begged and practiced my catechism, Mother would sometimes let me go home with Constantine on Friday afternoons. After twenty minutes of walking slow, wed pass the colored five-and-dime store, then a grocer with hens laying in back, and all along the way, dozens of shacky-looking roadside houses with tin roofs and slanting porches, along with a yellow one that everybody said sold whiskey from the back door. It was a thrill to be in such a different world and Id feel a prickly awareness of how good my shoes were, how clean my white pinafore dress that Constantine had ironed for me. The closer we got to Constantines house, the more shed smile.
Hi-do[46], Carl Bird, Constantined holler at the root-selling man sitting in his rocking chair on the back of his pickup. Bags of sassafras and licorice root and birdeye vine sat open for bargaining, and by the time we poked around those a minute, Constantines whole bodyd be rambling and loose in the joints. Constantine wasnt just tall, she was stout. She was also wide in the hips and her knees gave her trouble all the time. At the stump on her corner, she would stick a pinch of Happy Days snuff in her lip and spit juice straight as an arrow. Shed let me look at the black powder in its round tin, but say, Dont tell your mama, now.
There were always dogs, hollow-stomached and mangy, laid out in the road. From a porch a young colored woman named Cat-Bite would holler, Miss Skeeter! Tell your daddy hey for me. Tell him Is doing fine. My own daddy gave her that name years ago. Drove by and saw a rabid cat attacking a little colored girl. That cat near about ate her up, Daddyd told me afterward. Hed killed the cat, carried the girl to the doctor, and set her up for the twenty-one days of rabies shots.
A little farther on, wed get to Constantines house. It had three rooms and no rugs and Id look at the single photograph she had, of a white girl she told me she looked after for twenty years over in Port Gibson. I was pretty sure I knew everything about Constantine she had one sister and grew up on a sharecropping farm in Corinth, Mississippi. Both her parents were dead. She didnt eat pork as a rule and wore a size sixteen dress and a size ten ladies shoe. But I used to stare at the toothy smile of that child in the picture, a little jealous, wondering why she didnt have a picture of me up too.
Sometimes two girls from next door would come over to play with me, named Mary Nell and Mary Roan. They were so black I couldnt tell them apart and called them both just Mary.
Be nice to the little colored girls when youre down there, Mother said to me one time and I remember looking at her funny, saying, Why wouldnt I be? But Mother never explained.
After an hour or so, Daddy would pull up, get out, hand Constantine a dollar. Not once did Constantine invite him inside. Even back then, I understood we were on Constantines turf and she didnt have to be nice to anybody at her own house. Afterward, Daddy would let me go in the colored store for a cold drink and sucking candy.
Dont tell your mama I gave Constantine a little extra, now.
Okay, Daddy, Id say. Thats about the only secret my daddy and I have ever shared.
The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carltons, over to shoot guns in the field.
Why you crying, girl? Constantine asked me in the kitchen.
I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face.
Well? Is you?
I blinked, paused my crying. Is I what?
Now you look a here, Eugenia because Constantine was the only one whod occasionally follow Mamas rule. Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?
I dont know. I dont think so, I sobbed.
Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, something we both knew meant Listen. Listen to me.