Soulbook - Freedom Archives

carol freeman
THINGS
THAT GO
BUMP
IN THE NIGHT
As far back in her life as she wanted to remember, she had
been afraid of something . Respectable things that all children are
afraid of, the dark, large dogs, dizzying high places . . . . and when
mother and daddy died in a car accident, she was afraid of cars .
Then she became afraid of living with Gramma Foley in Arkansas .
She was afraid of the truckfull of Black people carrying sharp shiny
hoes to chop Gramma Foley's cotton . "They're devils!", Gramma
Foley would say in her thin crisp voice . "Lazy good for nothings
you have to watch all the time, else they leave the weeds and chop
down the cotton . "
And when she was older, and going to school in starched
white pinafores and red buster brown shoes, Gramma Foley said .
"Don't let me catch you playing with those black savages, Missy:
They ain't like us . God put a curse on 'em . They ain't more thark
trained apes, and all the boys thinking of is ravishing white ladies!"
And Missy (whose real name was Margaret Ellen Foley)
remembered and never played tag, or may hide , or little sally
walker, or hop scotch with the shy doe-eyed black girls, whose
parents share-cropped for Gramma Foley . The fact was that Missy
hated and envied them--those skinny tattered waifs that went to
school 3 months out of the year and sharecropped 9 . When she was
older, Gramma Foley let her keep the wage book for the piece