Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird #2)(49)

PART V





13


ALEXANDRA WAS AT the kitchen table absorbed in culinary rites. Jean Louise tiptoed past her to no avail.

“Come look here.”

Alexandra stepped back from the table and revealed several cut-glass platters stacked three-deep with delicate sandwiches.

“Is that Atticus’s dinner?”

“No, he’s going to try to eat downtown today. You know how he hates barging in on a bunch of women.”

Holy Moses King of the Jews. The Coffee.

“Sweet, why don’t you get the livingroom ready. They’ll be here in an hour.”

“Who’ve you invited?”

Alexandra called out a guest list so preposterous that Jean Louise sighed heavily. Half the women were younger than she, half were older; they had shared no experience that she could recall, except one female with whom she had quarreled steadily all through grammar school. “Where’s everybody in my class?” she said.

“About, I suppose.”

Ah yes. About, in Old Sarum and points deeper in the woods. She wondered what had become of them.

“Did you go visiting this morning?” asked Alexandra.

“Went to see Cal.”

Alexandra’s knife clattered on the table. “Jean Louise!”

“Now what the hell’s the matter?” This is the last round I will ever have with her, so help me God. I have never been able to do anything right in my life as far as she’s concerned.

“Calm down, Miss.” Alexandra’s voice was cold. “Jean Louise, nobody in Maycomb goes to see Negroes any more, not after what they’ve been doing to us. Besides being shiftless now they look at you sometimes with open insolence, and as far as depending on them goes, why that’s out.

“That NAACP’s come down here and filled ’em with poison till it runs out of their ears. It’s simply because we’ve got a strong sheriff that we haven’t had bad trouble in this county so far. You do not realize what is going on. We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my dear—that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five….

“No ma’am, after the thanks they’ve given us for looking after ’em, nobody in Maycomb feels much inclined to help ’em when they get in trouble now. All they do is bite the hands that feed ’em. No sir, not any more—they can shift for themselves, now.”

She had slept twelve hours, and her shoulders ached from weariness.

“Mary Webster’s Sarah’s carried a card for years—so’s everybody’s cook in this town. When Calpurnia left I simply couldn’t be bothered with another one, not for just Atticus and me. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king—”

My Sainted Aunt is talking like Mr. Grady O’Hanlon, who left his job to devote his full time to the preservation of segregation.

“—you have to fetch and tote for them until you wonder who’s waiting on who. It’s just not worth the trouble these days—where are you going?”

“To get the livingroom ready.”

She sank into a deep armchair and considered how all occasions had made her poor indeed. My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won’t have anything to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus—something’s wrong with me, it’s something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.

Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.

They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it’s all on account of the Negroes … but it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly and God knows, I might fly out the window any time, now.

“Haven’t you done the livingroom?” Alexandra was standing in front of her.

Jean Louise got up and did the livingroom.