Read Her Own Place for Free Online Page B

cotton crop and poor Maycie was sick, her mama left off her own hoeing and came over to help.
    Just then, who drove up in her fine car but Liddie Granger, Church’s wife. “Don’t look up, Mama,” Mae Lee urged, but her mama had already stood her hoe up and was walking over to the car.
    Liddie Granger leaned over and rolled down the car window on the passenger side. Mae Lee could hear a baby crying. Liddie sounded as if she was crying too, “Vergie, Vergie, my baby is crying and I can’t get him to stop. My mama is away. Oh, Vergie, please help me. I don’t know what to do. I really don’t.”
    Vergie looked over her shoulder at her daughter leaning on her hoe. “Go on, Mama,” waved Mae Lee.
    Vergie took off her shoes, knocked them together several times to shake off the soft dirt, and got into Liddie Granger’s car. Mae Lee watched them leave with the crying baby. What a pair they made, Liddie Granger with every strand of hair in place, face powder on, and her mama barefoot, in old field clothes and a frizzed straw hat.
    â€œIf my baby was sick I don’t think I’d take time to put all that stuff on my face,” she thought, but shrugged it off. “She probably already had it on.”
    Mae Lee’s daddy always said he’d never think too hard of the young Grangers. After all, they sold her the land sheowned, something very few white landowners in Rising Ridge would do. He made her promise to hold on to it.
    Watching the car disappear down the road, Mae Lee was jealous of the fine life Liddie Granger lived, terribly jealous. Liddie was so rich. In her jealousy she had forgotten all about her own children, happily playing in the shade from the trees at the edge of the woods. Mae Lee never ever carried her children into the cotton fields, because her mama always said, “If small children play up and down the cotton rows while their parents work, they will grow up to be cotton pickers. And if they pry open a green cotton boll with a boll weevil inside, they will have a short, tragic life.” Her mama always spoke of her regrets over letting her play in the cotton fields while she worked. But Vergie Hudson had made sure Mae Lee would be so afraid of the boll weevil inside a green, unopened cotton boll, that she’d never pry one open.
    It had been fine for her mama to tell her when she returned that Mrs. Granger’s baby was all right. She’d gotten it to sleep. But when her mama kept on talking, Mae Lee hoed furiously. “Mama, I don’t want to hear about the new things in that house, the presents her husband bought her, the good supper Lula Jane is cooking for her tonight,” she said. “Why couldn’t she take care of the baby?”
    â€œLula Jane don’t know nothing about no children, look at how she messed up with hers. When it comes to mothering she is as bad as some cuckoo birds. Well anyway, as I was saying—” “Mama,” she cut her short. “I don’t believe I want to hear any more.”
    â€œOh, good, then,” her mama grinned, waving a crisp fivedollar bill in her hand. “I thought you wanted to hear how I was planning on splitting what I made on that little short trip.”
    Mae Lee threw her hoe down and chased her mama up and down the cotton rows.
    The two women sat down at the edge of the field to rest. Vergie Hudson pulled sprouting grass from around the cotton plants on nearby rows. Her face grew serious. She looked across the field at Hooker and her husband plowing the land he loved so much. She listened to him calling out “gee,” “haw” to the mules. She pulled a crumpled letter from her shirt pocket. “Your granddaddy’s going down fast,” she said. “Mama wrote and asked if I could come down and help out for a while. It’ll be hard on your daddy for me to pull up and go down to the Low Country right in the middle of the farm