Read High Cotton for Free Online Page B

meetings of their club, the What Good Are We; the sheriff who received a Ford Foundation grant because he hadn’t killed anyone.
    Details reassured her, like an oil and tire check. She could remember the number of beaux she had before she met Uncle Eugene. The most impressive was a boy haunted by the memory of his grandmother throwing him from a second-story window when she thought whites were breaking down the door during the Atlanta riot of 1906. She wondered what had become of him. Most likely he had gone North. He’d often said that if he’d stayed in Georgia he’d have been lynched. She was in favor of hotheads: it was a masculine prerogative. She liked my father ever since he overcame “Fear Thought” in school and joined the rallies in support of Henry Wallace’s right of free speech.
    Aunt Clara talked like someone who had made up her mind not to leave any footprints. The lotus hum of her intermittent conversation, like the current from the electric fans in opposite corners of the sun porch, subdued hours. Her odd singsong pursued the smell of butane from my mother’s lighter. “Gene never could make up his mind, don’t you know. Picayunes. Wings. Hit Parade in the can. Dominoes. Lucky Strike in the green package. Philip Morris. Cavalier. Coffee Time. That was the war.”
    She remembered very well how upset a cousin was when E. E. Just punched him at Howard University. I thought she
meant the famous Negro biologist had knocked her cousin down. But no, Dr. Just never spoke above a whisper. To get punched, back then, meant to receive a failing grade. Aunt Clara’s cousin had worked too hard on his laboratory manual, copying bacteria from books when he wasn’t sure what he saw under the microscope. Dr. Just had included blank slides, in order to teach his students not to draw anything if they didn’t see anything.
    Some women were house-proud, some were husband-proud, and still others were pleased with their connections. Aunt Clara was all three. She was proud that Mattiwilda Dobbs had sung at my mother’s wedding, that a Washington cousin’s collection of poems had been reviewed in the New York Evening Post before the Depression silenced him, proud even of his parting remark that Jefferson must have had her in mind when he said he had yet to find a black who uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.
     
    Aunt Clara liked to “go places,” but she hadn’t been anywhere in years and evidently her opinion of wherever she had been had solidified around the issue of service. Holidays at Dobbs Ferry began promisingly enough, but things went quickly downhill to the poor Melba sauce in yet another lackluster Rhode Island Plaza restaurant in Washington, D.C., before “they” finally let “us” in elsewhere. Aunt Clara had probably never had the chance to grade hotels. Her traveling had been done in the days when you depended on “kissing cousins” for a bed.
    It was an indoors life, even a long ride in the powder-blue Cadillac was an indoor event. The trouble was that we all wanted to ride in the back seat. The automatic windows were more rewarding to me than the remnants of cotton fields or the dignified remains of Tuskegee Institute. Aunt Clara looked disturbed when someone wanted to stop. She was hardly aware of what the car passed. If we were heading toward Goat Rock Lake,
she was twenty years behind, back with my mother on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, going into Yates’s Drugstore for Dr. Palmer’s Lotion.
    Uncle Eugene’s early death had intensified some of her human instincts. Ebony cabinets bore a clutter of condolence letters, birthday cards, photograph albums. She collected funeral programs like signed menus, though she no longer attended funerals.
    She liked to plan her funeral, what music she would have and which preacher she would not. Her dilemma was that she couldn’t bear the thought of worms and bacteria eating away at her, of taking up room. She wanted to be compact, but