Paper Bag Records and Sweet Potato Pie

Sweet Potato Pie Eugenia Collier From up here on the fourteenth floor, my companion Charley feels like an insect scurrying among other insects. A deep feeling of love zoom alongs through me. despite the distance, he seems to feel it, for he turns and scans the upper windows, but failing to find me, continues on his way. I moderate him moving quicklygingerly, it seems to me down Fifth Avenue and around the corner to his shabby taxicab. In a moment he will be heading back uptown. I turn from the window and misfire down on the bed, shoes and every.Perhaps because of what happened this afternoon or maybe Just because I see Charley so seldom, my houghts hover over him like hummingbirds. The cheerful, impersonal tidiness of this room is a world away from Charleys walk-up apartment flat in Harlem and a hundred worlds from the bare, noisy shanty where he and the rest of us worn out(p) what there was of our childhood. I close my eyes and side by side I see the Charley of my boyhood a nd the Charley of this afternoon, as clearly as if I were looking at a split TV screen. Another surge of love, seasoned with gratitude, wells up in me.As far as I know, Charley neer had any childhood at all. The oldest children of sharecroppers never do. mama and Pa were shadowy figures whose voices I heard aguely in the morning when quietness was shallow and whom I glimpsed as they left for the field before I was fully awake or as they trudged wearily into the house at night when my lids were irresistibly heavy. They came into sharp focus only on supernumerary occasions. One such occasion was the day when the crops were in and the sharecroppers were paid. In our cabin there was so much excitement in the air that even l, the baby responded to it.For weeks we had been running out of things that we could neither grow nor modernize on credit. On the evening of that day we waited anxiously for our parents return. Then we would luster around the rough wooden tableI on Lils lap or cl inging to Charleys neck, little Alberta nervously tugging her plait, Jamie crouched at Mamas elbow, like a panther about to spring, and all seven of us silent for once, waiting. Pa would place the money on the tablegently, for it was made from the sweat of their bodies and from the childrens tears.Mama would count it out in little piles, her dark face stool and, I think now, beautiful. Not with the hollow beauty of well-modeled features but with the strong radiance of one who has suffered and never yielded. This tor the store bill, sne would mutter, making a I p e. This tor cllection. T for a piece dgingham and so on, stretching the money as tight over our collective needs as Jamies outgrown pants were stretched over my bottom. Well, thats the crop. She would look up at Pa at last. Itll do. Pas face would relax, and a general grin flitted from child to child.We would survive, at least for the pre move. The other time when my parents were solid entities was at church. On Sundays we would don our threadbare Sunday-go-to-meeting raiment and tramp, along with neighbors similarly attired, to the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the frail edifice of bare oards held together by God knows what, which was all that my parents ever knew of security and future promise. Being the youngest and therefore the most likely to err, I was plopped between my aim and my mother on the long wooden bench.They sat huge and eternal like twin mountains at my sides. I remember my fathers still, black profile silhouetted against the sunny window, looking back into dark recesses of time, into some lightheaded antiquity, like an ancient ceremonial mask. My mothers face, usually sternly set, changed with the varying nuances of her emotion, its planes shifting, shaped by the soft highlights f the sanctuary, as she progressed from the subdued amen to a loud Help me, Jesus wrung from the depths of her gaunt frame. My early memories of my parents are associated with special occasions.The contou rs of my everyday were shaped by Lil and Charley, the oldest children, who rode herd on the rest of us while Pa and Mama toiled in fields not their own. Not until years later did I realize that Lil and Charley were little to a greater extent than children themselves. Lil had the loudest, screechiest voice in the county. When she yelled, Boy, you better git yourself in here you got yourself in there. It was Lil who caught and bathed us, Lil who fed us and sent us to school, Lil who punished us when we needed punishing and comforted us when we needed comforting. If her voice was loud, so was her laughter.When she laughed, everybody laughed. And when Lil sang, everybody listened. Charley was taller than anybody in the world, including, I was certain, God. From his shoulders, where I spent considerable time in the earliest years, the world had a different perspective I looked down on the heads rather than at the undersides of chins. As I grew older, Charley became more father than bro ther. Those days return n fragments of splintered memory Charleys slender dark hands whittling a monkey from a chunk of wood, his face thin and intense, brown as the loaves Lil baked when there was flour.Charleys quick fingers point a stick of charred kindling over a bit of scrap paper, making a marvelously picture take shapeJamies face or Albertas rag doll or the spare fgure of our purposeless brown dog. Charleys voice low and terrible in the dark, telling ghost stories so delightfully grand that later in the night the moan of the wind through the chinks in the wall sent us scurrying to the security of Charleys pallet, Charleys sleeping form. Some memories are more than tragmentary. I can still teel the bop ot the wet disn rag across my mouth. Somehow I developed a stutter, which Charley was determined to recover.Someone had told him that an effective cure was to slap the stuttered across the mouth with a sopping wet dish rag. Thereafter whenever I began, Lets g -g-g- -, sle ep with From nowhere would come the ubiquitous rag. Charley would always insist, l dont want to hurt you none, Buddy and whap again. I dont know when or why I stopped stuttering. But I stopped. Already primed(p) waste by poverty, we were easy prey for ignorance and superstition, hich hunted us like hawks. We sought education feverishlyand, for most of us, futilely, for the sum total of our combined energies was required for mere brute survival.