High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney

break.
    “They been saying it forever. How we can’t live without them. How much understanding there is. Son, when I was in Georgia I could have lived real good without crackers, I can tell you. There was this long line of paterolls.”
    “What?” Muriel interrupted.
    “Where you from, girl. Who whipped the slaves. They were called paterolls. The no-account trash that did the whipping.”
    Muriel’s face said that you can, after all, get blood from a turnip. But she wouldn’t leave them alone. I wasn’t sure what the men did. I knew there was a cotton mill that made sheets and bed linen in some mysterious part of town. They seemed to be part of a road crew.
    “If your wife heard you talking like that, she’d roll over in her grave.”
    “If she’s rolling over, it’s with her legs wide open.”
    I ran when Muriel ran, terrified of being left alone in the trees and not finding my way back.
    Aunt Clara said that if she ever caught Muriel taking Uncle Eugene’s silver engraved case to offer a honey dripper a cigarette again she’d give her something to cry about. It was only because Arnez was crazy about her that she put up with her, anyway. She remembered how Arnez used to carry Muriel around when she was a baby. They trailed behind their mother, whose job it had been to walk with an umbrella when my mother wanted to go into town and look at the Rexall window.
     
    The heat fell like an edict. The creek shriveled, exposed dry, cracked banks, like my skin was back home, my skin being why
I wouldn’t explain why I refused to take off my shirt in gym. Hornets circled nests, yellowhammers dived at stunted tomatoes; I was playing Pip meets his long-lost father on the marshes and also looking out for the boy from the back line. Mine enemies are lively and they are strong. I believed in the world’s Manichaean division into bad boys without shoes and victims with glasses.
    He also lived in one of Aunt Clara’s shotgun places, evidently that’s how bountiful and given to multiplying was her father’s land. He could climb trees. He said he was going to come back for me with a BB gun and dared me to leave the back yard. I took the path of least resistance and went on saying “What larks” to myself as if he hadn’t been there.
    He returned with something like a slingshot. Little missiles whizzed by my shoulders. To get it over with, I sat cross-legged in the dirt. Some of them hurt, but I didn’t say anything. If things got out of hand I could always run and tell, though that boulevard of appeal wasn’t as trustworthy as it used to be, after a cloakroom conference with a teacher on the perils of growing up a crybaby and a tattler. It taught me that the rule of squeal-to-a-woman-never-to-a-man had its disastrous exceptions.
    A coward is a man who does not know how much he can get away with. Nonviolence carried the day. My assailant ordered me to get up and come on over the fence. Ezell smelled of lemon that his mother rubbed on him to keep off mosquitoes. He had a younger brother called Brother. Before I knew it, I was AWOL again, sneaking down the road to look at two goats that Ezell said were special. They were “nervous” goats with sad pink eyes. When I clapped my hands or screamed in front of their noses, they fainted.
    Ezell had to go home and make lunch for Brother. They had two rooms, a kitchen, and an outhouse sprinkled with lime.
There were square and triangular newspaper panes in the windows; newspaper made scabs on the walls. Ezell drained catfish on newspaper when he took it from the frying pan. He fixed a plate for me. The head was still attached. Brother turned slices of white bread into grease balls and popped them in his mouth. I couldn’t move, didn’t know where to look.
    “Your grandmother is a witch. Everybody says so.”
    “So what, you’re a black nigger and you don’t have a television.”
     
    “We all will be called on in to Judgment,” Nida Lee said. “Father, we know that