The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker Page A

know the words she knew, and even if he could learn them he had no faith that they would fit the emotions he had. She could read magazines and books, and he could only look at the pictures in them and hazard a guess at what the print meant. Often, when they were thrown together in the house and she walked outside on the porch to keep from being inside alone with him, he followed and tried to talk to her. She would smile and speak a few words, never harsh, about his carryings on with Josie and Lorene. He expressed an interest in wanting to read and write, and she offered to teach him. He caught on quickly to small things, and they spent many afternoons, before the Dew Drop Inn opened, on the steps outside with her old school books. When she began teaching grade school in the fall she took him along with her class. Or tried.
    “In the first place,” she would begin, in an intense prim way Lorene and Josie scoffed at, “if you have two or three words to say and don’t know which word means two or more, it is better to just not use ‘s’ on the end of any of the words. This is so because the verb takes on the same number as the subject. You understand? Well, all I’m saying is ‘I have some cake,’ sounds better than ‘I haves some cake.’ Or, ‘We have a friendship,’ is better than ‘We haves a friendship.’ Now is that clear?” And she would look at him, properly doubtful, wrinkling her brow. And he would nod, yes, and say over and over happily in his mind, We haves a friendship! We, Mem and me, haves us a friendship! and he would smile so that she would stop her frowning and smile too.
    She was a good teacher. He had never had one. He learned to write his own name, to recite the ABC’s, and to write his name and her name linked together, all in a flourish, without lifting his hand from the paper. When she began to teach at school he sometimes sat on the porch by the open door and listened to her clear voice directing the small children, and he concentrated on what she said, as much for the subject matter (which taught him how to spell chicken, goat, cow, hog) as for the pleasure of hearing her speak. She did not sound at all like Josie and Lorene, who talked like toothless old women from plain indifference. Mem put some attention to what she was saying in it, and some warmth from her own self, and so much concern for the person she was speaking to that it made Brownfield want to cry.
    In his own mind he considered himself perfect for Mem, if only because he loved her. But much of the town saw things differently, including Josie and Lorene, who were so jealous of their Cinderella that Brownfield became afraid for her (although he was hardly royalty, unless they considered him Prince Stud). Besides, Mem had never told him she cared for him.
    But what really began to bother Brownfield was that since he became the man of the establishment, he had not felt it necessary to draw a salary. He was constantly dependent on Josie or Lorene for money, which they gave him readily enough, but with the understanding that he must work for his living and in exactly the ways they specified. And so he stood it around the house as long as he could, screwing Josie and Lorene like the animal he felt himself to be, especially when he stood next day in the same room with Mem, whose heart, pained, was becoming readable in her eyes. There was no longer any joy in his conquest of the two women, for he had long since realized that he wasn’t using them, they were using him. He was a pawn in a game that Josie and Lorene enjoyed. Sometimes he felt he was the link they used to prove themselves mother and daughter. Otherwise they might have been strangers. They existed for the simple pleasure of flirting with each other’s men, and then of fighting it out in the street in front of the lounge, where every man in the district soon learned that if you wanted a piece of pussy you had only to make up to one of them to have the other one fall in