Color Purple, The - Alice Walker [46]
They sing to the earth and to the sky and to their cassava and groundnuts. Songs of love and farewell.
We are all sad, here, Celie. I hope life is happier for you.
Your sister,
Guess what? Samuel thought the children were mine too! That is why he urged me to come to Africa with them. When I showed up at their house he thought I was following my children, and, soft-hearted as he is, didn't have the heart to turn me away.
If they are not yours, be said, whose are they?
But I had some questions for him, first.
Where did you get them? I asked. And Celie, he told me a story that made my hah- stand on end. I hope you, poor thing, are ready for it.
Once upon a time, there was a well-to-do farmer who owned his own property near town. Our town, Celie. And as he did so well fanning and everything he turned his hand to prospered, he decided to open a store, and try his luck selling dry goods as well. Well, his store did so well that he talked two of his brothers into helping him run it, and, as the months went by, they were doing better and better. Then the white merchants began to get together and complain that this store was taking all the black business away from them, and the man's blacksmith shop that he set up behind the store, was taking some of the white. This would not do. And so, one night, the man's store was burned down, his smithy destroyed, and the man and his two brothers dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night and hanged.
The man had a wife whom he adored, and they had a little girl, barely two years old. She was also pregnant with another child.
When the neighbors brought her husband's body home, it had been mutilated and burnt. The sight of it nearly killed her, and her second baby, also a girl, was born at this time. Although the widow's body recovered, her mind was never the same. She continued to fix her husband's plate at mealtimes just as she'd always done and was always full of talk about the plans she and her husband had made. The neighbors, though not always intending to, shunned her more and more, partly because the plans she talked about were grander than anything they could even conceive of for colored people, and partly because her attachment to the past was so pitiful. She was a good-looking woman, though, and still owned land, but there was no one to work it for her, and she didn't know how herself; besides she kept waiting for her husband to finish the meal she'd cooked for him and go to the fields himself. Soon there was nothing to eat that the neighbors did not bring, and she and her small children grubbed around in the yard as best they could.
While the second child was still a baby, a stranger appeared in the community, and lavished all his attention on the widow and her children; in a short while, they were married. Almost at once she was pregnant a third time, though her mental health was no better. Every year thereafter, she was pregnant, every year she became weaker and more mentally unstable, until, many years after she married the stranger, she died.
Two years before she died she had a baby girl that she was too sick to keep. Then a baby boy. These children were named Olivia and Adam.
This is Samuel's story, almost word for word.
The stranger who married the widow was someone Samuel had run with long before he found Christ. When the man showed up at Samuel's house with first Olivia and then Adam, Samuel felt not only unable to refuse the children, but as if God had answered his and Corrine's prayers.
He never told Corrine about the man or about the children's "mother" because he hadn't wanted any sadness to cloud her happiness.
But then, out of nowhere, I appeared. He put two and two together, remembered that his old running buddy had always been a scamp, and took me in without any questions. Which, to tell the truth, had always puzzled me, but I put it down to Christian charity.
Corrine had asked me once whether I was running away from home. But I explained I was a big girl now, my family back