The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [246]
“When you got something,” she said, “you got to look after it.” And when you ain’t got a thing but breath and britches, she added to herself, you can afford to come to town every morning and just sit on the Court House coping and spit.
A grotesque revolving shadow passed across the curtain behind her and was thrown palely on the opposite wall. Then a bicycle clattered down against the outside of the building. The door opened and a colored boy glided in with a tray from the drug store. It had two large red and white paper cups on it with tops on them. He was a tall, very black boy in discolored white pants and a green nylon shirt. He was chewing gum slowly, as if to music. He set the tray down in the office opening next to the fern and stuck his head through to look for the secretary. She was not in there. He rested his arms on the ledge and waited, his narrow bottom stuck out, swaying slowly to the left and right. He raised a hand over his head and scratched the base of his skull.
“You see that button there, boy?” Mrs. Turpin said. “You can punch that and she’ll come. She’s probably in the back somewhere.”
“Is thas right?” the boy said agreeably, as if he had never seen the button before. He leaned to the right and put his finger on it. “She sometime out,” he said and twisted around to face his audience, his elbows behind him on the counter. The nurse appeared and he twisted back again. She handed him a dollar and he rooted in his pocket and made the change and counted it out to her. She gave him fifteen cents for a tip and he went out with the empty tray. The heavy door swung to slowly and closed at length with the sound of suction. For a moment no one spoke.
“They ought to send all them niggers back to Africa,” the whitetrash woman said. “That’s wher they come from in the first place.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do without my good colored friends,” the pleasant lady said.
“There’s a heap of things worse than a nigger,” Mrs. Turpin agreed. “It’s all kinds of them just like it’s all kinds of us.”
“Yes, and it takes all kinds to make the world go round,” the lady said in her musical voice.
As she said it, the raw-complexioned girl snapped her teeth together. Her lower lip turned downwards and inside out, revealing the pale pink inside of her mouth. After a second it rolled back up. It was the ugliest face Mrs. Turpin had ever seen anyone make and for a moment she was certain that the girl had made it at her. She was looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life—all of Mrs. Turpin’s life, it seemed too, not just all the girl’s life. Why, girl, I don’t even know you, Mrs. Turpin said silently.
She forced her attention back to the discussion. “It wouldn’t be practical to send them back to Africa,” she said. “They wouldn’t want to go. They got it too good here.”
“Wouldn’t be what they wanted—if I had anythang to do with it,” the woman said.
“It wouldn’t be a way in the world you could get all the niggers back over there,” Mrs. Turpin said. “They’d be hiding out and lying down and turning sick on you and wailing and hollering and raring and pitching. It wouldn’t be a way in the world to get them over there.”
“They got over here,” the trashy woman said. “Get back like they got over.”
“It wasn’t so many of them then,” Mrs. Turpin explained.
The woman looked at Mrs. Turpin as if here was an idiot indeed but Mrs. Turpin was not bothered by the look, considering where it came from.
“Nooo,’ she said, “they’re going to stay here where they can go to New York and marry white folks and improve their color. That’s what they all want to do, everyone of them, improve their color.”
“You know what comes of that, don’t you?” Claud asked.
“No, Claud, what?” Mrs. Turpin said.
Claud’s eyes twinkled. “White-faced niggers,” he said with never a smile.
Everybody in the office laughed except the white-trash and the ugly girl. The girl gripped the book in her lap with white fingers. The trashy woman looked