The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [266]
“If you don’t have any pride I have and I know my duty and I was raised to do it. My mother raised me to do it if you didn’t. She was from plain people but not the kind that likes to settle in with niggers.”
At that point the old Negro roused up and slid out the door, a doubled-up shadow which Tanner just caught sight of gliding away.
She had shamed him. He shouted so they both could hear. “Who you think cooks? Who you think cuts my firewood and empties my slops? He’s paroled to me. That no-good scoundrel has been on my hands for thirty years. He ain’t a bad nigger.”
She was unimpressed. “Whose shack is this anyway?” she had asked. “Yours or his?”
“Him and me built it,” he said. “You go on back up there. I wouldn’t come with you for no million dollars or no sack of salt.”
“It looks like him and you built it. Whose land is it on?”
“Some people that live in Florida,” he said evasively. He had known then that it was land up for sale but he thought it was too sorry for anyone to buy. That same afternoon he had found out different. He had found out in time to go back with her. If he had found out a day later, he might still be there, squatting on the doctor’s land.
When he saw the brown porpoise-shaped figure striding across the field that afternoon, he had known at once what had happened; no one had to tell him. If that nigger had owned the whole world except for one runty rutted peafield and he acquired it, he would walk across it that way, beating the weeds aside, his thick neck swelled, his stomach a throne for his gold watch and chain. Doctor Foley. He was only part black. The rest was Indian and white.
He was everything to the niggers—druggist and undertaker and general counsel and real estate man and sometimes he got the evil eye off them and sometimes he put it on. Be prepared, he said to himself, watching him approach, to take something off him, nigger though he be. Be prepared, because you ain’t got a thing to hold up to him but the skin you come in, and that’s no more use to you now than what a snake would shed. You don’t have a chance with the government against you.
He was sitting on the porch in the piece of straight chair tilted against the shack. “Good evening, Foley,” he said and nodded as the doctor came up and stopped short at the edge of the clearing, as if he had only just that minute seen him though it was plain he had sighted him as he crossed the field.
“I be out here to look at my property,” the doctor said. “Good evening.” His voice was quick and high.
Ain’t been your property long, he said to himself. “I seen you coming,” he said.
“I acquired this here recently,” the doctor said and proceeded without looking at him again to walk around to one side of the shack. In a moment he came back and stopped in front of him. Then he stepped boldly to the door of the shack and put his head in. Coleman was in there that time too, asleep. He looked for a moment and then turned aside. “I know that nigger,” he said. “Coleman Parrum—how long does it take him to sleep off that stump liquor you all make?”
Tanner took hold of the knobs on the chair bottom and held them hard. “This shack ain’t in your property. Only on it, by my mistake,” he said.
The doctor removed his cigar momentarily from his mouth. “It ain’t my mis-take,” he said and smiled.
He had only sat there, looking ahead.
“It don’t pay to make this kind of mis-take,” the doctor said.
“I never found nothing that paid yet,” he muttered.
“Everything pays,” the Negro said, “if you knows how to make it,” and he remained there smiling, looking the squatter up and down. Then he turned and went around the other side of the shack. There was a silence. He was looking for the still.
Then would have been the time to kill him. There was a gun inside the shack and he could