You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [9]
“And after all this, Bubba wanted us to keep going together. Mama was just an obstacle that he felt he had removed. But I just suddenly—in a way I don’t even pretend to understand—woke up. It was like everything up to then had been some kind of dream. And I told him I wanted to get Mama out. But he wouldn’t do it; he just kept trying to make me go with him. And sometimes—out of habit, I guess—I did. My body did what it was being paid to do. And Mama died. And I killed Bubba.
“How did I get away with killing one of the biggest lawyers in the state? It was easy. He kept a gun in his desk drawer at the office and one night I took it out and shot him. I shot him while he was wearing his thick winter overcoat, so I wouldn’t have to see him bleed. But I don’t think I took the time to wipe off my fingerprints, because, to tell the truth, I couldn’t stand it another minute in that place. No one came after me, and I read in the paper the next day that he’d been killed by burglars. I guess they thought ‘burglars’ had stolen all that money Bubba kept in his safe—but I had it. One of the carrots Bubba always dangled before me was that he was going to send me to college: I didn’t see why he shouldn’t do it.
“The strangest thing was, Bubba’s wife came over to the house and asked me if I’d mind looking after the children while she went to Bubba’s funeral. I did it, of course, because I was afraid she’d suspect something if I didn’t. So on the day he was buried I was in his house, sitting on his wife’s bed with his children, and eating fried chicken his wife, Julie, had cooked.”
Elethia
A CERTAIN PERVERSE EXPERIENCE shaped Elethia’s life, and made it possible for it to be true that she carried with her at all times a small apothecary jar of ashes.
There was in the town where she was born a man whose ancestors had owned a large plantation on which everything under the sun was made or grown. There had been many slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slaveowners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of course. Not in the present—it went without saying—but at that time, stopped, just on the outskirts of his memory: his grandfather’s time.
This man, whom Elethia never saw, opened a locally famous restaurant on a busy street near the center of town. He called it “Old Uncle Albert’s.” In the window of the restaurant was a stuffed likeness of Uncle Albert himself, a small brown dummy of waxen skin and glittery black eyes. His lips were intensely smiling and his false teeth shone. He carried a covered tray in one hand, raised level with his shoulder, and over his other arm was draped a white napkin.
Black people could not cat at Uncle Albert’s, though they worked, of course, in the kitchen. But on Saturday afternoons a crowd of them would gather to look at “Uncle Albert” and discuss how near to the real person the dummy looked. Only the very old people remembered Albert Porter, and their eyesight was no better than their memory. Still there was a comfort somehow in knowing that Albert’s likeness was here before them daily and that if he smiled as a dummy in a fashion he was not known to do as a man, well, perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong.
The old people appeared grateful to the rich man who owned the restaurant for giving them a taste of vicarious fame. They could pass by the gleaming window where Uncle Albert stood, seemingly in the act of sprinting forward with his tray, and know that though niggers were not allowed in the front door, ole Albert was already inside, and looking mighty pleased about it, too.
For Elethia the fascination