She wanted to escape it all, go back to the past. To be a girl again. When she turned into the long winding driveway to the house and saw the bleak light spilling weakly from the curtains in the kitchen and den where Creasie sat there like a black shadow in the dim electric lamp’s penumbra with little Ruthie’s children in irregular orbits around her, she felt she was a stranger reentering a world she would have to remember all over again when she stepped in the door, by sight and touch and by things the others said that might bring her back to who she supposedly was, like someone lost her memory and struggling always against her own will to know something of this place, these people, these lives.
Discussion with the Dummy
CREASIE HAD HATED the dummy from the start. Mr. Junius would round up all the little grandchildren, Ruthie’s two and Edsel’s Robert, bring them out there and walk them out to the shed to see the dummy. Come on, let’s go see Oscar! he’d say. Come on, Creasie, you come along. And out they’d troop back to the shed, Miss Birdie fussing at him from the kitchen door the whole way, she didn’t like that dummy. Mr. Junius would rattle his keys and open an old hasp lock on the shed door, call out, Look alive, now, Oscar! Company coming! and he’d cre-e-e-eak open the big wide door that was nothing but another sheet of roofing tin on a frame made into a shed door. Blade of light would slice slowly into the shed’s darkness. And up on the highest shelf, feet dangling, eyes looking off to his left like a happy blind man, sat Oscar. He wore a dingy white shirt with no collar, shabby work britches with faded red suspenders, white socks, and a pair of knobby-toed work shoes that came over his ankles, if indeed he had ankles, she couldn’t say.
All of them looked up at Oscar in dread and a kind of wonder, though hers of a slightly different kind than theirs, wondering just what it was made this white man want to keep a colored dummy locked up in a black-dark shed like that, up on a shelf. Something about it very odd.
— Well hello there Oscar how you doin’ today! Mr. Urquhart’s most jolly voice would boom in the tiny stuffiness of the shed.
And there in a second would come Oscar’s voice, strange and muffled as if strained through cheesecloth: — Oh I’s fine Mr. Junius, how you?
— Well we doin’ all right here Oscar what you been up to?
— Oh nothin’ much Mr. Junie I guess I been busy with this’n’that, here’n’there.
— Well I just thought I’d bring the chulluns out to say hello to you, Oscar, it’s Sunday.
— Well they looking mighty fine Mr. Junie, mighty fine!
— Y’all say hello to Oscar now.
Hello hello hey they peeped, barely audible.
— Y’all want to touch old Oscar? You want to feel of his leg?
Silent, little heads barely waggling no, big eyes stuck on the dummy, hands clutching one another’s hands, and little Robert holding tight to Creasie’s.
— Well I reckon we better get on back to the house Oscar, is there anything I can get you, anything you need?
— No sah Mr. Junie I don’t need a thing!
— All right now.
And gently he would shoo them out and cre-e-e-eak the door would gently shut and rattle the lock back onto the hasp and she, Creasie, would be staring at the door and directly one of the children would always ask, GranPapa, don’t he mind being shut up in that shed all the time?
— Oh, no, Mr. Urquhart would say, old Oscar is a happy nigger. And she thinking how horrible it would be to be locked up in the dark like that all the time, dummy or no, it gave her nightmares, she’d be locked in there with him and he’d turn his old head at her and his awful red lips and white teeth would make her cry out in her sleep. He was going to bite her head off.
And then he’d taken her out there one Sunday afternoon Miss Birdie and Mr. Earl and the children gone into town, and she was going to head down to the ravine and see her mama but then he come driving up in his old automobile without honking the horn, had been to town but come back, said he’d thought she might be wanting a ride in. She said, — Thank you, sir, I’ll get my things from the cabin, and he followed her halfway there, stopping at the shed. She comes back and the shed door’s open, he’s in there, calls out, — Hey, Creasie, come here and help me with something. And when she steps in there he closes the door, nothing but dark and a cleaver blade of light through the black, across the dummy, and old Mr. Urquhart begins to run his hands all over that dummy, showing her this and that, though you could hardly see in there, just that blade of light from the door ajar. Then saying, — See this here plug in his heel here, this here’s an electric nigra, and then saying, — Why look here, I do believe this’s a horny old nigger here, too, my my I believe just the sight of you has put a spark in him, got him all worked up! — No, sir, she said, I don’t think he all worked up. -Oh, I believe he is, Mr. Urquhart said, and then he’d started doing something else — to her. He pushed her up against the wall and began to run his hands over her, and grabbing her, she was too frightened to breathe. When he pushed her down onto the floor of the shed she shouted and struggled, but he held her down and yanked at her clothing, and then he was lying heavy on her and pushing himself into her, the pain first sharp and hard down there and then cutting into her brain behind her eyes, and all the time looking up at that wide-eyed dummy up on the shelf, his amazed eyes wide open and dull in the blade of light from the door, and after what seemed a long time, a loud roaring in her head receded slowly into a distant noise and she heard a sound, a tic tic tic, and she could see a little gold chain disappearing into the little pocket in his vest which had ridden up on him and was close to her eye, a tic tic tic of the hidden watch in there, though this moment seemed outside of time, so that when he was at some point up and off of her and she was lying on the floor of the shed, she couldn’t have said how long she’d been lying there just staring at the dummy, not in her right mind. She said,
— You didn’t see nothing.
Dummy didn’t even blink.
— Son of a goddamn bitch! she heard old Mr. Urquhart say outside the shed door, his pocket change and belt buckle tinkling. And then in a softer voice, — Little nigger bitch, just talking to himself. -Bled on me like a stuck pig.
— I been stuck, she would say to herself later, when the capacity for reason had slipped back into her like waking up from a dream, but you the pig.
She heard him jingle off with his coins and keys. Heard the car start up. Heard him call out in a minute, — Come on, now, I’ll take you to town! Heard nothing but the car motor for a while. Heard the car door shut and heard him drive away. The dummy sat there.
She said, her voice strange to her own ears, — Why don’t they plug you into the electric? I know what you’d do. Go kill them all. Cut they throat.